Mastering Downtown Redevelopment: Lessons and Stories from the Front Lines

More insights and inspirations from a veteran of more than 25 planning efforts

We kicked off a series on downtown redevelopment last week to showcase the amazing work being done by cities to strengthen the “heart and soul” of their communities. We drew from personal experience on the downtown where I worked for more than three decades to share how a compelling, well-crafted master plan has delivered absolutely amazing results.

More importantly, we drew from the experience of Neal Payton, senior principal at design firm Torti Gallas, who led the consulting team that produced the master plan. Neal and I spoke for an hour-plus about the specifics of the project. I also asked him lots of general questions about downtown planning since he’s led more than two dozen master plan efforts. His responses to those questions didn’t make into the post but they are too valuable not to share.

I’ll also unveil a couple of behind-the-scenes stories from our project because they’re just too instructive — and juicy — not to share.

Here’s Neal speaking at the New Urbanism Film Festival (NUFF). Source: NUFF

Keys to Plan Implementation

Lots of cities create beautiful plan documents. Not everyone takes those plans from concept to reality. Why?

“I can tell you that there are a number of factors,” Neal said. “One is there has to be a way to implement it. There has to be an ability to do it. Like, you have to be able to diagram or explain how this can be done. There have to be steps that can be taken. Otherwise, what am I supposed to do?”

That doesn’t mean the steps have to be followed verbatim, Neal says. Plans take time to implement — think of them being implemented over decades — which means the facts on the ground will change.

“New laws get passed, new sources of funding get created, old sources of funding dry up,” Neal says. “Things happen that are different, but there have to be a set of steps. So that is, I would say, number one.”

Number two is recognition the government doesn’t have to do all the financial heavy lifting.

“Private enterprise will be doing the lion’s share of the stuff,” Neal says. “The municipalities are kind of like a coach. They can teach, they can guide, and they can sometimes prime the pump with certain things. But even when they prime the pump, it’s still a pittance compared to what private enterprise will bring to it if it is successful. So, if (the plan) relies too much on the public sector doing a lot of things that are expensive, it’s very unlikely to happen in this country.”

Next, the plan must be “market sensitive.” It can’t be so pie in the sky the private sector takes a pass and develops in the next town over. Which isn’t an excuse to play it safe, either.

“You do have to recognize what markets do,” Neal says. “You know, while you want to say it’s got to be market sensitive, that’s too often a crutch for not doing the right thing.”

A market issue often at play is gentrification of older downtown area neighborhoods that often results in issues of affordability for existing residents. (More on that below.)

Finally, the plan needs sustained advocacy.

“A plan has to have a champion within the government,” Neal says. “That’s tough because most individuals do not stay at jobs long enough to be that. If they’re an elected official, there’s elections every two or four years. So, a champion as an individual is important. A champion as several people who buy into the idea is even better.”

The ideal situation, as is the case in Round Rock, is when elected leaders make downtown revitalization an organizational strategic priority, not the project du jour.

“When it becomes a priority of the council, then its champion is bigger,” Neal says. “(Implementation) is a given. It’s, ‘This is what we’re going to do.’”

The Importance of Political Courage

These kinds of plans are inevitably controversial because they represent change and people hate change. So having elected leaders stay the course and make the hard decisions required to implement, say, a road diet, is critical.

“Absolutely,” Neal says. “It’s the heart of municipal government.”

City managers represent the other side of the coin. They’re the ones responsible for making sure the bold decisions of the elected leaders get implemented in a timely way.

“The city manager is huge,” Neal says. “The ability to get staff people to do what needs to be done in a timely way is really important.”

Neal recalled working on a housing project for a military base, which in many ways operates like a municipality. You’ve got staff responsible for utilities, facilities, law enforcement, fire protection, etc. Typically, it’s the garrison commander who’s responsible for implementing the plan, much like a city manager. In this case, the general in command of the base was “really into this thing.”

“And like in any project, you had bureaucrats that were being slow to respond or being difficult,” Neal said. “We were having a general assembly (to discuss the project) with everybody who had a stake in it in a room with us. And the general saying, ‘Neil, what do you need to have this happen?’ (And I said), ‘Well, I need this and this.’ And he would look at the person responsible, and say, ‘Neal needs this. Can you get that in two weeks?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘OK, Neil, let me know if you don’t have it in two weeks.’

“Now, city managers, they come in all styles, and they don’t have to be like that general. But having a city manager (who makes implementation) one of their priorities is critical. You need someone who’s not just looking for their next job. You need somebody that’s willing to be in that job for at least ten years and get shit done and have that on their resume. That’s a really important thing … the kind of leadership to be able to get your (public works) person or your (transportation) person or your parking enforcement person or your planning officer or whoever else has a seat at the table and has to get stuff done, to make that a priority is really important.”

Heavy turnover of staff and elected leaders makes it nearly impossible to get these terrific but challenging redevelopment projects off the ground and then sustain the momentum.

“That’s a killer. It kills when you have turnover,” Neal says. “You can’t get anything done.”

Common Challenges

Funding the many capital projects these plans contain is clearly the most difficult aspect of these redevelopment projects. Last week, I noted Round Rock has invested nearly $185 million over 15 years. It’s come through a mix of funding sources: general obligation bonds, certificates of obligation, utility funds, self-financed construction funds (fund balance cash set aside every year) and just regular annual budget allocations for staff and maintenance.

Other cities we’ll be looking at in future posts in this series used tax increment financing and other forms of public-private partnerships to cover major capital projects.

Land assembly is another difficult issue. Getting large enough tracts to develop the kind of mixed-use projects these plans often envision requires finding willing sellers of smaller parcels. Whose properties abut. And who are willing to sell. You’ve probably heard it before: Patience is a virtue. In many older neighborhoods, you’ll have properties that are jointly owned by multiple siblings after their parents have passed. You may have heard this before, too: there is often conflict among the fam-damn-ily.

Of course, there’s the ever-present challenges put forth by NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard) and BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything). Ironically, Neal says he often gets pushback now from YIMBYs (Yes In My Back Yard) when a plan doesn’t include enough density.

“What’s so charming about the YIMBY movement, bless their hearts, is they don’t get it either,” Neal said. “What they get is we need more density of places and more housing. OK. Right. But we also need to make great places and it’s not just packing as many people as possible into a place. I had some guy say, ‘I don’t care if you say Paris is nice. It’s not dense enough.’ And it’s like, oh my god, it’s one of the densest cities in the world!”

Charrette Magic

Comments like that often come up during a charrette, an intensive, days-long brainstorming session that are a great way to get public input early in the planning process. An effective charrette will have designers, engineers and planners working around tables in small groups, fully accessible to the public. As ideas come together and begin to form the basis of a plan, the public can see it happening over the course of a week.

As anyone who’s worked a charrette or any kind of public engagement knows, they are not for the faint of the heart. People will show up who you’d rather have stayed home. They will be in your face and believe not one word you say.

“I will tell you, if you do enough of them, you get these prototype people … and the one I always find the most amusing is the one that comes in angry,” Neal says. “They walk in the first day and they’re just so angry at, I don’t know, life. But they’re angry. This process is happening. They’re angry with city government. They think that all the bureaucrats are terrible. They hate it. Why are we doing this? And they walk around, and they’ve got their nose in the air, and they start quizzing you really rapidly and angrily, and you’re trying to (respond), but they start insulting you. Right? And at a recent one, this woman, I was working all day, and my shirt came untucked from my pants because I was working, right? She said, ‘Look at you. Your shirt isn’t even tucked in.’ I was like, this lady is really upset.”

Neal has enough experience to know it’s always, always, always worth keeping your emotions in check and treating those people with respect.

“You try to deal with it, but you ask them to … keep coming, keep coming,” he says. “I always love it when you convert those people. Because converts make the best zealots, when you can convert them. And it doesn’t always happen, but it happens a lot. They become your biggest champion.”

Neal recalled a public housing redevelopment in Bremerton, Washington, which sits on Puget Sound across from Seattle. It’s an old shipbuilding town, very blue collar. Neal is leading a charrette and, sure enough, in walks the Angry Man. He starts in on Neal.

“What are you doing here? This site should have never been developed to begin with,” he said to Neal, who replied, “Well, it was, and here we are, we’re redeveloping.”

The man tells Neal how he used to come to this spot as a kid with his dad, “and they would have picnics up on this one spot on the hill, and they would overlook the Puget Sound, and it was glorious,” Neal recalls.

They tried to find the spot on a map and couldn’t. So, Neal said, “Well, show me. Let’s go to the site and let’s see this place.” They walk the site. It’s overgrown but they eventually get to the spot, and you could tell, with some appropriate trimming of trees and shrubs, there was, indeed, an amazing view.

“We would have never known that if he hadn’t been there, right?” Neal says.

Given that information and the kind of planning and design work that occurs over the course of the charrette, Neal’s team wound up making the site the center of the project.

“Now, this guy, he was in tears at the end of the charrette,” Neal says. “He couldn’t believe how wonderful this was going to be. So, it was a better project because of him. And he was also a champion of the project because he was listened to.”

I love, love, love these kinds of stories. So, here’s another one.

Neal and Co. are working on a project in San Diego along the old Pacific coast highway. When a new interstate was built, this highway encouraged “suburban sprawl,” he says. The conversation turned to whether to make the area more pedestrian friendly.

“There was a big conversation about the amount of (traffic volume),” Neal said. “Like, we need this many cars. We don’t need this many cars.”

Lots of folks were understandably concerned about businesses along the route and the impact of decreased traffic volume. Participating in the conversation was the owner of an iconic burger joint. He was well-respected in the community. (As any owner of any iconic burger joint should be, IMO. Cue Jimmy Buffett.)

“So, there was a debate about maybe doing this ‘road diet’ where we took out two of the lanes and made it slower and more pedestrian friendly,” Neal says. “People were saying, ‘No, that’ll be terrible.’ And they looked at him and they said, ‘What do you think? I mean, don’t you need those many cars?’ And he said, ‘Well, having 25,000 cars a day going through, in front of my business, is a wonderful thing, but if they’re going through it so fast that they can’t stop, then it really doesn’t help me very much. I’d rather them go slower and have less of them.’ And when he said that I was like, oh, my god, I can’t believe this.”

‘An Affordability Issue’

There have been a few changes regarding downtown redevelopment since Neal worked in Round Rock nearly 15 years ago. First, most people now understand why placemaking makes sense. The notion of making the investment to create attractive, walkable districts with interesting places to eat and shop and live isn’t a hard sell. What’s changed is that people now know those changes will make the districts more expensive places to live, that property values and thus property taxes will be on the rise.

“I’ve seen people argue against bike lanes not because they want to see more cars, but because they associate bike lanes with higher value and they don’t want to get priced out,” Neal says. “They are against street trees because it improves the neighborhood and that will price them out of the neighborhood. This is a huge issue right now. It’s amazing.”

The issue of rising prices isn’t limited to any part of the country, Neal says. It’s everywhere where economies are growing.

“If your city or metropolitan area has a fair amount of economic activity taking place, it has an affordability issue,” Neal says. “That’s a given. It just is. It’s across the country. It’s worse in some places than in others, but it’s bad in every place with economic activity.”

Parking is perhaps the eternal issue for downtowns. There’s never enough, at least, not enough close enough to where you want to shop or dine or have a drink. The growing prevalence of ride share options hasn’t had much impact yet on the need to plan for, locate and figure out how to pay for more parking spaces.

“Well, I will tell you that Uber and Lyft result in about a five to 10 percent reduction on Saturday evenings in entertainment areas,” Neal says. “That’s where you see the biggest impact. So, it’s not a huge number yet.”

Pulling Back the Curtain

I shared a couple of stories from the Round Rock process that Neal wasn’t familiar with. I share them with you to show everything doesn’t have go perfectly for plans to come to fruition. (Speaking of which, Round Rock just announced last week another downtown project featured in its master plan!) Count on difficulties because nothing worthwhile in local government ever happens without a fight.

One of the most audacious proposals in our plan was the construction of a $6 million bridge from the interstate frontage road, over Lake Creek, to Main Street. The idea was to have this iconic structure that would serve as a kind of billboard to the tens of thousands of motorists traveling up and down IH 35 every day while providing an additional east-west thoroughfare into and out of downtown.

An artist’s rendering of a proposed bridge to downtown. Credit: City of Round Rock

It was No. 1 on the list of seven catalytic projects intended to jump start redevelopment activities. Yet, it took a seeming nanosecond for city council members to squash the idea. And it wasn’t just no, or let’s think about it; it was hell no. Years later, a council member told me why: the bridge would have taken vehicular traffic off Round Rock Avenue — the primary east-west thoroughfare for downtown. That would have meant fewer cars driving by the bank of one of the town’s movers and shakers.

It’s worth noting that banker later did build some lovely office condos, historic in design and character, in the downtown district. But that kind of stuff happens. It’s inevitable. It’s not a deal killer.

Another inevitability is the idea that proposing denser, walkable districts is a plot cooked up by new urbanists to force people out of their cars. One of our then-council members convinced himself that’s exactly what Neal’s Los Angeles-based Torti Gallas team was conspiring to inflict on downtown Round Rock.

The council member said, in a public meeting if memory serves correctly, that the whole effort “was a conspiracy out of California to get everyone onto mass transit,” or something like that.

“I get that all the time,” Neal says. “I’m very aware of all of that. Even (in Southern California), if I’m in the east part of (Los Angeles) County, it’s like, ‘Well, you’re from Santa Monica. It’s different there.’ Wherever I go, I always have to explain, people use their cars across the country. They even use them in New York City. I was doing a project at another place where we were proposing back-in diagonal parking. It’s actually controversial, though. It’s easier than parallel parking, and it’s safer than front-in. Much safer. But people were going ballistic. (They said) ‘You know, we drive pickups here. Not little Priuses like they do in California.’ I had to let them know we have pickups in California, too.”

Our conspiracy-minded council member, when a townhome project was proposed in downtown on the banks of Brushy Creek, just a few blocks from his business, absolutely loved the idea of being able to live there and walk from home to work.

I wanted to scream at him, “THAT’S THE CONSPIRACY!” But I really loved my job, so didn’t.

I know last week I wrote I’d get into the marketing of downtowns in this post, since I have lots of communicators in the GGF audience. I’m going to hold off and make that one the last in this series. As always, if you’ve done interesting work promoting your downtown, let me know in the comments. Share the goodness!

Gov Ephemera: Hits and Misses

The Never Ending Story: Here’s the headline from a Feb. 9 article in Governing — Problems With Idaho’s New $100M Financial System Demonstrate Just How Hard Modernization Is. From the article:

The state’s transition to a suite of new software programs has irritated a number of financial employees, who have said the situation has led to issues with accounting and intra-government processing of payments. Paychecks and travel reimbursements for some employees have been delayed, the financial employee granted anonymity said.

“It’s just been a huge struggle every day,” the employee said. “We hit brick walls constantly.”

“This is not a system problem, this is a process and education problem,” the chief deputy controller said. “The system works. You don’t just unplug it and plug a new one in.”

Say a prayer for our friends in Idaho. I recall going through a similar process when my city replaced a way outdated utility billing system a few years back. It’s a beatdown.

Road to Progress: The City of San Antonio recently launched a portal to help constituents get easier access to public works projects. The GIS-powered dashboards put a TON of information at residents’ fingertips. Well done, Alamo City!

Get Off My (Own) Lawn? The Baytown, Texas, City Council will consider repealing its ban on front lawn parking as part of a legal settlement with a man who ran afoul of the ordinance. The resident was arrested after failing to appear in court after being cited. He says he never received the citation, according to this news report.

The resident sued the city and settled. As part of the settlement, the City Council agreed to vote on repealing or amending its ban on front lawn parking. After listening to nearly an hour of public testimony on Feb. 8, the council didn’t vote but said it needed to study the issue further.

This is a classic no-win issue. If folks can park in their yards with impunity, you know the washing machines will be out on the front porch lickety-split. Then again, why is the government telling me where I can park my car? Hang in there, Baytown.

Onward and Upward.