Smart growth. Sustainable development. Neo-traditional communities.
These are the new, often vague, buzzwords tossed around in academic circles, environmental newsletters and planning conferences across the country. Slowly, though, the words are reaching Main Street. What they represent has created a growing yearning for bringing back the old hometown. Even if it’s with a ’90s twist.
It’s a neighborhood where you can walk to the corner store — for latte. A place, where at least in one proposed town in Indiana, energy efficiency doesn’t mean extra insulation. It means solar panels. Or a Disney-style community where tour buses come to see what all the fuss is about with front porches and sidewalks.
Recently in the middle of Baltimore’s rejuvenated Inner Harbor area, more than 750 people, double the expected number, gathered for a first-ever joint conference sponsored by the real estate interests of the Urban Land Institute and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The title: Partners for Smart Growth.
The term can mean a hundred different things to as many people. But the basic building block is the neighborhood. “New urbanists” and neo-traditionalists define it as a community with a town center that is within a fourth-of-a-mile walking distance. No cul-de-sacs. Houses, townhomes and apartments clustered close together. Narrow, and even winding, streets. Close or nearby offices and stores are a must.
“Without the neighborhood structure, you can’t have anything,” insists Andres Duany, a guru of the movement and a Miami-based architect with DPZ Associates. He calls metro Atlanta’s sprawl of subdivisions and cul-de-sacs “a mystery.”
In Maryland, new urbanism is not new. In a second, Baltimore taxi drivers will go on about how housing and businesses have redeveloped downtown in the past decade. Gov. Parris Glendening, one of the keynote speakers at the gathering, proudly talks about using state transportation money to refurbish older communities and about holding up the state’s budget process until legislators agreed to his “smart growth package.”
In Georgia, Gov. Zell Miller has generally avoided public debate about sprawl, saying it is up to local governments to control.
“Maryland is a great role model. But Georgia is the heart of the beast,” said Chris Leinberger, co-owner of the real estate research firm Robert Charles Lesser and Co.
Leinberger has been one of a parade of sprawl critics who have been part of a series of gatherings of developers and environmentalists in metro Atlanta sponsored by the Georgia Conservancy. It’s called “Blueprints for Successful Communities.”
“We are now into our second generation of subdivision dwellers, people who have not had the experience of living in a neighborhood,” said Ellen Keys, a Georgia Conservancy vice president and one of the conference speakers. “We have to begin to see the kinds of communities we want.”
The conservancy is working on a set of proposed bills for this coming legislative session in January. The group worked with more than 50 environmental and homeowner associations this past year to produce a “Livable Region” proposal that features sidewalks, bike lanes and transit.
Still, for now, the examples of smart growth or new urbanism are few and far between. It means, for now, the same 100 or so examples across the country are used over and over again. One of the most popular is Kentlands, in Gaithersburg near Baltimore, which Duany helped design. The 352-acre neighborhood opened in 1990 and has a mix of shops, offices and homes.
Zoning and regulations that can govern everything from how a house looks to how far it is from the street are the biggest hurdles. Many question whether enough of the public would buy into a model that packs homes together and puts them up close to their neighbor.
And lots of the communities have become upper crust or resort-style enclaves not necessarily accessible to the starter-home market: Seaside near Destin, Fla.; Newpoint in Beaufort, S.C.; and the sometimes-maligned Disney-created megacommunity, Celebration, which opened last year.
Many are often created by developers and planners with the deep pockets or power to afford to build large projects, wade through the government red tape and create test-lab style communities.
Lake Erie Land Co. has hired William McDonough, a dean of the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture and an adviser to President Clinton on “sustainable communities,” to create Coffee Creek. The project, on 640 acres on the outskirts of Chicago, will be a high-tech town with its own solar power utility for each of the planned 1,200 houses, its own water purification system and a shuttle system that will not only move residents around but deliver groceries and goods to each doorstep.
For many, the whole movement is all about the survival of inner cities and older suburbs. Others say it’s the only way to stop new sprawl growth from polluting the air, land and water.
But for those interested in the bottom line, the verdict is still out.
“We don’t know what the market is for smart growth because as it stands, much of the high-density development associated with it has become synonymous with poor schools, crime and bad services,” said Robert Lang, an official with the Fannie Mae Foundation, a private but government-chartered company created with a mission to increase homeownership.
“Until it’s done right over a generation and people are convinced it’s going to work, it’s not going to stick.”
With a whole conference of planners, architects, local government officials and developers comes a whole new language. Miami Architect Andres Duany contends planners have a mass of “fuzzy, feel good terminology” that can be confusing. The Congress on New Urbanism is in the midst of creating its own lexicon.
Here are some of the terms:
Greenfields: New construction and subdivisions on undeveloped land.
Brownfields: In-fill development on usually urban land that could have environmental problems from previous tenants, such as steel companies or paper mills.
TNDs, Traditional Neighborhood Development: Communities that typically are half a mile across that allow walking to a town center with a mix of shops and offices.
Neo-traditional Development: A term created by Stanford Marketing Institute in the mid-1980s. It’s a philosophy made to sell baby boomers on the idea of traditional neighborhood nostalgia but with modern conveniences.
