On Common Ground: Winter 2015

REALTORS & Smart Growth
on common ground
WINTER 2015
Resurgent Downtowns
Innovation Districts
Streetcar Boom
CITIES
ASCENDANT
The Urban Moment

That the nations economy is focused in our metropolitan
areas is nothing new. Eighty-three percent of Americans live
in its 363 metro areas, and nearly one-third of all Americans
now live in one of the 10 most populous metros. Recent
figures (2012) show that 92 percent of new jobs added and
89 percent of economic growth take place in the metro areas.
But focusing closer than the metro scale reveals a new pattern.
The largest cities are becoming larger, and the central cities
are seeing more growth than the suburbs. From 2010 to 2012,
cities with more than one-half million in population grew
considerably more rapidly than they did, on average, over the
previous 10 years, according to demographer William Frey of
the Brookings Institution. And between 2010 and 2012, big
cities in the nations largest metropolitan areas grew faster
than their suburbs for the first time since the 1920s.
Demand for living and working in cities is higher than at
any time in the past 60 years. One result has been that the
strongest sector of residential construction is the building of
apartments in cities, while homebuilding in distant suburbs
has not come close to returning to its high pre-recession
levels. As tastes change and employers try to attract young
talent, vacancies in suburban office parks with no amenities
within walking distance remain high, while many companies
relocate their work forces to downtowns.
Editor
Courtesy of Visit Denver
The leaders of tomorrows economy are the young and the

well-educated. Young, college-educated adults are choosing
to live in large metropolitan areas, but more specifically,
they prefer close-in urban neighborhoods where walking to
multiple destinations is possible. Their very youth suggests
that this urban moment in which we find ourselves is at its
beginning stage and will grow and flourish as the millennial
generation (our largest generation ever) matures and takes
its place as social, economic and political leaders. The urban
reawakening is the future of our economy.
For more information on NAR and smart growth, visit www.realtor.org/smartgrowth.
Joseph R. Molinaro
Managing Director, Community
and Political Affairs
jmolinaro@realtors.org
Assistant Editor
Hugh Morris
Manager, Smart Growth Program
hmorris@realtors.org
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS
500 New Jersey Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20001
On Common Ground is published twice a year by the Community and Political

Affairs division of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS (NAR),
and is distributed free of charge. The publication presents a wide range of
views on smart growth issues, with the goal of encouraging a dialogue among
REALTORS, elected officials and other interested citizens. The opinions
expressed in On Common Ground are those of the authors and do not
necessarily reflect the opinions or policy of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION
OF REALTORS, its members or affiliate organizations.
Distribution
For more copies of this issue or to be placed on our mailing list for future
issues of On Common Ground, please contact Ted Wright, NAR, at
(202) 383-1206 or twright@realtors.org.
On Common Ground is also available online at:
www.realtor.org/publications/on-common-ground
ON COMMON GROUND
WINTER 2015
2015 National Association of Realtors
On Common Ground
Winter 2015
Courtesy of DCVB
Shifting Patterns of Growth

Americans return to urban life
by Brad Broberg
Downtowns are Thriving

Around the Country
10
by Brian E. Clark
The Rise of Multifamily Housing

Multiple-family residences are dominating
new construction 16
by Christine Jordan Sexton
Whats Behind the Fastest-Growing

Suburban Cities in America?
20
by G.M. Filisko
Growing Up and Not Out
The fiscal benefits of higher density development 30

by Brad Broberg
Streetcars Spurring
Urban Development 34
by Joan Mooney
The WalkUP Movement

Shifting development patterns to
walkable communities
by John Van Gieson
40
Coding for the Future
Casting off outdated regulations

by David Goldberg
44
Detroit: Big Upside
50
by Tracey C. Velt
Techs Place in Urban Growth

Innovation districts play an important role in
developing city spaces 56
by Christine Jordan Sexton
Everything Is Bigger in Texas

Including urban growth challenges
60
by Brian E. Clark
REALTORS Take Action

Making smart growth happen
66
On Common Ground thanks the following contributors and organizations for photographs, illustrations and
artist renderings reprinted in this issue: Doug B. Adolph, City of Sugar Land, Texas; Colby Berthume, Rock
Ventures Family of Companies; Travis R. Crane, City of Raleigh; Lee D. Einsweiler, Code Studio; Cherie Gibson,
District of Columbia Department of Transportation; Rebekah Grmela, Austin Convention & Visitors Bureau;
Trey Hatt, City of San Marcos, Texas; Melanie Lentz, City of Carmel, Ind.; Brian McHugh, Buckhead Community
Improvement District; Derick ONeill, City of Boise; Camden Podesta, Visit Seattle; Daniel Parolek, Opticos
Design, Inc.; Brian Preece, City of South Jordan; Dave Robison, GoBE Realty; Josh Weaver, Sunlink Tucson
Streetcar; and Jane Whitledge, Frisco ISD Communications.
ShIftIng Patterns of Growth

Americans return to urban life
Photo by Adam Alexander

Photo by Adam Alexander
Courtesy of the City of Chicago
By Brad Broberg
he U.S. population is growing by one person every 15 seconds, according to the Census
Bureaus population clock. Thats an increase of
about three dozen people in the time it takes
to read this story.
But the countrys population isnt just growing. Its also shifting between regions, states and cities
and within them. The trends created by this ebb and flow
are changing the dynamics of American demographics.
The trend that trumps all trends is the growing percentage of Americans who live in the West (23.5 percent)
and the South (37.4 percent) versus the shrinking percentage who live in the Northeast (17.7 percent) and
Midwest (21.4 percent).
But thats a 10,000-foot view of where growth is occurring. When demographers zoom in for a closer look,
ON COMMON GROUND
WINTER 2015
The countrys population isnt

just growing. Its also shifting.
additional patterns come into focus that show not only
the relative strength of the West and South but also the
relative strength of urban environments and by extension smart growth.
As people gravitate inward toward the center of places
rather than outward toward the edges, smart growth
with its emphasis on focusing development where it
already exists is very much in step with the march of the
U.S. population.
Here are some revealing snapshots of how and where
growth is occurring based on recent Census Bureau data
and research by population analysts.
Between 2010 and 2013,

primary cities outgrew suburbs.
Cities upstaging suburbs

Historically, the suburbs within the nations large metro areas have
grown much faster than their primary cities. Between 2000 and
2010, the suburbs grew at an annual average rate of 1.38 percent
compared to 0.42 percent for primary cities.
The trend is now reversed. Between 2010 and 2013, primary cities with populations of 100,000 or more outgrew suburbs each
year 1.05 percent to 0.95 percent in 2010-11, 1.13 percent
to 0.95 percent in 2011-12 and 1.02 percent to 0.96 percent in
2012-13, according to an analysis of metros with populations of
one million or more by William Frey, a demographer with the
Brookings Institution.
Although 32 of the nations 51 large metros experienced faster growth
in their suburbs between 2012 and 2013, primary city growth in
the remaining 19 metros was as a whole stronger, pushing the average growth rate for primary cities past the average rate for suburbs.
Unlike most population trends, which tend to favor the West and
South, multiple examples of primary cities growing faster than
suburbs can be found in all regions, including metros in the East
like Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, Mass./NH. (1.2-0.8) and in the
Midwest like Columbus, Ohio (1.5 -1.0 percent).
Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau
Frey found the biggest gap in New Orleans-Metaire-Kenner,

La., where primary cities grew by 2.4 percent compared to suburban growth of 0.5 percent. The next biggest gaps were in
Charlotte-Gastonia-Rockhill, N.C./S.C. (2.4-1.7 percent), Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, Wash. (2.1-1.4 percent) and Minneapolis-St.
Paul-Bloomington, Minn./Wis. (1.6-1.0 percent).
Many cities are not only outpacing the suburbs, theyre outpacing their own growth rates from the previous decade. Looking
strictly at cities with populations exceeding 250,000, Frey found
they grew twice as fast from 2010 to 2013 1.06 percent, 1.11
percent and 1.01 percent than they did between 2000 and 2010,
Many cities are not only outpacing the

suburbs, theyre outpacing their own
growth rates from the previous decade.
Photo by James Willamor
when their average annual growth rate for the decade

was 0.49 percent.
In general, Frey wrote, the cities that are growing fastest are in metros with economies and amenities that are
attractive to millennials, graduates and young professionals. Among the fastest growers with rates exceeding
2 percent are Seattle, Austin, Charlotte, Denver and
Washington, D.C.
In some metros, geography is reining in suburban growth
especially on the edges, said Robert Lang, an urban
affairs professor and executive director of Brookings
Mountain West, a partnership between the University
of Nevada Las Vegas and the Brookings Institution.
In the past, it was go-go-go to the edges, but in some
places theres no edge left, he said. Theres a lot more
growth now in the centers of cities and older suburbs.
In the Phoenix-Glendale-Mesa, Ariz. metro area, the
suburbs outgrew primary cities in 2013, but the margin
was slim, 1.7 percent to 1.6 percent. Even there, however, development patterns are shifting.
If you look at single-family development, theyre building homes on smaller lots and much closer together,
said Mike Orr, a REALTOR and the director of the
Center for Real Estate Theory and Practice at Arizona

State University. At the same time, multifamily development apartment construction being the most
active segment of the market is surging at infill
locations along the main corridor between Tempe and
Scottsdale, Orr said.
A more metropolitan America
The number of Americans living in metropolitan areas
with an urban core of 50,000 people or more grew by
2.3 million in 2013, according to the Census Bureau.
The number of Americans living everywhere else grew
by only 35,000.
By and large, rural America is in decline ... except
for select rural areas like the energy belt (in the Great
Plains), Lang said. If you have energy instead of agriculture, you have growth.
Large metro areas those with total populations of one
million or more collectively grew twice as fast as metros with populations of less than 250,000, according to
the Census Bureau. Nearly one-third of all Americans
now live in one of the 10 most populous metros led
by New York (19,949,502), Los Angeles (13,131,431)
and Chicago (9,537, 289).
Courtesy of ExploreAsheville.com
ON COMMON GROUND
As large cities and metros grow, many are morphing

into productive networks with common goals,
As large cities and metros grow, many are morphing from collections of disparate municipalities,
organizations and special interests into productive
networks with common goals, said Jennifer Bradley,
a researcher at the Brookings Institution and co-author
of the book, The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros are Fixing Our Broken Politics and
Fragile Economy.
Courtesy of Visit Denver
The public and private entities within cities and metros

understand they are stronger together than separate,
Bradley said. You see people getting beyond this idea
of silos.
To maintain a healthy rate of growth, said Bradley, cities and metros need to expand exports, foster
innovation, develop a skilled workforce and take a
multi-sector approach to problem solving. This is
our research-based hypothesis about how they can
have a sustainable approach to the future, she said.
Ages and stages
Young and well-educated adults are among the most
mobile Americans. Where they choose to live is important to an areas economic success because they are the
workers that many businesses want and because the
location decisions they make early in life can determine where they will put down roots for the long run.
It appears from at least one study that most are choosing to live in large metropolitan areas and that they
prefer close-in urban neighborhoods.
All this comes from The Young and the Restless and
the Nations Cities, a report by City Observatory, a
Portland, Ore., think tank that analyzes population
data. The report explores the 2000 to 2012 migration
patterns of 25-34-year-olds with a bachelors degree
or better.
The report found that two-thirds of the young and
restless were living in a metro area of one million or
more in 2012. It also found that the number living
in close-in neighborhoods increased more than twice
as much as the number living outside close-in neighborhoods 37.3 percent to 16.7 percent between
2000 and 2012.
The metros where the young and restless population
grew fastest between 2000 and 2012 were Houston
(49.8 percent), Nashville (47.6 percent), Denver (46.6
percent), Austin (44.3 percent) and Portland, Ore.
(37.3 percent).
In a new report for the Center for Community Progress called Whos Moving to the Cities; Who Isnt:
Comparing American Cities, researcher Alan Mallach
looked at the distribution of adults with a bachelors
degree or higher by age group in 2000 and 2012 in
24 major U.S. cities. The research found that most of
the cities studied were attracting these college-educated
millennials, but not all of them. The key magnets for
millennials were San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Washington, D.C., Austin, Portland, Atlanta and Miami.
WINTER 2015
Photo by Dan Reed
Photo by James Willamor
Raleigh is growing a little bit all over the place, which includes
condos downtown, infill neighborhoods and surrounding small towns.
Also attracting significant numbers of millennials were
the post-industrial cities of Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and St. Louis. Lagging in drawing millennials were
Dallas, Phoenix and Las Vegas.
The study also found that none of the cities studied
showed trends toward urban living among college-educated adults 45 or older, highlighting the fact that the
shift toward cities is a young persons movement.
Carolina comes on strong
Two North Carolina metro areas, Charlotte and Raleigh,
made headlines this year when they were projected to be
the fastest-growing major metros (500,000 or more) in
the country between 2010 and 2030 with cumulative
population gains of 71 percent each.
I was kind of surprised to find that, said John Chesser,

a population analyst with the University of North Carolina Charlotte, who sifted numbers from a United
Nations world population report to come up with
the projection.
What isnt surprising is the rest of Chessers list.
The next 14 fastest growing metros are all in the
South and West led by Austin, Las Vegas and
McAllen, Texas. North Carolinas neighbor, South
Carolina, has two metros on the list, Columbia and
Charleston-North Charleston.
The Raleigh metro is part of the Research Triangle
anchored by three major universities, Duke, North
Carolina and North Carolina State. Corporations
are drawn there by the universities and the highly
educated population, creating a strong and stable economy. The universities also drive an attractive arts and
entertainment scene.
In terms of development patterns, Raleigh is growing a
little bit all over the place, said Mollie Owen, president
of the Raleigh Regional Association of REALTORS.
ON COMMON GROUND
Seven of the 15 fastest growing cities are in Texas.

That includes condos downtown, infill neighborhoods
within the Interstate 440 beltway and in surrounding
small towns, she said.
Dont mess with Texas
Seven of the 15 fastest growing cities with populations
of 50,000 or more are in Texas based on 2012 to 2013
data including three of the top four. San Marcos (8
percent) is number one and Frisco (6.5 percent) is number two. Cedar Park, Texas, (5.6 percent) is number four.
Texas also placed two cities among the top five in terms
of numeric growth. New York is number one with
61,440 new residents followed by Houston (35,202),
Los Angeles (31,525), San Antonio (25,378) and
Phoenix (24,843).
The fastest growing metro areas from 2012 to 2013 were
The Villages, Fla. (5.2 percent), Odessa, Texas (3.3 percent), Midland, Texas (3.3 percent), Fargo, N.D. (3.1
percent) and Bismarck, N.D. (3.1 percent).
(4.2 percent), Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, Calif.

(4.2 percent) and Durham-Chapel Hill, N.C. (4.1 percent).
Seven of the 10 large metros (one million or more workers) where job growth was strongest in 2013 are in the
West, according to an analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics numbers from 2013 by Professor Lee McPheters at Arizona State University.
Riverside, Calif., is number one at 4 percent followed
by San Francisco (3.9 percent), Denver (3.6 percent),
Houston (3.5 percent) and Orlando, Fla. (3.2 percent).
Brad Broberg is a Seattle-based freelance writer
specializing in business and development issues.
His work appears regularly in the Puget Sound
Business Journal and the Seattle Daily Journal
of Commerce.
Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land, Texas (137,692)

led metro areas in numeric population growth from 2012
to 2013 followed by New York-Newark-Jersey City,
N.Y.-N.J.-Pa. (111,749), Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington
(108,112), Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim (94,386)
and Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, D.C.-Va.-Md.W. Va. (87,265).
Where the good times roll
The 10 fastest growing economies among the 100 largest metro areas are all in the West and South, according
to a report from the U.S. Conference of Mayors. The
top five based on 2013 data: Austin-Round Rock-San
Marcos, Texas (4.6 percent), San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa
Clara, Calif. (4.2 percent), Nashville-Davidson, Tenn.
(4.2 percent), San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, Calif.
(4.1 percent) and New Orleans-Metairie-Kenner, La.
(3.9 percent).
The same report predicts where annual economic growth
is expected to be strongest through 2020. The top 10 are
once again all in the West and South led by Austin-Round
Rock-San Marcos, Texas (4.4 percent), Raleigh-Cary, N.C.
(4.3 percent), Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers, Ark./Mo.
Courtesy of VisitHouston; Photo by Jim Olive
WINTER 2015
Downtowns are
thriving
Around the Country
By Brian E. Clark
Courtesy of ThisisCleveland.com
hen Sharon Leicham moved from

California to Memphis, Tenn., she
was looking for an artsy neighborhood similar to ones shed known
in the San Francisco Bay Area.
(Above) Photo by William Reiter

(Right) Photo by Scott Meivogel
(Below) Photo by Larry E Highbaugh Jr
Before her jump halfway across the

country, Leicham was living in the hills above Oakland.
And while that locale offered great views, shed grown
weary of having to drive pretty much everywhere to fulfill any of her daily needs. So being able to walk to shops,
work, the grocery store and entertainment was high on
her priority list for her next home.
Leicham says she found just what she was looking for
in the South Main neighborhood of downtown Memphis. Always adventurous, her first apartment was in a
converted auto parts store that had cement floors with
holes that would fill with water when storms blew rain
under the front door.
Leicham, who has since moved up to a higher-end townhouse, is far from alone. Thousands of others are flocking
to downtowns around the country, according to figures
Being able to walk to shops, work, the grocery store

and entertainment was high on the priority list.
10 ON COMMON GROUND
WINTER 2015
Photo by Shannon Tompkins
www.flickr.com/photos/josepha
(Above right) The South Main area is a revitalized neighborhood of downtown Memphis.
Thousands are flocking to downtowns around the country.

from the U.S. Census Bureau. These core areas in many
cities are particularly popular with young people in their
20s and 30s and some empty nesters who are no longer
wedded to living where their kids can go to school.
In fact, according to census figures, downtowns have
grown at a faster rate than the suburbs over the past four
years. In 19 out of the countrys 51 largest metro areas,
city center growth outpaced suburbs last year, a phenomenon dubbed the great inversion by some demographers.
Figures show that many cities grew more in the nearly
four years since the 2010 Census than they gained for
the entire previous decade.
I wanted a more urban experience, so I took a leap of
faith, says Leicham, a merchandizing consultant, writer
and baby boomer. South Main, which is in the arts district, just caught my fancy so I decided to give it a try.
This area really did remind me of some of the wonderful
little neighborhoods in Berkeley and Oakland that had
grown up with good restaurants.
Though she knows that some people who live in East
Memphis still wont venture downtown, she says shes
never felt unsafe and is pleased with her neighborhood.
So much so that she now serves on the Downtown Memphis Commission (DMC) and several other city boards.
Downtown is evolving in a positive way, she says.
My neighborhood now has a dozen restaurants in a sixto-seven block area. Right across from my townhouse,
400 units are going in. I think this area is a great place
to live, filled with lots of history and character. Theyre
also building lots of bike lanes, which makes it all the
more attractive. I couldnt be happier with where I live.
Bill Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer, says the
surge in downtown population growth is due in large
part to the desire by young people and some boomers,
too to live in core areas of cities. The second reason,
he adds, stems from the lingering effects of the mortgage
meltdown, which stalled the growth of suburbs.
Downtowns are attractive to young people who are
extending adolescence and putting off getting married
and having kids, he says. Instead, they are investing in
their careers. This cohort has historically liked living in
cities because of the bright lights and night-time culture.
In the past, theyd settle down after a time, have kids and
head off to the suburbs.
The surge in downtown population growth is due in large part to

the desire by young people to live in core areas of cities.
11
Opening new schools would be

a big plus for downtowns.
But many of them are delaying this step. And I think
the jury is still out on whether they will eventually move
out of downtowns. A lot of it depends on what cities do
to get them to stay, like add schools for their children
when they eventually have them. That may be a lot to
ask, however. Most school systems are in tough fiscal
straights. But opening new schools would be a big plus
for downtowns.
The mortgage meltdown of the past decade also altered
the housing market, which for decades favored the suburbs over downtowns, he says. A lot of young people may
have seen their parents or acquaintances lose their homes,
making them reluctant to take on the debt and responsibility of owning. Instead, they choose to rent.
That meltdown seems like an old story, he says. But
were really not out of the woods with it yet in lots of ways
and places. Its part of the reason weve seen the flip in
the past two or three years where downtowns are growing faster than suburbs. If you look at the broad span of
time, some might say this is just a blip. Only time will
tell as the economy improves.
Frey also emphasizes that all downtowns are not alike.
San Francisco, Denver and Seattle are not Detroit, he
says, noting that while some downtowns are thriving,
some cities are struggling overall. Downtowns have been
attracting young people for some time. But over the past
few years, most cities in general have been doing better
because of generational preferences and the housing market, which has kept downtowns holding onto people who
might have otherwise moved off to the suburbs.
Photo by Tim Thompson
Sunny, summer days can be well spent exploring the many

treasures and flowers of Pike Place Market in Seattle.
Historic Pioneer Square is Seattles oldest residential area, now

a major visitor attraction with restaurants, galleries and lively clubs.
Paul Morris, president of the Downtown Memphis Commission, says the core area is growing much faster than
the rest of the city. Since 2010, the downtown has grown
by 7 percent, while the rest of Memphis has increased by
just 1 percent. He moved to the South Main neighborhood in 2002 and drove to a suburban law firm to work.
He hated the commute.
As fast as housing units are

built, they get filled up.
12 ON COMMON GROUND
Photo by Tim Thompson
Downtown Memphis is growing much faster than the rest of the city.
Right now, were at capacity for the downtown, says
Morris, who grew up in suburban Memphis, went to law
school and worked for a time in Manhattan.
There are about 24,000 people living in our downtown
and wed have a lot more people if we had places to put
them, he says. As fast as housing units are built, they
get filled up. And its happening because the downtown
is awesome. I live here because I enjoy the vibrancy, the
activity, the diversity and being able to walk to a Broadway show, NBA basketball, professional baseball or 100
restaurants. Its just a great place to be.
According to DMC statistics, a third of downtown residents are aged 18 to 34, while those 45-plus make up
another 33 percent. The smallest group are those from
35 to 44, who make up around 16 percent.
Where we are weakest is families with school age kids,
says Morris, who is 44 and whose children are 5 and six
months. When its time for them to go to school, wed
like to stay. In our downtown neighborhood there are a
lot of families with young children, so others are in the
same boat.
To keep the ball rolling, he said DMC is encouraging
investors to redevelop historic buildings to capitalize on
the character and authenticity of the downtown. We have
more historic listed buildings per square mile than most
downtowns. Were fighting blight and trying to repopulate areas that were depopulated in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
Were attracting with new restaurants and retail. Were also
incentivizing and spreading the word with marketing.
Joe Marinucci, president of the Downtown Cleveland
Alliance, said his city has experienced what he calls significant growth in its downtown in the past few years
thanks to some major capital investments.
Weve had two major projects, one of which was a new,
$450-million casino in the core of downtown that opened
in the spring of 2012, he says. Builders transformed
an abandoned department store into the Horseshoe
Casino, a joint venture between Caesars Entertainment
and Rock Gaming.
The other big development was a new convention center,
which cost more than half-a-billion dollars and replaced
one that was functionally obsolete and had ceased to
Photo by Sean Marshall
Developers cant build

apartments fast enough.
be an attractive venue for conventions for a long time,
says Marinucci. Yet another recent project is a
450,000-square-foot office complex called Flats East on
the Lake Erie waterfront.
As those projects were developing, we also saw a surge
in residential demand with a number of housing projects
coming on line, he says. The good news now is that we
have about 12,500 people who live downtown, and thats
a 60 percent increase since 2000.
During the same period, according to Census Bureau
figures, the overall city of Cleveland lost 6,702 residents
in what demographers say is a 60-year trend. The citys
total population is now roughly 390,000.
In the heart of Cleveland, however, Marinucci says developers cant build apartments fast enough.
WINTER 2015 13
Right now, we are running at about 98 percent occupancy in terms of our downtown portfolio, he says. We
have a number of other projects in the pipeline that appeal
to people who want to live, work and play downtown.
The city also landed the Republican National Convention for 2016 and has five new hotels under construction.
When finished, that will add 2,000 rooms for a total of
5,500 in the core, he says.
All these factors are coming together to create the
momentum that we are experiencing right now, he says.
And the city got another big boost this spring when basketball star LeBron James announced he would return to
the Cavaliers which plays in the Quicken Loans Arena
in downtown Cleveland.
We have a very strong amenity base in our core. We
are probably one of the very few downtowns in America where you can literally walk from your office or your
apartment or condo and go to three major sports facilities
and never get into your car. In addition to the Cavaliers,
the Cleveland Indians are in the Gateway complex which
is in our downtown and the Browns play downtown as
well. We also have the second-largest theater complex in
the United States, outside of the Lincoln Center in New
York, with 29,000 subscribers and 10 stages in the complex. Were continuing to push the envelope to attract
more people to this area.
Marinucci said downtown Cleveland is especially popular with millennials who want to live and play close to
where they work.
They are much more interested in walking and biking
and are more apt to use public transportation than automobiles, he says. Weve had a 68 percent increase in the
number of 25- to 34-year-old college grads moving into
downtown. But were also seeing empty nesters moving
into the area. In fact, our expensive product is leasing at
a faster pace than others because boomers and retirees
want to be down here, too.
Marinucci says the opening of a 33,000-square-foot grocery store in an old, domed bank building, complete
with a Tiffany glass ceiling in its rotunda, new parks and
a business development center that has attracted 30 new
companies and 5,000 tech jobs should keep downtown
Cleveland growing. He says he hopes Cleveland Metropolitan School District will open a magnet or charter school
campus downtown to serve the children of residents.
Our challenge now is to create amenity bases or packages that will help those families make the decision to
stay downtown, he says. Schools definitely need to be
part of our future.
In the northwest corner of the country, Seattles downtown population has surged to 65,000, up 7 percent in the
Downtown Cleveland is especially popular with millennials

who want to live and play close to where they work.
Progressive Field in downtown Cleveland
14 ON COMMON GROUND
Downtowns strive for a great natural setting, a great transit

system, a lot of amenities and strong job growth.
live downtown now are between 25 and 34 years old,
a significant increase from the past decade.
There are a lot more families with kids, too, he says. Its
not a huge percentage of the population, but the growth
there has been very strong. There are now about 3,000
kids under the age of 18 in downtown. We expect that
number to continue to grow. Unfortunately, we dont
have a public school downtown, so were working with
the school district to locate a K5 school here. That is a
big priority of ours. Weve seen other downtowns around
the country in recent years get public schools developed,
so we are kind of behind the curve with that here.
Cleveland Metroparks Edgewater Beach
past five years. Jon Scholes, vice president for economic

development and advocacy with the Downtown Seattle
Association, says the key to that growth was changes in
zoning that allowed for taller buildings to be constructed
in the city core.
We also believe we have the right fundamentals that
every downtown strives for: a great natural setting, a great
transit system, a lot of amenities and strong job growth in
downtown since the end of the recession, he says. Amazon.com, which moved its urban campus into the South
Lake Union neighborhood of downtown in 2010, is really
driving a lot of the economic activity. Amazon doesnt
release employment numbers, but Scholes estimates it will
have a whopping 30,000 workers in downtown Seattle
when its two office towers planned and under construction are filled.
As in other cities around the country, he says its both
young professionals and empty nesters who want to live
in the citys core. Roughly a third of the people who
A 45-minute bus ride to get to a school outside of downtown is not a popular idea. In some cases, kids are now
going to schools that are outside downtown, which sort
of defeats one of the purposes of living here. We know
if we want to keep young families, we need to have
a public school.
Scholes says his group tracks a lot of data. Four key metrics that are strong indicators of the downtowns health are
number of residents, workers, total taxable sales for retail
and total taxable sales for entertainment, arts and sports.
We coin that live, work, shop, play, he says. In each
of those areas since 2009, we are increasing market share
relative to the region. The rate of growth for population,
employment, taxable retail sales and then spending on
arts and entertainment is about twice the rate that we are
seeing in the surrounding metro area. That wasnt the case
a decade ago, as far as employment goes.
The suburbs were gaining jobs then and we were sort of
holding steady. Thats completely flipped and its what is
driving a ton of the investment and population growth
downtown. Everywhere you look around here, you see
construction cranes. And four more other big employers
from the suburbs south of Seattle have announced they are
going to relocate downtown. Thats an impressive shift.
Brian E. Clark is a Wisconsin-based journalist and
a former staff writer on the business desk of The
San Diego Union-Tribune. He is a contributor
to the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Sun-Times,
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Dallas Morning News
and other publications.
WINTER 2015 15
The Rise of
Multifamily
Housing
Multiple-family residences are
dominating new construction
Photo by Dan Reed
By Christine Jordan Sexton
Photo by Dan Reed
Photo by Dan Reed
resurgence in new construction

is happening across the country, but its not being fueled just
by traditional home construction.
Instead its multi-residential housing units leading the way in what
may be a growing and potentially lasting trend in the
21st century.
As the nation recovers from the Great Recession, a look
at recent housing numbers are encouraging.
Photo by Mike Madrid
Multi-residential housing units are

leading the way in a growing
and potentially lasting trend.
16 ON COMMON GROUND
WINTER 2015
Information released jointly from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the
United States Census Bureau on October 17 shows
the number of permits issued in September for privately-owned housing units was 1.5 percent higher
than the number of permits issued in August and
2.5 percent higher than the number of permits issued
in September 2013. The government reports on permits because they are considered a good indicator of
future building growth.
Likewise, the number of housing starts in September
this year was 6.3 percent higher than the previous
New multi-residential construction in 2013 increased

25 percent from the previous year.
month and was 17.8 percent higher than the number of
starts in September 2013.
Housing completions, too, were up in September 2014 to
a seasonally adjusted rate of nearly 1 million. Thats a 31.3
percent increase from September 2013.
But a closer look inside the numbers shows that a lot of
the growth in new construction is due to a spike in multiresidential construction.
New multi-residential construction in 2013 the latest
available annual figures increased 25 percent from the
previous year, while single-family housing for the same
period increased 15 percent.
Indeed, larger multi-family units, with 5 or more units,
accounted for half of the number of housing units authorized in 2013 in the District of Columbia, New York, North
Dakota, New Jersey and California.
And in 2012, the growth in starts for residential units
increased a whopping 37 percent from 2011, while single-family housing starts increased by 24 percent for the
same period.
Though annual figures arent available for 2014, a review
of the first and second quarters indicate the trend in new
multi-residential isnt going to change.
The trend to build multi-residential isnt surprising to Carl
Frinzi, senior vice president of multifamily housing for Balfour Beatty Construction. Balfour Beatty Construction is
the third largest multiuse builder in the nation and, according to the companys website, has produced 11,000 units
over the past five years.
He gravitated downtown because the location gives him

quick access to the two hospitals that serve the city residents. That was a major deciding factor when I was
initially looking, he said.
It also has access to the major highways which can make
travel easier for any purpose, Rouse added. Lastly, I am
able to walk to downtown venues such as Power and Light
or other events which is nice when the weather permits.
National Apartment Association President Doug Culkin
said his group has noticed a trend to build apartments in
downtown and urban areas in order to mostly appeal to
millennials such as Rouse.
An urban core really appeals to young professionals who
are saving a lot of time that would otherwise be spent
commuting to work or the city on the weekends from
the suburbs, he said.
Thats not to say that all new construction is in the urban
core. Frinzi said a well-located suburb close to a job center
such as a university or state college is also a prime
place to build a multi-residential project. It will be supported by investors, he said, and easily filled with tenants.
Millennials are choosing to

rent instead of buy.
Demographics is destiny Ive often heard. And the preferences of young people for renting and this type of living
defined that destiny and is a big reason for the trend, said
Frinzi, who has 25 years experience in multifamily residential construction.
Millennials or the 34 and under age group are choosing to rent instead of buy and more are choosing city life
over suburbia, studies show.
Mike Rouse, M.D., is renting a remodeled loft in downtown
Kansas City, Mo. Fresh from finishing his internal medicine
residency, 30-year-old Rouse said he initially rented because
his schedule was varied while he was finishing his residency.
He didnt want to worry about what he considered two
down sides of homeownership: yard work and home repairs.
Photo by Dan Reed
17
There is demand for well-located affordable housing for older Americans.
Photo by Mike Madrid
If anything, traditional real estate fundamentals are

governing even more strongly in this (building) trend:
location, access, proximity to work. Perhaps the biggest
change is a return to those fundamental market drivers
through the eyes of the customer, he said.
While millennials are attracted to apartment living they
arent the only ones gravitating toward rentals.
A recent study conducted by Harvard and AARP shows
there is and will be demand for well-located affordable housing for older Americans.
The report Housing Americas Older Adults, Meeting
the Need of an Aging Population notes that younger
baby boomers in their 50s arent as financially stable as
their parents. They have lower incomes than their parents
as well as less wealth and homeownership. Additionally,
they are less likely than their parents to have children,
meaning they dont have anyone to care for them as they
age in place.
For these people, affordable apartments located near transit hubs are a must, the report notes.
The HUD/Census data show that 23,000 age-restricted
units were started in 2013 or about 8 percent of all units
under development. Age restricted developments in the
North and the Midwest outpaced the national average.
Perhaps the largest driver of multi-residential housing has
been student housing, where residents are charged by the
bed not the unit.
18 ON COMMON GROUND
Photo by Greenbelt Alliance
Culkin said the amenities in the student-housing sector run the gamut from modern gyms to resort pools
and fire pits.
Some of the student housing product out there today
is amazing true luxury living and it is easy to see why
that would appeal to a college student, he said.
The online publication National Real Estate Investor
flagged cities in Florida, Georgia, Texas, and California,
as well as Philadelphia in its Top 10 list of hot markets
for student housing investments. Four cities in Florida
Tampa, Orlando, Gainesville and Tallahassee were
cited as good investment opportunities with Tallahassee
home to Florida State University, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, Tallahassee Community
College and branches for Keiser and Flagler universities
topping the list.
Floridas state capital is considered an all out college
town, the online publication notes, describing Tallahassee. Over the past year, it saw about $173 million in
student housing sales.
While it varies with the demographics, Frinzi said the
growth in market rate multifamily residential and student housing generally has outpaced the growth in new
construction for senior multifamily residential or affordable multifamily residential.
But the trend in both, he said, referring to senior and
affordable multifamily residential is still upward.
Frinzis assessment is underscored by data collected by the

National Association of Home Builders. The NAHB gauges
market sentiment with its multifamily production index,
or MPI. The MPI measures developers and builders perceived interests in three areas: market-rate rentals, affordable
rentals and for-sale units. Scores in the 50s or higher indicate
theres a positive perception or that the market is improving.
The trend for senior and affordable

multifamily residential is upward.
MPIs across all three sectors of multi-family residential rose

in the second quarter of 2014, the most recent data available.
The MPI for market-rate rentals increased by nine points to
68. The MPI for affordable units increased by four points to
52 and the MPI rose two points to 56 in the for-sale sector.
A corresponding analysis the MVI tracks builders
and developers perceptions of vacancies. Again, the MVI
for the second quarter increased by one point to 38. The
lower the number the less vacancies perceived.
Culkin said despite the uptick in multifamily residential
housing, the market isnt in danger of being over-flooded
with rental choices.
The apartment sector did not overbuild during the housing
boom, and then built nearly nothing for two years after the
market crash because no financing was available, he said.
Construction is now increasing but it still remains below
the levels needed to meet rising demand.
Vacancy statistics kept by the National Multifamily Housing
Council suggest hes right. There was a 9.1 percent vacancy
rate in 2013, according to the group, and moreover, vacancies are quickly filled. In 2012 the last year there is
complete data 63 percent of new units that came on the
market were rented within three months of completion and
81 percent were rented within 6 months of completion.
Photo by Dan Reed
Photo by David Mayfield
Frinzi said the flurry of multifamily building activity

and the willingness of Wall Street and conventional banks
to fund the projects actually dovetails at a time when
there are less skilled construction workers available.
The combination, he said, has caused a lot of pushback on
price and construction costs are beginning to rise. We will
have to see how that plays out over the next several years.
Christine Jordan Sexton is a Tallahassee-based freelance reporter who has done correspondent work
for the Associated Press, the New York Times, Florida
Medical Business and a variety of trade magazines,
including Florida Lawyer and National Underwriter.
Construction is now increasing but

it still remains below the levels
needed to meet rising demand.
WINTER 2015 19
Whats Behind the Fastest-Growing

Suburban Cities in America?
The suburban
cities whose growth
is outpacing that of
their neighbors are more
than suburbs. Theyre
destinations to work,
play and live.
Courtesy of PLACE Built Environment Centre
Courtesy of the City of Carmel, Ind.
By G.M. Filisko
op quiz: Name five of the fastest-growing suburban cities

in the country.
Give yourself a point if you came up with Frisco, Texas. Add
another if you named Carmel, Ind. Ditto for Sugar Land, Texas,
South Jordan, Utah, and Franklin, Tenn.
These suburban cities are booming because theyre more than

suburbs. Theyre destinations for families and businesses. Theyve got character and a uniqueness things so hard to find in the mass of cookie-cutter
and strip-mall-dominated suburbs. Theyre also the result of diligent planning. Finally, luck plays a part. Each of these go-go suburbs is located within
an economically healthy metro region.
The leaders of these cities are not only planning the wisest ways to build
on their already-burgeoning populations. Theyre also planning to head off
the challenges that typically follow rapid growth. Only time will tell the
success of that planning, but theyre confident theyre on the right track.
Courtesy of VisitHamiltonCounty.com
No more blinking yellow light
Carmel, Ind.
About a half-hour due north of Dallas sits Frisco, Texas, named in the past
five years by both CNN and Forbes as one of the countrys best cities in
These suburban cities are booming because

theyre destinations for families and businesses.
20 ON COMMON GROUND
WINTER 2015
Frisco benefits from being in a natural

corridor of expansion for Dallas.
which to live. Many people 136,000, at last count
agree, pushing the citys growth rate from 2012-2013 to
6.5 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Before
then from 2000-2010 Friscos growth was a whopping 247 percent, taking the city from 33,714 residents
to 116,989.
Maher Maso, the citys mayor, says its all been part of a
plan. When I moved here in 1992, we had 6,000 people
and one blinking yellow light and not much else, he
remembers. Our growth hasnt been an overnight thing.
Weve planned for it.
Tony Felker agrees. Were aware and proud of the growth,
but theres a concerted effort to ensure the growth by itself
isnt the thing were most focused on, explains the president/CEO of the Frisco Chamber of Commerce. We
want to make sure its smart, sustainable, and quality
growth, and growth in the right areas so its not something that gets away from us, becomes something we cant
manage, and eventually leads to issues.
For about 20 years, the city has guided growth through
a master plan leaders tweak every five years or so. Theyre
doing that now, says Felker, in particular evaluating
whether to develop a majority of the city with residential
housing. Theyre also deciding what they want Frisco to
look like at buildout. Our timeframe is variable depending on annual growth, says Maso. Our estimation is that
well have close to 350,000 in population, and thatll be
in 15 to 25 years.
theyd build their corporate headquarters and training facility in Frisco, and the Frisco school district will be able to
use the center for some sports events.
Finally, a critical component of the citys success is keeping its small-town values, says Felker. It created Heritage
Village, where key older structures from old Frisco,
such as a church and log cabins, have been moved to
create a walkable community. A big draw is Babes
Chicken House, which serves family-style dinners in an
up-to-code structure that developers designed to look
ancient and on the verge of collapse. We want to remember our history and that this was a small town not that
many years ago, says Felker.
Babes Chicken House diner highlights Friscos small-town history

and is a big draw for residents and tourists.
Maso says Frisco has also grown because its focused on

education. One-third of our growth has been below the
age of 17, and about 10 percent has been below the age
of five, he says. We have, on average, been adding three
schools a year, and for this school year, we opened five.
One was a new high school, but well also open a new
high school every year for the next three years.
The area also benefits from being in a natural corridor of
expansion for Dallas. That may be what has helped it attract
many professional sports teams, who arent just building
office and sports facilities in Frisco. The city often creates
partnerships that allow local school kids to also play in those
facilities. In August 2013, the Dallas Cowboys announced
Photo by Edward Mao
21
Photo by Edward Mao
Frisco, Texas
Photo by Edward Mao
Courtesy of Lifestylefrisco.com
New development, however, inevitably pushes up against

tradition. Friscos leaders have worked to marry the two.
We used to have just one high school, and weve always
had a homecoming parade down Main Street, explains
Felker. People made floats, and everybody has come out.
As new high schools have opened, people began asking
whether thered be a parade for each school, or would the
city have to end its homecoming parade tradition? There
was talk that the parade was nice, but that we couldnt
have it anymore, says Felker. But several entities said
no to that, and weve now converted it to a community
parade. Well use it to tie the historic part of Frisco to
the new part of downtown. Were growing and changing, but we still try to keep a sense of history and those
things that make it feel like a small town.
New development inevitably

pushes up against tradition.
22 ON COMMON GROUND
Photo by Jamie Wallace
A night on the town

Just north of Indianapolis is Carmel, Ind., which boasts
more than 86,000 people and an 8.5 percent growth rate
from 2010-2013, reports the Census.
The city, which houses more than 50 corporate headquarters, has long had a master plan. But when Jim Brainard
was knocking on doors in his run for mayor in 1995, he
heard a common complaint from residents, says Nancy
Heck, director of community relations and economic
development. They wanted places downtown where they
could go to dinner and a show.
When Brainard took office, he began creating that downtown. Just north of our civic square, where things like
city hall and the fire department are located, was basically
a farm field, says Heck.
With that as a foundation, Brainard began planning for
whats now City Center, a mixed-use development that
opened with residential and commercial uses in 2010 and
restaurants and retail in 2011. Heck says eight more

buildings are still slated to open in the development.
The city also had a low-traffic area called Old Town.
The mayor had heard about a lot of places making
arts and design districts and thought that would be
a good use for the Old Town area, says Heck. The
vision for those two areas came simultaneously, and
now in the arts and design district, we have 10 galleries all within a few blocks of each other.
New music and theater venues

have enhanced the quality
of life for residents.
Currently in the works is another mixed-use development to fill in the space, called Midtown, between
those two hubs. It takes about 15 minutes to
walk from city hall to the arts district, says Heck.
This will be a way to have infill development and
make the whole area walkable without any industrial
section in between.
New music and theater venues have also really
enhanced the quality of life for residents, says
Heck. There once was no dedicated concert hall in
Carmel. Today, theres The Palladium, which Heck
says has among the best acoustics in the world.
Across the green is another building with a 500-seat
and a 200-seat theater. We now have nine resident
companies for music, dance and theater that most
weeks are performing several shows a week, she says.
That really added a much-needed component to
the community.
Photos courtesy of the

City of Carmel, Ind.
But the story of Carmel wouldnt be complete

without a mention of the roughly 80 roadway roundabouts the city added to replace stop signs and stop
lights during all the redevelopment. Residents were at
first flummoxed, but the city did a major education
campaign to ease concerns. Now its statistics match
national statistics showing a 78 to 80 percent reduction in accidents with injuries where roundabouts
have been installed, says Heck. Theres also been a
40 percent reduction in overall accidents.
The mayor has a degree in, and is a real student
of, history, adds Heck. Hes learned a lot about
building for quality of life, and he believes you lose
vibrancy when everybody works in your city and
then goes home to someplace else. But when you
have regular exchanges with others because you see
them more frequently, you enjoy life more and feel
more connected to your community.
Courtesy of the City of Carmel, Ind.
WINTER 2015 23
You lose vibrancy when everybody works in your city

and then goes home to someplace else.
A perfect storm in a good way
Photo by PhotoDean
Exactly when the population of South Jordan, Utah,

began to explode is hard to pin down. Forty-year-old Dave
Robison, broker at goBE Realty and the 2014 presidentelect of the Salt Lake Board of REALTORS, has lived in
the Salt Lake City suburb since he was four. He says its
steadily shifted from not having a gas station when he
was a kid to growing at a faster clip in the past 10 years.
A huge contributing factor, says Robison, has been
Daybreak, a master-planned community the National
Association of Home Builders has twice rated the nations
number-one housing community.
Brian Preece, director of commerce for South Jordan,
agrees Daybreak has been a factor, but says people often
overestimate its importance in South Jordans growth.
I think people give Daybreak more credit than they
should, he says. Weve been growing like crazy since
the 1990 Census, and during the last 10 years, Daybreak
has been only about half of our growth.
South Jordan went from a population of 12,220 to 29,461
from 1990-2000, says Preece. That number spiked to
50,418 in 2010. Now our guesstimate is that its about
61,000, he says. I think its been because of good planning by the city. South Jordan has been growing because,
even before I came here just shy of 10 years ago, the city
required high-quality developments, both commercial and
residential, and it became the zip code of choice where
people want to live.
South Jordan, Utah
Robison says many factors have collided to bring growth.

You could say its been a perfect storm, he says.
Our population is increasing at a really high rate because
of the amount of kids all the families have. The second
factor is Daybreak, which has a lake and a lot of amenities. More than 3,000 homes have been built there in the
last 10 years; theyve got condos selling as low as $150,000
and luxury homes priced at $1 million.
Robison expects Daybreak to have 10,000 homes within
10 years. But the development isnt for everybody. People
either love Daybreak or dont like it at all, says Preece. If
they dont like it, its because its designed to be a walkable
24 ON COMMON GROUND
Photo by PhotoDean
Courtesy of
Daybreakliving.com
The citys leaders have a master plan

they review every few years.
community, but even in Daybreak, you pretty much
need a car. Its also higher density, and some people
want a one-third or half-acre lot and dont want to be
that close to their neighbors.
(Above) Courtesy of Daybreakliving.com

South Jordan, Utah
Lucky for them theres other housing in South Jordan,

even some thats affordable. The next contributing factor to South Jordans growth is that our past mayor,
who specialized and worked his whole life in development, did some really good things to make sure the
city had affordable housing, says Robison. Right now,
about 43 percent of all homes sold are on one-third
an acre or less. Ten years back, that number was less
than 25 percent.
Growth has triggered challenges. The biggest, says Robison, is schools. Our schools are overcrowded, he says.
They have a lot of pods, which are portable rooms
that sit outside the school, for students. To fund the
school system, we need different types of development
including multi-housing and commercial which
would increase our tax base. If people dont allow
those types of developments, their property taxes will
have to increase.
Photo by PhotoDean
South Jordan, Utah
Like Frisco, the citys leaders have a master plan they

review every few years. Leaders are currently addressing how to do infill development wisely, says Preece,
in addition to transportation issues. We have a highspeed train [the TRAX light rail system to Salt Lake
City] that runs through the east side of our city, but you
have to get in the car to get to the train station, he says.
We have buses, but theyre not convenient. Planners
are really focusing on getting people that last mile without getting in your car.
Annexation spurs growth
Another city on the fast track is Sugar Land, Texas,
about 20 miles southwest of Houston. It had a 6.5 percent growth rate from 2010-2013 and now has more
than 80,000 people, reports the Census.
In 1960, our population was just over 2,800, says
Jennifer May, the citys director of economic development. Really weve been growing for decades.
WINTER 2015 25
Photos courtesy of Sugar Land, Texas
Sugar Land has really good schools; a very, very low crime rate; great
public spaces and is actively developing entertainment venues.
A good chunk of that growth has come through annexation of master-planned communities, she says. In 2006,
Sugar Land annexed the Avalon community. It followed that several years later by annexing the River Park
planned development.
Since then, however, all of Sugar Lands growth has been
organic. May says city estimates from 2004-2014 show
that about 60 percent of its population increase came
from growth, while 40 percent came from annexation.
The biggest reason is our quality of life, says May. We
have really good schools; a very, very low crime rate; great
public spaces like an in-town square; and were actively
developing entertainment venues. Were now finalizing
the design on a 6,500-seat performing arts center. People
can literally live, work, shop and play here.
Growth has also come in part because of Telfair, an incity master-planned community. Its one of the more
successful communities in the Houston area, says May.
Theres a lake, and there are trails throughout it. They
26 ON COMMON GROUND
also have an incredible pool, a community center and a

fitness center. Theres a bridge within the development,
and it isnt just a bridge. Its a piece of art.
The development is on former state prison property,
and it still includes one of the old prison buildings. The
developer donated that building to the city, which then
spent about $6 million, says May, to create the Houston
Museum of Natural Science at Sugar Land.
As the city has grown, its become more diverse. Weve
seen a huge, huge increase in the diversity, with the majority split between Asian Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese and
Pakistani populations, says May. That required a lot of
learning on the citys part to understand the different cultures. We did a session for city staff to understand things
like the holidays our residents celebrate and how police
officers are perceived in various communities. But its also
giving us an opportunity to explain to residents, When
you call 911, this is what you can expect, and Heres what
to expect when you want a building permit.
The preservation community worked with the business folks

to redevelop the entire downtown Main Street area.
The citys now working on updating its land-use plan to
evaluate challenges arising from expansion. Infrastructure,
transportation and mobility are issues. As we have more
people and development, sometimes that can outpace
infrastructure updates, says Lisa Kocich-Meyer, director of planning. We dont have any public transit, but in
some limited cases, we have pedestrian connectivity. Getting people in and around the area has been a challenge.
A couple of years ago, we did a pilot program for a local
shuttle circulator during the holiday season. But it wasnt
well used because we have an abundance of parking, and
its free. Were still trying to figure that issue out. Here in
Texas, people are still tied to their cars.
of coffee, have lunch, and also wed like them to go

in and spend a little money.
Next up for the foundation: The Old Old Jail. In
2013, the foundation purchased the historic art-deco
building from the city for $25,000 an amount
donated by FirstBank. Renovations are underway
to transform it into office space that will serve as the
foundations headquarters.
G.M. Filisko is an attorney and freelance writer who
writes frequently on real estate, business and legal
issues. Ms. Filisko served as an editor at NARs REALTOR Magazine for 10 years.
Preserving history is a big draw

About a half-hour south of Nashville lands you in Franklin, Tenn., a city thats worked diligently to preserve its
historic center while attracting corporations like Nissan
and Healthways. That may be why from 2000-2010,
Franklin grew 49 percent, bringing its population to
66,000. It also grew at a 10-percent pace from 20102013, when the Census counted nearly 70,000 residents.
Courtesy of VisitFranklin.com
Much of the growth can be attributed to the work of the

Heritage Foundation of Franklin and Williamson County,
a historic preservation group that has focused on renewing
the use for many of the downtowns historic buildings.
It raised $8 million to create a 300-seat, multi-use venue
in the historic Franklin Theater, which opened in 2011
and features live music, theater productions and movies.
The entire downtown encompasses a 16-block National
Register district, and its Main Street claims more than
150 buildings on the National Register. The district is
filled with a mix of businesses ranging from restaurants
and antique shops to artists studios.
The preservation community worked with the business folks to redevelop the entire downtown Main
Street area, says Mayor Ken Moore, which involved
undergrounding utilities, upgrading infrastructure, and
for many of them upgrading the facades on their businesses.
Now its a place that people love to walk, have a cup
WINTER 2015 27
San Marcos is nations fastest growing city
he key to the Texas city of San Marcos burgeoning growth which expanded by 8 percent
each of the past two years, according to the
U.S. Census Bureau isnt just location,
location, location.
But it certainly doesnt hurt that this community of more than 54,000 occupies a sweet spot on
the Interstate 35 corridor about halfway between Austin, the states capital, and San Antonio. Respectively,
they are the nations 7th and 11th largest cities in the
nation. They, too, are growing fast.
But why San Marcos? muses Daniel Guerrero, who
has been mayor there for four years. In addition to
our location, there are a number of reasons. But Id
have to say Texas State University is a big draw. We
also have a lot of natural beauty and the cost of living
is significantly lower than some nearby communities.
When you figure in the price of housing, it costs about
38 percent less to dwell here than in Austin.
Moreover, our government regulations are reasonable,
we have a business-friendly environment and we dont
have a state income tax. All those things contribute.
Other assets are our lively arts and music scene, plus
an attractive downtown.
Photo by Don Anders
San Marcos companies also have access to an abundant

and educated pool of potential employees.
If you draw a circle with a 45-mile radius from the
center of San Marcos, it would encompass portions of
Austin and San Antonio, with a workforce of about 2.5
million, he says. That territory would draw in 25 different colleges, universities and technical schools that
generate a very diverse and enthusiastic workforce.
Major employers in the city include the university, several hospitals and core industries that include advanced
manufacturing and materials, aerospace and aviation,
clean technology, and corporate and professional operations. In addition, the city is also home to the largest
outlet mall in the state, which draws a whopping 14
million shoppers a year.
San Marcos downtown also has seen significant
improvements.
We recently invested $15 million to $20 million in
the redevelopment of our downtown to beautify it
and improve it by redoing our lighting, restructuring
sidewalks, improving roadways and making it safer for
bicyclists, he says. Weve created a destination downtown and densified it to make it a place where people
want to live, work and play. Its a historic area, so we
have done our best to be respectful of the preservation
and history in our downtown community.
As the community has grown, steps have been taken
to add parks and protect the San Marcos River, which
flows through town.
Were trying to balance growth while holding onto
our unique character and whats near and dear to our
hearts as a community, he says. By protecting the
river and investing in greenspace, folks will still have
places to play for generations to come, not just work
and do business. Certainly the investments weve made
in our infrastructure and natural resources havent
been easy or inexpensive, but weve tried to be as proactive as possible.
28 ON COMMON GROUND
WINTER 2015
Photo by Don Anders
Courtesy of Rice University
Guerrero, who was born, raised and educated in San

Marcos, credits his predecessors in city government as
well as the folks who manage the surrounding Hays
County for doing a good job of planning for the areas
steady expansion. He calls them enlightened.
One of the most positive aspects of that leadership
over a number of decades is that growth was anticipated, he says. I dont think we knew the magnitude
or the timeframe of what the growth was going to be.
But we saw all the factors and were prepared.
We havent had the explosive kind of growth that some
communities in south Texas have experienced because
of the presence of the Eagle Ford (oil-and-gas-bearing)
shale which has brought on a lot of positive things, but
also a lot of challenges, he says.
He acknowledges, however, that the city has a shortage
of single-family housing though many multifamily units have been built in recent years. While San
Marcos population has increased, enrollment in public
schools remained flat over the past decade in part
because of what he calls false perceptions about the
quality of the schools. But enrollment in the 7,200-student San Marcos Consolidated Independent School
District saw a surge of more than 500 students this year.

To plan for the future, district residents passed a $77million bond recently.
Over the past decade, San Marcos, Hays County and
the state invested greatly in roadways and wastewater
and other utility infrastructure. The city is also the
lead investor in the regional economic development
engine known as the Greater San Marcos Partnership.
Adriana Cruz, president of the Partnership, agrees that
there is a tight inventory of single-family homes in and
around San Marcos, but she says that should be easing with new developments coming on-line. And she
praised local and county governments for spending
roughly $500 million on road and other improvements
in recent years.
Theyve done a really great job of handling this expansion, she says. While other parts of the nation were
hit by the recession, we continued to have positive
growth with just some slowing down. I think well
continue to draw new residents and businesses here,
too. Fortunately, we seem to be doing a good job of
handling it all.
29
Growing Up
and Not Out
The fiscal benefits of higher
density development
By Brad Broberg
s municipal governments struggle to

balance their budgets, Joe Minicozzi
suggests borrowing a page from the
book Moneyball: The Art of Winning
an Unfair Game.
Moneyball describes how Oakland As

general manager Billy Beane bucked conventional wisdom to build a winning baseball team despite having
less money to sign players. Rather than using traditional
statistics to measure a players worth, Beane dug deeper
into the numbers to find the stats that matter most and
acquire players whose skills were undervalued.
He challenged the way we think about baseball,
Minicozzi says.
Minicozzi, principal at the land-use consulting firm
Urban3 in Asheville, N.C., is all about digging deeper
into the numbers, too. But instead of trying to win a
World Series, hes helping communities improve their
bottom line by doing the math when making decisions
about where to focus development.
Thats my bumper sticker slogan do the math,
Minicozzi says.
Doing the math means taking a fresh look at how development patterns drive a communitys tax revenues.
Rather than looking at the total tax production of a
given piece of land to gauge its economic performance,
30 ON COMMON GROUND
WINTER 2015
Courtesy of Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau; Photo by Julie Soefer
Minicozzi advocates looking at tax production per acre

as the best way to measure a piece of lands relative value to
the community.
Its the same principle people use to compare the fuel
efficiency of cars. People dont look at the total miles per
tank a car can travel to determine whether one car performs better than another. They look at the number of
miles per gallon.
In case after case, Urban3 has shown communities that
they get more mileage i.e. tax production per acre
from development in their more dense urban centers than
Tax production per acre is

the best way to measure a
piece of lands relative value
to the community.
development in their less dense suburban fringes because

the land there is more highly utilized and highly valued.
If you look at the data, the data will tell the story for
you, Minicozzi says.
Asheville, N.C., is a good example. After Urban3s parent firm, Public Interest Projects, converted the vacant
Asheville Hotel into a mixed-use retail/residential property, it ignited a wave of redevelopment throughout the
downtown that increased the taxable value of property in
the central business district from $104 million in 1991 to
$665 million in 2010. The hotel, which sits on 0.2 acres,
generates $634,000 in property taxes per acre and $83,000
in retail taxes. Meanwhile, the local Walmart, which sits
on 34 acres on the outside of town, generates $6,500 per
acre in property taxes and $47,500 in retail taxes.
Urban3s work is part of a growing conversation about
the economics of development decisions. With municipal
budgets tight but expectations for public services high,
many local governments are under financial siege.
As Urban3s tax production per acre model suggests, smart
growth with its emphasis on urban infill and compact
development offers municipalities a way to glean a greater
return from their most important asset the land.
A 2013 report by Smart Growth America drives that point
home. Building Better Budgets: A National Examination of the Fiscal Benefits of Smart Growth examined
data from 17 previously completed studies from around
the country and found that denser smart growth development patterns generate an average of 10 times more
tax revenue per acre compared to less dense conventional
suburban development. The report also found that smart
growth saves municipalities an average of 38 percent on
the upfront cost of infrastructure and 10 percent on the
annual cost of public services.
Information about the fiscal differences between various

development patterns is critical because decisions about
where and how to focus growth ripple through municipal
budgets in any number of ways, from the cost of constructing roads and providing police and fire service to
property values and tax collections.
The studies that form the basis for Building Better Budgets show what happens when municipalities do the
math. In Champaign, Ill., a study found that a smart
growth approach to future city development could save
$54 million in upfront infrastructure costs and $19 million in public services costs over 20 years. And in Raleigh,
N.C., a study concluded that a six-story building downtown produces 50 times as much property tax per acre
as the average Walmart store.
The goal of the report isnt to tell communities what they
should and shouldnt do, Preuss says. The goal is to help
communities make decisions with their eyes wide open
about the economic consequences of what gets built
and where.
Every community has the right to decide what kind of
development they want, she says. It comes down to
Information about the fiscal

differences between various
development patterns is critical.
I was disappointed at how few studies had been done

comparing different development types, but the outcomes
were so consistent that we are very confident about what
we found, says Ilana Preuss, chief of staff at Smart Growth
America, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.
Building Better Budgets is the first report to combine
comparative data from multiple studies and calculate
national averages. The response weve received is quite
remarkable, Preuss says. Local government leaders and
elected officials across party lines are looking for this kind
of information.
Photo by Larry E. Highbaugh, Jr.
31
Photos courtesy of ExploreAsheville.com
giving local leaders clear and quantifiable information

about the fiscal impact.
developed acre of land is likely to produce more tax revenue than a less densely developed acre.
A case study prepared specifically for Building Better Budgets compares the costs and benefits of three
residential developments in the combined city/county
municipality of Nashville-Davidson County, Tenn. Two
are smart growth developments an infill development
in a brownfield location and a new urban development
in a greenfield location and one is a conventional
suburban development.
Even though its obvious, it has not been conventional

wisdom, Preuss says. People have assumed that if there
is a demand for (sprawl development), then whatever tax
you can get out of that is good. Any development was
good development because people wanted the tax base.
Both smart growth developments proved to be better deals

than the conventional suburban development. The new
urban development cost 19 percent less in city/county
services per housing unit and the infill development cost
13 percent less per housing unit. The infill development
generated 1,150 times more net revenue per acre and the
new urban development generated 148 times more net
revenue per acre.
Such findings seem obvious. Youd expect it to cost less to
provide services and infrastructure in a compact geography versus a sprawling one. And of course a more densely
But that approach counted on federal funding to help

build infrastructure and on taxes/fees from new rounds of
development to maintain infrastructure and provide services added during previous rounds. Like a Ponzi scheme,
it could only last so long. When the Great Recession hit,
poof went federal funding, poof went new development
and poof went tax revenues as property values in the suburban fringe plunged.
We are in a day and age where there are limited resources
and [municipalities] have to spend their money wisely,
Preuss says. A lot of places that built low-density development for a very long time are finding they cant afford
to maintain the infrastructure ... because they cant generate enough revenue to cover the cost.
Smart growth developments proved to be better deals

than the conventional suburban development.
32 ON COMMON GROUND
Photo by Tau Zero
The numbers dont lie about

the benefits of density.
People have never really looked at this stuff, Minicozzi
says. Why hasnt anybody done this before? Sometimes
the simplest stuff is the most difficult to get at.
Tax production per acre is one half of the equation for
making economic comparisons between different development patterns. The other is the cost of providing
public services.
A lot of communities just look at revenue in a vacuum
without looking at cost, says Lee Sobel, director of public
strategies for RCLCO, a nationwide real estate consulting firm based in Washington, D.C.
Sprawls toll on a communitys long-term fiscal health was

diagnosed at least as far back as 1974 when the federal
government released a report called the Costs of Sprawl.
Yet conventional suburban development remained the
dominant form of development decade after decade.
People like the suburbs, but weve known how (problematic) they are since the mid-1970s, Minicozzi says.
He likens the nations unhealthy appetite for sprawl to
someone eating bacon every day. Were now paying the
price for all those years of eating bacon, he says.
Not everyone wants to change the menu. High density has always been tough for many people to swallow.
But the numbers dont lie about the benefits of density,
Minicozzi says especially in downtowns where the only
way to grow is up. As youre stacking up stories, youre
stacking up dollar bills, he says.
Urban3 uses geographic information systems technology
to make Minicozzis point in highly visual ways including a dramatic three-dimensional model that visualizes a
communitys tax production per acre as spikes rising out
of the ground. The taller the spike, the greater the tax
production at that spot on the map. Whenever Urban3
applies this model to a city or a region, the tallest columns inevitably spring from the downtown core and other
densely developed spots such as transit stops.
Using data collected from four cities, Sobel is creating a

model to help municipalities calculate and compare the
relative cost of services police, fire, roads, utilities
for different development patterns. For example, how
many fewer fire stations might be needed if growth is
tightly focused rather than spread out?
Its intuitive on some level. There are always efficiencies
that come with higher density. But its rarely [tabulated]
in a comparative way, Sobel says.
Together with tax production per acre, cost of services
data can help municipalities weigh the long-term economics of where and how they choose to grow. Since
the Great Recession, a lot more communities are sensitive
to the impacts of growth on their budgets, Sobel says. I
think interest (in the cost of service model) will be high.
Some municipalities may use the information to adopt
policies that increase density such as encouraging infill
development to make more efficient use of existing infrastructure, but they may also use it to determine whether
they can afford continued low-density development as
well, says Sobel.
Its not an all or nothing proposition. You can have both
kinds of development, he says. Youre just pointing out
that one does a more efficient job of paying for itself than
the other.
Brad Broberg is a Seattle-based freelance writer
specializing in business and development issues.
His work appears regularly in the Puget Sound
Business Journal and the Seattle Daily Journal
of Commerce.
WINTER 2015 33
Streetcars spurring
Urban Development
By Joan Mooney
he streetcars that many cities are building now

are very different from the ones that crisscrossed the country in the early 20th century
and not just because theyre air-conditioned
and wheelchair-accessible. Streetcar lines are
being built as catalysts for urban development and economic revival. They are connecting to other
parts of a citys transit system, connecting neighborhoods
that were not previously connected and creating a new
cityscape in the process.
Modern streetcars have been in place for a while in
Portland, Ore., Memphis and Little Rock not cities
typically thought of as trendy urban centers. Seattle and
Dallas are adding second lines. Streetcar systems have
opened or will open this year in Tucson, Atlanta and
Washington, D.C. Another 11 are planned for 2015 or

later in cities ranging from Fort Lauderdale to Milwaukee to Tempe, Ariz.
There are 38 streetcars in cities around the country today,
up from just seven in 1980. And usually one of the goals
when a city builds a streetcar successfully met in the
ones that have been built so far is to spur development.
Transportation and development go hand in hand and
always have, says Art Guzzetti, vice president of policy for the American Public Transportation Association.
The current streetcar wave is back to the future because
its hard to comprehend how much of urban American
life revolved around the streetcar from 1890 to 1930.
There was huge urban development in that era, largely
around streetcars.
Streetcars are connecting

neighborhoods that were not
previously connected.
34 ON COMMON GROUND
WINTER 2015
Streetcars have definite advantages over light rail.

Streetcars (also known as trolleys) have some definite
advantages over light rail. Streetcars are typically smaller,
lighter, less expensive than light rail and usually operate
in mixed traffic, rather than in their own exclusive right
of way, DC Streetcar writes on its website. Streetcar
systems can be built more rapidly, are more cost-effective
and cause less disruption to businesses and communities during construction in comparison to light rail.
Once they are built, streetcars have a different function
from light rail, serving more as circulators.
Streetcars are not geared for mass commuting because
theyre not huge time savers, says Guzzetti. They do
serve an important circulator role. You have an activity
center here, an activity center there, and you need a link.
Streetcars have a role beyond just being a mobility provider, Guzzetti says. Many of the projects around the
country are sponsored not by the transit system but by
the city. You want to shape the community, you want
to spark vitality, you create a sense of place.
Streetcars do have some disadvantages. They are expensive for the amount of ground they cover, and theyre
slow because they share the right of way with cars.
They arent intended to be fast, Guzzetti says. Theyre
intended to be part of a system.
Whats making them ripe is a demand for urban living
and for the mobility that goes with that.
Atlanta: Connecting historic districts with downtown

Atlanta is a prime example of the streetcar as a vehicle
for urban development. In the first part of the 20th
century, Atlanta had a streetcar system reaching over
200 miles. The last streetcar ended in 1949. Then a few
years ago, the city looked at the success of streetcars in
Portland, Charlotte and Seattle, and decided to build
one in its own downtown.
The venture is a public-private partnership between
the city, the Atlanta Downtown Improvement District
(ADID) and the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit
Authority (MARTA). ADID is itself a public-private
partnership aimed at creating a livable downtown.
Like many cities building streetcars, Atlanta got its
initial funding from a TIGER Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery grant from
the U.S. Department of Transportation.
The 2.7-mile track, slated to open before the end of the
year, has a $98-million budget, $47 million of which is
from the 2010 TIGER grant. The $98 million covers
more than the construction of the system, says Atlanta
Streetcar communications director Sharon Gavin.
A lot of decisions were made to enhance the project
and help the whole downtown area become more walkable, Gavin says. Designers paid careful attention to
Courtesy of DC Streetcar
The streetcar is a vehicle

for urban development.
35
Photo by Sean Davis
Atlantas 2.7-mile streetcar track is slated to open before the end of the year.
The Atlanta streetcars role is to enhance the downtown

area to attract more residents and businesses.
streetscaping, with actions such as changing a one-way
street to two-way to improve walkability.
The rest of the funding came from ADID and from
a car rental tax that the city council voted to divert to
the streetcar.
Why does the city want to fund the streetcar? The Atlanta
streetcars role is to enhance the downtown area to attract
more residents and businesses, says Gavin. Developers
have so far agreed to invest $450 million along the streetcar line, and more than half of that has already been spent.
About half of the investments are for small businesses such
as restaurants and boutique shops and half are for large
institutional, corporate and retail establishments, says Jennifer Ball, vice president of economic development and
planning for Central Atlanta Progress. Since 2010, there
are seven new restaurants and nine more planned a
triumph for an area that used to have none and 20
real estate transactions for buildings and land.
36 ON COMMON GROUND
Some of Atlantas largest companies and developments

are along the streetcar route. The Flatiron Building, the
citys oldest skyscraper and a designated historic landmark, has just been bought by a new owner who wants
to develop the office building into an entrepreneurial hub
for startup businesses, with a planned investment of $14
million. Georgia State University has spent $5 million to
build classrooms and dorms along the streetcar line, and
Coca-Cola has spent $35 million to expand its building.
The streetcar line includes two historic districts. Because
of the nature of the neighborhoods, says Ball, we dont
want to see wholesale redevelopment, we want to see
adaptive reuse.
To be awarded a TIGER grant, a community must
show that the money will benefit economic competitiveness, job creation and stimulus, safety, sustainability
and livability, with the goal of a 1:1 benefit/cost ratio.
Atlanta says it has achieved a benefit/cost ratio of 2.56.
The streetcar is affecting residential patterns.

People are moving back into town.
Included in the analysis is $159.3 million representing
incremental property value appreciation over 20 years
for existing property one-quarter mile from station areas.
But the biggest benefit may be harder to measure. Over
the years, weve created an image for Atlanta: traffic and
lack of transportation options, says Lennie Shewmaker,
government affairs director of the Atlanta Board of REALTORS. Hopefully, were changing that. So when people
visit, they can take MARTA to their downtown hotel,
hop on the streetcar line and go to the Old Fourth Ward.
They never have to rent a car. The Old Fourth Ward is
the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood where the Martin
Luther King, Jr., historic site is located.
The streetcar is affecting residential patterns, too. People are moving back into town, Shewmaker says. For
the first time there are more single adults than married.
They want to be near restaurants and green space without needing to own cars.
Tucson: Successfully bringing people downtown
Like Atlanta, Tucson wanted to build a streetcar to connect
different communities and to create economic stimulus.
The goal was to provide easy access to five distinctive areas
along a four-mile corridor, says Jeremy Papuga, the transit
administrator for the city of Tucson. Bus rapid transit or
heavy rail would not have worked on that route.
We wanted a vehicle that could run in the right of way
with automobiles, an agile vehicle that could handle
narrow streets, something friendly to pedestrian access,
Papuga says.
The Sun Link streetcar

opened in July of 2014
The Sun Link streetcar, which opened in late July, now

sometimes gets stuck in auto traffic created by the
streetcars success in reviving downtown. Weve seen tremendous activity in the downtown corridor, says Papuga.
Its a very active pedestrian environment.
Funding came from a combination of federal and
local moneys. In 2006, Pima County voters approved
The streetcar has revived tremendous

activity in the downtown corridor.
WINTER 2015 37
a half-cent sales tax to fund a 20-year, $2.1-billion

regional transportation plan. Of that, $87.7 million
was to be used for the streetcar. That money was later
supplemented by a 2010 TIGER grant for $63 million and $10 million from other federal programs.
We did see a lot of economic development prior to
startup, says Papuga, starting as soon as the TIGER
grant was awarded. As of March, private investment totaled $360 million, and public investment
was $930.7 million. The largest share of commercial private investment has been $97.8 million in
office construction.
There has been an influx of new businesses mostly
restaurants, bars and some retail and a tremendous
amount of residential development, Papuga says.
In the past two years, 2,600 residential units have been
built, mostly student housing for the University of Arizona. The streetcar has helped the university expand
its landlocked campus and has given students an
affordable, car-free way to commute from downtown
to campus. Papuga expects the next wave of development will be market-rate housing.
Our goal is to bring residents to the core of our
community, or people on weekends, he says. With
4,000 passengers a day in the first two months, weve
achieved that.
Washington, D.C.: Reviving a neighborhood
Washingtons streetcar is scheduled to start in November, but it has already generated more than 4.3 million
square feet in planned or completed construction along
the initial 2.4-mile track. In 2013, approximately
558,000 square feet of commercial space was built or
under construction along the route on H Street NE.
Anwar Saleem, executive director of H Street Main Street
Inc., had asked for several years for the neighborhood to
be put on the citys list of beautification projects. Once
the streetcar route was established in the mid-2000s,
beautification was scheduled. Since then, 186 new businesses have opened up along the route, Saleem says.
Photo by Matt Johnson
38 ON COMMON GROUND
The value of the streetcar system isnt only measured by how many
people are riding it, but by how its helping to direct investment
and meet some of the citywide goals around sustainability.
Courtesy of DC Streetcar
An H-Street festival celebrating the arrival of the DC Streetcar
The streetcar was the promise to a better H Street, Saleem says. We had developers who werent going to do
[any building] until the streetcar was running.
Says Sam Zimbabwe, associate director of policy,
planning and sustainability administration in D.C.s
Department of Transportation, On H Street, the installation of streetcar tracks came with full reconstruction
of the neighborhood.
Washington, which has an extensive subway system
through the city and suburbs, has been studying light
rail and streetcar options since the 1990s. A 2010 study
looked at building 37 miles and eight lines of streetcars
across the city, which the Office of Planning expects
would bring up to $8 billion in new development within
10 years of completion.
Now, a 22-mile streetcar system is in the planning or
construction stage, says Zimbabwe. The current plan
calls for another 45 miles of transit, whether its bus
lanes, streetcars or light rail. The city will decide corridor by corridor.
But with concerns about immediate costs, officials from
outgoing Mayor Vincent Gray's administration said in late
October that they will push the city to build only about
eight miles of streetcar line, down from the previously
planned 22 miles. The long-term goal of 37 miles remains.
So far, the streetcar has been funded almost entirely from

city revenue. The original plan was for 25 percent of all
of the citys incremental revenue, including income tax,
to go toward streetcar construction until most of it was
built. Then last May, the city council, unhappy about
cost overruns, cut funding to $50 million a year.
The first segment of the streetcar along H Street has
spurred development, but it will not connect the neighborhood with downtown, just connect it closer to a
Metro subway station. The next phase will connect
H Street east to Anacostia and west to Georgetown,
two very different neighborhoods that are not at all
connected now.
The initial H Street segment will help connect people
within the corridor and should cut down on the number of private cars and taxis driving to a neighborhood
that has become a big nightlife area, Zimbabwe says.
The value of the streetcar system isnt only measured
by how many people are riding it, but by how its helping to direct investment and meet some of the citywide
goals around sustainability.
Joan Mooney is a freelance writer who has written
extensively about transportation for Urban Land
magazine and other publications. She also wrote
the NARs water infrastructure toolkit.
WINTER 2015 39
The WalkUP
Movement
Shifting development patterns
to walkable communities
By John Van Gieson
ccording to local legend, Atlantas upscale

Buckhead district got its colorful name
from the head of a deer that founder
Henry Irby shot and displayed at his
rural tavern in 1837.
Buckhead, which is part of the city of

Atlanta, developed into a high-end suburb, featuring mansions housing Atlantas elite and long, winding roads.
By the year 2000, the commercial center along Peachtree
Road was known for its classy hotels, fine restaurants, one
of the Souths first premium malls and, a bit incongruously, a rowdy bar scene.
To take advantage of Buckheads attractions, however,
you needed a car. Until recently, walking from one place
to another was something you just didnt do.
Now Buckhead and greater Atlanta once the poster
child of sprawl are rapidly morphing into models
for the wave of walkable urbanism sweeping parts of the
nation. Other areas, unfortunately, are lagging behind.
Buckhead was initially built in a drivable suburban manner and is now transforming into a walkable urban place,
said Christopher Leinberger, the guru of the walkable
urbanism movement. This is the American built environment transformation of this generation, and Buckhead
has gotten a head start on most other places. Buckhead
is a model for the country.
A professor at George Washington University, Leinberger is a developer turned scholar, a senior fellow at
the Brookings Institution and consultant who studies
and analyzes development trends in other words,
walkable urbanism.
40 ON COMMON GROUND
WINTER 2015
Photo by Bossi
Walkable urbanism is based on high-density, mixed-use

buildings combining residential, office, retail, dining and
drinking establishments and green space in a compact
area thats easily navigated on foot.
In a walkable urbanism setting you can get most everything we require in our daily life within a distance of
1,500 to 3,000 feet, Leinberger said.
Thats basically a 10- to 15-minute walk.
The walkable urbanism movement is driving development
in many parts of the country, producing premium profits
for developers who saw its potential early. The Top 5 walkable metro areas, according to Leinberger, are Washington,
D.C.; New York; Boston; San Francisco and Chicago.
Atlanta ranks eighth. Lagging behind, Leinberger said,
are most Sunbelt and Midwestern metros.
Drivable suburbs dominated development patterns in
this country for the last half of the 20th century, sprawling out into the countryside around major cities. Now,
Leinberger said, even suburbs are embracing walkable
development of their town centers.
The concept of city versus suburb is an obsolete concept and should be thrown out, he said. In places like
Washington, Boston, Seattle, Miami and Los Angeles, the

biggest trend thats coming up in the future is the urbanization of the suburbs. These are places that have a very high
percentage of their development in suburban locations.
Leinberger says there are two kinds of walkable development: regionally significant and locally serving.
Regionally significant places have concentrations of
employment, civic centers, institutions of higher education, major medical centers, and regional retail, as well as
one-of-a-kind cultural, entertainment and sports assets,
he said. Local-serving places are bedroom communities.
He said the areas he defines as WalkUPs (for walkable
urban places) are emerging as the preferred development
pattern of the early 21st Century. Satisfying the pent-up
demand will probably take a generation to do.
The demand for walkable urbanism is there, according to
a 2013 NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS
survey. The NAR survey found 60 percent of potential
homebuyers preferred a neighborhood with a mix of
houses and stores and other businesses that are easy to
walk to, rather than neighborhoods that require more driving between home, work and recreation.
WalkUPs offer a variety of transportation options in addition to shoe leather: bikes, light rail, trolleys and buses
among them. Cars still come into play, Leinberger said,
but are a significantly less important option than they are
in the drivable suburbs. One of the signs of a good walkable urban district, he said, is a reduction in the number
of parking places required to serve the people who live,
work and play there. A growing number of those people
are living car-free lives, he said.
Based on his detailed studies of walkable places in Atlanta,
Washington and Boston, Leinberger concluded that WalkUPs occupy just one percent of the land mass in the 30
largest metro areas. He said there are 45 WalkUPs averaging 408 acres in size in Washington and 27 averaging 374
acres in Atlanta.
anywhere from 40 to 200 percent on a square-foot basis.

Thats pretty stunning.
Since 2009, Leinberger said, WalkUPs in Washington and
Atlanta have accounted for half of all the office, hotel and
rental apartment construction in those areas. In Atlanta,
half of all new retail development since 2009 has occurred
in WalkUPs, he said.
Twenty five years ago, downtown D.C. was dead,
Leinberger said. He said 14th Street, which was devastated in the riots triggered by Dr. Martin Luther King
Juniors assassination in 1968, has become a hot spot for
walkable development.
Going north from the White House last year, 20 new
restaurants opened, Trader Joes opened, he said.
Its been completely rebuilt. Its just remarkable whats
happened there.
Leinberger said Downtown Washington now generates
$1 billion a year in tax revenue, enough to pay for the D.C.
public school system.
Another impressive example of walkable urbanism is Buckhead Atlanta, a $1-billion, mixed-use development that
opened earlier this year. Built on the site of some of those
rowdy bars that offended neighbors, Buckhead Atlanta
comprises 300,000 square feet of upscale retail, restaurants
and cafes; 400,000 square feet of high-rise residential and
100,000 square feet of luxury office space. Spanx, the fashionable shapewear company, is locating its headquarters
at Buckhead Atlanta.
The Buckhead District in Atlanta, Ga.
WalkUPs in those cities produce economic benefits all out

of proportion to their size, Leinberger said, confirming
that walkable urbanism is the economic, as well as developmental, wave of the future.
Average rent in all real estate products in established WalkUPs is 112 percent higher on a rent-per-square-foot basis
than drivable suburban real estate, he said.
Denver developer Mark Falcone, who built a pace-setting
transportation hub at the citys historic Union Station, said,
The price premium for walkable urban development is
41
Buckhead Atlanta is promising upscale shoppers an experience that rivals that of New Yorks 5th Avenue and San
Franciscos Union Square.
Falcone said the massive project under construction
around Union Station in Denvers LoDo District, short
for Lower Downtown, will come in at about $3 billion.
Its probably one of the largest developments going on
in the country right now, and its also the only one with
that ambitious transportation plan already in place,
Falcone said.
In Denver, there are nearly 40,000 apartment units
in planning or under construction right now. Of those
40,000 units, nearly half of them are happening in and
around downtown Denver. By definition its all walkable.
Leinberger said the best walkable urbanism projects are
happening in cities that have developed public-private
partnerships such as business improvement districts to
facilitate development.
Property owners on the north side of Atlanta formed the
Buckhead Community Improvement District, levying a
three-mill tax on themselves to pay for improvements to
public spaces to encourage walkable development. District Executive Director Jim Durrett said the tax brings
in about $4 million a year.
He said Buckhead pedestrian projects include a foot
bridge over a busy freeway that split the district and planning for a biking and walking corridor along the highway.
As a result of the investments weve made, youre seeing a
lot more people out on Peachtree walking, Durrett said.
A smaller city that Leinberger said has done a good

job of developing walkable urbanism in its downtown
core is Boise, the capital of Idaho. Boises Capital City
Development Corporation relies on tax increment financing to pay for infrastructure improvements and assists
private developers.
Whole Foods and Trader Joes have opened stores in
downtown Boise, developers have built a large number
of apartments housing Boise State University students on
the edge of downtown and several tech companies have
located downtown, creating valuable jobs that attract young
techies, said Derrick ONeill, Boise planning director.
Another employment center is in the works, ONeill said,
as Boise State has announced plans to move its College of
Computer Science downtown.
For our downtown and close surrounding area, we have
really good bones, he said. We have a great street grid
system, we have good block sizes and we have good infrastructure in terms of sidewalks and alleys.
Jeff Speck, a Washington consultant who studied downtown Boises street grid and recommended improvements,
said the city needs to work with Ada County to make the
streets narrower, widen sidewalks, slow traffic, add bike
lanes and improve parking.
If you were to fix the streets in Boise you would have
almost a perfect little downtown, Speck said.
Meanwhile, ONeill said, Boise is engaged in an alternative transportation study and will consider future options
including rail. About 617,000 people live in the Boise
metro area, according to the 2010 Census.
Developing walkable urbanism is challenging, Leinberger
said, requiring developers to learn new skills and think
big. You need to put in a critical mass of development in
the first place, he said. More than 340,000 square feet
of retail as well as offices, residential and parks all concentrated in one place. Thats really difficult to pull off.
A major issue for walkable urbanism developers, Leinberger
and Falcone said, is outdated federal, state and local transportation, tax, zoning and other policies.
Falcone said he felt like he was banging his head against
the wall when he converted an old shipyard in Kirkland,
Washington, a Seattle suburb, into a highly regarded walkable urbanism project featuring a marina.
Buckhead community pedestrian project
42 ON COMMON GROUND
It cost me millions of dollars and years of headaches

to get the zoning change to allow me to build what I
built, he said.
Boise, Idaho
How should local government address the zoning issues

that complicate the lives and frustrate the planning of
walkable urbanism developers?
The very first thing is to make it legal, Falcone said. In
95 percent of the jurisdictions in this country, building
mixed-use, high-density WalkUP urban development is
not legal. It does not meet the zoning.
He said he has built 12 WalkUP projects and all 12 were
illegal when I proposed them.
Smart Growth America has formed LOCUS, a coalition
of real estate developers and investors, to lobby Congress
for changes in transportation, housing and tax policies
that would support walkable urbanism. Leinberger is
the chairman.
LOCUS Managing Director Christopher A. Coes said
LOCUS is calling for a new federal transportation funding
formula that would redirect a substantial portion of funds
from building roads and bridges to developing walkability, bike lanes and mass transit. He said the current split
is 80 percent auto-driven and only 20 percent for alternative transportation.
Another factor that must be considered by developers,
Coes said, is the cost of renting or buying housing units
in WalkUPs. There is a gentrification aspect to walkable
urbanism as a number of WalkUPs were developed in

lower-income areas. Residents of those areas may not be
able to afford the sparkling new housing replacing the
places where they used to live.
Developers and cities need to work on affordability,
Coes said. Teachers, fire fighters and mid-level managers
cant afford walkable housing in cities. They need home
buying incentives for millennials, tax incentives and rehabilitation of older buildings in rundown neighborhoods.
In the near future, Leinberger said, walkable urbanism will
continue to spread into areas where it has been slower to
develop. He predicts that Miami and Atlanta will move
into his list of Top 5 walkable places, replacing San Francisco and Chicago, and Tampa, Los Angeles, Phoenix and
Houston will move into the Top 15.
If you ascribe any wisdom to sophisticated capital providers, Falcone said, theyre clearly voting with their
purses. Hundreds of millions, billions, of dollars are being
directed to projects that have some kind of walkable amenity within them.
John Van Gieson is a freelance writer based in
Tallahassee, Fla. He owns and runs Van Gieson
Media Relations, Inc.
WINTER 2015 43
Coding for the Future

Casting off outdated regulations, cities reinvent zoning for a changing marketplace
(Pictured above) A rendering of the planned Plaza Station in Raleigh, N.C. Courtesy of the city of Raleigh.
By David Goldberg
mericas long suburban moment began

just after World War II, when city after
city began adopting zoning codes that
became the DNA of an urban form we
would later dub suburbia. The strict
separation of uses single-family residential from multifamily, office park from retail center,
etc. all connected by car. As residents began to leave
central cities for these kinds of places, many of those cities doubled down on suburban-style zoning in a vain
attempt to stem the ebb tide.
Today, many parts of the country are enjoying something of an urban moment. Not only did traditional,
walkable urban neighborhoods hold their value during
the recession, many were the first to rebound and today
are intensely sought after. New residential construction is
predominantly in multifamily housing in urban locations.
The millennial generation is famously putting off acquiring drivers licenses and vehicles and navigating instead by
smart phone, bicycle and transit, and gravitating toward
places that make it easy to do so.
At the same time, however, many cities have discovered
that their graying zoning codes are an impediment to capitalizing on this urban energy. For the first time in decades,
they are adopting new methods of shaping development
that encourage mixing, rather than separating, uses and
that sacrifice less urban space to the automobile. Fastgrowing tech magnets like Austin and Raleigh are looking
to manage growth in smart ways while meeting young
workers demand for urban neighborhoods that are walkable and bikeable. Los Angeles, long synonymous with
auto-driven sprawl, is taking steps to redraw development
rules in order to encourage, rather than outlaw, walkable
development. Older industrial cities like Cincinnati and
Cities have discovered that their graying zoning codes

are an impediment to capitalizing on urban energy.
44 ON COMMON GROUND
WINTER 2015
Buffalo hope to lure tech-oriented young talent to town while

reversing the suburban exodus of decades past.
Cincinnatis new comprehensive plan involved rewriting existing

codes to implement the vision that arose from citizen input.
Photo courtesy of Opticos Design.
To do so, they look to build on the character of their traditional neighborhoods, casting off or dramatically updating the
suburban-style zoning codes they adopted in the post-war era.
Every city I talk to wants to update their codes to compete
economically, said Colin Scarff, principal of Code Studio in
Austin, Texas, who is consulting on a number of such efforts.
Getting the development regulations right can put you ahead
of your competitors by making it easier to build the kinds of
places that meet the growing demand for urban living.
Cincinnatis New Vision
Cincinnati is among those taking the most comprehensive and
bold steps, several experts said. They are moves born of a realization that continuing old habits was unlikely to reverse years
of population loss, and that the citys good, urban bones were a
huge asset to build upon, said Roxanne Qualls, a former Cincinnati mayor and city council member who helped spur the
city to develop a new vision for redevelopment and the regulatory reform to make it happen.
Smaller cities like Cincinnati are really trying to capture more
of the market, to stop people from moving out aggressively
from the core, and attract residents in the numbers that spur
the necessary regeneration, Qualls said. Our older neighborhoods are great, but they had been degraded over time by a real
auto-oriented form of development.
The effort began nearly seven years ago with a three-year process
to craft the first new comprehensive plan in 30 years, said Charles
Graves, the citys director of planning and building. City officials
quickly realized that implementing the vision that arose from the
input of hundreds of citizens would require scrapping or rewriting existing codes and policies. In 2010 the city applied for, and
won, a $2.4-million planning grant from the U.S. Department of
Housing and Urban Development to develop an integrated Unified Development Code to replace current disjointed and outdated
development regulations and policies, including the zoning code,
subdivision regulations, building codes, and street-design policies,
according to HUD. At the same time, the city was pursuing a
streetcar that would become a spine for walkable neighborhoods.
Photo by Travis Estell
Smaller cities are trying to capture more

of the market, to stop people from
moving out aggressively from the core.
45
The new zoning designations were developed by distilling

the elements that residents and stakeholders appreciated most.
Among the most ambitious resulting moves was a decision to
shelve an outmoded zoning code that prohibited all but a single
use in any given area in favor of a more form-based development code. The new code describes the function of a given
street or neighborhood, and the relative size and arrangement
of buildings that should serve that function.
Form takes precedence over use, Graves said. If you have
an acre of land in a neighborhood business district, the formbased code would say you could have a building no taller than
6 stories, with parking in the back, the entrance at the street,
and the first floor is usable for commercial. But the buildings
uses could be office, apartment, condo or hotel, or a mix.
The new zoning designations were developed in large part by
studying Cincinnatis own traditional neighborhoods and distilling the elements that residents and stakeholders appreciated
most, according to Dan Parolek, principal of Opticos Design
and a consultant on the form-based code. It was easy to extract
the DNA of these places to embed them in the new form-based
code, he said.
Along with a form-based code, which was approved for use last
year by a unanimous city council, Cincinnati also is reducing
the parking requirements that were prohibiting smaller infill
projects or adaptive reuse of older structures, Graves said. In
addition, the city has adopted a complete streets plan that
seeks to convert overly wide, high-speed city streets into more
pleasant corridors that are safe for walking and biking.
Buffalos Bold Moves
Buffalo, similarly pressed to find a new economic niche in
the post-industrial era, has taken a similarly comprehensive
track with its ambitious Green Code. Under Mayor Byron
W. Brown, the city has pursued a vision of economic resurgence, community renewal, and environmental repair that
has triggered a wholesale rethinking of its development codes
and land-use maps.
Buffalo is a place that has struggled in recent times, but is really
pushing the envelope with the Green Code, said Scarff, whose
Code Studio has been part of the consulting team. Theyve
rethought everything.
The citys new land-use plan contains specific plans for the
waterfront and the redevelopment of industrial brownfield areas.
46 ON COMMON GROUND
Buffalos Green Code Plan. Courtesy of Code Studio.
An example of form-based code proposed in Buffalos Green Code Unified Development Ordinance. Courtesy of Code Studio.
The Green Code includes an update of the citys 60-yearold zoning code with a new form-based code, but it goes
farther still.
Most communities arent willing to revisit their zoning
maps, Scarff said. You can spend a lot of time and effort
redoing the zoning ordinance, but if you dont change the
map, it has minimal effect. People are still operating under
old rules. Buffalo has gone after the whole map and the
text at the same time with a real emphasis on mixed-use,
pedestrian-oriented development.
And, at the same time, city leaders have advanced a nearly
unprecedented proposal to eliminate minimum parking
requirements citywide. Thats an extremely bold step,
Scarff added.
Raleighs Response to Fast Growth
Raleigh is a fast-growing city in an even faster-growing
region. From around 300,000 residents at the start of the
2000s, the city has swelled to more than 420,000, on the
way to a projected 600,000 six years from now.
Our big question going into our comprehensive plan
rewrite was, Where are we going to put these people?
said Travis Crane, Raleighs planning and zoning
administrator. Under the citys low-density zoning,

he added, If we continued to grow under existing
regulations, wed build out in 20 years, using all the
land we had.
Raleighs existing zoning code was adopted in 1959, written when the city was a modest southern burg on the cusp
of suburban growth. With amendments over the years,
the zoning book grew to 700 to 800 verbose pages,
Crane said. It became difficult to interpret. There were
22 triggers for discretionary review, which added months
or years of complexity to development projects. The quality of projects suffered because of the costs of getting
entitlements to develop.
The 1959 code limited most buildings to a single story
and a single use, with setbacks from the street that rendered walking difficult or unpleasant. Vertical, mixed
use in our traditional form was made illegal, and building
that way required overlay districts and other cumbersome strategies.
The citys new Unified Development Ordinance is meant
to simplify the development approvals by using a formbased code and designating seven growth areas where
multistory buildings and traditional town-center features
WINTER 2015 47
are called for. Accounting for about 30 percent of the

citys land area, the growth areas include downtown and
zones around regional malls and other centers that will
be linked by transit, including a possible rail line that is
under discussion, Crane said. The remainder of the city
will stay as mostly low-density, single-family neighborhoods for the foreseeable future.
Today, multistory residential buildings are the development de jure in Raleigh, Crane said. Weve seen an
influx of technology companies such as Red Hat and
Citrix coming to our warehouse district. [North Carolina] State is a big player in the city. So the housing is
attracting a millennial workforce and students. Raleigh
hopes that its new growth vision will continue to attract
and keep residents in well-designed urban neighborhoods
for many years to come.
Los Angeles Joins the Competition
Los Angeles is pursuing similar goals for somewhat different reasons, Scarff said. They are somewhat concerned
that they might begin losing out to cities like Denver
Raleigh hopes that its new

growth vision will continue
to keep and attract residents.
(Above left) A page from Raleighs Unified Development

Ordinance showing a design for a pedestrian passage way.
(Right) The new Citrix building in Raleighs warehouse district.
Photos courtesy of the city of Raleigh.
48 ON COMMON GROUND
and Austin and a little worried about where they might

be in 50 years. Theres a real push to increase the citys
competitiveness in the world marketplace.
With little choice but to build up after decades of building out, Los Angeles has been pursuing a smart-growth
vision along with its burgeoning rail systems for several
years. But its underlying land-use policies and development codes remain frozen in amber, says Erick Lopez,
a city planner in the code studies unit at LAs department of city planning. The structure of the code was
put in place in 1946 and the large majority of the city
is still subject to it. We have great policies and visions,
but the code was never changed to make them a reality.
The city has just launched a sweeping review and
update dubbed Re:Code LA, complete with a heavy
duty advisory board including several battle-hardened neighborhood activists, and Donald Shoup, an
urban planning professor at UCLA who is perhaps the
nations leading expert on parking policies and their
affect on city life. That may be one reason we are
considering letting the market decide how much parking is

needed, Lopez said.
Edward Starkie is an economic analyst with Urban Advisors, based in Portland, Ore. He provides market research
to city planners and urban designers as they craft plans
that they hope will attract the right mix of residents, retail,
restaurants and office to make successful, vibrant places.
He has two critical pieces of advice for cities thinking
about taking on an overhaul of their development strategy.
What I try to tell planners who get excited about doing
really neat stuff is that no matter what youre coding, you
have to ensure that there is a public vision that is agreed
upon, he said. If not, every time someone wants to do
something, it opens up a long debate about whats happening to the neighborhood. And you have to have buy-in
from the real estate community, because they are the ones
who have to have a grasp of what youre after and they
have to inform it, or developers will say they cant make
it work, or REALTORS will say you cant lease that kind
of property there.
As a REALTOR herself, former Mayor Qualls would

not dispute that last point. In Cincinnati, at least,
All the theory gets confirmed when I talk to clients, she said. They say they want a walkable area
thats dynamic, where they can get to restaurants and
shopping and access public transportation. Today,
that can be hard to find outside a handful of highdemand, classic neighborhoods. But a new vision
and revamped, simplified development rules are laying out the red carpet for those who want to build
on the good bones of many other sleeping beauties.
That will help Cincinnati find renewed vigor, and she said,
I get to sell more of the city that I love.
David A. Goldberg is the communications director for Transportation for America, a nationwide
coalition based in Washington, D.C., that advocates for transportation policy reform. In 2002, Mr.
Goldberg was awarded a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University, where he studied urban policy.
Photos Courtesy of LA Tourism
LA has great policies

and visions and the updated
codes in Re:Code LA will
help implement them.
WINTER 2015 49
Detroit: Big Upside
Photo courtesy of Quicken Loans
By Tracey C. Velt
etroits woes are well known abandoned

properties, an exodus from downtown,
failed manufacturing industry. However,
there are signs of life in the Motor City.
Rebuilding Detroit requires

collaboration from national,
state, private and local entities.
When one thinks about tech innovation,

thoughts of Silicon Valley and Seattle
come to mind. Now you can add Detroit to that list.
The Motor City is flush with initiatives to bring young
entrepreneurs to the area, including cash incentives and
new housing programs. For a long time Detroit was
reliant on the auto industry and manufacturing. For
the economy to survive, the city needed to transition to
a brain economy, says Ross Sanders, executive director of
Bizdom, a nonprofit web and tech-based company startup
accelerator founded in 2007 by Dan Gilbert, founder and
chairman of Quicken Loans and Rock Ventures.
The Motor City is flush with

initiatives to bring young
entrepreneurs to the area.
50 ON COMMON GROUND
WINTER 2015
Photo courtesy of Quicken Loans
There is so much going on

in Detroit right now.
Photos courtesy of Quicken Loans
Committed to Rebuilding
Rebuilding Detroit is no easy job. It requires collaboration
from national, state, private and local entities. However,
it all started with one man: Dan Gilbert, who moved
Quicken Loans headquarters and some 8,000 employees
to downtown Detroit and dedicated himself to rebuilding the city. According to the National Journal, he now
controls more than 40 downtown properties covering
nearly 8 million square feet of real estate and his family of companies employs more than 12,000, all working
in downtown Detroit. To date, Gilberts total investment
in Detroit nears $1.5 billion. Theres no doubt Gilberts
influence is bringing energy to the transforming Detroit
movement. Dan Gilbert relocated his businesses to
Detroit and launched the Downtown Detroit Partnership. At the same time, there are others, such as JP Morgan
Chase, contributing with new economic initiatives,
collaborating and pooling money for economic development, says Sanders.
JP Morgan Chase committed to investing $100 million in Detroit, with $50 million going to community
development investment, $25 million to fight blight and

restore properties to productive use and the rest for small
business growth, workforce training and the M1 Rail, a
streetcar connecting downtown and midtown.
According to JP Morgan Chase CEO and Chairman Jamie
Dimon, We are for profit. We are investing in Detroit.
With this investment, we are putting our resources and
expertise to work to help Detroit chart a course back
to economic prosperity.
Signs of Life
Eric Larson, CEO of the Downtown Detroit Partnership, a partnership of corporate, civic and philanthropic
leaders that supports and develops programs and initiatives designed to create an inviting Downtown Detroit,
is excited about the changes. For the last 40 years, we
have been fighting an uphill climb. A number of companies have kept the city on life support, such as Blue Cross
and the auto companies. When Dan Gilbert moved his
companies into the city, our occupancy rate went from 55
to 60 percent to 90 percent. Were almost full, says Larson.
51
Rent has increased from the low teens to the mid to

upper 20s. That provided us with a stable foundation.
That foundation allowed private and public entities to
expand the infrastructure. There is so much going on
in Detroit right now, says Tiffany Hart, president and
CEO of Hart & Associates and an affiliate member of
the Detroit Association of REALTORS. Her company
recently won a contract to work on the infrastructure of
the M1 Rail project. This project is a catalyst for major
development. So many opportunities can sprout from
this, businesses will develop along the line, and people
want to live downtown. Were seeing new residential construction for the first time in a long time, says Hart.
People want to be a part of Detroit now, and its exciting.
Young Entrepreneurs
In addition to the M1 Rail, new programs are bringing
young entrepreneurs into the city. In early 2012, Bizdom
changed its business model and launched an accelerator
bringing young tech entrepreneurs to the city, says Sanders. We now have 17 active businesses, and just under
70 jobs created. In January 2012, we had zero, so were
making progress.
Photos courtesy of Quicken Loans
One such company is foodjunky, a one-stop delivery service that allows business owners to place an online food
order with local restaurants. Co-founder Travis Johnson
relocated from Chicago to Detroit to expand. My cofounder, Andy Waldman, and I founded foodjunky in
Chicago. I went to an industry investor event and met
some Bizdom executives who convinced me to come out
and see what was going on in Detroit, says Johnson.
I saw the culture and energy and got excited. I made the
decision to move my life and company to Detroit in May
2013. Andy stayed to run our Chicago branch, he says.
What made the difference for Johnson is the support for
startups such as his. If I ever need anything, I just pick
up the phone, says Johnson.
Brian Bosche, founder of TernPro, a full-service video company, agrees. He started his company after participating in
Venture for America, a program for young, talented grads
to spend two years in the trenches of a startup with the
goal that these graduates will become business owners.
Entrepreneurs Brian Bosche and Travis Johnson
52 ON COMMON GROUND
Detroit has an unbelievable

community of support.
It is an unbelievable community of support. I got connected with other start-up company founders, Quicken
Loans leadership, established close connections with investors and built a network of local business owners, he
adds. Both entrepreneurs live in downtown Detroit as well,
which leads to another key to rebuilding the city: housing.
Innovative Housing Programs
Detroit is flush with innovative housing programs geared
toward everything from rehabbing vacant properties and
saving neighborhoods to attracting young people to the
area. One such program is Live Downtown. Employers
such as Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, Compuware,
DTE Energy, Marketing Associates, Quicken Loans and
Strategic Staffing Solutions offer financial incentives to

employees to live where they work. New homeowners
get a $20,000 forgivable loan toward the purchase of
a primary residence and renters receive a $2,500 funding allowance toward the cost of their first year, among
other things, says Larson. In the downtown, we expect
a 3,500-unit demand over the next three to five years.
We have an absorption rate well in excess of 500 to 1,000
a year. The program is a little less than three years old, and
we have 1,100 participants, he adds. In that same threeyear period, Larson has seen rents increase by around 20
percent. Our average price per square foot was $1.65 and
now its closer to $2 per square foot. That was our magic
number to support new construction, he says.
Photo by Ian Freimuth
WINTER 2015 53
Rebuilding Neighborhoods
Another entity helping to stop the blight and encourage
homeownership in downtown Detroit is the Detroit Land
Bank (DLB), a public authority dedicated to returning
Detroits vacant, abandoned and foreclosed property to
productive use. It started small, buying homes, rehabbing them and auctioning them off, says Craig Fahle,
director of public affairs for the Detroit Land Bank.
We scrapped the old model a few months ago, he says.
The new model is to auction off homes as is and give the
buyer six months to get the home up to code. The goal
is to keep out the investors and speculators and get actual
homeowners into these homes, so we limit the number of
auctions people may participate in, says Fahle.
The DLB offers two auctions a day and buyers may purchase only 12 properties per year. We want people to
invest in a home that they otherwise couldnt afford.
We have partnered with banks to come up with rehab loan
We want people to invest

in a home that they
otherwise couldnt afford.
Photos courtesy of Michigan Municipal League
54 ON COMMON GROUND
programs, so buyers can restore the home and live in it,

he says. The DLB is also filing nuisance abatement orders
against those not taking care of the properties. These are
mostly filed against landlords. They have three days to
respond and enter into an agreement with us to fix up
the homes. Sometimes they just deed the property over
to us; sometimes they fix it up, he says. Since the new
program started in January 2014, most of the homes are
just starting to get up to code and completed.
Another DLB program offers side lots for $100. People
have been asking for this for a long time. Most of the
single-family homes have small front and back yards.
If they buy the side lot, they can build a garage or have
a yard, he says. With no marketing, weve already sold
50 side lots and the demand is high. We expect to sell
several hundred within six months.
The hope is that we stabilize these neighborhoods and
stop the bleeding. People want to stay in the neighborhoods, and this gives them a reason to stay and be proud
of where they live, says Fahle. Working in concert with
the DLB is Reclaim Detroit, which was founded in 2011
and is applying their in-depth research to push for deconstruction or taking apart a building by components for
re-use, recycling or waste management of 10 percent
(about 8,000) or more of the citys abandoned buildings.
Photos courtesy of Michigan Municipal League
Photo by Calamity_Sal
Detroit is seeing a resurgence

in those committed to
rebuilding the city.
Burgeoning Art Community
From the smaller start-up companies and housing initiatives to the mega investment programs, Detroit is seeing
a resurgence in those committed to rebuilding the city.
While the city is far from recovery, these signs of life are
encouraging. Weve made great progress, says Sanders.
With the venture capital and business leaders committed to the city, there is a lot of opportunity in Detroit.
One of the newest homeownership programs is

called Write-A-House (writeahouse.com). Founded
by Toby Barlow, creative director at the advertising
agency Team Detroit, and Sarah Cox, Write-AHouse (WAH) is a Detroit-based organization that
is leveraging the easy availability of distressed housing in order to promote vocational education,
homeownership, neighborhood stabilization and
creative arts. Homes are given away free to writers.
Larson agrees. We have a lot of work ahead of us. While

the core downtown a 7.2-mile stretch has seen
a tremendous amount of stability, we still have a city that
is 139 square miles, and a number of neighborhoods and
communities that need our attention, he says. However,
with business and municipal leaders committed to proactive and thoughtful stewardship, well continue rounding
out the edges on our downtown and midtown. Its a great
place to be.
According to The New York Times, as part of the

launch of the program, three homes have been
donated or purchased (for $1,000 each), and the
Detroit bungalows will undergo a $35,000-to$70,000 renovation from the nonprofit group Young
Detroit Builders. In addition, Power House Productions, an artist-run non-profit, is marketing vacant
properties for public art installations.
Tracey C. Velt is an Orlando-based freelance writer.
WINTER 2015 55
Courtesy of Missouri Division of Tourism
Tech's Place in Urban Growth

Innovation districts play an important role in developing city spaces
(Above) Downtown Kansas City, Mo.
By Christine Jordan Sexton
he numbers clearly show that American cities

are experiencing a renaissance as more millennials choose to remain in an urban setting
instead of flocking to the suburbs like their
grandparents did.
But theres a growing trend that says the key

to creating a flourishing urban environment is bringing
together high-tech businesses that can jump start a sluggish
economic recovery with a place, and spaces, for people
to live and play.
The latest U.S. Census data show that in 2013 there were
nearly 270 million people living in urban areas, or about
2.3 million more than the previous year.
And once they arrive there, people are staying put. Three
quarters of Americas metropolitan areas maintained or
grew their population between 2012 and 2013, census figures show, reversing the decades-old trend of
suburban flight.
For the revitalization efforts to take hold, innovation districts must play a role argues Bruce Katz, director of the
Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings Institution.
Innovation districts reflect smart growth principles
such as transit-oriented neighborhoods and mixed-use
56 ON COMMON GROUND
WINTER 2015
For revitalization efforts to

take hold, innovation districts
must play a role.
development. But not all smart growth redevelopment initiatives are innovation districts, said Katz, author of The Rise
of Innovation Districts: A New Geography of Innovation
in America. For a redevelopment effort to be considered
an innovation district, though, it must have at its core a
high-tech or STEM-related (science, technology, engineering and math) economy.
I think what is really important to understand here is this
is not just about demographic preferences, Katz said in an
interview with On Common Ground. This is about the location practices of large firms and entrepreneurs who realize
that innovation in the United States is increasingly going
to be open innovation. And as you move to an open innovation model where companies are really interacting, you
begin to see the demand for very different kinds of places.
St. Louis, Mo., has a burgeoning innovation district

known as the Cortex Innovation Community.
It sprang from a recognition from academicians at Washington University in St. Louis, University of Missouri-St.
Louis, Saint Louis University, as well as executives at BJC
HealthCare and the Missouri Botanical Garden, that
downtown St. Louis should better capture and cash
in on its research dollars and collective brain trust.
They joined efforts in 2002 and invested $29 million to
launch Cortex. Funds were used for strategic land acquisition within the zone and staff to advance a master plan.
The targeted area is former industrial land adjacent to
three of the five founding institutions. Once a forgotten section of town, the area now is abuzz with activity.
In September, the U.S. Department of Transportation
announced it was awarding a $10.3-million grant in federal transportation funds to help build a MetroLink stop.
When completed, Cortex Innovation Community could
represent $2.1 billion in investments, have 3.7 million
square feet and create 13,000 jobs, about 77 percent of
them in the technology field. Dennis Lower, president
and chief executive officer of Cortex Innovation Community, said about 25 percent of the goal has been met
to date. There are about 75 businesses and entrepreneurial startups at Cortex today.
While its thriving today, Cortex Research Community
did have some growing pains along the way. The founders and the city made solid decisions with the urban
location. They did a lot right, Lower said, but added
that the master plan was fashioned more like a suburban
business park which stymied growth at Cortex.
Urban development is about

the location practices of large
firms and entrepreneurs.
Lower worked with the Cortex board of directors to reposition the district when he was hired as the president and
chief executive officer in 2010 and started focusing on
the advantages of the urban environment. Lower worked
with other partners to develop workshops and seminars
between the universities, students, entrepreneurs, business accelerators and venture capitalists. He worked with
the innovation district partners and carefully planned,
spontaneous social networking opportunities and happy
hours that encouraged openness between businesses and
their employees.
Its all part of our strategy of engagement to create a value
proposition to say you know what? I need to be here,
Lower said. If thats not in place, its hard to develop an
urban research district. It has to be more than the sum
of its parts.
Lower also forged ahead with a mixed-use, high-density master plan. A 3.5-acre linear park called the Cortex
Commons is in the works and streets are required to be
bicycle and pedestrian friendly.
When Cortex announced its first building in 2004,
not one developer was interested in building out the
space. Ultimately, Washington University guaranteed the building and several university labs became
anchor tenants to balance the spec space offered to
technology tenants.
Photo by Paul Sableman
Courtesy of Quicken Loans
Photo by Paul Sableman
The new Cortex Innovation District in St. Louis, Mo.
57
Fast forward, 10 years later. Several developers, Lower

said, responded to a request for a proposal to build residential units as part of the Cortex mixed-use master plan.
There already is a good mix of housing options within
blocks of the Cortex Innovation Community, Lower
said, but he wants to include residential projects in the
district to keep activity in the district day and night.
And with the new MetroLink stop, it will be easier for
residents to live car-free.
Open technology is a key feature in innovation districts.
There is perhaps no better poster child for open technology than Tesla Motors which manufactures highway
capable electric vehicles. Its chief executive officer, Elon
Musk, announced in a blog post this June that it would
open source its technology. The companys manufacturing plant, located in Fremont, Calif., and a $900-million
BART extension are anchoring an 879-acre district that,
when complete, could have 4,000 housing units and
12,000 jobs.
The Cambridge Innovation Center in the Kendall Square
area is todays iconic innovation district, Katz wrote
in his report. Created in 1999 and located in a Massachusetts Institute of Technology building, the area
is connected by transit to Harvard and Mass General.
What was once an industrial district has been reinvented into innovation districts where clusters of life
sciences, pharmaceutical and information technology
companies locate.
ones. Florida author of The Rise of the Creative

Class analyzed Dow Jones data by zip code which
showed that predominantly urban zip codes accounted
for 85.7 percent of the investments in the Greater San
Francisco Bay area.
In another analysis Florida used data provided by the
National Venture Capital Association and examined deals
and investments by area codes. In that study, Florida
found that the San Francisco/Oakland area had overtaken Silicon Valley for the number of deals in 2012 as
well as investment dollars. Florida claims that startups
in the San Francisco/Oakland area in 2012 had 744
agreements with capital investors and saw $6.9 billion
in investments compared to just under $4 billion in
investments on 415 deals in Silicon Valley.
The long-standing model that capital investors direct
money to the suburbs, Florida wrote, is giving way to
urban tech.
Four hours west of downtown St. Louis is downtown
Kansas City. Upward of $5.5 billion in public and private investment in recent years has been funneled into
downtown Kansas City which has been heralded by the
New York Times as a hotspot for millennials, or the
34 and under set.
Photo by Chiaki Hayashi
Housing, though, is an issue in Kendall Square and a

2013 report compiled by the Cambridge Community
Development Department notes that the high costs
of housing is a major concern, and more housing is
needed generally. The report said housing was one of
the foremost challenges to achieving a well-rounded
urban environment. The same report also notes that
innovation space for startups also is in great demand
given the growing popularity of the area. The issue is
how to ensure its affordability.
Not only are innovation districts helping reshape downtowns they are attracting investment capital better than
their suburban counterparts, some claim. University professor and best-selling author Richard Florida argues in a
series of articles published in CityLab that venture capital is shifting away from suburban areas and into urban
Open technology is a key

feature in innovation districts.
Cambridge Innovation Center at Kendall Square in Massachusetts.
58 ON COMMON GROUND
The long-standing model that capital investors direct money

to the suburbs is giving way to 'urban tech' investment.
In September 2013, Sprint announced it was opening an
accelerator in downtown Kansas City in the Crossroads
District, just south of downtown. The new Sprint Accelerator building is an open-concept design, enabling startups
to collaborate and network. It provides its community
members with round-the-clock, open-area workspace
and connection to high-speed internet access along with
private storage space. It also houses the Sprint Mobile
Health Accelerator program powered by Techstars,
which works with startup companies in the e-health and
mobile health care field.
The Accelerator worked with 10 firms in the second
quarter of 2014, seven of which sought and hired staff
after the three-month mentoring session, and has made
a similar commitment for 2015.
Kevin McGinnis, vice president development and operations of Pinsight Media+ at Sprint, actively is searching
for new entrepreneurs who might benefit from the Sprint
Mobile Health Accelerator in 2015.
When McGinnis was recruiting entrepreneurs for the

2014 class he said he often was asked why the initiative
was launched in downtown Kansas City. There were a
lot of questions about whats here, McGinnis said.
Between the success of the first graduating class and the
New York Times story, McGinnis said he isnt finding
himself having to defend the location or to explain the
attraction to downtown Kansas City anymore.
The message is getting out, he said, saying the area is
the corporate headquarters for several large companies
other than Sprint, including H&R Block, Hallmark and
Garmin. Downtown Kansas City is starting to draw
more attention.
Christine Jordan Sexton is a Tallahassee-based
freelance reporter who has done correspondent work for the Associated Press, the New York
Times, Florida Medical Business and a variety of
trade magazines, including Florida Lawyer and
National Underwriter.
Courtesy of Quicken Loans
Courtesy of Missouri Division of Tourism
WINTER 2015 59
Everything
Is Bigger
in Texas
Including Urban Growth Challenges
Photo by Clay Coleman
By Brian E. Clark
yle Klyne could be a poster boy for Austin, Texas,

one of the fastest growing cities in the United
States. Klyne, 27, is a part of the wave of millennials and there are tens of thousands of them
who have moved to this city in the past few
years, drawn by what many call its vibe and
its vibrant economy.
In 2013, Austin gained more people almost 21,000
than any other city in the country with less than one
million residents. But that wasnt so unusual for the Lone
Star State, officials say. Seven of the fastest growing cities
were in Texas, including Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston and
San Antonio, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures.
The state is also creating jobs at a rapid rate, with roughly
400,000 new positions over the past year.
Id read a lot about Austin, its music scene and how
it was always ranked high on those best of lists, said
Klyne, a University of Washington graduate who lived
in Seattle for several years before making the move to the
Texas capital in 2011. I had friends whod already relocated here and they really liked it. So I made the move.
60 ON COMMON GROUND
WINTER 2015
Lloyd Potter, the Texas State Demographer, said many

of the states cities are growing, while some rural areas
are losing young people who have left to go to school or
find work. Where the population is expanding, half of the
growth has come from what he called natural increase,
which means births have outpaced deaths.
Potter credits business-friendly incentives, no state income
tax, low levels of regulation, moderate housing costs and
tax incentives for attracting businesses to Texas, including the U.S. headquarters of Toyota, which recently
announced it would move from California to Plano, a
suburb north of Dallas.
Texas cities are growing.
The rapid population expansion

has reinforced the need for smart growth.
The slogan here is that were open for business, and with all the incentives, a lot of companies are coming here, not just Toyota, he said.
We also have a large and skilled workforce.
Jana McCann, former urban design officer with the city of Austin, said
her hometown is struggling to keep up with its rapid growth.
Austin is finally trying to get ahead of its curve, though that is next to
impossible given the speed at which things are happening here, said
McCann, a partner in the McCann Adams Studio, an urban design
consulting firm.
In terms of land-use planning, the city just finished their big comprehensive plan 2012. Im now involved with helping rewrite the land
development code to bring it into alignment with the citys overall vision
for growth in the future.
That vision can be summed up in two words compact and connected, she said. We want to be more sustainable, growing by infill
rather than sprawl. The connected part is an allusion to have better,
multimodal transit.
And rather than delaying smart growth efforts, she said the rapid population expansion has actually reinforced the notion of the need for it.
There are a lot more higher-density housing developments being developed here, as well as other cities like Houston. In early November, Austin
residents are voting on a proposition to fund light rail.
Photos courtesy of Austin Convention & Visitors Bureau
She said the city has suffered for the past 25 years in the transportation
arena, but not for lack of planning.
Weve actually done a lot of planning, but just havent implemented it
in a serious transit system, she said. Because we are such an environmentally forward community, there has been a lot of delay in funding
road projects. So we are hurting, both in terms of transit and vehicular
capacity and connection.
She said Austin is a sprawling city with the same population as San Francisco (roughly 850,000) spread out over 10 times the land area, with much
of its growth spread out in a suburban pattern.
Over the past 15 years, there have been efforts to curb that and become
more compact, she said. Still, a lot of the growth is going in the extra-territorial jurisdictions, outside the city, and its not necessarily transit connected.
But she said urban, walkable, mixed-use and higher density projects are
being built. She cited the Triangle and Mueller municipal airport redevelopments as success stories in central Austin. Both were public-private
partnerships, she noted.
61
Urban, walkable, mixed-use

and higher density projects
are being built in Austin.
McCann, who lives in the 700-acre Mueller area, said
the planned community is a national model of walkable urbanism that includes the missing middle types
of housing that fills the gap for singles, couples and
older folks who want to age in place. While the Triangle
is now built out, the Mueller redevelopment is about
40 percent complete.
She said she does not believe the city will build a highway
loop around it because the road would most likely be built
in the so-called Drinking Water Protection Zone where
the city wants to limit growth. In addition, many residents
view loops as a mechanism to increase sprawl, she said.
But we are going to continue to grow because people
and employers recognize our high quality of life and the
talent thats here, she said. Traffic is a problem, but we
dont want to do things that diminish the citys attractiveness and identity. Thats why growing in a compact and
connected way is so important. Fortunately, I think most
of the millennials moving here recognize that. They arent
as wedded to their cars. Some of them dont own them

and use bikes or car shares to get around.
Some 200 miles to the north, Duane Dankesreiter,
vice president of information and research at the Dallas Regional Chamber of Commerce, said his city and
the region are growing fast because corporations want to
locate there in part for the excellent airport service and
the location in the middle of the country. Nor do the tax
breaks hurt, he acknowledged.
He said the citys population has surged to 1.3 million,
while the metropolitan area now has 6.8 million residents
who also live in Fort Worth (population 793,000) and a
dozen other cities with populations of more than 100,000.
Toyota is moving here to improve efficiencies, he said.
Its relocating its U.S. headquarters from the West Coast
and other offices from Kentucky and New York City, too.
They are getting their operations all under one roof. It
will mean about 4,000 jobs. And a lot of other companies, like suppliers, will follow.
Dankesreiter touted Dallass quality of live and moderate
cost of living as attractions. Our home prices are relatively low compared to other areas, he said. We always
pitch that and we have everything from condos to big
suburban homes.
Photo courtesy of DCVB
Courtesy of Austin Convention & Visitors Bureau
Growing in a compact and connected way is so important.
62 ON COMMON GROUND
And while Houston boasts energy related jobs, he said

Dallas has a much more diverse economy with financial
companies, law firms and equipment makers locating
there. Some of them serve the oil and gas industry, but
the economy is broad-based, he said.
Photo courtesy of DCVB
Patrick Kennedy, a Dallas resident who is president of

the North Texas chapter of the Congress for the New
Urbanism, said how governments in the Dallas region are
responding to growth is a mixed bag, often dependent
on how old the individual municipality is.
Growth isnt occurring everywhere. Its mostly sprawl,
mostly to the north of the city leaving behind the southern sector of the city of Dallas and Dallas County behind.
From 2001 through 2011, Dallas County lost 266,000
jobs. In terms of job growth/loss and wage growth/loss,
only Wayne County (Detroit) is performing worse.
This at a time when the Dallas-Ft. Worth region gained
1.2 million people.
Then there are the old suburbs now approaching their
second generation of infrastructure. Most are unprepared to pay for an infrastructure that is largely over-built
for the tax base it created. Thus, they are struggling to
afford it and the lifestyle these areas grew accustomed
to when 90 percent of original cost was covered by the
federal government.
He said other cities such as Plano have been very smart
about realizing the inherent ephemeral nature to 1)
growth that has largely passed them by now; and 2) the
imbalance between tax burden (infrastructure) and tax
base. So they have been focusing smartly on reorganizing
themselves around walkable regional and neighborhood
centers and revitalizing their downtown.
Though much of the growth has been on greenfields,
Kennedy added there is clear evidence that the market
realizes the value in walkable development patterns even
if regional transportation decisions have not reflected it.
The major corporate relocations have all been focused on
walkable commercial centers even in greenfields, like State
Farm in Richardson or Toyota going into Legacy West in
Plano. In infill locations like uptown Dallas, there is a huge
premium for any semblance of walkable urbanism, often
pricing out the majority of the market simply because there
isnt enough supply.
The challenge is that developers are scrambling to meet
this pent-up demand but they are running out of sites
where a critical mass of density and development is already
The market realizes the value in

walkable development patterns.
in place and the infrastructure is already walkable. For the
most part the infrastructure isnt, the roads are too big and
fast and too disconnected and we dont have the public
capital to retrofit it. At the same time the developers and
investors simply cant be the pioneers because either the
incomes in areas needing investment arent there for the
lenders or the comparable developments arent already on
the ground to make the pro forma work.
Kennedy said the demand for walkable neighborhoods
is strong, though only 4.5 percent of Dallasites live in
walkable neighborhoods and only about 1.5 percent of
the entire metro lives in walkable neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, according to a city of Dallas survey as part
of their complete streets plan, 68 percent responded that
they wanted their neighborhood to be more walkable. As
USDA photo by Lance Cheung
that
plays out in the market place, the huge gap between
WINTER 2015 63
Photo by Raul Santillan
supply and demand means prices skyrocket and then

become unaffordable in places where we need the most
affordability, near jobs and transit.
The odd paradox most people dont get is that we actually need higher land values to deliver more affordable
living. Because the higher land values drive density which
means there is more housing near jobs and transit and
more ability to deliver affordable or workforce housing
in those locations. As weve seen with recent studies, cities with very expensive housing are actually cheaper to
live in when factoring both housing and transportation
in relation to median income.
He said some local governments are adopting codes or
policies to foster smarter urbanism.
But they are fairly hamstrung by inertia of old-minded
regional transportation policies, he said. When any
broader effort (occurs) to create a unified vision and
decision-making process towards smarter growth, it is usually toothless and doesnt address the larger problem of
Local governments are

adopting codes or policies
to foster smarter urbanism.
64 ON COMMON GROUND
congestion fighting and the vast amount of public spending and debt that goes towards ever widening highways.
Down on the Gulf Coast, Patrick Jankowski, vice president for research at the Greater Houston Partnership,
said his citys energy expertise has fueled its boom. In
addition, he noted, Houston is a major center for international trade, shipping out more than $250 billion worth
of trade in 2013 up from $41.7 billion in 2005. The
result is the creation of a bucket load of jobs, swelling
the citys population to more than 2.2 million, he added.
In the past 12 months, this region created 9,300 engineering jobs alone. And those folks can easily earn
$100,000 a year, he said. Technicians with two-year
degrees can earn $70,000. Heck, outside my window I
can see a whole bunch of cranes.
Because of the rapid growth, he said Houston has struggled to bring in talent in part because millennials want
to live in cool cities like Austin.
Ill be frank, he said. We are trying to reach out to millennials. One program is called City With No Limits,
aimed at letting them know that Houston has a lot of
great stuff going on. Unfortunately, many of them make
decisions based not on where the jobs are, but where
the lifestyle is.
David Crossley, president of Houston Tomorrow, said the

city and regions rapid growth has created a lot of issues,
mostly dealing with mobility and changing of neighborhoods. If you think you have 50 percent more people and
50 percent more cars coming, and its already crowded,
youve got massive problems.
Crossley praised Houston Mayor Annise Parker for paying attention to walkability and bicycle safety with her
Complete Streets executive order that says every street
that is rebuilt has to be done with bike lanes and as a
complete street that is safe for all users.
He said she also launched an effort this past spring to produce a general plan, the first in the citys history, to guide
the citys future. There has also been a lot of discussion
about developing neighborhoods that are walkable and
healthy, in part because health and obesity are big issues
in Houston. That is all moving in a good direction.
Though Houston doesnt have zoning, he said it has
extensive development regulations and is moving toward
something called form-base code, which some new
urbanists are pushing as a replacement for zoning that
often separates uses and makes it hard to build a real city.
Many millennials make decisions

based on where the lifestyle is.
Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau; Photo by Jim Olive
Houston residents would prefer to

live in a walkable residential area.
While Houston itself is becoming more dense because
of the population increase, he said much of the growth
outside the city is unregulated.
We have 134 towns and cities here in our region and a
grand parkway that manages to weave around and only
touch one of them. It is designed to pull growth out of
the municipal areas into the unincorporated areas of the
counties where there are no development rules at all.
However, inside the citys boundaries, he said the demand
for walkable neighborhoods is growing. The most recent
Houston Area Survey, produced by a Rice University professor, showed that 62 percent of Houston residents would
prefer to live in a walkable residential area.
They said theyd rather have a small house and not have
to drive so much vs. living in a bigger house on their own
lot where they do have to drive a lot. Its a high number,
and it grows every time the survey is done. We have cranes
all over downtown Houston, with six big employment
centers, each of which has more jobs than downtown
San Diego or Miami.
All those places are developing with smart growth plans
that are all about walkability, though it will take a long
time to convert some of them because they were so poorly
designed in the first place. But hardly any single-family
dwellings are being built in Houston. Its all dense now.
Smart growth is how the city is developing.
Brian E. Clark is a Wisconsin-based journalist and
a former staff writer on the business desk of The
San Diego Union-Tribune. He is a contributor to the
Los Angeles Times, Chicago Sun-Times, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Dallas Morning News and
other publications.
Houstons Buffalo Bayou area at night
WINTER 2015 65
REALTORS Take Action
Making Smart Growth Happen
REALTORS help rejuvenate Austins heart and core

John Rosshirt, associate broker and part owner of Stanberry and Associates in Austin, Texas, likes to quote
Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell For us to stay the
same, we have to change. Rosshirt says the nations fastest
growing city cant be afraid to change in order to preserve its values, its natural assets and maintain its
outstanding quality of life.
Austins rapid growth means the vibrant downtown is
spilling over in all directions, including areas that werent
initially designed for city living, people or the compact
walkability that creates thriving metropolitan areas. One
of those areas is the South Central Waterfront an area
that encompasses 97 near-downtown acres, including
the Lady Bird Lake shoreline. The area currently contains a distribution center, a variety of office buildings,
several hotels, some small restaurants and condos and lots
of parking lots.
The area is a hodgepodge with no real connectivity.
No lots are the same size or shape. They were just carved
out as needed. Its an area that needs a master plan,
explained John Rosshirt who also chairs NARs Smart
Growth Advisory Board. The South Central Waterfront
is part of the heart and core of Austin and if the heart is
strong, so is the whole body.
This area, equivalent in size to 33 downtown blocks,
represents $1.2 billion in potential development during
the next 20 years. But, as city officials note, the area historically has lacked a development vision and instead still
relies on a piecemeal approach that evaluates development
on a parcel-by-parcel basis rather than a long-term plan
that meets community and private needs and aligns with
community values.
Current zoning regulations meant that no one could
get what they wanted. Landowners couldnt maximize
development. Neighborhood residents lacked access to
66 ON COMMON GROUND
WINTER 2015
flickr.com/photos/mirsasha
the waterfront. The city couldnt create affordable housing

or deal with traffic congestion. The area also has environmentally sensitive riverfront and creek areas that need to
be protected to maintain the standards that Austin has
set so high for itself, explains Rosshirt.
Vision + Design Intensive Charrette
City planners and community leaders believe the appropriate and thoughtful rejuvenation of the South Central
Waterfront will create a lively, accessible and affordable area
that will also be a model for the rest of the city. Rosshirt
says that commitment to rejuvenation was the reason for
a charrette in April that brought together local stakeholders and national experts to share perspectives and visions
and develop a long-term plan for the area. Alan Holt,
principal planner with Austins Urban Design Division,
and Emily Chenevert, Governmental Affairs Director of
the Austin Board of REALTORS (ABoR), recognized the
need for combining a community conversation about the
South Central Waterfront with expert direction on how
to maximize the areas potential. The ABoR assisted in
making the charrette possible by securing a $15,000 NAR
Plans calls for a paseo or public walkway that will be

home to stores and restaurants. Replacing parking lots
with parking structures will help create green space.
A light rail line into the area would provide alternative transportation and affordable accessibility to jobs,
housing and community amenities. The South Central
Waterfront will become more than a place where people
work, but a place where people want to be.
Greening Americas Capitals Program
Courtesy of the City of Austin
Smart Growth Action Grant and ensured the charrettes

success by providing local experts to assist the charrettes
design/consultant teams.
The REALTORS wanted to get involved in the process
and the city wanted someone with smart growth experience. It was a natural fit, explains Rosshirt.
The charrette included a vision workshop, an open studio so the public could weigh in on proposed drawings
and plans and a review forum where the conceptual plan
was unveiled. The charrette brought together approximately 170 residents, property owners, stakeholders, city
staff, and local and national experts for a robust community discussion. One out-of-state landowner flew in
several times to participate throughout the charrette.
The Vision + Design Intensive charrette produced a report
and vision framework that was later approved by the city
councils Comprehensive Planning and Advisory Committee.
Rosshirt describes the current South Central Waterfront
as mainly an employment center, but says the long-term
plan for the area will transform it into a destination
both during the business day and outside of work hours.
The area is getting an extra boost to its development

efforts. Austin was one of five cities around the country to win the EPAs 2014 Greening Americas Capitals
award. The designation means that Austin will receive
assistance to create green infrastructure and pedestrian
and bike improvements in the South Central Waterfront. The program will also assist in environmental
enhancements to the area. Rosshirt says the work of
EPA designers and consultants is estimated at $50,000
in development assistance.
Successful planning and development relies on the work
of a variety of individuals and groups. By taking a leadership role in assisting with the April charrette, the ABoR
is helping plot Austins future. But thats not the only
lasting benefit of the charrette. Rosshirt says the experience provided great face-to-face opportunities to create
relationships with Austin leaders and that will help make
the South Central Waterfront plan a success and a model
for the rest of the city.
ABoRs goal was to be more involved, and thanks to
the NAR Smart Growth Action Grant, we were appreciated, acknowledged and involved and it was a great
benefit to the city, says Rosshirt. The primary return
is well have good development and the market will stay
strong. And thats good for everyone.
67
REALTORS & Smart Growth
on common ground
WINTER 2015
CITIES
ASCENDANT
Resurgent Downtowns
Innovation Districts
Streetcar Boom

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REALTORS & Smart Growth

The Urban Moment

Courtesy of Visit Denver

The leaders of tomorrows economy are the young and the

For more information on NAR and smart growth, visit www.realtor.org/smartgrowth.

On Common Ground is published twice a year by the Community and Political

2015 National Association of Realtors

Shifting Patterns of Growth

Downtowns are Thriving

The Rise of Multifamily Housing

Whats Behind the Fastest-Growing

Growing Up and Not Out

The fiscal benefits of higher density development 30

The WalkUP Movement

Coding for the Future

Casting off outdated regulations

Detroit: Big Upside

Techs Place in Urban Growth

Everything Is Bigger in Texas

REALTORS Take Action

ShIftIng Patterns of Growth

Photo by Adam Alexander

The countrys population isnt

Between 2010 and 2013,

Cities upstaging suburbs

Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau

Frey found the biggest gap in New Orleans-Metaire-Kenner,

Many cities are not only outpacing the

Photo by James Willamor

when their average annual growth rate for the decade

Center for Real Estate Theory and Practice at Arizona

Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau

As large cities and metros grow, many are morphing

Courtesy of Visit Denver

The public and private entities within cities and metros

Photo by Dan Reed

Photo by James Willamor

I was kind of surprised to find that, said John Chesser,

Seven of the 15 fastest growing cities are in Texas.

(4.2 percent), Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, Calif.

Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land, Texas (137,692)

Courtesy of VisitHouston; Photo by Jim Olive

Around the Country

hen Sharon Leicham moved from

(Above) Photo by William Reiter

Before her jump halfway across the

Being able to walk to shops, work, the grocery store

Photo by Shannon Tompkins

Thousands are flocking to downtowns around the country.

The surge in downtown population growth is due in large part to

Opening new schools would be

Photo by Tim Thompson

Sunny, summer days can be well spent exploring the many

Historic Pioneer Square is Seattles oldest residential area, now

As fast as housing units are

Photo by Tim Thompson

Photo by Sean Marshall

Developers cant build

Downtown Cleveland is especially popular with millennials

Progressive Field in downtown Cleveland

Downtowns strive for a great natural setting, a great transit

Cleveland Metroparks Edgewater Beach

past five years. Jon Scholes, vice president for economic

Photo by Dan Reed