Commentary –

Common Sense For Downtown Development

By William A. Collins

The drive to work?

I’ve had a dose;

Move to town,

So I’ll be close.

Cities and towns, large and small, generally make a hash of downtown development. Norwalk, for example, just announced lift-off for a project which will “house” 3,500 new office workers. Of course it will not really “house” anyone, just provide desk space. No housing made its way into the plan.

The city will instead spend $7 million to improve access to the project from already clogged I-95. With this expenditure, it will wash its hands of any responsibility for providing dwelling space for all those workers. At the same time its elected leaders will complain bitterly to the state that the highway is indeed clogged.

This project may well succeed economically, because there is a strong office market in Fairfield County just now. If the economy folds, so will the project. In any case it won’t do downtown much good, since there is no housing, no retail, no culture, and no transit in the plan. With luck, the city will enjoy a boost in tax revenue, and a heightened image from having a couple big new buildings visible from the highway.

Connecticut is rife with such foolishness. In New Haven, a huge single-purpose mall proposal just self-destructed. In Hartford, it was an NFL football stadium. In Bridgeport, a multi-purpose “new city,” away from downtown. Hartford is now taking another plunge with a convention center. Good luck.

As any planner knows, there is a dramatic difference between these massive trophy-style projects, aimed purely at profit and visibility, and the more complex interdisciplinary models aimed at making a city or town more livable. In a city, such a model may focus on a new transit corridor, like in Dallas. In a town, it may be as simple as requiring that all new retail buildings have at least two stories, with either apartments or offices above. From the smallest community to the largest, apartments are typically the civic element in shortest supply.

The secret to a civilized community is the balance and intermingling of many such elements. It’s what makes our Northeast cities so much fun to visit and live in. The shops, offices, restaurants, apartments, and museums, all cheek by jowl, are what define a town. Larger size and public transit make it a city. Museums can be small, like Georgetown, S.C.’s Rice Museum. Galleries can be small, too, even to having the town rent a vacant storefront for use by local artists as free studio and display space. Likewise, transit may take the form of just a single bus, shuttling in from an edge public parking lot.

Where many Connecticut towns have lost their way is in thinking that development must mean snagging a big developer. Or a fat check from the state capital. Sure, some projects could use them, especially in central cities that have gone to seed. But mostly town officials and energetic citizens overlook the dramatic improvements they can make with small expenditures and thoughtful amendments to their zoning and building codes.

Fundamentally, the most critical goal is simply to increase downtown density. The more shops, the more restaurants, the more offices, the more entertainment, and the more dwelling units squeezed into the same walking district, the more people will want to walk there. Sometimes even a discreet parking deck is needed to fend off the acres of asphalt that have disfigured so many downtowns, as hard as this concept is for some small towns to swallow.

But if downtown becomes lively enough, more young and old people will cheerfully live there. And the more years they do that, the fewer subdivisions will be required to house them on the outskirts. This helps preserve open space and allows much-needed affordable housing to be included inconspicuously in the town center. Close-in residents also get cheaper auto insurance, since they don’t have to drive so far. For a nation accustomed to spreading out, the charms of density need to be relearned. The payoff, happily, is renewed excitement downtown.

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)