O Street Market Zoning Hearing March 6th

The weekly newsletter circulated by my representative on the D.C. Council, Jack Evans, contains this personal plea for community members to attend an upcoming zoning hearing regarding a mixed-use redevelopment of the O Street Market:

O Street Market needs support from residents

The DC Zoning Commission will hold a Public Hearing on the O Street Market project on March 6 at 6:30 pm at the Zoning Commission Office, 441 4th Street, NW Suite 210S.

“I am personally asking those concerned to show support for this important project in the heart of Shaw by attending this hearing,” Councilmember Evans said.

If you wish to testify, you can sign up at the meeting. For more information, contact the Office on Zoning at 727-6311 or Evans’ Shaw liaison, Windy Abdul-Rahim.

The site currently contains a Giant Supermarket, surface parking lot, and abandoned market structure. The developer is asking the Zoning Commission to re-zone the parcel from C-2-A to CR or C-3-C, commercial zones supporting higher density. The official notice generated by the zoning commission contains a description of the request and information about how to testify.

For more discussion of the project see my original post, or this interview where Roadside Development founder Armond Spikell discusses it with DCmud.

Who Wants to Live in Pabst City?

Soon, Pabst-loving hipsters will be able to live in the buildings where the beer they saved was once brewed.

Founded in Milwaukee in 1844, the Pabst Brewing Company’s flagship beer earned its name during the 1893 Columbian World’s Exposition in Chicago, where it was awarded the blue ribbon as America’s best beer. However, economic realities began to catch up with the company in recent years, and they closed their massive Milwaukee brewery in 1996, transferring all production to the Miller company in 2001. However, after decades of declining sales, around 2001 Pabst Brewing Company sales executives discovered sales of Pabst Blue Ribbon were beginning to pick up in unlikely places — cities like Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, and the Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn. The beer’s low price and working class cachet had led to a modest rebound in popularity among hipsters across the country.

From the start, the brewery’s former facility in Milwaukee was eyed for redevelopment. Located adjacent downtown Milwaukee, the complex contains a collection of ornate 19th century buildings almost begging to be converted into hip lofts. The first redevelopment proposal, a $300 million behemoth called PabstCity centered around the conversion of the complex into an entertainment district, collapsed when city officials voted down the subsidies demanded by the developer. The project became controversial in the city as citizens questioned the long-term viability of the plan, and its potential impact on downtown. Since I first wrote about the PabstCity project on this website, hundreds of people looking for more information have found their way to the site from search engines.

A year and a half after the first deal collapsed, real estate investor Joseph Zilber purchased the land and design work for $13 million. He moved quickly to draft plans for a much more pragmatic scheme to redevelop the complex into a mixed-use district with multiple owners. City officials approved the plan last year, and an official groundbreaking was held in January. Although unfortunately isolated from surrounding neighborhoods on two sides by freeways, the project seems on track to become a successful rehabilitation of a unique collection of historic buildings. The project’s first residential building, dubbed Blue Ribbon Lofts, will target low-to-moderate income artists and entrepreneurs. Other buildings will contain offices, shops, and yes, even possibly a brew pub.

> The Brewery Project Website
> Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Pabst Project Moves Ahead (8/06), Pabst Revamp Coming Together (1/07)
> Undercity: Abandoned Pabst Brewery
> Previously: Pabst City? (2003), Pabst City Project Falls Through (2005)

Photos courtesy The Brewery

Slums in Cape Town and Beyond

Part 5 of my South Africa series.

To begin this week’s final post on South Africa, let’s consider this satellite image of most of metropolitan Cape Town, population roughly 2.9 million. This map depicts an area some 40 miles across.

Next, this map of the economic geography of the city from a city planning document shows the economic patterns of the city. The area shaded light yellow the planners have labeled “market avoidance.” Here, joblessness and drug use are high, and many residents are living in substandard conditions.

Like most cities in the developing world, Cape Town has squatter settlements, known in the country as informal settlements, where the poor have erected shacks on vacant land. In Cape Town most of them are along the N2 freeway, adjacent existing poor areas, although some communities have been established in desirable neighborhoods with sea views. I made this map using city data, but I do not know exactly the definitions or accuracy of the data. The small scale of the map and the high density of these communities should be taken into consideration.

According to a government report (PDF), about 3.5 million people in the country live in such settlements, or 7% of the total population. As shown in the table, the government considers their government building program a direct response to informal settlements.

Many of the residents of the informal settlements and also poverty area would qualify under the United Nation’s definition of a “slum household,” which they define as “a group of individuals living under the same roof in an urban area who lack one or more of the following: durable housing, sufficient living area, secure tenure and access to clean water and sanitation.” South Africa is relatively well-off by African standards, as experts estimate 72 percent of sub-Saharan Africans live in slum conditions. Experts also estimated that for the first time in human history, a majority of the world’s population now lives in cities. One-third of these city dwellers live in a slum.

The 2003 UN report “The Challenge of Slums” for the first time marshaled reliable data on cities from around the world. The report estimated 928 million people living in slum conditions, and world urbanization was occurring at a rapid pace. In his book Planet of Slums, Mike Davis compared the report with those produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “If the reports of the [IPCC] represents an unprecedented scientific consensus on the dangers of global warming, then The Challenge of Slums sounds an equally authoritative warning about the worldwide catastrophe of urban poverty.” He concludes that “The cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood … surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay.”

In June, United Nations experts reported global shanty towns are growing by more than a million people every week, and estimate they will reach two billion people by 2030. Davis and others have long argued this enormous population of the impoverished will be vulnerable to religious fundamentalism and fear their political repercussions. The intellectual world is only beginning to catch up with enormous urbanization, and in English at least there are few books on the topic. The two usually discussed are Davis’ Planet of Slums and Robert Neuwirth’s Shadow Cities. Davis’ book makes clear there exists a tremendous potential for researching and understanding these places, a task that has only just begun. The relevance of urban planning to global slums will remain to be seen: what is the meaning of a regulatory discipline in a context where regulations do not exist or are not enforced? The biggest role for planners, it seems, will be overseeing upgrading of basic infrastructure and also the legal processes of documenting property and tenure necessary if these places are ever to participate in the formal economy.

More
> Forbes: “Two Billion Slum Dwellers”
> The Independent: “Planet of slums: UN warns urban populations set to double”
> UN-HABITAT: The Challenge of Slums
> UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs: World Urbanization Prospects
> Robert Neuwirth’s Squattercity blog

Government-Built Sprawl

Part 3 of my South Africa Series

The lack of progress bridging the social divides in South Africa has not been due to political will. In addition to a variety of political rights (many which Americans will be familiar with from our Bill of Rights), the South African Constitution includes workers’ rights to join unions, a right to education, a right to a clean environment, a right to access to government information, and a right to “adequate” housing, among others. The housing section reads as follows:

1. Everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing.
2. The state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of this right.
3. No one may be evicted from their home, or have their home demolished, without an order of court made after considering all the relevant circumstances. No legislation may permit arbitrary evictions.

In order to achieve that goal, the government’s National Department of Housing has spent considerable funds to construct free or very low cost housing for citizens housed in sub-adequate conditions. Since 1997 the department has constructed 2,355,913 homes. Although I cannot find the precise break-down, I believe most of those were free homes provided first time home owners. This graphic illustrates where in South Africa most of these homes have been built.

Despite the millions of new homes, the government continues to struggle to accommodate the long lists of needy citizens. The model of housing adopted for the early phase was a 6 meter by 6 meter square house, or less than 400 square feet, located on a roughly 2,000 square foot lot. The houses are provided a small bathroom and power and the poor are provided a small allocation of power and water free of charge. These admittedly “starter” homes are intended to house the most needy, although the program has been fraught with criticism. Moralists critique the lack of privacy resulting from more than one family living essentially in the same room. Extensions to the original house often amount to little more than a tin lean-to. Finally, the mass development of these homes at the city edge, where land is cheapest, has created large communities of poor far from jobs and municipal resources. To make matters worse, most of the poor do not own automobiles, and are heavily reliant on public transit. (Luckily, unlike in America, the commuter rail system and shared taxis do service the periphery.)

During my stay in Cape Town we were able to visit a government-funded housing project under construction in the area known as Delft. Here the homes being constructed in an area known as the “Cape Flats,” beyond the airport on a vast flat sandy area miles from downtown. At the site two demonstration houses stood next to a container retrofitted as a mobile office.

We spoke to the employee of a civil engineering firm who was overseeing the construction of basic infrastructure – sewer, electrical, water pipes, and streets. Here a pile of manhole covers and drain grates (designed to have no value as scrap iron to deter theft) stood stacked waiting for installation. We were told the entire project would include some 50,000 homes when complete.

Google Earth captured a similar project under construction that conveys the scale of these developments:

The problems associated with the mass construction of these homes have sparked a sea-change in the thinking of government officials. Currently officials talk about the need to move beyond the single-minded focus on mass construction, and attempt to create “sustainable human settlements,” and this summer have issued a new official policy statement dedicated to creating sustainable communities. The current model of housing construction is also fundamentally at odds with the government’s strict approach to urban growth: each city has an urban growth boundary, and the government is attempting to pursue a policy of “densification” to focus development in already-urbanized area. Newer projects, such as the N2 Gateway project in Cape Town, have experimented with a variety of housing types (condominiums, duplexes, single-family homes) as well as tenure (rented and owned). The reason most housing to date has been small single-family homes is complex, and has to do not only with user preference and the high cost of high density housing, but also a stigma against government apartment complexes dating from Apartheid-era policies.

However, despite inspired policy documents issued from housing authorities, the simple fact remains that the cheapest land is the farthest from the city center, and a house designed at a minimal cost leaves much to be desired. While American government policies such as home loans, freeways, and the mortgage tax deduction have sparked suburban sprawl, in South Africa the government itself is the builder of impoverished, sprawling, low-density communities.

In both cases, residents and city builders are now facing a similar challenge: how to transform these landscapes into something more sustainable and urban to better serve residents’ needs.

Ballston Examined

I completed this essay for the final assignment for my urban design class. The assignment was to conduct an analysis of this block adjacent the Ballston Metro Station in Arlington County, Virginia. My study area is part of the “Ballston-Rosslyn Corridor,” a nationally-known example of smart growth. Along the corridor, the county has added roughly 40,000 residents, 20 million square feet of office, and one million square feet of retail — with only a negligible increase in automobile traffic, thanks to bus and Metrorail use.

In the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., adjacent the Ballston Metrorail station stands a collection of buildings far taller than any in the national capital. Reaching 10, 15, even 22 stories into the sky, these buildings contain offices, shops, apartments, and a hotel. Unlike most cities, however, this compact urban node has sprung out of the ground in just twenty years. 17 of the 19 buildings nestled in the area’s roughly 20 acres were completed since 1980. (fig. 1)

Nothing existing here before anticipated the scale and character of the development. The two oldest buildings in the study area are at an entirely different scale than the new construction. The surrounding neighborhoods of single-family homes and garden apartments have different lot sizes, street widths, and building rhythm. County officials and private builders have chosen to deviate from the established urban patterns, deliberately striving to knit together new development into a new urban texture. All of the buildings here were developed under specific zoning adopted in 1979 in response to the construction of the train station. While this zoning has evolved somewhat since its first adoption, the rapid development of the area creates an intriguing case study in the urbanity created by a specific set of polices and standards. While boasting clearly urbane aspirations, the collection of buildings has not created a coherent urban space. My analysis falls into three categories: the area’s poor street void definition, lack of an open space hierarchy, and its streetscape inconsistency.

A coherent urban space depends on a clearly defined street form. Considering the building footprints alone, in surrounding neighborhoods the streets are clearly defined by rows of single-family homes. (fig. 2) This system of what William C. Ellis has called a structure of voids. Moving to the study area the structure of voids transitions to a structure of solids, where each building has a unique shape, only loosely related to the adjacent streets. In order to visualize the structure of voids for the study area a rough, three-dimensional sketch was created. (fig. 3) The illustration depicts highly variable street spaces, quite distinct from the regularity in traditional urbanism. The visitor navigating these streets perceives the unfolding of a variety of spaces among buildings, not a street with a clear definition, beginning and end.

To determine the cause of the irregular distribution of public space we must examine the underlying structure of the district. The study area’s 24 lots range in size from some similar in scale plots intended for a single-family home, to lots large enough to encompass an entire city block. (fig. 4)

When developed under Arlington County’s zoning code, this variable underlying structure has profound design implications. The area’s zoning (C-O-A) requires 10% of the total site area for each building be landscaped open space. This provision guarantees the public open space will be found heterogeneously distributed throughout the area as each developer negotiates with county officials about what 10% portion of his lot will become public. In some areas this space has been coordinated to create larger courtyards, but the locations of these courtyards must be opportunistically located at the intersection of similarly sized lots. The result is a proliferation of awkward, ill-used open spaces, instead of the creation of larger, more coherent spaces. (fig. 5)

The proliferation of landscaped space drains the potential vitality of the larger parks, which in another setting could perform the role as a district-wide focal point. An interesting counterpoint to the success of nearby Market Commons in Clarendon. This mixed-use complex contains most of the public space in the area, and sits just off a street that has been intensely developed creating a continuous street wall. (fig. 6) While the public spaces in Ballston were sparsely used on a recent visit, the Clarendon Commons was bustling with activity. Of course, the success of the spaces is also related to the distribution of commercial space – in Ballston it is concentrated in the large mall.

Finally, county regulations also translate the variable lot sizes into a variable streetscape. In order to incentivize lot consolidation and the construction of apartments, the C-O-A zoning creates a hierarchy of allowable building heights depending on the primary use of the building and the lot size. Taller buildings can be built on larger lots, and apartment buildings can be built taller than office buildings. The result has been buildings over a considerable range of heights (fig. 7)

Combined with the open space requirement, the result of the regulations is buildings of highly variable heights and configurations. Despite text expressing the county’s desire to cultivate street level retail, the policy regime creates an irregular streetscape both at the pedestrian scale and building scale. Lastly, the zoning code’s parking requirements mean the buildings contain over 7,000 parking spaces. While for the most part these spaces have been cleverly embedded into the buildings, the car entrances and exits create additional interruptions to the street level fabric. (fig. 8 )

Although the district does not create the fabric of traditional urbanism, it cannot be said to be a failure. Meandering among the buildings, the visitor is invited to discover new urban spaces and stores and restaurants in unexpected locations. The city builders have achieved extremely high density in a highly landscaped, almost peaceful setting. While deviating from the traditional urbanism they espouse, their insistence on public landscape surrounding every building has created an alternate system, perhaps not unlike the landscape urbanism described by theorists like James Corner. As we leave Ballston, it must be noted this is an immature landscape in urban time. Only time will tell how its remaining underdeveloped parcels will evolve. Perhaps in that time the many young street trees (fig. 4a, 4c) will mature, and the landscape itself play an increasingly important role in defining more clearly the urban fabric.

‘Leapfrog’ Sprawl In West Virginia

Not many Washington, D.C. area residents are familiar with Berkeley County, West Virginia. Over a 100 mile drive from downtown Washington, the county isn’t even served by a highway that reaches the city — residents must take I-81 north to I-70, or south to I-66, to get to the District. However, they may be surprised to learn that in the last five years the Census estimates county has added almost 20,000 residents, far more than the District has, making it the fastest-growing county in the state.

The sheer volume of development recently approved in Berkeley County is impressive. In this county without any zoning (although there is a proposal to change that), new developments must only meet minimal subdivision requirements before approval by county officials. According to official reports, between 2004 and 2006 the county approved subdivisions creating 6,985 lots consuming 3,653 acres of land. Another 5,847 lots have received preliminary approval. In total, since 2000 the county has approved subdivisions creating 10,511 lots taking up roughly 13 square miles of land. The size of subdivisions since 2000 shows a clear upward trend, although it should be noted all these lots won’t necessarily be developed:

Harder to track is commercial development. As an indicator, the area is already home to two Wal-Marts (Martinsburg and Charles Town) and Berkeley County Planning Commission unanimously approved another 180,000 square foot store at a contentious meeting in December. (DOC) The store will be located just off I-81 north of Martinsburg, near the residential development seen above.

In an interesting contrast, while Montgomery County Maryland’s agricultural preserve and transfer of development rights programs have helped keep the county’s far western and northern portions rural, fewer such controls exist in West Virginia, causing the sprawl to “leapfrog.” Despite the rapid pace of development, the majority of the area remains rural and the county has made tentative steps towards more deliberate growth. The Post reported last year on citizens who had launched a grassroots campaign against growth, and the county recently completed a master plan. Although it included a “growth management” area (shown on the left in yellow), the area is considerably larger than the existing urbanized area (on the right, in pink), leaving plenty of room for D.C. sprawl for years to come. From a regional perspective, we should remember this growth during debates about density in and around the District.

> Berkeley County Planning Commission
> W. Post: “Suburbia Catches Up with Unger, W.V.”
> Chesapeake Bay Journal (1999): “WV’s Eastern Panhandle Coping With Problems Caused by Growth“

Analyzing D.C.’s Inclusionary Zoning

After years of wrangling between affordable housing advocates, policy wonks, and real estate interests, D.C. has finally adopted a commonly-used approach to creating affordable housing.

Known as “inclusionary zoning,” the policy requires developers include units reserved for low and moderate-income families when developing large residential projects. In exchange, developers are allowed to increase the density of the project to offset the cost of these affordable units. One of the most well-known programs in the country is run by Montgomery County, Maryland, which has a Moderately Priced Dwelling Unit Program that has created over 13,000 moderately priced units of housing since 1974. Inclusionary zoning policies create affordable units integrated into larger projects, without getting the government involved in owning property. For years, real estate interests have resisted such a policy in D.C., complaining as recently as last October such a policy constitutes a “development tax” and would depress development in the District.

The D.C. Office of Planning put together a very detailed presentation last fall to explain how the program would work. The following slides are from the presentation, however I suggest viewing the entire document via the link below. In D.C., the policy has been adopted in a way where it applies to roughly 37% of the city.

Unlike Montgomery County, in D.C. the units must be reserved for qualifying individuals in perpetuity. Of the area where the policy applies, 19% falls within historic districts. Some have raised concerns suggesting the inclusionary zoning policy and the historic districts might conflict, however the Office of Planning points out that the historic districts contain few parcels large enough to trigger the inclusionary zoning law. They also point out that if they law was triggered, it would simply require narrower rowhomes, similar in size to many historic rowhomes in the city.

Here are a couple examples of how the law might work for projects in different zones:

The D.C. Office of Planning estimated the program could create over 100 units of housing a year reserved for people below the area’s median income, currently around $90,000 for a family of four. However, because the enabling legislation only recently took effect, many of the specifics about how the program will be carried out (my understanding is that it will be the D.C. Housing Authority) remain unclear.

Resources

> DC Office of Planning Inclusionary Zoning Presentation (PDF) (10/07)
> W. Post: “Inclusionary Zoning Program Is Approved”
> Washington Business Journal: “Mapping a disaster area: You are here” (7/14/06), “Affordable housing debate moves back, forward” (10/13/06)
> DC Council: Inclusionary Zoning Implementation Act of 2006
> DC Campaign for Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning
> Washington Regional Network: D.C. Campaign for Inclusionary Zoning
> Fall 2005 Student Report on Montomery County MPDU Law

Although I have done my best to be accurate in this post, it is based on my analysis of technical documentation of a complex, evolving policy. Anyone aware of inaccuracies should post a comment.