Posts about Christopher Leinberger

However, the study doesn't automatically equate "urban" with "center city," as most of the WalkUPs are outside of the District. The WalkUPs fall into 6 categories, ranging from "downtown" and "urban commercial" neighborhoods in the District to "suburban town centers" and "greenfield" communities outside of the city.

"Suburban" WalkUPs include historic towns, like Alexandria and Frederick, that later became suburbs, and newer communities like Tysons Corner that are being "retrofitted" with more urban features.

Jonathan O'Connell recently questioned whether you can "export" city life to the suburbs, with some calling the new "town centers" "plastic" or "artificial." But as Leinberger points out, there's a growing consensus that the recession and demographic shifts will change the way we arrange our lives and our communities. As a result, the demand for urban living has surfaced outside of center city neighborhoods. If done well, and with the proper support, suburban town centers can become cherished, authentic places and integral parts of Greater Washington's urban ecosystem.

To determine a WalkUP's success, Leinberger uses economic and social indicators to rank each one as "Copper," "Silver," "Gold," or "Platinum." The study notes a strong correlation between a community's economic performance and its Walk Score, job density and education levels.

Though they take up less than 1% of the land in Greater Washington, WalkUPs already have a third of the region's jobs. They contain nearly half of the region's "income properties," or offices, apartments, hotels and retail space, up from just a quarter in 1992. Office rents and home values in WalkUPs are each over 70% higher than elsewhere in the region. Not surprisingly, WalkUPs tend to contribute more in tax revenues than the amount of land they consume.

Meanwhile, Leinberger measured social equity performance based on housing and transportation costs, unemployment levels, racial diversity, and transit accessibility. Over three-quarters of the WalkUPs are close to Metro stations, reducing transportation costs, but housing is often far more expensive.

The study found that many economically successful WalkUPs, like Georgetown, often failed to create or sustain a diverse population. Almost all of the WalkUPs are located within Greater Washington's affluent "favored quarter," generally to the northwest of the city. They're far from much of the region's working class, many of whom lack cars and must endure long transit rides to job centers.

WalkUPs are now appearing outside of the "favored quarter," bringing jobs and other amenities closer to low-income households. While some are successful, others like University Town Center and Wheaton have struggled to develop. Leinberger highlights Silver Spring for seeking economic and social parity. It "walks the tightrope in attempting to achieve higher economic returns without gentrifying and detracting from its unique and diverse character," he notes.

To ensure the future economic success and social cohesion of the WalkUPs, Leinberger calls for public policies that direct more development to them through zoning and investment in infrastructure, like more pedestrian-friendly streets. In addition, he says more must be done to provide affordable and workforce housing in WalkUPs, both through subsidies and simply building more housing to meet the demand. He also stresses the importance of building neighborhood support for walkable urban development, which happened in White Flint.

While The WalkUp Wake-Up Call is encouraging to anyone who cares about creating great urban neighborhoods, many of the trends Leinberger highlights have taken hold only in the past few years. Some of the places in the study may be years or decades from becoming truly walkable or urban; meanwhile, a large portion of the region's development still takes places on the suburban fringe, where it's less sustainable. On top of that, the benefits of pedestrian-friendly, transit-oriented development have yet to reach the people who need it the most.

The real "wake-up call" isn't about how far we've come, but how far we still have to go.

To [Christopher] Leinberger, a developer himself, the shift for apartments and offices is a function of the market: Developers are getting higher rents in denser areas, leading to rising values compared with typical suburban-style development. "That's the market telling you, dramatically, build more of this stuff," Mr. Leinberger said. "There's pent-up demand for walkable urban."

Leinberger identifies include 43 "walkable urban" places, which are both "regionally significant" and meet a set of criteria for walkability. The places span everything from Columbia Heights in the District to inner suburbs like downtown Silver Spring and even satellite cities like downtown Frederick. As The Atlantic Cities notes, these "walkable urban" places take up less than 1% of the land in Greater Washington but already have a third of the region's jobs.

Whether or not you personally want to live in an urban neighborhood, this report is good news. Increased demand to build in areas with existing infrastructure can reinvigorate struggling communities. It can also save local governments a tremendous amount of money compared to development on the fringe where roads, utility lines, and schools may not already exist.

We know that there's an unmet demand for housing in neighborhoods with public transit and other amenities within an easy walk, so those people could get the opportunity to live in the kind of communities they want. Meanwhile, those who prefer a suburban or rural lifestyle will be able to have that in communities that may see reduced development pressure in the coming years. And as Leinberger points out, the glut of large houses in suburban areas built in recent years means that they'll be more affordable as well.

The challenge, then, is ensuring that everyone who wants to live in a "walkable urban" place gets the opportunity to do so. These neighborhoods are likely to have housing costs, and though they're often offset by low transportation costs, we have to make sure that renters and homeowners alike aren't priced out, even when there's substantial neighborhood opposition to new housing.

It's also important to make sure that our urban neighborhoods are the best they can be. We need to make sure they get high-quality public spaces that make up for the lack of private space and allow people to come together. The region's towns, cities and counties would do well to follow the District's lead and get developers and police officers together to ensure that new neighborhoods are designed for safety.

We also have to ensure that people of all ages, not just young adults, are welcome in our urban neighborhoods. These places have lots of potential benefits for kids, but only if they have the right amenities to draw families who may otherwise look to suburban areas.

Greater Washington isn't the only region in North America that's moving towards a more urban future, but it's probably the furthest along in shifting growth to urban places instead of suburban ones. Hopefully, this report will serve as a wake-up call to both the potential our area has and the challenges it will face.

Many drivable-fringe house prices are now below replacement value, meaning the land under the house has no value and the sticks and bricks are worth less than they would cost to replace. This means there is no financial incentive to maintain the house; the next dollar invested will not be recouped upon resale. Many of these houses will be converted to rentals, which are rarely as well maintained as owner-occupied housing. Add the fact that the houses were built with cheap materials and methods to begin with, and you see why many fringe suburbs are turning into slums, with abandoned housing and rising crime.

Leinberger goes on and cites several examples of urban neighborhoods that have transformed from slum to hip in recent history: Capitol Hill in Seattle; Virginia Highland in Atlanta; German Village in Columbus, Ohio; and Logan Circle in Washington.

I don't know much about Capitol Hill or Virginia Highland, but I do know something about Logan Circle and German Village. One very important (and I think non-trivial) quality that they share is that they both have a high quality, durable housing stock that has held up very well, given its age, all things considered.

When I think about what made cookie cutter houses in suburbs appealing to people, in addition to the square footage and the yards and the school systems, I really suspect that one of the things that people were drawn to was the absolute "newness" of everything. People love having new stuff—new appliances, new counter tops, new floors. When stuff is brand new, it's almost guaranteed to be in style. When it's brand new, it's not in need of immediate repair. There's a lot to like about brand new.

The problem though, as Leinberger notes, is that fringe suburbs were literally built on the cheap. They may have looked nice initially, but the drywall they used to throw up houses in Prince William County is not the same as the brick they used to build rowhouses in Dupont Circle. At the time, the appliances they put into new suburban homes might have been nicer than what was in old urban houses, but appliances can easily be replaced, structures can't.

Around DC, a lot of old rowhouses have gone through the process of renovation—some have gone through many renovations since originally being built. The interiors have been gutted, redesigned and rebuilt, but the physical structure is generally the same. These houses were built to last, I can only imagine what a cookie-cutter house on the suburban fringe might look like in 100 years. The rowhouses in DC that have been re-built look beautiful, easily as nice as what got built in the suburbs during the boom.

At one point, the suburbs looked so much "nicer" because that's where the building was—that's where stuff was brand new. That's not necessarily true anymore. Now, some of the newest, shiniest stuff is right in the heart of the city.

I was reminded of this when I saw this article in the Plain Dealer last month. The author makes the case that there's more demand for housing in downtown Cleveland than the market can keep up with. A lot of folks will use this as evidence of a downtown renaissance, I think it says that people are no longer afraid to live downtown (something that was true in Cleveland for many years) but I also suspect it has something to do with the quality of downtown housing.

While it seems true that downtown Cleveland is doing well, many other urban Cleveland neighborhoods are not doing well at all. The apartments and condos popping up downtown are all brand new, beautifully renovated spaces. The houses in Cleveland's urban neighborhoods, on the other hand, are much lower quality. Compared to Washington's rowhouses, they're downright terrible. I suspect that many of Cleveland's houses are also below replacement value. The only hope is to knock them down, and that's exactly what's happening.

When I studied home prices in Cleveland a few years ago (pdf), I found that while downtown was in fact the neighborhood in the city with the highest prices, there was nevertheless a positive relationship between home price and the distance from the city center. In other words, the farther from downtown you went, the higher the price of homes. It was "drive til you qualify" in reverse.

I think the future of suburbs as Leinberger imagines them is going to look like some of Cleveland's neighborhoods today - Hough, Mount Pleasant, Cudell—places with generally poor housing stock that isn't worth fixing up. Places where crime is frustratingly high, where most of the housing that isn't vacant is renter-occupied, and where few are willing to make any investment.

Is it true to say that millennials and baby boomers have a taste for urban living? I think there is good evidence to support that theory, but it's clearly the case that they don't want to live just anywhere in the city. Nobody wants to live in a slum, and the type of homes that people want has to meet at least a certain threshold of quality.

In high-cost cities, like DC, that's not so hard to pull off. A $200,000 rowhouse rehab might be well worth the cost when you can turn around and sell the house for half a million or more. A similar job simply doesn't make any financial sense in a city like Cleveland. In fact, the Plain Dealer article above specifically says that developers aren't building in downtown Cleveland without government incentives because the rents are too low to support the kind of investment they need to make.

I think the more realistic assessment of suburbs and cities is that some suburbs will see a precipitous decline, some urban neighborhoods will experience a renaissance, and the degree to which each happens will be highly dependent on local market conditions. In other words, it will happen, but it won't be as clear cut as the magazine articles might lead you to believe.

Crossposted on Extraordinary Observations.

While the five largest property owners in the area are working together on a multi-year plan for higher-density, mixed use projects aligned with transportation improvements, residents—and anyone who drives through the area—will likely face huge traffic tie-ups until those new projects are implemented.

At a Jan. 31 meeting of the Beauregard Corridor Stakeholders Group, Donna Fossum, chair of both that group and the Alexandria Planning Commission, said when the new BRAC office building opens in eight months, "everyone's lives will change."

To put the developers' proposals in context, Fossum invited Christopher B. Leinberger of the Brookings Institution to give a presentation at the Jan. 31 meeting on the benefits of creating "walkable urban places."

According to Leinberger, there are two main options for development: "drivable suburban," in which housing, retail, and office buildings are all separate and connected by roads, and "walkable urban," where people have access to transit and can easily walk to shops and restaurants.

The "drivable suburban" model contributes to sprawl, which creates lots of problems, including long commutes, economic segregation, higher levels of greenhouse gas emissions, higher energy use, and even increased rates of obesity. The highest levels of foreclosures occur in the outer suburbs Leinberger says, because "we built too much of the wrong product in the wrong location."

The pendulum began to shift in the mid-1990s, he says. Surveys show 82 percent of the "millennials," people born in the period 1980-95, want to live in walkable urban places, like Arlington and Dupont Circle.

Metropolitan Washington has 23 existing (and 16 emerging) "regionally significant places," including walkable urban places like downtown DC, "downtown adjacent places" (such as Dupont Circle and Georgetown), suburban town centers (Bethesda and Silver Spring fall into this category), places where suburban strip malls have been redeveloped (Ballston and Friendship Heights), and "surburban green field developments" (Reston Town Center and National Harbor).

The presence of the BRAC project in the Beauregard Corridor gives this area the potential to become a "regionally significant place," Leinberger says. But in its current state, "it's neither fish nor fowl"; it's not quite a drivable suburban area nor a walkable urban area.

"There are few successful examples of drivable dense urban places," he says. There is concern that if it isn't transformed into an urban walkable place, "it could be on a downward spiral," as younger people and investments abandon the area for more favorable communities.

According to Leinberger, successfully transforming a suburban strip mall environment into a walkable urban place—like Ballston and Clarendon—requires strong management to protect the quality of life in surrounding neighborhoods from noise and traffic cut-throughs. When it's done right, the value of single-family homes near urban walkable places will rise significantly, and the tax base will increase, primarily from commercial property. He says this kind of development will cut greenhouse gas emissions and energy use by some 60 to 80 percent.

He acknowledged some of the challenges of developing the Beauregard Corridor are the barriers posed by I-95, Seminary Road, and Holmes Run.

The development of Annandale poses even more challenges. While the Beauregard developers envision the eventual extension of the Columbia Pike streetcar line along Beauregard Street, there is no plan to bring transit to Annandale. And while most of the property in the Beauregard Corridor is concentrated in the hands of a few developers, Annandale is chopped into many small parcels of land. Any attempt to bring a large mixed-use project to Annandale, as proposed in the Annandale amendment to the Fairfax County comprehensive plan, would require consolidation of land.

Leinberger told the Annandale blogger such development is possible: If one visionary developer takes a risk on a large project, others will follow. But communities like Annandale could stagnate if other areas, like the Beauregard Corridor, draw development and businesses from aging suburbs.

Kai Reynolds of the JBG Companies, one of the Beauregard Corridor property owners, says Leinberger's presentation about the value of urban walkable places is very much in alignment with what the developers want to do—except for Leinberger's statement that developers should help pay for transit.

Representatives of the five companies who own properties along the corridor have been meeting with local residents periodically to explain their vision for redevelopment. The developers have promised to provide public amenities, such as parks, athletic fields, or community facilities, based residents' priorities.

At their latest meeting, Jan. 24, the developers outlined their plans for multi-phased, higher-density development—including about 4,600 new housing units—to occur over the next 25 to 30 years. A key part of the plan is the creation of an elliptical traffic circle to improve traffic circulation through the Beauregard/Seminary intersection and a new network of through-streets to replace the current system of parking lots, cul-de-sacs, and dead-end streets around the existing housing developments. (You can access the presentation from that meeting here.)

JBG has plans to transform the current shopping center between Reading Avenue and Rayburn Avenue into a much larger mixed-used development with more stores, offices, and a new nine to 12-story hotel. "There is not enough commercial space to meet the demand," says Victor Dover, with the Dover, Kohl and Partners town planning firm, who represents JBG.

A representative of Home Properties, which owns Southern Towers, wants to replace the adjacent three-story garden apartments with a series of five-story multifamily buildings and new parking decks, resulting in 669 additional units within the next five to 10 years.

Jon Eisen of the Hekenian Group, which owns the 10.1-acre Shirley Gardens property on the other side of Beauregard across from Southern Towers, is planning a 16,000-square foot mixed use development with a hotel, offices, shops, restaurants, 520 multifamily units, and, on the land closest to the existing single-family houses, 15 to 20 townhouses.

Peter Schultz of Duke Realty, which owns Clyde's and a series of office buildings along Beauregard, has longer-term plans to replace those buildings with more energy-efficient projects, possibly including a boutique hotel, in about 10 years.

According to Dover, the developers have refined the plan they presented to residents in December, reducing the proposed developments by half a million square feet, cutting 500 housing units from the plan, simplifying the street grid, adding more green space and recreation areas, and adding a site for a fire station at Beauregard and Sanger Avenue.

The developers' next meetings with residents will be Feb. 28, focusing on open space and environmental issues, and March 28, with more details on the ellipse and other transportation plans.

Cross-posted at Annandale VA.

Furthermore, there is a long-term political value to more walkable urbanism. The more urbanism we have, the more voters will experience it on a daily basis and appreciate its advantages. That will reduce the tendency of elected officials and journalists to assume that "everybody" drives everywhere and thus the best policy is to focus all spending on auto infrastructure and zoning on building auto-dependent places.

When I criticized "freeway bus" plans a while back for bypassing commercial corridors, an inner jurisdiction official told me that even though he preferred buses along those corridors, the freeway plans could win over substantial numbers of otherwise car-using Fairfax residents to support transit. Walkable urbanism, too, develops more of a built-in supporter base the more of it there is. That's good for everyone.

ReThink Health: The final ReThink Montgomery discussion will focus on health, and specifically children's health. Urban and suburban developments alike often lack good spaces for children to play.

Joan Almon of the Alliance for Childhood will discuss "the vital role of play and how planners can design and build spaces that make it easy for children to be active." The event is at 7:30 pm at Montgomery Park and Planning's auditorium, 8787 Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring, near Silver Spring Metro.

Meet the Met (Branch Trail): On Saturday, Rails-to-Trails Conservancy is holding a party on the Metropolitan Branch Trail, a partially-completed walking and biking trail along the CSX and Red Line tracks from Union Station to Silver Spring.

Currently, the trail is complete from L Street, NE (just north of Union Station) to Franklin Street in Brookland. The party is on the newest segment past the Rhode Island Avenue Metro, which you can reach through the parking lot of the large shopping center at 700 Rhode Island Avenue, NE, just across the tracks from the Metro station.

Daniel Burnham: Finally, next Wednesday is a screening of Make No Little Plans: Daniel Burnham and the American City, a documentary about the architect who designed Union Station and the Postal Square building next door. Burnham was also one of the members of the McMillan Commission which redesigned the National Mall in 1901. His influence also carries far beyond Washington, DC.

The documentary takes its title from his most famous quote (which he may or may not have actually said): "Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves be realized." Here's a trailer:

You can always see these events and more on our calendar. If there are events we're missing, please send them in using the tip form.

Photos at top, clockwise from upper left: WMATA hearing by thisisbossi on Flickr; Christopher Leinberger from his site; Met Branch Trail sign by TrailVoice on Flickr; and Joan Almon from ReThink Montgomery.