Old urbanism becomes new

A master plan guides the dramatic revitalization of a once shabby, moribund downtown. West Palm Beach, Florida, has staged a amazing turnaround in six years since the city hired new urbanists to create a downtown plan. At the start of the decade, the downtown’s retail occupancy rate was approximately 20 percent. The city was a world apart, socially and economically, from West Palm Beach’s rich neighbor across the bay, Palm Beach. Now, retail space in West Palm Beach is 94 percent leased. More than $300 million in downtown development has taken place in recent years; another $650 million is underway. Pedestrian traffic has dramatically increased, and the streets have come alive again. The downtown master plan, based on a 1993 charrette, is geared toward attracting investment and improving the quality of the public realm. The plan, by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, Jonathan Barnett, Walter Kulash, and Gibbs Planning Group, is based on the idea that when traditional streets and public spaces are made beautiful and traffic is calmed, pedestrians will come back to the city and merchants will follow. With proper codes, the plan assumes, new and renovated private buildings will add to the vitality and harmony of the public realm, creating still more real estate momentum and value. Officials in West Palm Beach enthusiastically bought into the New Urbanism and implemented the plan. The strong economy and the city’s strategic location played important roles in this turnaround. New urbanists articulated and illustrated the strategy. Public investment West Palm Beach spent nearly $6 million on major downtown streetscape improvements from 1993 to 1995. The city also contributed $100,000 toward downtown facade improvements, awarded to building owners willing to spend matching funds for tile work, awnings, paint jobs and other creative touches. The city views the storefronts as part of the public realm. A town square and fountains were built to terminate Clematis Street, the major downtown shopping thoroughfare, at a cost of $2 million. This square has become the site of regular public events and a magnet for pedestrians. A waterfront park and amphitheater (which replaced a vacant Holiday Inn dramatically demolished on New Year’s Eve, 1993) cost $3.5 million. The city plans to spent another $5 million on traffic calming. Urban regulations The downtown plan tosses aside conventional zoning regulations which focus on land uses, and replaces them with rules based on building type. “The goal is to establish an environment with a high degree of physical predictability — not only for aesthetic reasons, but to encourage renewed building in the city,” according to the plan. The regulations prescribe the general form and massing of buildings, and ensure that they squarely face the street with a uniform setback. “The control of the building capacity is not an abstract floor area ratio, but the actual physical description of the building volume,” the plan states. The plan is divided into primary “A” streets where the codes are most strict, and regular “B” streets, which accommodate more automobile-oriented uses. Four general building types are allowed in specific areas of downtown — “yard” buildings, “low” buildings, “medium” buildings and “tower” buildings. The medium type, which is required in much of the central business core, is two to five stories high, with storefronts on the first floor. The retail must be level with the sidewalk. Upper floors can contain offices or apartments. In contrast to standard codes, the height of the building is not regulated, only the number of stories. This encourages taller floors, especially on the first level. Most property owners are working closely with the city. “There’s always a balance that has to be negotiated between what the plan calls for and what the developer wants to do,” says city transportation planner Ian Lockwood. Retailing strategy The planners developed a strategy that takes advantage of the downtown’s strengths as a traditional main street, yet makes use of modern retailing principles employed by malls. Keys to this strategy are the tenant mix, store front design, and circulation patterns. The plan identifies three distinct areas of Clematis Street — the restaurant and entertainment district near the waterfront, the core retail area, and the neighborhood service district. Groupings of similar businesses are encouraged in these districts as part of achieving the tenant mix. The plan addresses proper window display, entry design, signage, lighting and other issues. In the past 12 months, at least 34 retailers and restaurants have opened their doors. A significant number of national tenants have recently, or will soon, move on to Clematis Street — including the Gap, Baby Gap, Watch Station, Starbucks, Banana Republic, Z Gallerie, and Sunglass Hut. The plan’s emphasis on multiuse buildings has brought residential units along with the retail. A building on the 100 block of Clematis is being developed with 17,000 square feet of retail and 80 to 85 live/work units, for example. Taming streets for pedestrians Despite the traditional downtown grid first laid out in the late 1800s and improved in 1923 by town planning great John Nolen, West Palm Beach’s streets in recent decades had become harsh, and in many ways hostile, to pedestrians. Landscaping was minimal, streets were designed to move automobiles rather than pedestrians, and frequent parking lots and vacant lots created gaps in the urban fabric. The transformation of Clematis Street illustrates the dramatic improvements the city has made in the downtown. Bulbouts narrow the perceived street width. Benches and lighting add to pedestrian comfort. Clematis Street now terminates at a public square with a series of fountains and sitting places. Lockwood’s ideal measure of traffic calming is the 8-year-old pedestrian. “Would it be safe,” he asks, “for an 8-year-old to walk around the neighborhood without feeling endangered by vehicular traffic?” In addition to bulbouts, the city employs raised intersections, widened sidewalks, and the technique of narrowing the optical width of the street to create a sense of enclosure. Lateral shifts in the street, which use surplus space to shift the street at an angle, also are used. In the two years Lockwood has been in West Palm Beach, the city has not spent “a dime” on widening streets, the planner reports. Although the city has been mostly unsuccessful in its efforts to shift one-way streets to two-way thoroughfares (opposition has come from county transportation officials), the city won this particular battle on Clematis Street. Shifting back to two-way streets tends to slow traffic and create more even flow of automobiles throughout the day. In a one-way system, retail often will concentrate on certain streets that carry most of the home-bound traffic, according to Gibbs Planning Group. Parking The authors of the master plan found an oversupply of parking spaces in downtown, but need for better management and sharing. In order to spur development, off-street parking requirements were reduced for residential and commercial units. Developers of residential units in the downtown are allowed to use on-street parking spaces to help meet their total parking requirements. The city has attempted to make parking in the downtown as convenient, or nearly as convenient, as it is in the malls. CityPlace West Palm Beach’s largest development to date, the 72-acre, $380 million CityPlace, is currently under construction. Several blocks from the downtown core on land that was mostly vacant, CityPlace includes 600 residential units, 300,000 square feet of retail, 100,000 square feet of restaurants and 100,000 square feet of entertainment. CityPlace includes apartments above street level retail. A plaza with a historic church forms the center of the project. The fact that CityPlace utilizes the city’s historic block and street pattern is a tribute to both the downtown plan and public officials’ commitment to the New Urbanism. Because CityPlace is a planned unit development, the developers were free to ignore the master plan and create a suburban mall if they wished. Without the city’s clear new urbanist planning preference, it’s a safe assumption that developers would have chosen a the more conventional approach. The scale of CityPlace is a concern, however. It creates a second downtown core, three blocks from the current one. City planners are hoping that subsequent infill development will connect CityPlace to the Clematis Street district over time, creating a unified core. Looking Ahead A measure of West Palm Beach’s success is the acceleration of investment over the past three years as confidence has returned in the downtown district. West Palm Beach has, in a very short period of time, redefined Clematis as a main street retail district that can offer an alternative to the regional malls in the area. The city is refining its plan and revising some aspects of the code, especially details that were not addressed in the original plan, says Joe Minicozzi, urban designer for the city. These issues will be covered in a charrette scheduled for July to update the master plan. Most significantly, a change of leadership has taken place in the city. Former mayor Nancy Graham, the public official most responsible to implementing the downtown plan, chose not to run for reelection in 1999, and has gone to work for a private developer. New mayor Joel Davis has expressed support for the downtown plan. Although the downtown plan has backers, there are powerful opponents who don’t like the architectectural regulations or the limits on the number of stories of buildings. The zoning code that helped to shape West Palm Beach’s success will be put to the test, politically, in the second half of 1999. This report was based, in part, on an analysis by David Brunelle of Gibbs Planning Group.