Donjek :: The Cents of Place Blog

@Strib: Reconnecting Minneapolis' Seven Corners and West Bank

Like many urban and rural places, Minneapolis and St. Paul each have plenty of underutilized land area. 

One of Minneapolis' most striking examples is the Washington Avenue "trench," a 1960s-era highway that today splits the Seven Corners area, the University of Minnesota's West Bank, and the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood. Current plans call for construction of light rail transit service through the middle of the trench, a station beneath the 19th Avenue bridge, and a pedestrian/transit mall on Washington Avenue just across the river. In tandem, these plans translate to an opportunity for fundamental rethinking of how the trench inhibits the health of the places around it. 

I have posted a piece about these issues at the Star Tribune (link to that post), and I have included here at the Cents of Place, additional images created by University of Minnesota graduate students of architecture working with adjunct professor Mic Johnson, also of Ellerbe Becket. My thanks to Mic for his permission to include these images.

@Strib: Twin Cities Gearing Up for Greenways

In mid-July last summer, gas prices peaked, remaining in the range above $3.50 per gallon until late September, 2008. One consequence of the spike was a boom in interest in commuter bicycling. July traffic on the Midtown Greenway, the principal bike commuter infrastructure in the Twin Cities, was 30% higher in 2008 than the previous year. An average of over 4,100 cyclists per day used the Greenway at Hennepin Avenue.

Greenway traffic diminished slightly this summer, thanks largely to a 40% drop in the price of gasoline. But interest in establishing a network of greenways has continued to rise. Two new efforts – the Twin Cities Greenways Initiative and the St. Paul Greenway Committee – suggest that the many interests who stand to benefit from an effective bike commuter system are joining together to move it forward.

The Twin Cities Greenways Initiative, inspired by the combination of ridership and development in Midtown, is working with neighbors to explore conversion of residential streets to greenways, linked together eventually in a network to link neighborhoods, schools, open space and commercial areas. “As we talk to neighbors,” said advocate Matthew Hendricks, “we find that 90% of them respond very positively to the idea of converting their streets to greenways.” Auto access would remain to homes via the alleys, as illustrated above.

The St. Paul Greenway Committee is stimulating interest east of the river in a facility akin to the Midtown Greenway – to which many in St. Paul have long sought a connection. Led by transit advocates St. Paul Smart Trips, the committee intends to begin planning with neighborhoods, to determine which connections will link high-priority destinations most effectively.

Greenways play a key role in a transportation system where implemented. They also enhance property values – a case proven by numerous studies of comparable cities. Gas prices will rise from current levels in the future, and providing affordable choices for getting around is key to our region’s competitiveness and quality of life.

Note: This post is also available at the Star Tribune, with fewer images. 

All images courtesy of Michael Nelson and Twin Cities Greenways Initiative.

Quantifying Open Space Benefits: Donjek Presentation at MRPA Conference

Today, I am presenting to the annual conference of the Minnesota Recreation and Park Association on the costs and benefits of open space, with Jenna Fletcher, project coordinator of Embrace Open Space. View my part of the presentation here, and see Jenna's presentation here.

Intuitively, we all agree that parks, open spaces, greenways and natural areas have economic value. The real estate marketplace recognizes this: Studies consistently indicate that residential property owners pay up to a 30% premium to live within walking distance of a park. Similarly, access to bike and pedestrian infrastructure such as greenways also boosts property values.

Despite a surge in academic and practitioner analysis of open space premiums, many policy makers continue to view parks as cost centers, as opposed to stable assets that consistently support social and economic activity, as well as tax base, located nearby.

The case for identifying the benefits of open space more effectively is important. In addition to its relationship to residential and commercial property values, local policy stands to be improved by better information about the economic value of the physical activity, non-motor transportation, stormwater management and other benefits.

We have the tools in the form of property data sets and GIS analytics. We have the need to respond to overwhelming budget pressure. And we need urban design that helps rather than hinders our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Each of these factors call for a change in the way we understand, talk and make decisions about the role of open space in our cities and towns.

Donjek Project: Little Rock's MacArthur Park District Master Plan Wins Awards

Last fall, Donjek was hired to support a master plan process for MacArthur Park in downtown Little Rock, Arkansas, producing findings on feasible investment models for the City and its partners to reinvent the space. 

The process,  led by Conway+Schulte Architects of Minneapolis, has since received two awards for the MacArthur Park District Master Plan: A Citation of Urban Design from the Boston Society of Architects, and a 2009 Merit Award from the Minnesota Society of Landscape Architects. Congratulations to Conway+Schulte and their partners at the University of Arkansas Community Design Center and Oslund and Associates.

As part of the planning process, I examined multiple park revitalizations, searching for sustainable models for renovating, operating and maintaining quality urban open space. 

Pack Square Park in Asheville, North Carolina provides an example. Just over six acres, Pack Square Park is today the focus of a $20 million redevelopment effort involving the public, private and philanthropic sectors, at the helm of which is an effective conservancy.  Private capital will finance half of the renovation, and the new Pack Square Conservancy is raising an endowment of $2 million to bolster ongoing maintenance by the City of Asheville and Buncombe County.

Funding the capital and operating components of open space is a key area of public finance. Open space, in turn, is a key driver for effective places and a substantial influence on surrounding property values. If your community has an underutilized space or a park calling out for reinvention, contact us.

Talking Open Space

On May 28, I presented to the quarterly meeting of a land conservation  collaborative that has brought together groups including the Metropolitan Council, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, the McKnight Foundation, Trust for Public Land, and 1000 Friends of Minnesota. Embrace Open Space has released an analysis of five years of Hennepin County housing sale data, which illustrates the influence of nearby open space on home values. The analysis has identified that a typical Hennepin County home located near open space is roughly $15,000 more valuable than a comparable property located elsewhere. The study follows a related analysis of Washington County sale data, released in 2007, which reached similar findings.

As part of the program, I will present context for the study, describing the range of economic, fiscal, and ecological benefits that flow from parks and other conserved lands, in cities, suburbs and in rural places. I also expect to discuss how open space produces benefits that cross sectors - for example, open space has been shown to produce improvements to health and serve as transportation infrastructure (as with greenways), as well as meeting recreation needs. 

View the Donjek five-page summary here.

Photo: Post Office Square in Boston; courtesy of Flickr.

Donjek Project: Minneapolis Downtown Open Space Initiative

The year's twilight is a good time to add a postscript to a previous item I wrote, at that time introducing work undertaken to help the City of Minneapolis evaluate the prospect of converting downtown land area to open space. Since that post in fall, 2007, Donjek has been engaged on projects in a similar vein in Little Rock, Arkansas and I have written a number of short commentary pieces on that project and issues surrounding parks.

The City of Minneapolis' Department of Community Planning and Economic Development (CPED) recently posted the full report of the multi-disciplinary team to its website and the document is available by chapter or as a whole here. There is never a "perfect time" to convert land from taxable to tax-exempt use (history suggests the same), and property and sales tax revenues are at a premium across the country today for core public purposes. Still, what is also evident is that other things equal, urban land stands only to become more valuable in the coming decades thanks to transportation logistics, energy policy and climate change. In economists' terms, the opportunity cost of failing to procure open space for downtown dwellers now stands to grow significantly in the future.

Photo: Courtesy of jpnuwat/Flickr.

Donjek Project: Renovation of Little Rock's MacArthur Park

Readers will find continuity in another brief comment on parks:  The Cents of Place blog has touched on the economic value of parks and the multiple layers of significance in a space like Rice Park in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota.

Donjek has been retained to assist in the implementation analysis for MacArthur Park in Little Rock, Arkansas.  In our office, implementation means raising the capital and operating funds required to renovate and operate quality open space into the future.  Partners, which have moved the project for the last twelve months, include lead consultants Conway + Schulte, as well as Oslund and Associates, each of Minneapolis, and the University of Arkansas Design Center and McClelland Engineers of Little Rock and Fayetteville, Arkansas.

MacArthur Park represents an urban open space with significant historic elements and a physical location close to commercial and academic assets, but challenged by the close proximity of two interstate highways in Little Rock.  Over the coming weeks, we will be examining public and private funding mechanisms and their application to MacArthur Park and the realization of community objectives for the space.  

Graphic:  Courtesy of Conway + Schulte

St. Paul's Rice Park: Part Catalyst, Part Message

St. Paul boosters have long sought to present the Rice Park area as a symbol of life here, to audiences near and far. A brief historical retelling reveals how the park and the urban activity that envelops it have always been inseparable, and why.

Rice Park as Catalyst

Nearly ten years before Minnesota gained statehood in 1858, Rice Park was donated to the City of St. Paul as a public square by Henry Rice and John Irvine. The park’s first years were modest in many respects – accounts recall its use for cows’ grazing and as a place to hang linen to dry. With James J. Hill’s Great Northern railroad monopoly in place, lumber and grain enterprise thriving and the city booming by the 1880s, developers erected a panoply of prominent buildings throughout downtown including the Ryan Hotel (1885-1962) and the Pioneer Building (1889-). Rice Park increasingly became a center of the city’s economic and civic life.

The Panic of 1893, as I mentioned in a previous post, represented the most severe economic depression in the nation’s history to date, effectively halting construction downtown. Following recovery, development came to resume in downtown St. Paul – with the Rice Park area in particular focus.

Between 1910 and 1920, three signature structures appeared around the park: The St. Paul Hotel, the Minnesota Club, and the St. Paul Public Library / James J. Hill Reference Library. These joined the Federal Courts Building (now the Landmark Center, pictured), finished in 1901. A report commissioned for historic designation in 2001 noted that

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, business leaders worked toward enhancing St. Paul’s attractiveness for business…Business leaders, including James J. Hill, were active in focusing downtown development on the Rice Park area and ensuring that architecturally designed buildings enhanced the vision they promoted. (St. Paul Heritage Preservation Commission, "Rice Park Historic District Study,” 3).

So committed were business boosters to creating noteworthy space around the park, the Business League – forerunner to the chamber of commerce – raised $125,000 to purchase the site for the St. Paul Hotel, a sum equivalent to over $2.7 million in today’s dollars.

Between the 1930s and the 1960s, Rice Park and its surroundings endured a period of neglect, during which both the park and the buildings were threatened and saved. In the 1970s and 1980s, activists saved the Federal Courts Building from demolition, and a major renovation of the hotel moved the main entrance to face the park rather than the core of downtown. Again, capital from the private market and public sector followed a path to the park’s perimeter. The construction of the Ordway Center and a recent renovation of the St. Paul Public Library have reestablished the Rice Park area in the mold envisioned by Hill and others in the early twentieth century.

Rice Park as a Message

Braided into the narrative of Rice Park’s inception and development, its period of decline and restoration, is the notion of the park as a physical message to audiences beyond downtown, beyond city limits, around the country.

One hundred years ago, the grand opening of the St. Paul Hotel was attended by the governors of both Minnesota and North Dakota, the mayors of St. Paul and Minneapolis, magnate James J. Hill, Archbishop John Ireland and others. Clearly, the hotel’s parkside construction was viewed as a significant statement to a broader audience.

In September, the park will transmit a message to the nation when 45,000 Republican activists and reporters come to St. Paul for the party’s national convention, to be held in the Xcel Center, located just one block from Rice Park.

Anthony Andler is the proprietor of Heimie’s Haberdashery, a men’s clothing store located in the historic Hamm Building in the Rice Park area. Said Andler this week, “when I started my business, I asked myself, ‘what do I love about this city and how can I help others experience that?’” When I heard these words, I imagined the same sentiments exchanged at Business League meetings one hundred years ago. At that time, boosters answered this question by leveraging a public space and investing heavily in the design and construction of the buildings around it.

“Windows say something: They say, ‘here we are and here’s what we do’,” Andler says about Heimie’s. Rice Park is itself a window, through which residents and visitors view how St. Paul pictures itself – characterized by lasting and traditional architecture, a meeting of public and private sectors. It also suggests that after a hundred years, the people of St. Paul continue to be inspired by the place created by this combination of open space and buildings, by the joining of past and present.

Photos:  Courtesy of Maggie Osterberg and H. Head, Flickr.

Include Financial Sustainability in Comprehensive Planning

Sustainability will get lots of ink in this decade’s comprehensive plans for local governments.  And, to be sure, as is evident from past posts, I agree there are many good reasons for planning and development to reflect environmental costs and other externalities ignored by previous generations.

Still, one critical form of sustainability will remain largely invisible:  Financial sustainability. 

As cities allocate resources to develop workforce, cultural amenities, quality schools, housing stock, multiple modes of transportation and other initiatives, comprehensive plans must establish an approach for financing these core public functions.  Not only is this as critical as ever, it is also potentially at its most difficult.  Two suggestions for how planners and citizens engaged in this work can consider financial sustainability:

Developing alternatives to the property tax will strengthen cities’ financial stability for years to come; failing to do so will be at a community’s own risk. Beyond the anecdote that seniors are on fixed incomes and are therefore more sensitive to property tax increases, this fall’s polling for school referenda reveal a heightened antipathy to this funding source by voters ages 45-65.  Evidence from the 2006 elections nationally suggests that property taxes are a watershed issue for voters – and the stakes are high for candidates who promise to “solve the problem.”  Long-term public planning needs to include both some analysis of alternatives to the current form of property tax as well as concerted education about the fact that public services aren’t free. 

The relationship between local governments and their state and federal counterparts has shifted in recent years, and the shift may be long term or permanent in nature.  In Minnesota, local government aid (“LGA”) reductions have received much attention as the source of diminished services and increased property taxes; a list of Minnesota cities and the LGA received from 2002-2007 is included here.  The infrastructure and services required for future urban development (in a physical sense and in terms of human resources and capacity) are in Minnesota provided primarily by cities, counties and school districts:  Streets, stormwater and wastewater, to start.

More quality analysis is available today than ever before that reveals the many factors contributing to a robust residential tax base.  Data is available to evaluate the impact of physical amenities integral to formation of a comprehensive plan, on property values and tax base.  For example, view articles examining a comparison of high-profile, big-ticket arts investments to neighborhood arts facilities; the impact of a quality K12 system on local property values; and how nearby parks boost home values.  The volumes of data available through residential listing services even allow valuations of a single mature tree (in 2002, its minimum value was estimated to be $10,000) in a residential yard.

With multiple chapters to update, it’s difficult for municipalities to explore each issue in detail.  Moreover, readers will fairly note that social and political issues transcend municipal boundaries, making efforts to reduce reliance on property taxes (for example) very difficult. However, with federal and state support ebbing, local governments cannot afford not to consider financial sustainability in their long-term planning process, property taxes and all.

GIS map courtesy of Prof. Paul Lorah, University of St. Thomas.

Interview with Author John Crompton on Property Value and Public Investment

Investment in public facilities – whether in transportation, water treatment, education or open space – is an influential dynamic in urban real estate markets.  A prominent voice on the interaction between park amenities and property values is Dr. John Crompton, Distinguished Professor of Recreation, Park and Tourism Sciences at Texas A&M University.  John is author of fifteen books on this and related subjects, and has written a multitude of articles exploring the economic impact of green spaces.

 

In addition to his analytic work at the university, John was elected to the College Station City Council in 2006.  I reached him in College Station for an interview yesterday, focusing on the challenges associated with understanding the relationship between public investment in parks and healthy tax base.

Notably, John’s list of publications is growing this month, with the release of his recent book, “Community Benefits and Repositioning:  The Keys to Park and Recreations’ Future Viability.”  The publisher’s notes describe the content, which promises to be powerful for public and private interests working to leverage the economic and other benefits of open space:

Crompton demonstrates that the success of park and recreation agencies in securing tax funding will depend on the extent to which they are perceived by elected officials to contribute to alleviating high priority community problems. He identifies nineteen community-wide benefits that park and recreation services can deliver and provides a concise three-page executive review which summarizes the scientific findings supporting each of those claims.

Listen to a seven-minute excerpt here; the file is nearly 1MB.

Photo of Amsterdam Museumplein courtesy of Jos Mecklenfeld.