Learning from Glenwood Park
I recently found a great mini-documentary concerning Atlanta and an emerging New Urban neighborhood within the city. You should check out the entire thing (available on YouTube), but I wanted to highlight one particular clip:
Notice the film of the BACKS of the townhomes in Glenwood Park. Gee – that looks basically identical to the FRONT of most townhomes in Houston.
Glenwood Park was built right – when you put your best face forward it enhances the surrounding community, improves compatibility with adjacent properties, and creates a virtuous cycle of property value appreciation. In other words, if you put a nice front on your building, the properties around you gain value. Those property owners are then more likely to put a nice face on their buildings, and if they do, they’ll make your property more valuable too.
Houston needs wake up and start paying attention to the way buildings face the public street. The design details make a huge impact on public safety and tax-base. It’s foolish not to have some simple, consistent standards that require a bare minimum of safe and compatible design.
As a carrot to developers, let’s throw out the parking regs at the same time. Most of the developers I know would take that trade in a heartbeat.
Update: Per Greg’s request, here is a quick visualization of how alleys could grow over time in already crowded hodge-podge situations.
Keep in mind, this is far from the ideal condition. However, the city needs a policy to prevent excessive curb cuts – thus preserving ample on-street parking, in the rapidly densifying inner city. While it would be better for the city to go in and add simple, straight alleys (and move the power lines back there while they’re at it), there’s no realistic cost effective way to do that across any large percentage of the city.
Instead, they could offer big incentives to developers who create an alley “stub” in their projects, and then offer smaller incentives for developers who tie into that stub to access subsequent infill projects. That, and some negotiation with existing property owners, could reasonably result in most infill development areas migrating to a primarily alley-loaded configuration over the next 20-30 years.
Here’s the sketch. Yellow buildings represent older buildings in moderate condition. White represents run-down older buildings. Orange represents new development.
Categories: think
Tags: Atlanta, developers, development, Glenwood Park, regulations, standards, The Problem with Parking Ordinances, townhomes, video
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Where you don’t have alleys and the land has already been developed to preclude the use of alleys, how can developers accomplish such a design?
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Great question.
First – there is no place where existing development precludes alleys. You don’t have to load an alley from the end of a block, you can do it at the mid-block, internal to a new development. Here’s an example.
This is downright easy if you’re redeveloping at least two lots – which most builders usually are. It’s not as easy if you’ve just got one lot, but in that case what we need is a city standard that requires the alleys on each block and then provides a reimbursement for the first builder on a block. Then, that first builder on a single lot puts basically a long driveway that reaches a ‘stub’ alley and also serves his garage, but leaves connections for future extensions of the alley.
Second, there are two important things to note about alleys. One, they only need to be about 10 feet wide. For proof, see the Boulevard Oaks area – their alleys are 8′ wide. I know a few people who live over there, and they all agree that their tiny alleys work fine.
Two, alleys don’t have to be perfectly straight. In Holland they’re really big on the idea of “woonerfs” which are basically ‘free-for-all’ spaces where you can park, but you’re also allowed to put out a basketball hoop and play etc. Alot of these are used as accessways in the rear of properties, and are deliberately designed to bend and curve so that driver’s aren’t able to race down them.
Now, if an alley bends around in order to dodge existing buildings it may need to be a bit wider, but it’s workable.
The real problem is that you’ve got a first-mover disadvantage. If only one property on the block sets aside the dirt necessary to allow an alley, and then nobody else reciprocates, then that first property essentially wasted their land. So, you need to make this kind of thing an incentivized standard, where you give some kind of bonus to the first X percent of a block to adapt for alley access, and you require that subsequent redevelopment load from the back.
It won’t happen very quickly – and in areas that are totally stable and do not redevelop at all it may never happen. But in emerging areas (esp. East End and Near Northside) this kind of policy could make for a radical improvement in neighborhood compatibility as transitional development begins – and make for a much more desirable and valuable community when the neighborhoods mature.
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“But in emerging areas (esp. East End and Near Northside) this kind of policy could make for a radical improvement in neighborhood compatibility as transitional development begins – and make for a much more desirable and valuable community when the neighborhoods mature.”
Oh, I agree and it opens up street front parking with less issues (neighbors don’t have to worry about cars blocking driveways and such. I just have a hard time wrapping my head around the visual of what would have to occur to make it a reality. Maybe you could sketch out several simple examples (from an inner block section and a corner block section) of what would have to happen to accomplish this going forward.
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Greg, I roughed out a sketch and added it to the end of the post. Take a look.
The real answer is: every block will be different, and the evolution over time will always be different. Some blocks might decide they want to get together and convert to alleys all at once (or over a period of a few years). The city should support that by offering low interest financing and tax incentives for blocks that convert. But even when the entire block isn’t on board, any newly redeveloped parcels going forward should be loaded from the side or the rear.
For what it’s worth, it’s not really the driveway that’s the issue – though reducing the number of driveways is a great boon to on-street parking. The real issue is putting a wall of garage doors onto the street. You might as well be in an industrial park if that’s how the street is going to look. That is the biggest source of incompatibility between existing smaller-scale development and new infill development.
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Just to clarify, the example you provided is interesting, but it appears that developer had enough street front space and minimal depth (assuming there isn’t an opposite row of houses behind) so he could still make a profit by improving the look even though he lost the value of possibly a couple larger units or one additional unit by putting the driveway in. What do developers do when they have 50 feet of street and 100 feet of depth on which they want to develop a property on an inner part of a block?
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My neighborhood is half streets-only and half streets with alleys. The alleys are private property which introduces a few challenges. First, we have private trash collection because the city of Houston will not run their collection trucks through the alleys to allow for back-door trash removal. Second, road repair of the alleys is left to the homeowner even though most damage is due to the collective damage of all neighbors and the damage often straddles property lines. Third, the alleys do not have storm drains, they only use topology to guide water runoff. This leads to easier flooding. Over time, the topology settles and several ponds form which serve as prime mosquito habitat. So, for Houston, I recommend making sure alleys are on land owned by the city so that trash collection, road repair and storm drainage take place.