| This is the first in a ten part series on Smart Growth based on the ten smart growth principles:
1. Mix land uses
2. Take advantage of compact building design
3. Create a range of housing opportunities and choices
4. Create walkable neighborhoods
5. Foster distinctive, attractive communities with a strong sense of place
6. Preserve open space, farmland, and critical environmental areas.
7. Strengthen and direct development towards existing communities
8. Provide a variety of transportation choices
9. Make development decisions predictable, fair, and cost effective
10. Encourage community and stakeholder collaboration in development decisions.
If you have heard the term smart growth and want to know what it actually looks like and how its principles have been applied in cities, suburbs, and small towns across the country, then read on. |
| MIXED LAND USE
Our post World War II land use decisions have separated and compartamentalized the various aspects our lives. We live in one place, work in another, and venture to still another place for shopping and entertainment. This separation has created a car-centric society and taken away from the vitality of the traditional town center or Main Street.
Smart growth supports the integration of mixed land uses into communities as a critical component of achieving better places to live. By putting uses in close proximity to one another, alternatives to driving, such as walking or biking, once again become viable. Mixed land uses also provides a more diverse and sizable population and commercial base for supporting viable public transit. It can enhance the vitality and perceived security of an area by increasing the number and attitude of people on the street. It helps streets, public spaces and pedestrian-oriented retail again become places where people meet, attracting pedestrians back onto the street and helping to revitalize community life.
Mixed land uses can convey substantial fiscal and economic benefits. Commercial uses in close proximity to residential areas are often reflected in higher property values, and therefore help raise local tax receipts. Businesses recognize the benefits associated with areas able to attract more people, as there is increased economic activity when there are more people in an area to shop. In today's service economy, communities find that by mixing land uses, they make their neighborhoods attractive to workers who increasingly balance quality of life criteria with salary to determine where they will settle. Smart growth provides a means for communities to alter the planning context which currently renders mixed land uses illegal in most of the country. But things are changing.
One specific aspect of the mixed use concept that is catching on is the "live/work unit." Many zoning rules prohibit home-based businesses (not to mention mixed use developments in general). However, live/work units are designed for both residential and commercial uses, often with the owners conducting business on the first floor while living upstairs. Businesses you might see in live/work units include restaurants, law offices, hairdressers, and other neighborhood services. Buyers benfit because their monthly mortgage payments cover their business rent, typically one of the biggest expenses for small-business owners.
Main Street in the Kentlands (see picture), a development in Gaithersburg, MD, includes 62 live/work units alongside townhouses, detached homes and an apartment building for seniors. In this neighborhood, you can own a home and a business at the same address.
A final word of caution on mixed use. Many big box developers are co-opting the mixed use idea to sell their big box developments to naive communities. Konover is attempting to do it in Simsbury with River Oaks and S/R Weiner is now proposing a similar development in Cheshire. These developments include large big box stores and large asphalt parking lots with condos/apartments sprinkled around to give it a faux Main St look. The problem with these developments is that they miss some essential principles of mixed use and smart growth in general: buildings within human scale and building within the existing infrastructure. A 100,000 sq. ft. store is not within human scale not matter how pretty you make it look. As the saying goes, you can put lipstick on a pig, but in the end, it is still a pig.
For more information about mixed use, including case studies, fact sheets, and reports, check out The Smart Growth Network |
