EP 09: Reshaping Suburbia
A question dangles before populous states that grew with low-density development in the 20th century: What do we do now? Planning and development preferences aren't what they used to be. Today they favor higher-density, walkable, mixed use layouts, and local governments far and wide are wondering how to best reshape the traditionally spread-out suburban spaces. "What is the local government's role in this transition? How does a city or county encourage the redevelopment of suburban spaces? And what are the practical and political implications?" Those are questions posed by UNC School of Government Assistant Professor Adam Lovelady, our guest on this episode. If one thing's for sure, he says, it's a complex issue. Show notes: Report, "Reshaping Suburban Spaces: Lessons from North Carolina Cities" - https://www.sog.unc.edu/publications/reports/reshaping-suburban-spaces-lessons-north-carolina-cities
Top Keywords
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- transit 0.006
Transcript
On this episode of Municipal Equation. My focus here is on redevelopment. It really is changing the place. And so going from a vacant big box store to a mixed use apartment and walkable density area or taking the old garden apartment complexes that may have seen better times and redeveloping that into a town center. And so I'm really focused on a transition of the place from suburban to a more, walkable able urban
place. Reshaping suburbia. How it's done, what the questions are, and what tomorrow is gonna look like. My name is Ben Brown and this is Municipal Equation from the North Carolina League of Municipalities, episode nine.
Let's examine the typical metropolitan area of the nineteen twenties, just a generation ago. Here at the heart of the city, a concentration of shops, business offices, hotels, apartments, factories. Farther out, pleasant middle income residential areas. Rapid transit lines fanning out in a half dozen directions to the city limits. A few miles beyond, a ring of sleepy little towns that housed local trades people and upper income businessmen from the city. Each suburban town had its own government, its own community services. There was no overall planning agency for the area. No one foresaw the need for such an agency. Neither the city nor its satellites prepared for change because none of them expected change. Not even when the family car arrived on the American scene in a big way, bringing new homes, new families to the suburban fringe. Depression halted that first tentative expansion throughout the nineteen thirties, and World War two brought housing construction to a standstill for the first half of the nineteen forties. Then they came back from the war. 15,000,000 GIs clamoring for new homes and a piece of land in the country. Almost overnight, suburbia was born. A half million homes sprang up around the country in 1946, Nearly a million in 1947. A million in 1948. Still more in 1949, 1950. The empty farmlands, the quiet towns and villages surrounding the city found themselves in the midst of a roaring housing boom. New developments on every hand. Some well planned, well designed, blending naturally into the terrain. Some seem to have been thrown together in monotonous rows, as the project builders raced to keep up with the demand for more and more homes. Where the families moved, the trade and service facilities followed, and the factories moved with them. Land costs soared everywhere. The old rule of thumb that land represents 10% of the cost of house and lot went by the boards. The ratio climbed to 15, in some places to 20% and more, squeezing hard on the limited budgets of home buyers. And the builders moved farther and farther out in search of good development land. Bypassed expensive or difficult terrain, leaving undeveloped islands behind them. Wherever the new subdivisions went, they created problems for the unprepared communities of the new suburbia. More taxes for more and more schools, roads, sewer and water lines, more of everything to service the swelling population. The hard pressed communities.
In episode eight, we talked with economic and social trends expert Joel Kotkin, who gave a lot of credit to low density development, especially the suburbs, as a place that can serve people quite well, contrary to what a lot of people say. And as a place where city loving young people eventually will want to be when they reach an age where high density apartment living might lose its desirability. We're gonna continue examining the suburbs in this episode. And yeah, a lot of scorn has been cast on the suburbs over the decades. There's a ton of writing and documentary work out there about the development of the suburbs and sprawl and we won't cover that here. You heard plenty of that at the start of this episode and, that was a clip from a reel called Community Growth, Crisis and Challenge. That was something that the National Association of Home Builders put out in the late nineteen fifties. Instead, we're gonna talk with the author of a new report about the future of suburbia and a question on the minds of a lot of municipal leaders And that is, how do we update suburbia for tomorrow or even for today? And what role do the people have in that? What role does local government have in that? Adam Lovelady is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina's School of Government. And he's put out some recent findings on what's happening in a shifting area, specifically North Carolina, where high growth in the twentieth century followed a spread out low density pattern. Communities now are trying to figure out the best way to move into more compact mixed use development. Some of these findings might easily relate to what's happening in other states. The report is called Reshaping Suburban Spaces. So, give us some background on where this report began and what the purpose was. And, in that, maybe talk briefly about suburbia, what the trends and transitions have been over time, and why today we're talking about, as your report says, reshaping suburban spaces.
This is the the discussion around, reshaping suburban spaces, retrofitting suburbia, redeveloping cities and surrounding areas, that's a discussion that's been going on for decades, really. Mhmm. And, and it's been approached from a lot of different directions, from a design perspective, from a, local government and, kind of municipal authority direction, from metropolitan governance direction. So it's been discussed in lots of different ways. And I think it's become an especially important topic in the last decade or fifteen years as there has been a real shift in the market preferences and the demographics toward denser, more walkable areas. Right. And away from, not completely away from, but less of a desire for, kind of conventional suburban development. And there's a whole variety of reasons for that and there's plenty of demographers and economists that know a lot more about all of that than I do. But certainly in in Southeastern and Sunbelt cities like those in North Carolina, Texas, Georgia, and elsewhere, Florida and elsewhere across the the South, A lot of those places grew up in the second half of the twentieth century Mhmm. When development was very much focused on, developing with the car in mind. And so it was Right. Single family homes that were, pretty much accessed by, an individual automobile. It was shopping centers that were, mostly parking lot with a shopping center to the back. And it was designed and developed very purposely, with the with the car in mind. And that remains the predominant way that most of our North Carolina cities most of the built environment of our North Carolina cities. That's the that's kind of the the way that our cities are set up. That's right. There's a lot of value for that. There's a lot of autonomy in having your own car, being able to scoot around where you wanna go. But then when we all have our own car and we all scoot around where we want to go, we wind up with traffic jams. And and so we built out, many of our cities through the twentieth century with that kind of low density automobile focused development pattern. And then in the last kind of ramping up in the last ten or fifteen years, there has been an increased interest in walkable areas with a mix of uses. As that market has shifted, the developers have tried to provide that and the local governments have tried to, figure out how do they accommodate that change, how do they, in some cases, encourage that change from a suburban area to a more urban area?
And what's the role for the local government there? Right. Yeah. This obviously has private market interests, but it also concerns the public sector. So how are local governments going about this in facilitating these updates to suburban landscapes?
Yeah. Well, in lots of different ways. Oftentimes, it starts with the planning process, a study identifying that, that there's kind of changes on the horizon and trying to to make plans for how they're going to address that. Mhmm. Cary right now is going through a comprehensive planning process. And one of the topics that certainly for a community like Gary is some of the older suburban areas, the older malls, what will become of those and, what's the city role in that process. And then with with plans in place, then it's a question of implementation. And, my focus has been the legal tools. There's other, tools available to local governments, but just because of my, background as a land use attorney, I really focus on the legal tools both on the zoning regulatory side of things as well as the public finance and local government finance side of things. I was really struck as I one of the things that kind of captured my attention early on was the town of Chapel Hill, using three different approaches to zoning, to land use regulation for three different suburban redevelopment projects. They are all very close to each other. And just a really interesting, kind of, it it captured how local governments are really experimenting with different tools and trying to figure out ways to approach this, somewhat new issue,
with the tools that they have at hand. So legal tools you mentioned, are are there special, financing tools, ways to kinda speed up or incentivize these efforts that towns are playing with?
Yeah. There sure are. There are a variety of of financing tools that are available to to North Carolina municipalities and counties. And then looking at other states, there's a whole there's a much broader range of financial tools that some other, localities are using. I focused on North Carolina, municipalities and and the authority in North Carolina. And, it's it it is the full range of financing tools that they've had available to them for a while. One of one of my overarching questions is kind of thinking about, really these these legal and financing tools, cities have been using them in downtown spaces for decades. Mhmm. And so it's kind of a question of how do these fit into a, how do these fit into a suburban space? And really, it's kind of it's just picking up the same tools and using them just in a different, different setting, a different space.
To cut in real quick for anyone who doesn't know, some of these tools essentially give a boost to the private developer for work that ultimately comes back and benefits the public. For example, the local government might invest in roads or storm water infrastructure or even neighboring park space for a project. The government might also acquire and sell the developer the site to develop. There are additionally economic development grants that a local government can put together for a developer, though all of this might be limited or shaped by state law and it'll vary state to state. But again, the bottom line is investing in something that's going to benefit the public, which is something local government does all the time. Here's Adam Lovelady again.
On the one hand, there's no need for innovative or kind of newfangled financing tools. I mean, cities can use, their conventional financing tools that they've been using, to to fund public improvements. So that might be, using general revenues or general bonds, seeking specific bonds to address public infrastructure needs in these areas. But then there's also more targeted and, I wouldn't say more aggressive, just more targeted financing tools, things like municipal service districts or also called business improvement districts Right. Right. Where you can identify a certain area that's gonna pay additional, taxes Mhmm. But that's going to support additional services and infrastructure for that space. And so you you've that's been used in downtown spaces for a while, and now we're starting to see it, in more suburban redevelopment spaces. So Chapel Hill is using a municipal service district for one of its redevelopment areas. I've heard discussions that some of the developers of the South Park area in Charlotte are looking at that, kind of a business improvement district as an option for funding the needed, public improvement or funding the needed infrastructure improvements in that space because of the, great increase in density they've seen over the last fifteen years.
To take it to a higher altitude, in a general sense, we know what the word redevelopment means, but your report was very careful and intentional on defining what we mean by redevelopment in this context. What does redevelopment mean for suburbia?
It can be a whole range of things. My focus here is on redevelopment. It really is changing the place. And so going from a a vacant, big box store to a mixed use, kind of, apartment, and walkable density area or taking the, the old, garden apartment complexes that may have seen better times and redeveloping that into a town center. And so I'm really focused on a transition of the place from suburban to a more, walkable urban place. But you see examples of redevelopment in suburbia, covering the full range of of options. And so there's lots of good examples of the vacant big box store, being repurposed as a public library or as a church or as, a new big box store, just being upfitted for, a more modern version. Okay. There's also examples, especially in areas where there's not a strong market that's pushing for new residential units or new retail, taking those, those blighted suburban commercial areas and just turning them back into parks or, using them for, new public uses that aren't necessarily a, big mixed use development.
And so this impacts construction and layout. You you kinda mentioned this at the beginning. I I can remember going to stores when I was a kid, you know, with gigantic open parking lots, just kinda like the sea of asphalt. And I feel like I don't see that as much in terms of new construction.
Well, there is a lot of communities are changing their, they're changing their parking standards so that there's not as much of a requirement for that sea of parking. Mhmm. Oftentimes, those large parking lots weren't necessarily the retailers demanding them. They may have been required by the local zoning ordinance. And so a lot of what's happening is community is tweaking and adjusting their zoning ordinances so that they're not requiring, that outcome. At the same time, there is there's plenty of growth in our suburban areas, especially on the kind of urban fringe of of new good suburban spaces. And I'm not, I'm not proposing that that those should all be shut down or we need to prohibit, any of those spaces. What I'm really curious about is is those spaces where the communities do want to transition. How did they get from point a to point b? And on that, that makes me think of transportation.
Transportation is a different kind of conversation in the twenty first century than it was a few decades ago. And certainly, when the suburbs became popular. How does transportation and connectivity play into all of this? Yeah. It's a it's a big factor
and, sometimes unwieldy factor. The certainly, a lot of this discussion nationally happens around transit oriented development and fixed rail transit, where there's significant public investment in light rail or heavy rail or streetcars. And then there is the private development that comes along beside or behind that infrastructure investment and really reshapes suburban places with that with that infrastructure investment. There certainly are examples of that happening in Charlotte where they do have light rail. But for most of our North Carolina communities, fixed rail is not a current reality. It may not even be a future reality. And so the so I focus less on the the while I touch on on, rail transit, it's not, a key question for me. Also, that's rail transit winds up being, you have to cover several layers of government, for the funding of that. And so I was really focused on what municipalities can do. That said, there are lots of options for creating transportation alternatives and options through redevelopment and through good planning and investment by municipalities. Some of that is a good bus network including bus traffic transit, which we're seeing, kind of on the horizon for some North Carolina communities. Some of that is, providing for on-site options, so creating a street network that connects through to neighborhoods and allows for multiple routes, so that it's not so that not every car trip is required to go out to the to the highway, and create that congestion, creating networks for bicycles and pedestrians so that there's, so there's it's not a requirement or an expectation that every trip has to be made in a car. And as you see, a a place have a more of a mix of uses than if, you know, if there's offices, restaurants and retail, some residences, then when the office workers are headed to lunch, they don't have to get in their car and go for a trip to, down the road to the restaurant. They can walk to the restaurant that's downstairs. When, some of the some of the restaurant workers can potentially live in the apartments, above the store. And so you can see some reduced, or some reduction in those number of car trips. Right. That said, as these, I mean, the suburban communities, real and really all of our communities, they are car dependent, and they will remain car dependent for the the foreseeable future. And so it's a transition that's happening, and It's not gonna be overnight that, people give up the car keys and can, hop on the the light rail train to get where they wanna go. So parking and addressing parking over the long term is one of the real challenges for this transition of figuring out how to handle that current needs of parking that may change over time.
So with the suburbs being car designed or car focused, there was a guest on our last episode who said that he saw the suburbs becoming more self contained over time. Self contained areas where residents don't have to leave as much. Do you see suburbs maybe heading in that direction where it's less about a morning and evening long, you know, commute to and from the city and more about a place where you can stay put, kind of a self contained area? Yeah. It's it's a good question. And,
they I think there's lots of ways and lots of transitions that are gonna happen, certainly over the next, over the coming decades. Mhmm. One of the things that, one of the pieces of this reshaping of suburban spaces, one of the elements of this transition is places that are quintessentially suburban trying to diversify and redefine themselves. Right. To create a town center where they didn't, where they didn't have one. To create a, more of a a mix of uses and some options for some different options for housing, or they may have been basically a bedroom community with only single family homes. And so I certainly I certainly see, communities, trying to to not be so dependent on just single family homes but to have a mix of options and, and and to have a, some kind of housing alternatives. I think that at the same time, many of our communities are interdependent and, jobs happen across regions, across municipal lines. And so it it is, it seems to me that it's still a while until, a, there's little villages within the region that are kind of self contained. And I think that increases in in transit and increases in both both rail transit as well as bus transit will help support those, kind of having both sides of that so that you have some contained and kind of complete communities and villages within a region, but then you also have connectivity between those nodes in the region. And and certainly telecommuting, plays into that transition. The the autonomy a lot of talk recently about autonomous cars and the way how that plays into traffic and transit over the coming years. There's plenty of other folks who know more about that than I do. But it does raise interesting questions about what what are our needs for infrastructure, what are our needs for parking, and how will we get around, in ten years?
In terms of demand, the report mentions a couple forums that were held earlier this year that focused on this conversation, this problem, at least in the Tar Heel state. How did that go down? Who came out and what were people saying?
Yeah. So we, the school of government hosted two forums focused on these topics. One was in Charlotte. The other was in Raleigh. And, it was, very, very targeted invitation for local government staff from various departments in various cities that are facing these issues and and addressing these issues right now. And so, from one community, it might be, someone from the city planning office, someone from the city attorney's office, from the city manager's office, and from the finance office. And they would send that team of of kind of representing different offices to the forum. And then at the forum it was representatives from nine or 10 different jurisdictions from around that region. And it was set up as a day long workshop where we both we had speakers that talked about some of these topics but then also had a lot of opportunity for dialogue across jurisdictions and across departments and hands on case studies to really dig into some of these issues and see how different communities are approaching them and what new options, what new solutions might be available for communities to use. And so it was certainly a chance for communities to share with one another, for departments within one community to collaborate and work on these issues together, and then also to help improve and refine this report so that it's addressing the topics that the city is really facing. Okay. Okay. And,
were there any hot central topics that lent to what the demand might be or what the visions might be for suburban areas in the future?
Well, one of the, one of the reasons for structuring the discussion with the way we did and having folks from different departments, it's a really complex issue. And it's not it's not something that public works can go take care of or not something that it's just a planning issue. It really touches on all of the departments within a municipality. And so it was there was not, one single topic that rose to the top as, oh, this is the this is the key issue. I think my takeaway was, this is a complex issue and communities are approaching it in lots of different ways and trying new things. And even within one community, they are facing lots of different challenges across the community. And so you a place like Charlotte, where they've got examples of three old malls from the 1960s and 70s with three very different stories of of investment and reinvestment and redevelopment between the South Park Mall that is continuing to boom and the private sector is really redeveloping around it. You've got the old Charlottetown Mall that has already been torn down and rebuilt through a public private partnership, rebuilt as a kind of mixed use development. And then you've got the the Eastland Mall that, struggled for was a thriving mall and then struggled for some years. The city bought it and tore it down with plans of, selling it to a developer for for redevelopment. But those plans didn't pan out. And so now the city is still trying to figure out what do we do with the space and how do we transition it and get it redeveloped. And so even even within one community, lots of different approaches and lots of different challenges depending on where you are in the community.
So trying to figure out how to reshape suburbia, it's it's not just a financial challenge. It's not just a planning challenge. It's a political challenge too. Right?
Oh, certainly. Yes. This is yeah. It's it is a hot button political issue. And, again, it kinda depends on where you are in the community and and, what the what the surrounding area and the surrounding politics are like. It's there's not, there's certainly not a uniform approach or uniform politics around this topic. Many of these communities, suburban communities, folks bought their homes in that area because they wanted, a suburban space. They wanted low density. They wanted single family homes. They wanted lots of trees. And they see the cranes show up and the bulldozers show up and they see these new apartments going up. And there's a lot of anxiety and and anger about that because it's not the community that they bought into. It's not the vision that they have for their community. And there's also then the challenges of, what was the the new mall or the new big box store that is now sitting vacant and empty and weeds are growing in the parking lot. And folks saying, well, I bought into this suburban space or this suburban community. But now that the new development, the new investment has gone on to the next jurisdiction or the next county, how do we how do we redefine ourselves? How do we reinvest and and get new investment? And, so there's a a mix of perspectives and a and a mix of politics around it. It also, within a jurisdiction, raises a lot of questions about equity. And if if a city is choosing to invest in certain places, that means those dollars aren't available to to invest in other places. And so it's, there's a there's as with everything in in local government as with everything in any government, but especially local government, those those challenges of equity are always there.
Are there conversations about making these redeveloped suburbs more adaptable to future needs? So fifty years from now, we're not back to a complete,
teardown and rebuild, so to speak? Yes. There are conversations around that. They're still working through I don't know that anybody's really figured it out yet, but it is, it is a a challenge to figure out what will be, what will be resilient and what will be, adaptable for whatever new use or whatever new idea comes along in twenty years that we can't even think of now. Right. Right. Like, trying to to truly, anticipate self driving cars thirty years ago, for instance. Right. And so, I mean, you can think back to not that long ago when a lot of North Carolina towns had these old mills that were sitting empty. And people, I'm sure, were wondering, what will we ever do with these old mills? Who would ever want to do anything with these things? We should just tear them down. And, of course, now those are some of the most desired places for, for offices and residential lofts and Right. Redevelopment, because of the character and the history that they have behind them and the, the desire to be in those historic buildings. And so, to some extent, I think we are well, we clearly are blind to the future. We don't know what the next trend is going to be or the next idea is going to be. And so there's some extent to which we can't really we can't we can't do a very good job of of planning out for how will this be retrofitted in the future. That said, there are little increments that we can do. And you're already seeing, things like structured parking decks being developed in a way so that in the future, that can be retrofitted for actual, habitable space because we're gonna need less cars, whether it's through transit or through autonomous vehicles or through more, complete communities where people don't need cars as much. And so developers are already looking at, well, how can we, build this parking deck now so that in the future it could be office space or residential units or something else? And in the same way, there are, interesting approaches to the increments of development and allowing for incremental development. And so not requiring the developer to build out everything to the full scale now, But to realize that this this large project is going to be built out in phases over time, it might need adjustment over time. And so then it might be that, some buildings are built for the short term. They might be temporary one story buildings, that in the future are going to be moved and then a three or four story building will go in its place. Or the surface parking lot is merely a temporary holding place, and in the future that will be a hotel or an apartment complex. And you already see that that's that's happening in developments right now where the the parking lot is there for five or ten years, and then it's redeveloped as, part of the development.
So just to kind of encapsulate everything, what do you think the suburbs are going to look like in twenty years?
It will be diverse. One of the challenges of this discussion is, kind of the discussion around reshaping suburbia is the suburbs are not a monolith. It it they are very different and unique places, with different politics and different demographics and different stories. And so there will be a real diversity of suburban places, in twenty years. There will be some that have reframed themselves and reshaped themselves into something that's almost unrecognizable from what they are now. There will be some that have used, zoning and preservation and other tools to preserve their low density and their current form and, they may succeed with that or they may have challenges with that. Right. And, so it there will be a real diversity of of places as these as these communities continue to change. And it's also worth noting that oftentimes we think of the suburbs as jurisdictions, as those bedroom towns and villages outside kind of on the periphery of the central city. In a place like North Carolina, our central cities are very suburban and so our our even our biggest cities, Charlotte and Raleigh, most of their area is low density suburban development. It's just in in pockets and nodes where they have high density high density development. And so really, it's all of our communities that will be going through this transition and and, seeing change over the coming years.
So what's the bottom line, with your report? What do you think the the key takeaway is?
I think the key takeaway is there are a variety of tools that are available for local governments, and many communities are experimenting with those and trying to see how they can allow or facilitate or even encourage reshaping of some of their older suburban areas. And some of that's working, some of that's finding some challenges, and communities will continue to to go through that evolution and and, try to find find their way into the future. And the report's available online, right, for anyone who wants to see it? Sure. So it's on the School of Government website. And, so if you Google UNC School of Government, and then on that site search for reshaping suburban spaces,
you should be able to track it down. Joshua Klobuch (zero fifty seven:forty seven): Great. Well, Adam Lovelady, we really do appreciate you taking the time to explain this to us. Joshua Klobuch (zero fifty seven:fifty seven): Glad to hear. Definitely take the time to read this report. It's not a terribly long read and there are a lot of insights in there. One thing I want to highlight is how it breaks down how and when a local government should consider using one of these legal tools or one of these financing tools. Here are some considerations. Real estate market conditions and demographic indicators. Level of blight, deterioration and under utilization. Number of owners and willingness for district fees. Types and needs of public infrastructure, ability to repay financing, and public ownership of land and the opportunity for redevelopment. All of this, obviously, should be taken under the umbrella of public and future interest. And one extra, the UNC School of Government has something called the Development Finance Initiative which partners with local governments to analyze all of this. The group can evaluate redevelopment opportunities, market factors, what legal or financing tools might be the best bet, and examination of the development proposals that come in. Just do a search for Development Finance Initiative UNC if you want to learn more. Lastly, I'm glad this episode came together. It almost didn't because of Hurricane Matthew which knocked out power in the studio and caused quite a bit of flood damage, but nothing nothing like what we've seen elsewhere in the storm's path. So we hope all of our listeners are okay. We hope everyone is okay. And where possible, please consider donating to a legitimate relief effort and be aware of charity scams that seem to crop up after disasters like this. In the meantime, please reach out. Let me know what you think of this episode and let me know if you have ideas for future episodes. Get up with me at bbrown@nclm.org. NCLM stands for North Carolina League of Municipalities, which makes this podcast possible. Nclm.0rg. All past episodes are at soundcloud.com/municipalequation. My name is Ben Braille. Keep in touch.
