Pumping life into a city with urban design

Milwaukee is proving the principles of the New Urbanism in a tough real estate market — a rust belt city. The lessons can apply to other cities, towns, and even suburbs. Housing construction in Milwaukee increased by about 80 percent in 1998, according to a report in the daily newspaper the Journal Sentinel. In a recent month, fully a third of metropolitan region building permits were issued within the city. Milwaukee’s real estate renaissance partly is the result of a national trend — a survey of 24 cities nationwide found that all predict their downtown populations to grow by 2010 (see article on page 6). But Milwaukee’s success also is the result of planning. Along with numerous other communities — West Palm Beach and Orlando, Florida; Portland, Oregon; and Baltimore and Gaithersburg, Maryland, to name a few — Milwaukee is deliberately employing a wide range of new urbanist planning techniques to boost real estate values and attract residents. The tenets of the New Urbanism guide nearly every official planning, transportation and development decision in Milwaukee. Mayor John Norquist, a member of the Congress for the New Urbanism Board of Directors, has been preaching for years that cities can capitalize on their urban form. Norquist wrote a book published in 1998, The Wealth of Cities, which explains the value of traditional, walkable, interconnected mixed-use neighborhoods. Catalyst on the river The city’s RiverWalk, completed for a mile on both sides of the Milwaukee River (another half mile is under construction), has been key to the downtown resurgence. “Stroll along the downtown RiverWalk on a warm, clear day, when a breeze is puckering the surface of the Milwaukee River and the ripples are spangled with sunlight, and you begin to sense what a transformative effect the $13.8 million waterway is having,” says Whitney Gould, architecture critic for the Journal Sentinel. “Upscale apartment and luxury condominiums, some selling for as much as $750,000, have sprung up in old warehouses and commercial buildings along the waterway.” With new housing and waterfront bars and cafes, the RiverWalk has added $22 million in new assessed value to the downtown, Gould says. The RiverWalk is new urbanist in that it opens up the waterfront to the public, is directly connected to the street grid, and is pedestrian accessible. Because it is more or less on street level and features paths on both sides of a narrow river lined with buildings, the RiverWalk has more of the ambience of a canal street than a waterfront path. It is the fulfillment of the vision of early 20th Century planner Alfred Clas, an Olmstead contemporary who was part of the flowering of U.S. town and urban design so influential to new urbanists. Restoring urban fabric Like older cities all across the U.S., Milwaukee’s urban fabric has severely deteriorated, as illustrated by three graphics below. In the latter half of this century, the destruction of urban fabric has been cancerous. The city is trying, piece by piece, to restore the block and street coherence and connectivity that existed up to 1950. In its new developments, the city is demanding small, walkable blocks with a high level of connectivity. A prime example is the Beer Line B project, planned on a “brownfield” site near the Milwaukee River (see plan on page 4). The city owns most of the property, and hired Solomon Architecture of San Francisco, California, to create a design. The city will build the public infrastructure and sell land to private developers. Milwaukee is setting up a tax increment financing (TIF) district, whereby the city will borrow funds to build streets and parks on the assumption that increased tax revenues eventually will pay the development costs. In addition to the new real estate development that it will support, Beer Line B creates value for adjacent neighborhoods by connecting them to the waterfront — a common theme in Milwaukee projects. East Pointe Commons, a mixed-use project with condominiums, apartments, rowhomes, and retail, is another example of the city restoring an urban pattern. This project is under development on 25 acres cleared for an expressway which was never completed. East Pointe fills this space with normal city blocks and parks in the form of squares. The buildings line the exterior of blocks with parking in the middle. The final phase, under construction, includes a pathway down to a park on Lake Michigan, providing an amenity to a neighborhood with no previous pedestrian access to the lake. Like Beer Line B, East Pointe is being developed within a TIF district. The city provided public infrastructure and accepted competitive bids on development. The developer, the Mandel Group, has benefited from eight to nine percent annual rent increases. The city is constantly battling developers to get them to employ traditional urban patterns, especially when projects are entirely the result of private initiative, says city planning director Peter Park. “You would think that infill development in the city would take an urban form — but it doesn’t,” says Park. “The inclination is to create a cul-de-sac and turn the backs of houses on surrounding streets, and put a fence around the project. In such cases, the houses hold their value but they don’t do anything for surrounding neighborhoods.” Midtown Triangle area The city and other developers are building working class housing in the Midtown Triangle, northwest of downtown. The area features a traditional street grid with modest homes interspersed with vacant lots. When the development efforts began a few years ago, average household income in the Midtown Triangle was about $10,000 and average assessed valuation was about $15,000. Promoting development in such a depressed neighborhood would seem quixotic at best — but new units are being built and sold in many parts of the 90-block area. The biggest and most successful project in the Midtown Triangle is CityHomes, consisting of three blocks where the city has developed about 60 homes in the last three years. The houses are 1,600 to 1,800 square foot, two-story, traditional models, selling for $95,000, up from $76,000 in 1995. The cost to build these homes is about $125,000. The city plans to make up the difference between construction and sale price through increased tax revenues during the next few decades (CityHomes is another TIF district). All homes in the project have a full basement, a standard feature in Milwaukee, which adds about $7,000 to the cost. The basement raises the first floor a few feet, adding to the vertical proportion of the homes. Because they have a relatively small footprint on a 120-foot deep lot with detached garages, the houses have long back yards, some of which are surrounded by garden fences. Restored urban fabric and “eyes on the street” are designed to promote safety. The blocks are connected to the city grid. “We wanted the project to connect to the neighborhood, to bring up property values on surrounding blocks,” says Leo Ries, head of housing development for the city. “We have achieved that.” Midtown Triangle benefits from a number of other development initiatives, including Habitat for Humanity housing and Lindsay Heights — scattered-site manufactured housing on about 90 lots. The manufactured homes are designed to look like traditional Milwaukee housing stock. Looking to the future, new urbanist developer Crosswinds Communities is interested in building a larger, more complete traditional neighborhood development (TND) in the Midtown Triangle, according to Ries. Tearing down freeways U.S. downtowns have suffered grievously due to the construction of freeways since World War II. Recently, some signs are pointing to a reversal of that trend. In Boston, the multibillion dollar “Big Dig” is placing I-93 underground, and in Oakland, officials chose not to rebuild the Embarcadero freeway that collapsed in the 1989 earthquake. Milwaukee is taking the freeway backlash a step further — the city has plans to get rid of at least one, and possibly two, sections of freeways in the downtown. The more realistic goal in the short term is to tear down a mile-long expressway stub called the Park East Freeway. This highway was originally planned as part of a downtown “loop” that was fortunately never completed (it would have completely cut the downtown off from Lake Michigan). Now Park East ends abruptly at the parking lot of a shopping center, and is highly underutilized (24,000 cars/day at the busiest point inbound, 21,000 cars/day at the busiest point outbound). The elevated highway is a visual blight, cutting off views of downtown, destroying pedestrian connections between neighborhoods, and reducing adjacent property values. The city plans to replace this freeway with a grand boulevard — opening up a large swath of downtown, including some riverfront property, to development. The cost to tear down the freeway, build the boulevard, and create a new entrance to Interstate 43 (a main expressway to which one end of Park East is attached) is estimated at about $50 million. But the project could result in $84 million to $160 million in new real estate development, garnering $4.7 million annually in property taxes and adding 3,500 to 5,800 new residents to downtown, according to an analysis by the University of Wisconsin School of Architecture. If the Park East expressway were demolished, “land around it would be developed so fast it would make your head spin,” predicts one local developer. The Park East freeway demolition appears to have broad support. City planners also would like to tear down a two-mile section of I-794, which likewise cuts through downtown. Unlike Park East, I-794 is a connecting freeway, and carries more traffic. Although city planners believe that the city grid could handle the traffic, the idea of taking down I-794 is opposed by state transportation planners and many local officials. A highly successful Park East demolition might be required to get the I-794 plan moving forward. Other initiatives The city has commissioned a $350,000 Downtown Plan, hiring new urbanist planners A. Nelessen Associates of Princeton, New Jersey. Research for the plan, which is being drafted, included a Visual Preference Survey (VPS), Nelessen’s method for determining what residents want their city to look like. As with other VPSs nationwide, the survey demonstrated a strong preference for compact, pedestrian-oriented, urban places. The city also is revamping its zoning codes based on new urbanist principles. The current code calls for housing types and setbacks that often are in conflict with traditional city patterns. The new regulations will be more flexible and based on context, says Park. New buildings will be required to have similar placement and appearance as adjacent buildings. In another effort, officials are changing traffic patterns in the downtown — turning one-way streets into two-way thoroughfares. Two-way streets often are favored by new urbanists, who place a higher priority on ease of navigation than maximizing traffic speeds. Beyond larger initiatives, city officials make decisions on a day-to-day basis that are grounded in the New Urbanism. Critic Gould offered two examples in a Journal Sentinel article: “When you are driving across it, the Wisconsin Avenue viaduct is just another swath of concrete. But if you look at the underside — the part of the bridge visible to people in the working-class neighborhoods on the edge of the Menomonee Valley, you’ll glimpse a far different sight: a rhythmic progression of huge, open-spandrel arches combining the monumentality of a Roman aqueduct with the simplicity of abstract sculpture. “The bridge, built in 1993 ... may be one of Mayor John Norquist’s proudest but least-known achievements. The mayor forced state transportation engineers to junk their original plans for a stripped-down, standardized bridge in favor of a design more in keeping with the 1911 span it would replace. “Nearby, at the corner of 36th and Wisconsin, a new Walgreens drugstore also bears the Norquist stamp: Instead of the usual suburban-style store — faceless, concrete block; no windows; a sea of parking in front — this one has a variegated orange-brick facade with windows, planters and corner towers. It hugs the sidewalk, with screened parking off to the side.” Planning decisions like these have a cumulative effect on the quality of life in Milwaukee. The city demonstrates the extent to which the New Urbanism can be aligned successfully with public policy. u