Changing land-use and development culture

A new approach to the built environment requires comprehensive education on the part of regulators and land-use professionals, so that plans don’t just sit on the shelf. Like many aspects of Plan El Paso, the city has gone the extra mile in this area.

Perhaps the best professional education program focusing on New Urbanism is run jointly by the University of Miami and the Congress for the New Urbanism. Four hundred and thirty-seven (437) people have gone through the CNU-Accreditation (CNU-A) program, of which 17 percent of the total have been from El Paso. “In the most recent exam registration, residents of the City of El Paso made up 81 percent of the registrants,” notes Abigail Bouzan-Kaloustian of CNU.

Mathew McElroy, deputy director of Planning and Economic Development, explains the city’s education program:

“The New Urbanism and SmartCode were both very new for City of El Paso staff, the design community, and for developers. Everyone had heard of it, knew a tiny bit of it here and there, but no one that I came across could profess any real expertise. We had developers, for example, saying, ‘I have a great project, it’s got skinny streets!’ — never mind that the streets got skinny because they took out the planting strip, left 36 feet between the curbs, and were doing it with a rolled curb. Prior to my joining the city, we actually approved several subdivisions like this.

“When City Council started pushing for a different form of development, we realized we had to engage in a detailed and widespread education effort. At that point a co-worker and I decided to prepare for the CNU-A exam and passed just at about the time we had a few more public projects not meet with Council’s vision. I recommended to our city manager that all department heads with either capital projects or who are involved in development review take the exam.

“We prepared 12 two-hour courses and a four-hour practice exam. The department heads went first, then all senior managers — 67 of them passed the exam. “We have more than 90 enrolled now preparing for the next exam, but what’s exciting about this group is that it’s the private design community — the architects and engineers designing new neighborhoods in El Paso. If they want to work for the city, then they must have a project assigned CNU-A, which got us pretty much everyone in town enrolled.

“The exam needs to evolve and get tougher, focus more on streets, detailed design guidance, but it’s a great tool in markets like mine to at least begin to get past just the big ideas, get into the details, and think differently about how we build so that we end up with better projects. That way no one can say that they didn’t understand the design the city wanted.”