Town transitions to new urbanist planning

What does it take to get a traditional neighborhood development (TND) approved? The answer may be different in every municipality, but in Chesterton, Indiana, a favorable legal framework, educated municipal planners, and a determined developer all played key roles. In this town about 30 miles east of Chicago, the Lake Erie Land Co. (LEL), proposed Coffee Creek, a 640-acre TND with significant open space and innovative environmental features. Soon after, LEL got into a rancorous battle with the Hoosier Environmental Council (HEC), a local environmental group that filed lawsuits to stop Coffee Creek. Furthermore, the New Urbanism was a concept new to Chesterton and its region. Despite facing these hurdles, LEL has made remarkable progress since February, 1997, when it first sought permits. The first three phases are approved, totaling more than 1,300 residential units and 1.1 million square feet of commercial/office/retail space. These phases consist of a town center, a main street district with a significant workplace component, and the first primarily residential neighborhood. The developer broke ground in late summer, 1998. “The fact that all of this is going on and the permits can be obtained in a town like Chesterton, where there is a lot of antigrowth sentiment, says a lot about our efforts to build relationships in this town,” says Kevin Warren, spokes-man for LEL. The case study provides insight into what many developers and planners will face in trying to introduce the New Urbanism to municipalities in coming years. Both Chesterton and LEL view themselves as pioneers, hoping to prove that a traditional street pattern can be reestablished, marketed and implemented. Few new examples of this type of development exist in Indiana, or, for that matter, the Midwest. Time is money For a developer, getting a TND approved in a reasonable period of time may make the difference between financial success and failure. Education and careful relationship building were important in LEL’s expedient entitlements, Warren says. But other significant factors worked in LEL’s favor: 1) Shortly after LEL began seeking approval for Coffee Creek, the state approved legislation allowing plannedunit developments (PUDs). Chester-ton became the first municipality in the state to pass such an ordinance, providing a better legal framework for the New Urbanism. PUD approval is more difficult than conventional subdivision approval, but the advantage is that the developer gets to bundle all variances together. In LEL’s case, each phase under normal circumstances would have required 30 to 40 variances to allow mixed use, narrower streets, smaller curb return radii and setbacks, and other elements of the New Urbanism. The PUD ordinance allowed flexibility and a mixture of uses, and the project was approved as a whole. Legal risk was reduced, because opponents could challenge the PUD approval, but not every separate variance. 2) The town hired Tarik El Naggar, a local architect and town planner, to represent the municipality. El Naggar has worked for Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company in the planning of many TNDs, including some of the earliest examples, such as Kentlands and Mashpee Commons. An experienced new urbanist designer, El Naggar made suggestions on behalf of the town that improved the plan. Moreover, El Naggar is a leading proponent of traditional main street preservation in Indiana, and had the credibility to assure officials that New Urbanism would not undermine the existing downtown. Public officials trust him when he says elements of the plan should be left unchanged. The PUD ordinance, which allowed the town to bill the developer for its planning costs, enabled Chesterton to hire El Naggar. 3) Town officials recognized the damage caused by conventional suburban development, and were open to alternatives. Because the historic part of town is built on a grid pattern, officials looked favorably on reestablishing an interconnected network of streets. 4) Town officials were willing to experiment with narrower streets, smaller curb return radii, reduced impervious off-street parking requirements, and other elements that allow a TND to be built — but insisted on special tests and contingency plans. Without LEL, however, it is safe to say that Chesterton would not be getting its first new urbanist development, for several reasons: 1) Despite the fact that neotra-ditional development is unproven in this market, LEL was determined to build a TND. 2) The PUD process requires an extra approval step, and is expensive, but LEL was willing and able to bear this cost. “All of the town’s legal, planning and engineering fees are charged to the developer,” says Warren. “We can go through this, but the little guys (smaller developers) can’t do it. The path of least resistance here is still the conventional subdivision. The developer must really want to do TND.” 3) LEL spent considerable resources on education of public officials on the TND concept. Engineering issues In making the transition from conventional suburban to new urbanist planning, engineering standards are a significant hurdle, says Charlie Ray, Chesterton’s town engineer. “We are so used to following guidelines that create large, wide roads, capable of carrying large amounts of traffic,” Ray says. “In a traditional neighborhood you are trying to slow things down.” Looking at the town’s older neighborhoods is not an adequate model for TND, Ray says. Older neighborhoods, for example, provide little off-street parking, he points out. TNDs provide plenty of off-street parking, a fact that has to be taken into account when designing road widths. Ray has studied TND through discussions with officials from municipalities in other states that have approved these types of developments and by reading articles in trade journals. One strategy was to lay out a full scale Coffee Creek neighborhood street configuration in a large parking lot, complete with narrower street widths, on-street parking and small curb return radii. Fire and trash trucks and buses were driven around these simulated streets to evaluate how well the proposed dimensions would work with large vehicles. As a result, the town allowed LEL to use six-foot curb return radii instead of the usual 15 feet. However, on-street parking will not be allowed within 40 feet of each intersection to provide more maneuverability on turns. The town reduced street width requirements to 28 feet, from 30 feet. Parking will be allowed on both sides of streets, but town officials reserved the right to restrict parking to one side “if streets turn out to be too congested,” Ray says. Chesterton required a backup for an innovative stormwater retention system proposed by LEL. Th new system allows runoff from the town center to trickle slowly down a naturally vegetated slope leading to a creek, but the town requested that a conventional detention basin be installed as well, for use if the primary system fails or needs repair. “Most developers would not have agreed to a duplicate system,” Ray says. Finally, the town allowed a reduction in its parking requirements for Coffee Creek’s mixed-use town center. For the few days a year — the day before Christmas, for example — when extra parking is needed, the town allowed LEL to construct an overflow grass-covered parking lot. Opposition and lawsuits LEL faced significant legal opposition from the Hoosier Environmental Council, which challenged two variances received by the developer prior to the town’s adoption of the PUD ordinance. The variances were related to a supermarket that wanted to locate in Coffee Creek. Now the variances are moot: they are superseded by the PUD approval, and the supermarket has pulled out of the project. While these suits were active, however, they had an impact on the development by generating significant negative publicity and legal costs (the PUD process requires the developer to pay for both its own and the town’s legal fees). Also, these lawsuits were a factor in the supermarket locating elsewhere, Warren says. LEL directly challenged HEC by counter suing, claiming that the organization had no legal standing to fight the variances. In response, HEC tried to get “slap suit” legislation approved at the state level. This initiative, which would have enabled “opponents to do and say anything, and not be sued,” according to Warren, backfired. LEL teamed up with school boards and police departments statewide to defeat the version of the legislation supported by HEC. Meanwhile, the Town of Chesterton fought the HEC suits contesting the variances. HEC sued the town, claiming $40 million in damages. The result of all this legal mess was that town officials and the developer both looked at HEC as an opponent. “I don’t recommend that a developer get involved in a suit against citizens,” Warren says, “but there is a galva-nizing effect in having a common enemy.” In public relations wars with the environmentalists, LEL’s cause was helped by the fact that Coffee Creek was designed by William McDonough & Partners, an architectural firm nationally recognized for sustainable design. Also, the project was endorsed by such well-known planners as Andres Duany and Randall Arendt (who is widely recognized for work in conservation design). Taking a new direction Municipal officials in Chesterton are taking what may be the first steps in reverting to traditional town planning, from the suburban model that has dominated community development in the last half century. “We’re the grand experiment,” says Gina Darnell, who sits on Chesterton’s town council and the planning commission. “If it works for us, we will be an example for other towns.” Darnell believes the change makes sense — but that proof or disproof of its value will take decades. Questions remain about how well neotraditional planning can accommodate modern business needs, traffic and market demands, Darnell says. “I won’t know if it will work until after I’m dead,” she quips. Jeff Trout, another planning commission member, has few reservations about trying New Urbanism. “It’s a social experiment — if it works it’s great,” he says. “If it doesn’t, where’s the harm? The alternative is more sprawl. The biggest risk is that TND won’t sell.” If it sells, Trout says, other developers will rush to copy Coffee Creek. But if sales are slow, getting other local developers to try the New Urbanism “will be a struggle,” he adds.