Slight Change of Plans

By Rebecca Leonard, AICP, LEED-ND, CNU-A, and Joe Porter, FASLA

Here are a few names that will be familiar to planners: Jim Rouse, Bob Simon, George Mitchell, and Ben Carpenter. These visionary business people launched the planned community movement in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s. The developers of Columbia, Maryland; Reston, Virginia; and Las Colinas, Texas, respectively, all shared a passion for creating an alternative to suburban sprawl.

In her 2005 book, Reforming Suburbia, Anne Forsyth recognized the early contribution of planned communities in designing and building new social organizations, physical forms, legal structures, and marketing programs for developing communities. Their success in creating community identity and open space is closely linked to the smart growth movement emerging at the time. She also recognized the failure of planned communities to provide affordable housing and transportation choices.

Now, 50 years later, there is a significant flight back to cities, an increasing acceptance of density and urbanism, a reemergence of public transit in the U.S., and a global call to work toward a sustainable future.

With all the focus on urban infill today, it is easy to think that greenfield development has all but stopped. However, according to a working paper by the Urban Land Institute, the U.S. will grow by 58 million people between 2003 and 2025, and 70 percent of that growth may happen in suburban and rural areas. Planned communities are a worthy approach to greenfield development because they allow for broad, thoughtful planning and limit the incremental change that occurs with small subdivisions in greenfield scenarios.

Many established planned communities compete with newer developments on a variety of fronts, including availability of services and infrastructure, land uses, and amenities. The economic value of these established communities has strengthened as they have grown and gained critical mass.

High levels of amenities and sophisticated community associations have helped to position them to improve services and address challenges of land-use change and densification faced by all growing communities.

Some have been very successful at retroactively adding new infrastructure, services, and amenities, while others have struggled. This tension is forcing communities to revisit their planning and design principles as a foundation for decision making. Planners can learn from them how to build flexibility into new planned communities that will allow them to evolve as their needs change.

James Rouse envisioned Columbia, Maryland, as a new type of development guided by social equity. John Loengard/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Image.

Columbia, Maryland

In the 1960s James Rouse pioneered a new approach to suburban development motivated by social equity. He wanted to develop a racially integrated community where lifelong learning, community participation, and interaction could flourish. He hoped to replicate this model throughout the country.

These values are evident in Columbia today. According to Shauna Miller of the University of Maryland, "It's more racially diverse than America as a whole: 22.4 percent of the town is black, compared to 12.4 percent of the nation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau." Its mixed race numbers are also nearly double that of the U.S. as a whole, Miller noted in a 2009 article.

Columbia was developed as a series of villages, each organized around a village center with convenient retail, its own identity, and gathering places. Wilde Lake Village was the first to open in 1967, complete with a small village green, a grocery store, shops, second-story offices, an interfaith center, a teen center, and an indoor swimming pool.

Wilde Lake and the other early village centers served their purpose but don't provide the densities, retail attractions, mix of uses, green buildings, and infrastructure that's evolving in urban and suburban centers today. As a result, many of Columbia's village centers are undergoing redevelopment.

Wilde Lake Village Center was approved for redevelopment in June 2012. Its original small village green and surrounding buildings will remain as the Shops at Wilde Lake Village, thanks to the historic preservation efforts of local architects. The interfaith center, tennis club, and indoor swimming pool will also stay.

A new CVS drugstore and David's Natural Foods — a response to the trend toward specialty food stores — are open and Alta Wild Lake, a 230-unit apartment complex with ground-floor retail, is under construction. Planting areas harvest water from buildings, streets, and parking lots.

Plans for the redevelopment of Long Reach Village Center are also under way. Both centers lost their grocery stores nearly 10 years ago, leaving holes in already declining areas. That economic situation helped make redevelopment palatable, but in both cases, village residents were dismayed that they could only support smaller specialty food outlets rather than a general grocery store.

Easing the way for redevelopment was a change to the approvals process used for the last 40 years. The Howard County Council, not the master developer General Growth Properties (now Howard Hughes Corporation), now has jurisdiction over approvals. This expedites the process and removes a barrier for village center redevelopment.

Downtown Columbia, the largest center in the planned community, is also undergoing significant redevelopment planning. For the last four decades it has taken the form of a standard indoor mall, flanked by undistinguished office buildings. A 2007 vision plan, followed by the adoption in 2010 of the Downtown Columbia Plan: A General Plan Amendment, aims to change that.

The approved plan calls for the formation of a nonprofit Columbia Downtown Housing Corporation to build 5,500 housing units, additional retail and office space, and new hotel units over the next 30 years.

Map Courtesy Fairfax County Planning and Zoning Department.

Columbia: A New Kind of City

A half-century ago, Rouse envisioned Columbia as a new kind of American city, that, through rational planning, would avoid the problems associated with larger cities. Today, planning continues to be at the forefront of efforts to transform its suburban-oriented town center into a vibrant urban downtown. The 2010 Downtown Columbia Plan provides a comprehensive framework worthy of the community's founding vision. The breadth and scope of projects to date reflect the quality and applicability of its urban design principles and collaborative efforts with private enterprise. Courtesy the Columbia archives. Courtesy Howard County Department of Planning and Zoning

Reston, Virginia

Reston was imagined by Robert E. Simon, the owner of Carnegie Hall in New York City. "Simon's Seven Goals" formed the vision for Reston — recreational choice, housing diversity, individual dignity, live-work opportunities, early phasing of mixed uses and recreation, beauty, and financial success.

Although both the Metrorail connection from Dulles airport into Washington, D.C., and the plans for Reston were being conceived of at the same time (in the mid-1960s), Reston's original plan didn't precisely address mass transit. But it did intend to reduce congestion and reliance on the automobile by creating a sense of place and community with a hierarchy of village and town centers that provided goods and services close to where people lived, a jobs-housing balance, and an integrated open space and trail system.

Decades later, the town center is still a work in progress. Some large multifamily residential buildings are within walking distance, but the downtown is still car-oriented.

This will change when the Reston Town Center Station of the Metrorail Silver Line opens in 2018 and adjacent land parcels are developed. The Silver Line Extension will link Reston and other edge cities with Washington, D.C., and Washington Dulles International Airport, with the goal of spurring development and reducing highway traffic.

But interjecting mass transit into an existing master planned community is challenging, and the officials wondered whether Reston could deliver sufficient density to make transit viable. The Reston Master Plan Special Study, adopted last June — just as environmental analysis and funding documents for the extension were being created — identified the right densities and design character of the areas surrounding transit stops. It recommended that the area around the three planned stations in Reston, which was mostly zoned industrial, be rezoned to allow more intense employment densities, such as those in the Reston Town Center.

That shift, among others, helped to refocus Reston's efforts on transit for today and the future. This endeavor, and the death of Simon himself last year, has brought a renewed interest in Simon's Seven Goals, reinforcing the diversity and other aspects that are necessary for a lasting community.

Refocusing Reston
Reston's original master plan didn't precisely address mass transit. Half a century later, Reston is injecting mass transit into its established community after identifying the densities and design character that would make sense for the areas surrounding the new stations. Much of the land around the stations had been zoned industrial, but will now allow more intense employment densities.

Las Colinas, Texas

When Las Colinas was first begun in the early 1970s, Ben Carpenter set out to create a comprehensive community of lasting value that would preserve the natural splendor of his ranch outside Dallas, with its hills, creek, and lake.

Transit was always part of that vision — both regional transit to the then new airport and internal transportation systems. Today, the water taxis of Las Colinas's Urban Center are largely used only by tourists and amorous locals, but they were once thought to be a key to mobility there.

As the Urban Center grew, the beautiful setting drew corporations, but retail and service commercial uses were slow to follow, and the place emptied out after five in the evening. Rooftops were needed to create morning, evening, and weekend demand.

In recent years a great deal of effort has been put into developing multifamily housing. Retail growth has been slow, but it is expected to pick up thanks to the completion in 2014 of the Dallas Area Rapid Transit's Orange Line expansion to Las Colinas and Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.

In 2013, the city of Irving, where Las Colinas lies, and the Las Colinas Association worked with Sasaki Associates to create a master plan that would revitalize the Urban Center into a pedestrian-friendly, vibrant, mixed use live-work district.

There are three new stations in Irving — the Convention Center Station, the Las Colinas Urban Center Station, and the University of Dallas Station. Each features its own unique look, location, and architectural details. Three more stops are planned for Irving, two of which will be in Las Colinas.

New multifamily developments have been built or are in progress around the new stations, and the city recently attracted the Music Factory, a performance venue provider from North Carolina, to the Urban Center. The Las Colinas Association believes it will finally get the "play" in live, work, and play.

Outside views of the Wiehle-Reston East station, the last stop of the Metrorail Silver Line extension's first phase, show what the remaining at-grade stations will look like when the extension is complete. The station opened in 2014

The future for planned communities

Older planned communities did — and continue to do — many things well, but their shortcomings provide opportunities to learn and adapt.

They clustered density and preserved green space in an era when massive tracts of previously undisturbed lands were being consumed by sprawl. They considered places for people to live, work, and play — a principle for most planners still today. The most successful communities were planned to be somewhat self-sustaining, with homes, schools, jobs, services, and gathering places. Planned
communities have taken decades to evolve, as any properly developed city should.

Their deficiencies fall in a few common areas, typically tied to the evolution of the marketplace. First, the centers were often not urban enough to support the full range of services a town or city center needs to function. The street networks — typically not a grid — did not allow denser development to plug in over time.

Columbia's village centers and Las Colinas's town center have changed significantly to adjust to the need for better services and the recent acceptance of greater density. Those that were developed early in the life of the planned community met the market demands of that time and were typically lower density. Those that were developed later in the history of planned communities came closer to the densities needed to support the live, work, and play visions.

Second, transit has confounded planned communities like Reston. In the case of Las Colinas, mass transit was always envisioned — but for others, transit was an afterthought. When they were planned, who would have thought that these remote communities would ever have transit service? Today, they are no longer remote and are logical transit destinations.

Another surprise to planners was the need for reverse commuting in established planned communities. Employment in the town centers of Reston and Las Colinas is so successful that transit is a practical way to deliver workers to these compact centers. Now planners struggle with how to inject transit into the physical environment without reserved right-of-way or clear options for stations.

Newer planned communities like Verrado in Phoenix (See "Cool (Planned) Places," January), Mueller (Austin, Texas), Cadence (Henderson, Nevada), and Daybreak (South Jordan, Utah) have found ways to offer all the traditional benefits of planned communities, such as walkable neighborhoods surrounded by significant open space, while delivering on modern demands such as truly diverse centers and transit.

The competition created by new planned communities will continue to drive the older planned communities to transform and meet demand. Creating a framework for change in the early years of a planned community is essential to its ability to adapt to change and growth with the marketplace.

Rebecca Leonard is principal and president of the planning and design firm of Design Workshop. Joe Porter is a founding partner and past president of Design Workshop. He worked on plans for Columbia in the 1970s.

Resources

Planner Faheem Darab explains the next step in Reston's planning process: http://tinyurl.com/hbuw5gm