Americans “built some great walkable places” before the Second World War, according to Christopher Leinberger, a developer, land-use strategist and leading voice for the New Urbanism movement.
One of those places was downtown Birmingham, Leinberger believes, based on photographs of the Magic City in the 1920s.
The days of massive freeways and sprawling suburbs may be almost over. Developer and New Urbanist Christopher Leinberger says Birmingham should use commuter rail to spur high-density development. Photo by Myriam Thyses.
“The streets are packed, just bumper to bumper people, with rail serving them, and you know what it looks like now,” Leinberger said during a presentation about walkable urbanism held Jan. 17 at the Birmingham Jefferson County Transit Authority downtown.
In front of an audience of government officials, environmental advocates and built environment professionals, Leinberger argued that Birmingham should try to make those days of a bustling downtown come back, in part by embracing commuter rail.
“Your investment in rail transit over the next few years, if you choose to do it, is the most important infrastructure [decision] you’ll make in the early part of the 21st century, and if you don’t do it, you’re condemned to be in a 20th-century economy,” he said.
Leinberger cited other cities that have recently passed transit initiatives and said that this represents a challenge for Birmingham. “If you’re not going to keep up with Dallas and Houston and the rest of the places that are investing in rail transit, you’re going to be left in the dust,” he said.
Leinberger, who lives in Washington, D.C. , is president of Locus: Responsible Real Estate Developers and Investors and founding partner of Arcadia Land Company, a transit-oriented development firm. The seminar, titled “The Rise of Walkable Urbanism,” was presented by the Regional Planning Commission of Greater Birmingham and eco-lobbying group Conservation Alabama. Also on the program was Geoffrey Anderson, president of Smart Growth America.
Leinberger is also an author whose most recent book is "The Option of Urbanism, Investing in a New American Dream."
The developer showed the audience an aerial photograph of a freeway interchange and told them that Birmingham should not see new highway proposals as its best transportation choices. “You have a lot of ill-conceived new highways that will look like you’re investing in the buggy whip business in 1920,” Leinberger said.
Birmingham should instead use rail to spur high-density development. “The reason in building transit… is not moving people,” he said. “The goal is economic development. The means is by moving people, and by getting those ends and means mixed up, we screw up a lot of investments. You build rail transit to spark development around those stations.”
Rail, not buses, is the way to go, according to Leinberger. “As a developer, I can show you examples of billions of dollars put into development around rail transit and I have yet to see the first dollar invested a bus stop,” he said.
“I’m coming from a purely developer point of view,” Leinberger told the group. “I want to make a buck, and I want to see economic development happen.” While there are social and environmental reasons to try to make smart growth happen, he said, “If it’s not going to make a buck, it’s not going to get built.”
“Transportation drives development,” Leinberger said, adding that, “For the last 60 years, we built what the market wanted – highways.” The result, he said, was “drivable suburban development,” which is low density. “All the places are separated and the only way to get between uses is by car,” he said. “This was not some conspiracy by GM, we weren’t brainwashed. The market wanted it.”
The market began to change in the 1990s, according to Leinberger, as downtowns became revitalized and popular TV shows like Seinfeld and Friends provided a powerful new set of myths about the joys of urban living, myths that have influenced the Millennial generation. “It’s the damn kids,” the Boomer-age developer said, laughing. “It’s their fault. They want this more than anyone else.”
He said that the Boomers will also help fuel the move toward walkable urban, since many of them are retiring and downsizing.
Another factor will the increasing number of homes without children (25 percent of households today, he said, as opposed to 50 percent in the 1950s).
The market wants smart growth to happen, according to Leinberger, because we’re now in what he called “a knowledge/experience economy.” He said that “the bulk of that economy wants to be in walkable/urban places. The new American dream is to have the choice, at different phases of your life, of living in either drivable suburban or walkable urban.”
Smart growth advocate Geoffrey Anderson says Americans want to preserve the things that are “special and unique” about their communities.
Leinberger, who has visited Birmingham numerous times and has friends and associates here, laments the fact that Birmingham consumers have “no choices.” “You can live in a single-family house, or in a single-family house,” he said. “It’s your choice. When you go shopping, you can choose between a 1980s strip mall, or a 1990s strip mall.”
Cities that don’t recognize the new demand for walkable places will suffer, Leinberger said. “The creative class is demanding the option of walkable urbanism,” he said. “These creative class workers need to cluster. And the big thing from an economic point of view is that if you don’t give the market the walkable option that they want, they’re going somewhere else. And if you’re in your 40s and 50s, your kids are going to go someplace else.”
Leinberger described various types of walkable urban and suburban spaces and held out Chattanooga, Tenn., as a possible model for Birmingham. “It’s a remarkable downtown turnaround, and it’s as comparable to Birmingham as you get, because their heavy industry collapsed, and they rebuilt their economy fundamentally and focused on downtown,” he said.
The builder offered his “to-do list” for Birmingham, which included his admonition to adopt commuter rail. He also noted that, in its new comprehensive plan, Birmingham should decide which locations in the city, in addition to downtown and UAB, could serve as what he calls “regionally significant walkable urban places.”
Anderson said more Americans are questioning the way development has been done. “One of the trends the last 15 years is that people are asking are we getting as much as we can out of our development and can we do better,” he said.
According to Anderson, most people across the United States seem to want many of the same things to improve their towns. “They want more housing and transportation choices,” he said. “They want to value the cultural assets they have. They want better access to those assets. They want to be able to walk and bike. They like a sense of community. They want to preserve the things that are special and unique about that place and not become a commodity community that looks just like everywhere else.”
Arlington, Va., used one-story, strip-style development in the 1960s and 1970s but has now moved to mixed-use development along a new commuter rail line, according to Anderson. “Now there are a lot of housing and transportation choices,” he said. “You can live in an apartment above a store. You can be a half-mile off this main corridor and have access to all these amenities – the restaurants, the transportation options, the offices – but still be in a single-family home on a large lot.”
Anderson listed a few other factors that are making smart growth look better to citizens and city leaders, including what he says are lower infrastructure costs for smart growth. “City after city, region after region, have consistently done these exercises [i.e., comparing types of development], and what they find is [that] coordinating their land use and their transportation better, making more walkable communities, trying to have centers of economic activity, is a lot cheaper, from an infrastructure standpoint, in terms of initial capital costs.”
Anderson said that those who try to reuse and maximize existing property tend to see a higher revenue per acre. For example, he said, an old J.C. Penney’s store in downtown Asheville, N.C., which sat vacant for 40 years, was renovated, and its taxable value soared over a 15-year period.
He presented data indicating that in cities such as Miami and Boston, walkable communities held their property values more effectively during the recent market downturn than did far-fringe suburban housing.
As to the issue of transportation, Anderson said, “One recognition is that it is incredibly hard if not impossible to simply build your way out of congestion. It’s costly and tends not to be terribly effective.”
He cited Cleveland, Ohio, where he says that while the population remained roughly the same from 1948 until 2002, the population is now more spread out, and that the area’s traffic congestion, measured in VMT, is higher, despite the fact that at least 2,000 miles of additional roads were built.
“All your basic indicators of travel got in fact worse, despite adding a whole bunch of roads, and the same number of taxpayers have to pay for that stuff and sustain it, and, that’s a real fiscal burden,” Anderson said.
Like Leinberger, Anderson sees a receptivity to new modes of development on the part of the American public. “People are beginning to see things in which we’ve under-invested, like transit, as armatures for economic growth,” he said.
Transportation initiatives put to a public vote recently have passed at nearly a 70-percent rate, twice the rate of all ballot measures, according to Anderson. This was true in both majority Democratic and Republican congressional districts, he said.
To watch the video or download a PDF of the presentation, visit www.rpcgb.org/events. The video and PDF are also available at www.smartgrowthamerica.org.
Jesse Chambers is a contributing editor at Weld for Birmingham and a contributing writer at B-Metro magazine. Send your feedback to editor@weldbham.com.
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