| | Cities & Codes Panel/Presentation |
Transcript of Rick Cole, John Wolff, Tom Lyons, Matt Taecker, Chip Kaufman presentation toCouncil IV, (independently published), Santa Fe, NM
Transcription by Jason Miller
October 19, 2002
[View the pdf]
“…after flying all the way to Washington from California, someone turned to me and said, “What would be the first thing you would do?” I know that I was going to get only one shot, so I said, “First, blow up the zoning code.” And that was it. I flew back to California…”–Rick Cole, at the 25th AIA Earth Day teleconference.
[BEGIN TRANSCRIPTION]
Rick Cole:
We’re here in a house of worship, and it happens to be my faith; I’m Catholic. One of my favorite parts in our liturgy is a point in the mass when the priest says, “Peace be with you,” and the people respond, “And also with you.” And then he says, “Make the sign of peace with each other.”
There is a part in the mass where everyone turns to their neighbor and extends a greeting of “Peace be with you.” I think after the polemics we’ve had this morning, it would be appropriate if each of you would turn to those around you and remember that we’re all new urbanists here!
[Laughter and applause]
So, peace be with you! And it’s customary to shake hands or, if you know the person well enough—say, they’re your partner—you can kiss them.
My name is Rick Cole. We’ve struggled a bit with democracy in the presenters who are scheduled now, to frame why we were thrown together. I think, ultimately, what we concluded was that all of us are engaged in works in progress, and that this would be a valuable time now, as we get ready tomorrow to figure out where we go from here, to share with you experiences that come from the front lines, that come from grappling with these issues on the ground.
And so, Chip Kaufman, who is from Australia, is going to present an alternate code that has been adopted at staff initiative, to allow developers and communities to develop on a new urbanist model. John Wolff and Tom Lyons are going to present a place-based, incremental approach that is already working in Boulder, Colo., and how that is working. Matt Taecker is going to focus on a performance-based methodology that informs his work in Salt Lake City and in other jurisdictions. And I am going to present—and I think I should introduce myself: I am Rick Cole; I’m the city manager for the City of Azusa—I’m going to talk about a vision-based project to comprehensively replace our general plan and our zoning code with a new urbanist, transect-based, complete code.
So with that, I think it’s important, in the ecumenical sense—drawing upon a Greek word, since we’re talking about Greek things most recently—in an ecumenical sense, not only the Catholic tradition, but also the Buddhist one, to remember that there are a thousand paths to enlightenment, and that whether we’re talking about an alternative approach, an incremental approach, a performance-based approach or a vision-based approach, that they are all efforts to reach the same [desired result].
Let me begin with my own journey toward enlightenment.
In 1995, I had one of the most surreal experiences I’ve ever had in my life. I was invited to Washington by the American Institute of Architects to be a part of the 25th anniversary of Earth Day teleconference. Ten thousand architects across America were going to participate. So it was Bill McDonough and other great AIA icons of the green, environmental architecture movement. I was there because of the experience I’d had as mayor of Pasadena.
It was a surreal experience because you fly all the way to Washington, consuming God knows how much jet fuel, to sit in a hot television studio all day, for the opportunity to give 30 seconds of wisdom to 10,000 architects out there somewhere, connected to you by a wire. [You never see them; you can’t interact with them.] My 30 seconds—after flying all the way to Washington from California, someone turned to me and said, “What would be the first thing you would do?”
I know that I was going to get only one shot, so I said, “First, blow up the zoning code.”
And that was it. I flew back to California—
[Laughter]
—and three years later, got the opportunity to be a city manager, and I thought that I should take my own advice.
Let me tell you a little bit about Azusa. We are a foothill community, halfway between Pasadena and Claremont —two better-known cities along the San Gabriel Mountains—in a basin called the San Gabriel Valley. The San Gabriel Valley is larger than the San Fernando Valley (the famous “The Valley” of California): “The Valley” is 1.8 million; our valley is 2 million people. “The Valley” is in the city of Los Angeles and is struggling to get out; our valley is chopped up into 31 former towns that have grown together in sprawl.
There are 45,000 people in our community, and we are, along the foothills, the “poor cousin.” In median property values, in median income, in homeownership, in test scores, in crime statistics—[using] whatever objective criteria you wish to choose, we are what our mayor said in the Los Angeles Times when I was hired, “the caboose on the foothill train.”
The Times took notice of my being hired. They said Azusa was so desperate, they’ve been forced to hire a recovering politician as their city manager.
I arrived just at the moment when they were in the final throes of the entitlement process, (which is really not what it is in California—it’s an excruciating process, rather than an entitlement process) of a sprawl-based plan of adding 1,500 to 2,000 units of housing at the lower end, because at that point our median housing price in Azusa was $130,000. That may seem fine in Iowa, but it made us dirt poor by southern California standards. There was an effort to entitle this development on 300 acres of the last big piece of agricultural land in the San Gabriel Valley.
I was basically told by the city council, ‘We’re tired of the process; bring it to a conclusion.’
That was against all my instincts, and yet I felt I had very little choice, so within the “room to maneuver” of a developer who said, “We don’t know why we have to talk to you; we have three votes,” I attempted to patch what was wrong with the plan. In the end, it crashed and burned, and led to a citizen referendum that overturned the city council’s approval.
We really reached rock bottom in our city. The Chinese word for crisis is danger and opportunity, and [we had] an extraordinary opportunity. For 20 years, we had not had enough money to do a general plan. General plans are required by law in California—you heard that a day ago—and they are expected to be updated every five years. Ours had not been updated in 20 years, and as best as anyone could remember—and no one could—the last thing they had done—20 years before—was put a new cover on. But essentially, it was a general plan that was probably less relevant than if we had adopted one of the codes from the 5th century!
Because of my experience in Pasadena—where we had created an award-winning general plan and then, totally exhausted by the effort, had failed to do a zoning code that implemented it—it seemed to me from the beginning to be an opportunity to redo our general plan and redo— “blow up”—the zoning code at the very same time. So at the same time we hired Moule & Polyzoides to work with us on our general plan, we hired Paul Crawford to begin preparing the development code, rather than wait till the general plan was done. Usually in California you run out of money after your General Plan is done, so you don’t do anything. Even in the best case, you go out and find some completely new consultant who comes in and who reinvents it, and by the time you’re done with that, you’re ready to revise your General Plan again.
So we wanted to have something that was holistic and comprehensive.
The planners were skeptical about all this; after all, I didn’t come from their profession. One of them complimented me in a sort of back-handed way, as the only city manager they had ever worked for who was a “wanna-be planner.” I brought a different perspective to the planning professionals in the city. Because what do planners do in our society?
[Laughter]
It’s not a trick question! Planners make plans. I know this; I’m married to a planner. They make plans. I think Stefanos described planners as children of a divorce of architects and planners no longer having much of a relationship with each other. In Italy I went to see the planning departments, and there are none. There’s the Department of Urbanistica—those are professional registered architects—and they do planning. So when people go to build buildings, they have been educated in planning. And when people plan cities, they’ve been educated in buildings.
In America they are not. Planners are educated to make plans. So they were prepared to make a plan, but they were quite dubious about the way in which I suggested we make the plan, which was to involve the community at a very different level than is customary now in California. In California, the process of making a general plan has become so convoluted and complex, that it is like the circus coming to town. You pay an enormous amount of money to a set of consultants who have done the same thing in various places, and they bring the three rings and the lions and the clowns and the horses and the highwire acts, and they come to your town. It’s all pre-programmed. And when they leave, you have the document into which none of your staff had any input, and so it is incomprehensible to them, and so it goes on the shelf.
The circus that was coming to our town includes, as a matter of standards in California, that you create a stakeholder committee. That is taken as naturally as LOS (level of service) standards. And this stakeholder committee always includes an environmental wacko, a business zealot, a property rights fanatic, a Realtor, two or three NIMBYs, and a collection—a menagerie—of types, who are called “representatives.” They are representative not of the community, but of special-interest segments of the community. They are all brought together and, after two years of listening to consultants, finally come to some kind of agreement, go out to the community, and the community says, “Wait a minute. We didn’t have anything to do with the preparation of this. You’ve been in a room for two years, hammering out some unholy compromise.”
The community has no ownership in it. So, as a recovering politician, I told the planners that we were going to involve hundreds of people in this process.
Now, our community is not like Boulder or Berkeley where you have hundreds of people who are wanna-be planners, citizens who are architects and designers and whatnot, either amateur or professional. In Azusa, a town of 45,000, the number of people who had ever heard of the New Urbanism could be collected in a phone booth, and have a good deal of room for elbows! So we didn’t have hundreds of people interested from the start. But I said that we were going to involve hundreds of people in the process.
So I offer this, because I have enormous respect and I have learned so much from this organization and from the people who have contributed to it: If there is one story I would share with you that I think is important to keep in mind, it’s from the book The Best and the Brightest. Lyndon Johnson came to Capitol Hill after his first cabinet meeting with McNamara and Rusk, and all of these guys in The Best and the Brightest. And he was raving to his old mentor, Sam Rayburn (Speaker of the House), “Sam, you won’t believe how bright these guys are. They are the best and the brightest. They are whiz kids. They are from Harvard and MIT—”
And, presumably over branchwater and bourbon, Sam Rayburn responded, “Well, yes, Lyndon. There’s just one thing. I’d sleep a lot better every night if just one of them had ever run for sheriff.”
[Laughter]
I’ve run for city council. And I’ve gotten more votes than my opponent. And that has made me a believer in democracy. The picture we all laughed at on Friday, of “the public,” (a photo of the hideous Orcs from “Lord of the Rings”) is easy to internalize: “the great unwashed.” And yet, if we believe in democracy, we ultimately get to “consent of the governed.” That is what I have to offer you today.
We began our general plan process with a different kind of circus. Not a circus of hired consultants with their show. But we put a circus tent up next to the annual community carnival, with its Ferris wheels and all of that, and we called it the “Future Fiesta.” Three hundred citizens walked through the process and had fun learning about the future and making choices and playing games. We had everyone from grandmothers to gang members go through this experience of essentially whetting their appetite to participate in the more substantive work—workshops and charrettes.
We created this entity we called the “Citizens Congress,” because I learned something in high school: If you tell people that they’re important, they act with a certain amount of responsibility. I learned this because we always used to have these battles over cheerleaders. I came from a very racially polarized community, and we’d have these battles because there was never quite the right mix of people chosen at the end. There weren’t enough black people, or enough brown people, or too many white people—whatever it was, there was always some problem, because there were only six [cheerleader positions]. So, as student body president, I adopted the suggestion of one of our council members that we allow anyone to be a cheerleader who wanted to be.
Of course, if anybody can be a cheerleader, nobody wants to be, because it’s really a pain in the ass. You have to dress up, spend a lot of money, and perform in front of a whole bunch of people who don’t really want to pay attention to you anyway. If there’s no status in it, why do it?
So it’s important to give people status. We made people “delegates” to the Citizens Congress. They weren’t just “the public,” invited to give three-minute speeches. They became delegates to the Citizens Congress, and the Citizens Congress, rather than some twenty “stakeholders,” is made up of hundreds of citizens. Now we have hundreds of informed Citizens Congress delegates in a community where before, the number of people who understood these planning issues could be numbered on a single hand.
We began very differently than most of these efforts. We began literally with the values of the community. “What is that we value in this city?” We’re a fairly old-fashioned city. We’re a 65 percent Latino city, a Mexican-American city, a city where “faith, family, and country” is not something you snicker at; it’s something you stand in the hot sun on July 4 and pledge allegiance to. That’s the kind of community we are, and that’s the kind of general plan that made sense. That was the foundation on which we’ve built. We’ve called ourselves the “Gateway to the American Dream,” because we’re not a city like Beverly Hills or Newport Beach, where people have “arrived.” We are a place where people really do aspire to work hard and create a better future for their children.
So we began experimenting with alternatives. We used some of the sophisticated technology that Peter Katz showed on Friday, and we gave our citizens choices: “Do you want this or this?”
It’s remarkable: Shorn of the jargon, people make fairly intelligent choices. “Oh, that’s mixed use? Well, then, I want mixed use.”
“Oh, that’s a livable community? Then I’m for livable communities.”
“That’s New Urbanism? Then I’m for New Urbanism.”
The vocabulary came second. The imagery and the vision came first. You build on that vision and the values. The most important part, though, for our community, was hope. Because we had been beaten down. Always, our operative principle was, whatever can be done well, we’ll accept badly. If you can build good apartments in Pasadena, we’ll take cruddy apartments in Azusa. If you can build lousy big boxes, we’ll take them.
So we were a community that had very little hope of raising standards. That was the most important lesson, and most important turning point, was that the light began going on. It’s not that people ever lost hope, but they had been so beaten down by the politics of low expectation, [and] they came once again to believe in themselves and their community.
The most elaborate part of this was the Monrovia Nursery design competition, which, for better or worse, was my brainchild. It remains to be seen how it will all sort out. We went through a process where we RFP’ed it through CNU and other resources. Twelve firms responded. We selected four, gave them each $50,000, and told them to go off and design a plan. But before they were allowed to do that, they had to sit down with the community. We worked out a set of four guiding principles, with details. Some of the people in this room participated in that process.
They came back two and a half months later—after a lengthy set of charrettes going on in four teams— and presented their four programs to the community. The community fell in love with them. We selected two of the firms—EDAW and Torti Gallas—to work together. The working together has been challenging and it’s not over yet. They hammered out a draft plan —the environmental impact report is now on the street and today, as we speak, we’re having a joint city council/planning commission public workshop on an aspect of that. I expect it’s going to be approved, and one of the things that I’ve learned from this conference is that we need to go back and make sure that the coding for it delivers what we’ve actually planned.
That was the most elaborate and perhaps high-visibility piece of this, but meanwhile, we were completely rewriting every word of our general plan. We literally threw the old general plan in the wastebasket; there’s not a word from the 20-year-old general plan that is being carried over into the new. The same goes for the development code.
And so Stefanos (Polyzoides) and Alan (Loomis) and Paul (Crawford) have been working closely with us; we’re now in the drafting stage. We’ve worked out a framework and a format, but I think it would be important to use words that Paul has shared with me: Ours is one that is “explicitly purposeful.” This may sound redundant. Explicitly purposeful. Because it’s an infill community; it’s a community that’s already there, and our explicit purpose is to heal the community, to make it better, to take the best of what is already in the community, and to begin to apply it more broadly, in a healing manner. Stefanos insisted, although the planners at first resisted, that in each of the sections, there would be an explicitly new urbanist typology of districts, corridors, and neighborhoods. Based upon intensive field work, we analyzed the five-minute walk and the patterns of habitation in our city, and came up with 23 neighborhoods and three districts, and corridors. We then began to apply a coding format and a set of ideas for change in each of those districts and neighborhoods and corridors, that would begin to repair and to heal the city, and to bring prosperity and livability.
I think one of the things that we hoped to share with others is that this is not a paper-based code. Instead of thinking about how to translate paper to the Web, we’re thinking about how to translate the Web to paper, and that this document really needs to be accessible 24/7, worldwide. Because an architect, a planner, an investor, a citizen, a Realtor, a property owner, needs to have access to what they can do in Azusa. It needs to be accessible, it needs to be colorful, and it needs to be embedded in a single, comprehensive, comprehensible document—not the design guidelines, and the zoning code, and the general plan, and the specific plan, and the area plan, and the redevelopment guidelines, and that sort of Troy-like encrustation that I came to loathe about Pasadena. Because Pasadena is so wealthy, they can afford to buy a wonderful plan at half a million dollars—and put it on the shelf. In Azusa we can’t do that.
I sold this idea as “This will cost us $350,000” in a city that couldn’t afford $350,000. Two and a half years later, we’ve gone over the $2 million mark. Why? Well, it’s expensive, involving the community. It’s expensive, having top-flight talent. It’s expensive, doing it right.
There has not been a single whisper of public criticism, in a city where we need more police officers, where we need to fix our potholes. In a city where we need to do those things, there has not been a single whisper of public criticism of the expenditures. Now, I don’t go around advertising that it’s cost $2 million—
[Laughter]
—but people know it has cost a lot of money, and that we’ve put a lot of resources and time into it. And the reason is because people believe in the process. Because hope is priceless. Quality is priceless.
So we’re now at that “tipping point” in our community. I would be the last to take for granted that this is all going to go well, but we really have enormous political will. Stefanos made reference [to that] yesterday, in a way that I often hear architects and planners: “If only they had the political will” or “I gave them this great plan, but they didn’t have the political will” to implement it. If there’s one lesson that I would offer to all of you, it’s that political will is not something you buy, it’s not something you manufacture, it’s not something you bring from another place. It’s not something you can avoid or shortcut or short-circuit. Political will is the consent of the governed.
I think that bears repeating: Political will is the consent of the governed.
Andrés quoted Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence earlier this morning, saying that truths are self-evident. Well, further on in the Declaration of Independence—and I can’t quote it exactly, but it says that “Experience hath shown that men are more inclined to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right those wrongs by altering the forms to which they have become accustomed.” Which is why we’ve had zoning for 60 years.
[Laughter]
[Jefferson] said, “However, when a long train of abuses and usurpations evincing invariably the same object to reduce them to absolute despotism, then it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such forms, and institute such new forms as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
If ever there was a paradigmatic argument for the moment we are at, it’s that the “long train of abuses and usurpations” of conventional zoning and all that that implies has finally come to the “absolute despotism” that we now suffer under, of sprawl suburbia. It is our right, it is our duty, to throw off such forms, and for the people to put in place such forms as to them shall seem most likely to effect their future safety and happiness.
That is the “tipping point” we are now at, is to get people to recognize, as Jefferson did. Jefferson had to point out these self-evident truths. The fact is that in America, there were never more than a third of the people who were signed up for the revolution. But that third carried the day, because that third was willing to walk with no shoes through the snows at Valley Forge.
So we are now at that “tipping point.” Oddly enough, so was zoning, 60 years ago. Zoning was, as has been said, a reform movement. That ultimately, enough communities decided that the Dickensian horrors of mixed use were so great, they would make the shift to this new paradigm.
Well, we’ve now come full circle, and need to make the next shift. Who’s going to do that?
I think it’s important to recognize that all politics is local. What I’m suggesting, what Chip will suggest, what Matt will suggest, what Tom and John will talk about, are local examples. What works in Australia and Boulder and Salt Lake City, is not the same as what will work in your community, but each one of you can go back to your community and, by a strategic approach, create the political will for change.
Churchill said in wartime, there are three things you need to do: “Attack, attack, attack.”
Being a Trinitarian, especially in this environment, the three forms of attack are:
The covert assault—you know, the sneaking in part (Andrés is always for that), get underneath their radar, figure out a way to insert this thing subversively.
There’s the flank attack—[putting] a specific plan in one neighborhood. That may work in some places.
And then there’s what we’ve done in Azusa, which is the frontal assault. You find out that once you get to the front lines, there’s really not that much there there.
I conclude with just a couple of points:
Start with vision. Ours was a vision-based plan. I’m not going to say that’s the only way to start, but that’s the way we started, and that’s what had the most impact in a community that had suffered from the failure of vision, whose vision was a pale copy of things from other communities, whose zoning code was just one of those model codes grafted onto a city and then tinkered with for years and years by planning commissions and city councils. A vision is not a vision of a new zoning code; a vision is of a new community. The zoning code is the means—not the end. You cannot stand in front of a group of your fellow citizens and say, “Follow me to the battlements for the new zoning code!” Or, “Adopt the new transect!”
That is not what causes people to rise up and follow. It reminds me of when Robert Kennedy was contemplating whether he should take on the sitting president and run against him to end the war in Vietnam. There was a tremendous battle between the young people on his staff who wanted him to run, and the older Kennedy advisors of his brother who wanted him to stay put and wait four years. Finally, Kennedy turns to Arthur Schlesinger and says, “Well, Arthur, what would you have me do?”
And Schlesinger said, “You should unite the new Democrats around a ‘peace plank.’”
And Kennedy replied, “Arthur, when is it that you remember millions of people rallying around a plank?”
“You all” can figure out what the code is, but “we all” have to figure out why we need a new code. That’s the role of “we all.” It has to be based upon a vision. It has to be locally calibrated, as we’ve heard over and over from Stefanos. It has to be embedded in the conditions and the aspirations of the place that will grow from those conditions.
In the end, it has to be comprehensive and comprehensible. How you get there is your choice, but in the end, it has to work and it has to make some sense.
This is what I conclude on: There’s a dirty word in our lexicon. It’s “hybrid.” There is that sort of scathing sense that what makes new urbanists, new urbanists, is that we’re purists, that we are the carriers of the gospel. That these cul-de-sac subdivisions with front porches grafted onto them are worse than the enemy, because they undercut the very essence of what we’re up to. Most of the time, I think I agree with that. But we stand in a sanctuary that was placed here because of the power of what one might argue is a “hybrid” religious figure: the Virgin de Guadalupe, who is an Aztec god whose image was delivered by Juan Diego—now Saint Juan Diego—to the bishop in one of the provinces of Mexico. The power of that image for over 500 years, is a mestizo power, which is, roughly translated, a hybrid. It is not the European Catholic tradition; it is not the indigenous Aztec tradition. But it’s more than a hybrid, it transcends them both. It is more powerful than either, and that is where its power comes from. That is where her power comes from. She is a transcendent symbol of something bigger than white Catholics or indigenous Mexicans. She becomes an incredible symbol and power of motherhood, of universality, of faith, of gentleness, of miracle.
Now, at the risk of sounding like Andrés, I think there is power that we can derive from that inspiration. That what we are about is imperfect, as Andrés just reminded us. No code is going to produce purist perfection in the 21st century—we live now in a global, colliding culture. But we can transcend the limitations of today. It’s not about “hybrid.” It’s about what works in Iowa City being different from what works in Azusa. What works in Azusa is different from Santa Barbara. But there is a universality, a transcendence, that works for all of us. A common faith, a common future, a common ideal, and a common courage. And that is what I hope you will take home to all of your communities.
Thank you very much.
John Wolff:
I’m going to shift the focus to something probably a little more mundane than some of those ideas.
Tom Lyon and I are architects that have progressively gotten involved in larger questions of urban design and coding, starting from doing very small buildings, and we’ve been using this code in Boulder, here, the Title 9 land use regulations. We are veterans, if not victims, of this code. It has a different specifier in it, I think, that you should add to your list: It’s the Sterling Codifiers in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. I didn’t realize there were so many of them.
In any case, we’ve been using it for about 25 years, and regardless of the scale of the project that we’ve been working on, we’ve found that we’ve always been breaking rules—usually one, often many. Every now and then, we’ve been able to get into a situation where the rules are changed in such a way that they seem to make our job easier, and to at least suggest the right response, instead of the most difficult path to get to the place where we want to go.
We’re going to talk a little bit about some of these mixed use zones and codes that have been created in Boulder over the last few years. As you’ll see, there was one early one, and then four more recent ones that were added to it.
To get started with this, we’ll give you a little bit of a history of some of the big achievements, or big accomplishments, that the City of Boulder has managed to make over the years.
This is an image of the early days, before zoning, when the citizens of the People’s Republic were working on the Flatirons, which is our mountain backdrop. You can see that they’re using the most modern technology up there, to construct these rocks; this has been an important accomplishment. So it began with this; the Flatirons is a cherished icon for the city, and everything seems to revolve around that.
Early events: Around 1969, the city established a blue line, which was an elevation marking around its western edge. Boulder, by the way, is a city of about 100,000 people now. I think at that time it was probably closer to 50,000. The mountains are right here to the west, in this zoning map. And the blue line established an elevation that worked its way along the foothills like this, above which the city would not extend water service. That was instrumental in establishing a nice, clean edge, there, and helping to preserve the mountain backdrop. Along with that, about a year later, they came up with a height ordinance, which limited height within the city to 35 feet for by-right buildings, and 55 feet for buildings that had to go to planning board review. This ensured that there was more uniform scale. There were a lot of designers who felt that this was overly restrictive, but it ensured greater compatibility between different building types, and smoothed over some of the problems that the city had had with incongruous buildings.
Along with that, probably most importantly, was the open space program, which was begun around 1971. I believe this was coincidental: [The open space program was begun] about the same time as the comprehensive plan was adopted by the city, which has been in place since then. The open space program began with a sales tax initiative to acquire land around the city. It was fairly far-sighted: Over the last 30 years, we’ve acquired 46,000 acres of open space. What it has done is create a ring around the city to keep other communities from growing into us, and given us a kind of build-out, or at least a recognizable build-out condition for the future, where we can see where the edges of the town are, and we do have the sense of it being a compact city form.
A few years later, in 1976, Boulder was one of the cities modeled on Petaluma, I believe, in California—adopted the Danish plan. That was a citizen initiative that set growth control limits for residential development, limiting growth to two percent at that time. Over time, it was ratcheted down to one percent. It’s still in place now; it’s been there for 25 years. This has had some major impacts on things, as we’ll see in a second, but most importantly on the cost of housing; the availability of affordable housing, of course; and, later, jobs and housing imbalance.
Around 1976 also, the Pearl Street Mall opened in downtown Boulder. It was designed to re-invigorate the downtown, where the cultural, religious, and civic institutions were. It was quite successful right from its initiation. It’s at the end of this street; unfortunately, we don’t have very good slides of a lot of these things. This is the historic main street—Pearl Street—which is heading west; where those trees are down at the end, that’s where the Boulder Mall begins. This was a way for Boulder to establish its identity, its focus; its downtown core was assured by having this thing in place, and some good things followed from it.
In 1982, Boulder began to look at its first mixed use zoning district. The reasons for this were that there had been some inappropriate zoning on that main street. You can see here: The downtown core is where the Pearl Street Mall is. In this section right there. Just to the east is one of the main feeders into that area, called Pearl Street. Pearl Street, historically, was a downtown main street, with one- to three-story buildings. Those kinds of buildings; you can see the different scale of buildings there. This was typical of the street. But somewhere prior to that, this corridor had been zoned high-density residential. I’ve never been able to figure out why that was the case, but it made most of the buildings there nonconforming, which caused great distress for the people who were there, since only residential uses were permitted, and so the city began to study ways in which this type of zoning might be changed to something that was more appropriate. It has established residential neighborhoods on either side, which is [represented by] the purple and the green. So mixed use zoning seemed like the appropriate candidate.
A committee was formed about 1982, to start to study this. [The committee] had all the usual suspects that we’ve heard about: It had the business people, neighborhood activists—I don’t think we called them “NIMBYs” back then, but they were that type—and it also had Tom and I, who were designers who happened to live in those adjacent neighborhoods. We got involved, then, with our first real study on how to code mixed use to get the desired physical form out of it.
After two years of study, the result was the creation of a zone called MUX, which was this zoning district. Interestingly enough, this was adopted, I think sometime around 1984, and nothing really happened for seven or eight years, even with a zoning district that had some fair incentives that encouraged the mix of use. The economics weren’t quite right, the leasing rates for commercial square footage and the per-square-foot housing prices weren’t really there to overcome the other expenses that were involved, and there was plenty of other land available to do either/or. And the whole idea of people living in this kind of denser, mixed use environment really hadn’t become appealing yet.
So for seven or eight years, this place just languished. Nothing really happened. It had a bunch of vacant lots. It had a lot of run-down buildings that hadn’t had much attention [paid] to them for quite some time, and it stayed that way until the early ’90s.
Now what I want to do is shift forward a little bit to the next decade. So the first mixed use zone is in place; now we’re up to 1990. Looking back: We have this growth-control restrictions in for residential, it’s now ratcheted down to one percent. And around 1990 we started to see a lot more new commercial development taking place.
By 1994 there was quite an imbalance between population and jobs. We had gone over the 100,000 mark in population, and we had almost an equal number of jobs at that time. Boulder had begun as a kind of bedroom community for Denver, a lot of people commuting out of the town, and of course by this time, I think greatly due to the restrictive residential growth policies, we’d reversed it. We had a tremendous amount of in-commuting, with all the traffic congestion and [related issues] that that brings.
This became a matter of major concern for the council and the citizens. The projects for the future, just within the built-out area within the city—pretty much what you see there in color—was for adding up to 126,000 jobs. This scared a lot of people. There was a citizens’ initiative to restrict this commercial development, and the result was—believe it or not—commercial growth control: a whole new ordinance that limited the amount of commercial building that could happen in the city to 100,000 square feet per year.
This created a lot of problems with the business community. It meant that you applied and then you had to wait until you got to the front of the line, basically, and of course, like any ordinance like this—any kind of drastic measure—there was a stampede to get these commercial building permits and get everything built as quickly as possible.
After about a year of that kind of nonsense, the council decided it would look at a comprehensive rezoning of many different properties, as an alternative to the commercial growth, with the idea that they would downzone much of the commercial area, and keep the jobs from proliferating.
So in 1996, they started that process. It began with that in mind, but it also had some other sub-community plans that went along with it. The principle one was the one in north Boulder, which many people involved in the CNU worked on. Dover Kohl came out and did a lot of very interesting studies. There was [much] citizen involvement: many meetings, with hundreds of people attending them, looking at the future of that area.
What came out of all of that, in the end, was a series of mixed use zones. The first one is the one we’ve already talked about: the MUX zone, which was designed for that one little stretch of Pearl Street. The second one, business main street zoning, was designed as a kind of “village center,” adjacent to already developed commercial areas—a kind of scaled-down, less intense commercial area, where the residential uses would start to creep in. There are some areas that you’ll see in a second—these are just adjacent to our downtown core, and they start to transition to usually single-use districts that are primarily residential. The MUD zone—in Boulder we use this “X” and “D” [notation] to denote developing and redeveloping areas of the city. I think it’s really very important that the codes change when we look at the two different types. Boulder uses the designations, but then the codes don’t really ever change from one district to the other, which is kind of a problem, but . . .
The mixed use developing district was designed for just a section of north Boulder: several properties along the corridor that they wanted to develop. It’s a less intense commercial zoning than BMSX, which you also see. And then this RMX is somewhat similar to it; it’s a more residential version of the business main street zoning.
And the last one I think is kind of interesting. This was a mixed use zoning that was designed as a transition between industrial areas and more commercial areas. I think it tried to recognize things like live/work uses, the kinds of uses that are often difficult to find an economical place [in which to put them], such as dance theaters and things of that nature—experimental dance, and theater, and stuff like that.
This is a chart that shows these five zones and some of the different coding that went into them. The principle thing that was used to govern them was a floor area ratio (FAR). I think the really interesting thing about that—at least in this particular context—was that the policy-makers and the planners were looking for something that they could quantify. I know people have different feelings about FAR, but FAR is a very simple way of doing that. In fact, they could have made the same calculations by what kinds of cars you could have stored on the site, because that’s clearly what ends up governing the intensity, and they had the parallel code of parking as well, but it was very simple to put these FARs on there; that gave assurance to the policy-makers that you could make these quick calculations and you new exactly how much new commercial area was going to be generated.
In the two zones—the BMSX and the MU (the two more intense zones)—there’s a 1:1 FAR, which is, at least in Tom’s and my experience, a very, very good intensity for small cities and large towns that have predominantly two-story scale with maybe some occasional three-story and some one-story. The other factor that makes the business main street zone kind of interesting was that the by-right density in that zone for nonresidential use is a .67:1 FAR, and then as an incentive, in order to encourage the developer to do the right thing, there’s an additional .33:1 that can be added to get to the 1:1.
In the MUX zone, the basic mix is a 50/50 residential split. The incentive in the MUX zone is a little bit different: If you do the 50/50 mix between commercial and residential, then your parking requirements change. And, as we all know, parking is what governs pretty much everything that you do with design. In this case, you were able to go from a 1:300—which is the typical commercial zoning requirement throughout the city—to a 1:400. That doesn’t sound significant, but if you’ve ever worked through these things, that slight increase really gives you a much better urban design solution, and really frees things up.
In the BMSX zone, you already started at a 1:400. Remember, we’re 15 years down the road, now. This was a newer zoning district. The planners were willing to ratchet down the parking further, and so in this zone, if you were just doing the straight commercial—the .67:1 FAR—you could do 1:400. If you did the 50/50 mix of residential, you could get to a 1:500. They could recognize that these zones were located in areas where there was a reservoir of on-street parking; it’s the first time I’ve seen a place start to recognize that the on-street parking does play a part in solving the parking problems.
The other zones have only a .6:1 FAR, and in a little while you’ll see some of the problems that generates. That’s not very much FAR; it’s so little FAR that sometimes you don’t have enough two-story building even to get the kind of frontage that you want along every street edge. The parking is similar: that 1:400, with a 50 percent residential.
Interestingly enough, in the IMSX zone, what makes that interesting is that there is a requirement there that 50 percent of the space be industrial. It’s really meant to be an industrially transitional zone, and so you have to provide 50 percent of the space as industrial use, but it’s a very different kind of industrial use, probably suiting a lot of jobs that people have these days.
The setbacks for most of these are zero at the front, allowing the buildings to go right out to the street. We haven’t really indicated it here, but interestingly enough, in these two zones—MUX and BMSX—there’s an interesting setback twist: It’s zero only to the first and second stories, and then, if you want to do a third story (which is permitted in those zones), the third story has to be set back an additional 20 feet from the street. It can create a curious urban design when it happens on every building, but it does ensure scale at the street and some better access for sun getting down to the street level.
The one that puzzled us was the minimum setback in the MUD zone of 15 feet. I don’t know why it was coded like that. We’re doing a project there now, and it’s been changed through site review, and it doesn’t really work. I think the “zeroes” are the only way to go.
These were some studies that were made by Civitas—a Denver firm, prior to adoption of these districts—studying certain kinds of outcomes that would occur, using some of these code requirements. I think they were very sketchy in nature. They did help a little bit to determine some things, like the FAR. Our experience has been that you have to do incredibly thorough testing in a three-dimensional way in order to get these things right. The big disconnect over time, of course, has been that we just adopt the policies, we adopt the zoning requirements, and then we have no idea how they’re going to play out when the designers actually get their hands on them.
This is a map of Boulder’s zoning. It’s like any zoning map you’d see in any jurisdiction. We’re using it to indicate where all of these new mixed-use zones are. They are very site-specific, they’re located at transitional areas between other types of districts, and they’re placed in areas where we want to see a desired vision take place, the kind of vision, I think, that Rick (Cole) was alluding to.
These are tools to get you there. The one that we’ve been working with a lot recently is up here in this area, which is the north Boulder area. This area has a state highway, which becomes kind of the main street through town, here, but it’s owned by the Colorado Department of Transportation (DOT), so they have a lot of ideas about what can happen along the street. The city is planning to take the street over from the highway department so that they can turn it into more of a main street road section, and allow things like parking on the street, 15-foot sidewalks, things like that.
So up here you can see this has many of the districts, up here in this area. You can see that all four districts are in that area. They’re right along the corridor that goes to the north, and they’re meant to create the neighborhood center for a lot of residential development that will occur in that area.
These are where the BMS and the MUX zones are located, on either side of the Pearl Street Mall. They transition to these respected and desirable residential neighborhoods, and are very important. They’ve actually worked very well.
Now we’re going to show you a series of projects that were generated by this zoning. This is the first of the projects that was done in the BMSX zone. We’re two blocks from the downtown mall. This is a building that was existing right here. It’s a historic building; we put the porch back on it, based on old photographs. Then the building inspector asked us to put this on here, which is the 42-inch railing height requirement, which we added. But it’s basically an L-shaped building. It meets all those code requirements that you saw before in the BMSX. It does have underground parking; that’s one of those things we found to really get the urban design solution to work. Underground parking is essential. This building is done with a very simple, kind of main street building, and then as you move around to the sides and rear, you get some more modernistic, loft-style stuff happening.
This is the second project, which occurred about six months after the first. It is also designed by our firm. It’s very different; it uses a much more traditional vernacular for the main street building. I should note that the mixed use is organized differently. In the other one, basically we have a vertical organization, where the residential units sit on top of the retail. Here we have retail, with office above it, and then the parking garage sits below this stuff here, and there are five residential units that have dooryards and raised porches that look out on the street. We had a lot of grade change here, which allowed us to tuck the underground parking in there. This is what the building looks like: much more traditional vernacular—there, you can see the kind of break between the main street piece along the historic main street, and now we’re transitioning up the hill to this historic residential neighborhood, so the forms change and start to respond more to what’s going on there. The parking garage: We actually managed to park 40 cars on this side—it’s only 18,000 feet.
Our experience has been—and Andrés was talking about it before—parking is IT. That’s all we’ve been doing for 25 years, is figuring out what to do with these cars! When we’re really successful with it—when we can get them underground or into little pockets—we end up with good design solutions. Here, we had alley on two sides and public right of way on two sides—we were able to drop the cars down below, in here, and put them underneath the residential buildings. So many of the cars—I think 26 of the 40—are parked down below. The other 14 are along the alley to the north. The grade change also allowed us to deal with accessibility issues in a unique way: We were able to bring an accessible route up the street and enter onto the second floor without ever having to go in an elevator.
This shows the alley treatment and the kinds of amenities and appointments to make the alley feel nice, and relate well to the residential district.
This is a third project that we’re breaking ground on now. You can see the other building over here, which we talked about at first. This is a building that we’re going to move over—it’s a historic building. (Often in these projects, we find there’s almost always some historic building.) We found it difficult to [determine] what was historic about this, but it was built about 1880, and then some time around 1930 it was remodeled into this more bungalow style. But underneath that there is some brick, and it is an 1880—it’s actually one of Boulder’s earliest buildings. So it’s being moved from here over to here; it’s going to be rehabilitated and slid over there so it can stay on the streetscape. This is the new building, kind of a traditional two-story building along a fairly commercial street. There is retail on the first floor, some office and residential up above here. You can see opening up the building to the west and the south, on the back here.
These projects that I just showed you are all right here in this zone. They are all mixed use projects. Two of them had a .5:1 commercial FAR; the more historic-looking one had a .67:1 FAR.
These are some projects in the MUX zone, done by other architects and developers. As always, there is something historic. That was the historic building, there. This is the mixed use response. There is residential, as you can see, sort of piggy-backing up there. This is an alley scene along there. Ways to handle the circulation and parking. Another example of a two-story, main street building. Residential behind; you can see the residential elements up here in this area. These are residential buildings that are organized horizontally on the site. This is the garagescape, where there are some individual garages for the residential units. Some of the residential up above there. An interior parking court—I think these can be less successful.
These are projects where the parking is not put underground, and what you tend to get is much more of the parking being expressed.
This is another one. This was one of the first ones in this district. The historic building right here, that was renovated. This is another building that was added alongside. And then that third one, this is the rear of that building.
This is a new project that just got built. This is an existing building that used to be a storage warehouse for a candy and tobacco company, and it has a loft thing that’s been added on top of it.
Here’s an interesting one that is presently under construction. I think this is where the nature conservancy has just moved to. There’s a series of residential-style row houses, different vernaculars. Pretty successful—it’s not quite finished.
This one is one that we don’t like very much, but [we included it because] we feel this is a great example of where good coding doesn’t necessarily [guarantee] a good architectural response. Somehow, they’ve managed to caricature a lot of the design elements, and it doesn’t feel very well resolved, and the public spaces are badly appointed and nothing seems to really work. This was done by one of the deans of our architecture school.
[Laughter]
This is another one. This project is called Steelyards. It’s in this odd little area over here. This is where our regional mall is, called Crossroads, which is now failing. So if anybody wants to come and fix our failing mall, they should come do that, but this is the failing, suburban-style mall. This is 28th and 30th Streets—a kind of couplet of two very busy commercial streets. This was an old steelyard—an old steel manufacturing company—a 10-acre site that’s being developed as a new urbanist project, and is being done quite well. There is a mix of uses and densities here, a small park—these are the kinds of buildings that are being utilized there. It’s presently under construction.
Last, we’ll talk about this district in north Boulder, where the corridor—this is the Broadway corridor has it goes north, heading out of town. This area here is very ill-defined. It’s filled with strip uses. There’s a topless night club out here, a bunch of U-Store-Its, a homeless shelter—what else is out here? Right in here I think we have a U-Haul facility, and this partial up here is the armory, so we have tanks and trucks up there—that’s the parcel right here. This is a U-Haul facility; this is a little gas station.
So this area right here is one of the things that came out of the north Boulder sub-community plan. It’s a mixed-density, mixed use community of about 320 units. It has 500 different developers and architects working in it, so there’s a bunch of individual variety created that way, which Andrés talks about a lot. This block over here is meant to be a neighborhood center. It has that MUD zoning. It fronts along Broadway and a new street that is going to be built, which will become the entrance to that neighborhood.
This is a drawing that Tom did of what we’re hoping to do there. We hope to break ground on this in April. This is a zoning district that has a .6:1 FAR; you can see that we’ve had to use a lot of one-story buildings in places, in order to be able to get the frontage that we want along the street edges. There are two two-story buildings—
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