Sustaining Sustainability: It Ain’t Always Easy

A little more than a dozen years ago, a collection of three adjacent suburban towns in the sprawling Sun Belt region of Charlotte did something extraordinary. After months of public workshops, lectures and community discussions, months of looking at slide shows to choose what kinds of streets, stores, houses and apartments they wanted for their towns, they revamped their town codes. They aimed to discourage conventional suburbia and encourage traditional neighborhood development, transit-oriented projects and farmland preservation.
It warmed the hearts of planners. It drew national attention and awards and, after a couple of New Urbanist neighborhoods were built, busloads of visiting Smart Growth disciples. Writers, including yours truly, ladled on praise. In 1996 I wrote an editorial calling the new ordinances in Huntersville, Cornelius and Davidson, N.C., “a remarkable exercise in local and regional planning” and “a remarkable vision.”
But as Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys sang decades before, “Time changes everything.”
“It faded away in Cornelius first,” says David Walters, an urban design professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who has worked as a consultant for all three towns starting in the mid-1990s.
“The torch didn’t get well passed,” says Bill Coxe, transportation planner in Huntersville, a one-time mill-town and railroad hamlet that has grown from less than 3,000 people in 1988 to an estimated 39,000 in 2006. In both Huntersville and the next-door town of Cornelius, early enthusiasm for concentrating development into higher density nodes and for pushing more growth into the towns’ tiny, historic downtowns has faltered, victim of elections and the departures of some key planners, mayors and town managers. It hasn’t helped that a long-wished-for commuter rail line remains in funding limbo.
Today, Huntersville town commissioners are thinking of using a city-owned former cotton mill site–purchased years ago with an eye to a mixed-use development clustered at a planned commuter rail stop–to build a new police station. After all, the reasoning goes, it would save money to use land the town already owns. And anyway, conservatives on the town board had successfully scuttled a deal with a willing local developer. That happened back in the pre-recession days when developers could still get financing.
By 2010, only Davidson–an affluent college town of about 9,000, home to Davidson College–was hewing religiously to its strategy: channel most growth into already developed areas, protect the village feel of its historic downtown by requiring new development to fit in with the old and try to protect open land in its fast-disappearing rural surroundings.
In Huntersville, by contrast, “The cadre who believed in it moved on,” Coxe says. “Now you just have a bunch of suburbanites. And they just don’t get it.”
How, he wonders, do you embed into a town’s culture the precepts of smart planning, of building walkable town centers and channeling the growth into the areas where it makes sense to grow? After so much work by so many townspeople and elected leaders, how do you maintain that level of interest, engagement and understanding of the underlying principles? After all, most Americans still equate “density” with poverty.
With so many newcomers, and the generally transient nature of much of America, how many Huntersville and Cornelius residents were even aware of all those hours townspeople devoted 15 years ago? Walters worked with Cornelius, population about 13,000, on an area plan in 2003 and with Huntersville on a 2005 downtown plan. Public participation, he says, was “pretty disappointing.” And, he says, “More worryingly, there was not a whole lot of interest from public officials.”
In addition to the turnover and the influx of newcomers unaware of the past work, I suspect a piece of what has happened relates to starker political partisanship and more liberal-versus-conservative tensions in the past decade. Much about traditional neighborhood design might be considered conservative–such as its aim to hold down municipal services costs and its association with small-town values. But once “smart growth” came to be associated with environmentalism, it became a target for many conservatives suspicious of anything favored by liberals.
Yet the northernmost town of the three, Davidson, has held to its course. Walters credits many things, including its long-time mayor, Randy Kincaid, who only left office two years ago. “He got it,” Walters says. “He really didn’t need any convincing.” The town board, also, has seen little turnover and is generally well-educated about the complexities of growth and planning. And while the town’s top planners have changed, they’ve all been, in Walters’ words, “activist planners.”
And, as if happens, Davidson is a place enamored of itself. “Davidson’s own dynamics, its sense of specialness,” has, over the years, helped it work through difficulties and keep its eye on its goals, Walters says.
Coxe, the Huntersville planner, told me recently that he considers it a personal failure that Huntersville hasn’t held to its much-praised vision of a decade ago. I think he’s too hard on himself. Like a large number of Americans, many of Huntersville’s new townspeople have never lived anywhere but suburbia. That’s the way of life they know and love.
Walters, who has worked as a consultant on planning projects around the country, thinks the inability to stick to community plans is likely a continual problem, especially rapidly growing suburban areas such as Huntersville. He’s right. People move away. They forget. They elect new politicians. Time changes everything.
Even if 15 years ago hundreds of people devoted hundreds of hours to learn a better way to grow, Walters reminds us, you need “constant vigilance, constant education, constant programming of public events to keep the issues alive.”
Source : Mary Newsom / Feb 28 2010