Retrofitting Neighborhoods
Lobby City Hall to change most zoning to mixed-use
Note to City Hall: If you’re involved with local government as an elected or appointed official, or a member of city or county staff, you’re in a position to help make some important changes. We suggest the following as three of the most important of those changes.
Part of being sustainable means driving less, but that can be very hard to do when the shops and services you need are beyond walking distance. The solution? Bring these shops and services to your neighborhood. To do this, your municipality has to allow “mixed-use zoning” in your neighborhood.
For most towns these days, mixed-use zoning means allowing condominiums in the downtown area to encourage live-in shoppers, or in Napa’s case, condos as second homes for infrequent high-end visitors. It means living in a commercial area. It is hard yet to find a town that allows “commercialing” in a “living” area. Yet that is what is needed to make residential areas truly livable.
Here, in brief, are some steps that can be taken to retrofit existing neighborhoods, transforming them into social communities with all the services such mini-communities need on an everyday basis.
Local governments should not only allow, but encourage this type of zoning with active support, tax breaks, grants, equipment and labor donations, permit fee reductions or waivers, and any other means they can use to help bring this transformation about.
Small neighborhood businesses not only provide goods and services, they provide jobs—full-time for working adults and part-time for youth and retired persons. City Hall should let people convert homes—particularly foreclosed ones—scattered throughout the area into small businesses. Owners could live in, above, or next door, to their businesses; customers would be able to walk from their homes to the businesses.
Stores/Shops – small grocery and hardware stores (maybe even a “general store”), laundries, cleaners, barber shops, post office and bank mini-branches, municipal services outlets. Also coffeehouses, cafés and neighborhood-focused restaurants.
Professional - physicians, dentists, lawyers and the like but also skilled essential services, including computer and gardening consultants, small appliance repair, plumbers, electricians and others whose services are needed in the neighborhood.
Neighborhood Centers – a place where neighbors can gather for socializing, meetings, classes, day care, home schooling, exercise, games and a large variety of other activities.You may find that a school could be used evenings and weekends as a neighborhood center, but even better would be a building, perhaps even a former home (unfortunately more and more are becoming available), that is dedicated to this purpose.
Neighborhood Offices – a “co-working” suite of offices with shared staff, office equipment and communications technology where residents can telecommute, or base their home or start-up business.
More on Small Businesses and Services
Many small businesses and services can be done out of the owner’s home. That’s the way it used to be, whether it was a doctor, a tailor, a grocery, or a small appliance repair shop. Others might require a separate building. Unfortunately many such buildings are becoming available.
We say “unfortunately” because of the reason they’re becoming available. A massive number of homes in the United States are being foreclosed on due to bad loans, predatory lenders—including some of the nation’s leading financial institutions, the collapsing economy, increasing job layoffs, and a variety of other reasons. The first order of business, obviously, is to try to help people remain in their homes. But this will not be possible for a large number of the homes.
When homes are foreclosed on in a neighborhood, there is often a common pattern. With no inhabitants, the home is no longer looked after, which becomes quickly apparent from the lack of landscaping maintenance. Lawns grow and dry up, weeds appear and multiply, windows and walls grow dirty. This deteriorating appearance contributes to the lowering of home values already created by the mere presence of an increasing number of foreclosed homes in the neighborhood. It is a downward spiral as other homes become emptied of their owners and remain unsold on the market.
Some of these homes, although lost to their previous owner/inhabitants, could be saved by the neighborhood. A foreclosed home, unable to be sold, is a prime location for a local neighborhood-serving business, service or neighborhood center.
Something Else Your Neighborhood Can Do
Environmentally, suburban tracts discourage sustainability of resources.
1. The major use of potable water is for landscaping. Water is used primarily for lawns and, usually, non-native plants. The lawns are generally mowed by high-polluting gas-powered lawn mowers, or in some cases, electric lawn mowers. You’ll seldom see hand-powered lawn mowers.
2. Because expansive landscaping consists of lawns, hedges and flowers, few people have vegetable gardens. Thus they are dependent for 100% of their food on stores which are not comfortably accessible on foot.
3. Large concrete and asphalt driveways mean much rainwater is not absorbed by the soil but instead flows into the municipal drainage system.
4. Large, sprawling tract homes are seldom designed for energy efficiency, are not built to last with energy-saving renewable materials, and are not sited for natural heating and cooling.
The “villain” in most of these cases is city zoning. Since World War II, zoning in the U.S. has primarily been single-use, particularly in the new towns and suburbs that have sprung up like fungi throughout the country. While it once made sense—and likely still does in most cases—for heavy industry to be isolated from other areas due to the unhealthy pollution from smoke, emitted toxins, noise and other undesirable elements, it made little sense for “light industry” and particularly huge office complexes to be sited far from the homes of the people who work in them. And it certainly made no sense to ban essential shops and services from the residential areas.
No doubt city planning departments had good intentions in adopting single use zoning. But whatever good reasons they might have had are of little value in today’s world.
The suburbs created in the United States and, unfortunately, elsewhere—including currently on a large scale in India and China—over the past 50 years could only have happened with widespread use of the private automobile, fueled by the cheap gasoline that resulted from cheap oil.
Few suburban tract home developments have stores, services, schools and employment within walking distance. Almost all require automobiles to get their inhabitants to and from their destinations. Those destinations are generally surrounded by vast areas of asphalt that provide a daytime resting place for the cars while their humans shop and work.
James Howard Kunstler, author of “The Geography of Nowhere – The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape”, calls the creation of suburbia “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world”.
Can suburbia be saved? The most pessimistic see its future as a wasteland, the slums of the future where empty buildings are cannibalized for their resources, and streets become impassable from lack of repair. Those who are more hopeful see suburbia transformed into a world of small villages, where the former residence-only streets are filled not only with homes—now with their own vegetable gardens—but also with shops, entertainment, small neighborhood schools, community meeting places, light industry and offices. All this with far less asphalt and much more green. In short, places where people live, work and play, all within walking distance.
Take down the fences
Take down your back and side fences and open up the area behind your home. As other neighbors do this, a beautiful parkland can be created. You’ll have a private, community park for the use of residents on the block. Kids can play safely, vegetable gardens can be planted, and the feeling of community and neighborliness will be enhanced.
“N” Street Cohousing in Davis, California is a cohousing group that was started in 1986 when two tract homes built in the early 1950s took down their side fences. “N” Street continues to grow slowly, adding one house at a time. Currently they’ve expanded to 19 houses and have removed fences between 17 homes. (Two of the homes on N Street are across the street from the community but are active members.)
The removal of fences has created a beautiful open-space area that includes vegetable, flower, and water gardens; a play structure; a hot tub; a sauna; and a chicken coop, large grassy area, pond and more.
N Street Cohousing
www.nstreetcohousing.org
Community Greens
www.communitygreens.org
Shared green spaces inside residential blocks.
Create Cul de Sac Paths
Create paths and trails that connect cul de sacs with the cul de sacs and streets behind them, so that people can easily walk from one location to another without having to wander an endless maze of sidewalks to reach what is actually a close destination.
Reclaim Streets
(See Walking and Traffic Calming)
