One of the most surprising things about each of my two or three trips back to Boise every year is that once-sleepy Boise does surprise me, every time I come back. Or at least it had, until the last few trips, when the go-go growth finally started to slow. Driving into town from the West, you see the developments encroaching closer and closer to the Oregon border, spreading like the cheatgrass that finds its way onto any bare spot of land and takes hold out here, next to impossible dislodge. The small to medium-sized towns of Caldwell, Nampa, Meridian, Eagle and Kuna are spreading eastward, while Boise extends westward, and there are few stretches of more than a couple of miles in this approach to Boise that remain completely empty.
Likewise, the interstate itself sprawls out at one absurd point to six lanes, bottlenecking too quickly back down to two as you get to the downtown exits, traffic siphoned off to the "connector," a shortcut from one side of town to other, built unfortunately to California specs, so that every winter it turns to sheer ice in a snow storm or a freeze, causing multiple daily accidents. But it gets the vast amount of cars that now have to travel to either side of town, or in from the outskirts where it's a bit cheaper to live, to their destinations. And it takes a lot of cars, because Boise's transit--never even adequate in large swathes of the city--has become downright pathetic in the face of growing populations and greater sprawl.
In town, new shopping centers have finally stopped popping up all over, but the housing developments have started lagging more recently. Just below the bench where my parents' house is is the Boise River floodplain. When my family moved here 32 years ago, the whole expanse below us was agricultural, most of it a large horse ranch. Within the last decade, it's all been swallowed up by tonier and tonier developments. What was half-rural and the outskirts three decades ago is now the desirable Boise zip code, thanks to a planning and zoning board that will grant pretty much any developer pretty much anything he wants, flood potential be damned. And a legislature that seems to be dominated by men living in 1959 and all on farms.
Boise isn't unique among mountain west cities in this vastly and rapidly changing profile. In fact, it's pretty much prototypical, which made it a fantastic venue for a two-day conference I attended this week, NewWest.net's Planning in the West: A Conversation about Our Future. The first day was devoted to pre-conference tours around the city, focused on art and architecture in streetscapes, mixed use and infill, and renewable energy projects. The second day featured panel discussions and speeches from leading planners, developers, and students of the West. All of it was focused on how we could try to tame the beast of rapid growth, and find a way to develop out here for--get ready for the buzzwords--sustainable communities.
My chosen tour was "infill and mixed use," a mixed bag of new developments around the city. The first was the most interesting to me, the focused redevelopment of a forgotten part of historic downtown Boise, the Linen District, centered around a fantastic renovation of the Linen Building, a 1910 structure that spent most of its life as the American Laundry Building--the only laundry in the country operating for most of the last century using geothermal power and water. A handful of other stops included another mixed retail/residential development on yet another floodplain, some reasonably priced and well-built condos in a re-emerging neighborhood close to downtown, downtown living in a high-rise squeezed into a lot eighteen feet wide, between a parking garage and Front Street (the building cantilevers about six feet out over the street starting on the third floor, and featuring a massive, 4,300 square foot penthouse), more downtown condos, and one of those floodplain developments my parents overlook.
"Mixed use" in Boise hasn't really quite reached the level that most of us from larger cities think of it as. None of these developments included any basic services in the retail part. None had grocery stores or drug stores or necessary services within walking distance. Only one could be considered remotely affordable, though all made some effort--and one extraordinary effort--to use energy efficient and sustainable designs. With that experience to mull over, I was ready for what the region's thinkers were going to have to say about all this development.
Follow me below the fold for that.
In a day of sessions, the gathering was focused on the key issues facing planners today: the challenges faced in an economic downturn; how to turn the buzzword of “sustainability” to actual, on the ground planning; moving beyond planning to sustainable design in order to foster stronger communities; and the granddaddy of all issues--how to save the region in the face of the massive growth facing it. The thread throughout the day was the idea of community, and how to plan in a region where the sentiment for unfettered private property rights tends to overwhelm the desire for planning growth.
There was strong consensus among the participants that an engaged community can help overcome some of the natural hostility to bureaucracy, but getting them to the table can be the largest part of the problem. Outside of offering free food for coming to meetings, citizen engagement over the long term remains a challenge. It might be fun to show up for the “visioning” session of what you want your community to be, but how is that translated to the dry job of creating the nuts and bolts of ordinances, zoning regulations, all those things that make the average person’s eyes glaze over.
Interestingly, another theme regularly emerged about where the housing markets were heading in the face of the economic downturn. It seems that is actually has provided some interesting opportunities in planning. It’s changed market demand in some areas for more centralized, less car-dependent, and smaller homes. It’s created more of a demand for city officials to worry about “taking care of the basics,” making sure that the things like transit, water and other utility services are well maintained and responsive to citizen needs. One of the downsides of the economic downturn--slowed development--has created an upturn in the opportunity to have some breathing room, allowing for some evaluation of the impact of the development boom in the region.
The first Keynote speaker Christopher Duerksen had perhaps the most important point of the day: how to make sure that "sustainability," remains more than just a marketing term, but an actual fundamental principle in design. He gave the example of a new development in rural Colorado that is touting itself as a a carbon-neutral development, but that is located five miles from the nearest town with a grocery store, and 15 miles from a town that provides other services. Isolated from bus service, residents could have an energy efficient, carbon neutral home, but lose all the benefits of that when they have to get in their car to accomplish anything. That kind of greenwashing, using the kinds of language that appeals to a market that’s increasingly concerned about living sustainably, Duerksen argues, has to be combated by planners on the look-out for it, who can create sustainable codes on so many levels: energy, food supply, public health and safety, habitat protection.
Carrying on the sustainability theme, the next panel represented some planners and officials in the thick of it, from more urban communities including Seattle, LA, Boise, and Denver. The takeaway from this panel was that demand is increasing in these urban areas for sustainability, which includes mixed development--allowing mixed commercial, residential, public services. Those market demands have led to more and more developers factoring in green and sustainable developments. In the Seattle area, and much of California, the standard for any development now is a silver LEED. That’s the new reality for urban areas, and likely to filter down to smaller localities in the coming decade.
That point was brought forcefully home by Dr. Arthur “Chris” Nelson, professor of planning at the University of Utah, who had some astounding projections for growth in Idaho’s Snake River Corridor--from Idaho Falls to Ontario, Oregon. The region could reach a population of two million by 2050, according to his modeling, creating a need for nearly 300 billion new square feet of development. The demographic profile of that population growth is going to have as massive an impact on the housing needs forty years hence as the sheer numbers involved. The population is aging, and there are growing numbers of childless families, and singles. The housing needs for those demographics will dramatically change the demand for housing in the region. This presentation, more than anything, brought home the need for sustainable planning--conservation of energy, of water, of open space--to begin now, ahead of the demand curve.
Some experiments in sustainable planning and development were featured in the remaining sessions, including a fascinating mapping project in Montana's Bitter Root Valley. One of my personal sacred spaces, because so much of it remains unchanged from when Lewis and Clark first journeyed through it over 200 years ago, the planning project undertaken by the community wasn't focused on the physical geography of the place, but the cultural heritage of it. The community was brought into an effort to protect the valley's watersheds by being asked to tell their stories about the place, to make the personal connection between place, past and future, that should be guiding decisions about how its developed. Another presentation was about a visionary new mixed-use development in Arvada, Colorado that is truly carbon-neutral, with essential services built-in, along with a mix of low, moderate, and market rate housing opportunities in multiple, single-family, and co-housing arrangements. It includes water-permeable streets, rain gardens for water collection, community gardens, and even optimal housing placement--a checkerboard pattern within blocks--for optimal solar exposure. We also had the mundane--the arduous experience of Salt Lake City in trying to expand transit.
There were some really visionary ideas floated around among the participants, ideas that you could see were starting to gel for folks who are just having to start to grapple with the problems of having too many damned people for the available infrastructure. Watching the cross-pollination of ideas--tiny Victor, Idaho's Envision Project, Salt Lake's light rail, Boise's nascent urban farm program--take hold was a fascinating thing. This conference seems to have marked the beginning for some of the region's key planners and developers to start trying to grapple with managing the growth the region has already seen and that is only going to increase once the economy improves. It seems their primary challenge is going to be getting their political and elected counterparts to keep up with them.
But there were also some critical discussions that were largely missing. Most glaring was fundamental economics. The tour around Boise set me to thinking about whether the city was going to grow in smart ways and in ways that would allow for decent affordable housing in neighborhoods that don't require cars. Except for a developer in the Denver area, and a Seattle planning official, the issue of how to make sustainability affordable to everyone was rarely discussed. These are issues that the larger cities have had to deal with for decades, but while we are still in hard times, something every town and city in the region should be confronting head on, and sooner rather than later. The region as a whole has been so go-go, grow-grow, affordability hasn’t been as critical an issue in development. Building "ranchettes" and second homes, or keep-up-with-Joneses granite-countertopped McMansions, or high-end shopping centers has been the rule for an awful lot of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and Utah planners and developers in the past decade. The economic downturn, however, is going to change all that, and that’s going to be the next hurdle for the region’s planners to face.
The one after that is rapidly diminishing resources, primarily in the form of water--the other issue that could have taken up at least an entire day of discussion, but one that tended to not pop up frequently in the presentations. There are some very real limits to growth in this region, and the primary one is that there just isn't going to be enough water to sustain even the current levels of population for very long, unless we start figuring out how to use less of it. Even then, shifting weather patterns mean we're going to have a lot less of it, starting about now.
I have this indelible image in my head, from my trip last fall around the West. It was in Phoenix, and it was probably about 90 degrees. It was the middle of the day, and my host was driving me around town, showing me the highlights. In one of the most exclusive neighborhoods, all I could see around me was green, green lawns. And there, in the middle of the day in 90 degree heat, sprinklers running. Water pouring down the street's gutter into the storm drain.
Phoenix in general is the cautionary tale for the rest of the West in terms of planning and development. That single scene is the cautionary tale in particular.