"We don't have that opportunity here." What a difference a little city support can make; two streets that are the same age but have totally different characters. ABOVE: A Franklin residential street. BELOW: A Traditional Neighborhood Development-type street in Middleton Hills, WI.
Way back in June of 2007, I wrote a post that featured the pictures above, entitled Traditional Neighborhood Design (TND) in Franklin: Who Will Step Up?
I said:
Franklin has room, opportunity and need for a TND development, yet we see bleak subdivision after bleak subdivision go up, accompanied by malformed commercial developments that serve vehicles and shun people.
You can imagine, then, how my ears perked up at the first Mayoral Ad-Hoc Development Process Review Committee meeting this past Thursday, when I heard Franklin developer Mark Carstensen address some of the frustrations he faces in dealing with the city of Franklin's development process.
He began by reminding the assembled that, when asked, Franklin residents regularly cite "rural character" as one of the elements of our city that they find important.
But what do people mean by "rural character" or "rural feel"?
Carstensen:
Do people really understand what that term means? Versus the suburbs of Milwaukee County; what does it mean? Has it really been defined? Because it can mean a lot of different things; you throw out words that mean a lot of things to different people.
For instance, if I were to take -- and I don’t want to get too long winded here -- but the way things are set up right now...For instance, we did a development up in Mequon a few years back that entertained the idea of clustered development. So they were rewarding developers to, let’s say that you were out in the areas that were not served by sewer yet, and the zoning would require that you could only have one unit per five acres. What the city did was they provided an avenue for the developers to come in and say, look, let’s say you have a tract of land 40 acres, 80 acres, what have you; the real goal here is to preserve green space, the real goal here is to preserve sensitive areas and so forth. If you show us you can condense the footprints of your lots, what we’ll do then is there’ll be a ratio we’ll give you for density.
Therefor we were conserving more green space -- and everybody wins.
So we did that. I think we had a 40-acre parcel property; by the time it was done, the lots themselves, there were seven lots on that development. I think the lots averaged an acre and a half. And the rest was left green space. Very easy.
That's Mequon. Now the bad news for Franklin. Carstensen continues:
We don’t have that opportunity here. When you go through Franklin and you start adding all the disciplines where you can put retention basins, setback requirements from sensitive areas, landscaping ratios; and if you were to create a map to overlay all of these things, you would see that you’re burning up more land and getting less out of that land because we do have to also take a look at the tax base and revenues of the city. And as Randy [Plan Commissioner Randy Ritter, who has been on the commission for 17 years] is pushing for the "70/30" [the city's stated goal of balancing the tax burden at 70 percent residential, 30 percent commercial]; well, if the UDO [Unified Development Ordinance] is forcing you to use up more land to build less, I think it’s pretty easy to understand that you are going to leave what we would call a lot on the table, and not use your land that you can’t replace in the best possible manner and get the most out of it.
So, if nothing else comes of this effort, you have in the statement above some very clear proclamations from the leading developer in Franklin:
A) The current system simply does not allow him to propose and execute the sorts of forward-looking developments that will prove sustainable and create economic growth in Franklin;
B) Nearby communities (in this case, Mequon) are capable of encouraging (and thereby benefiting from) high quality, high demand, smart-growth, tax-base expanding development;
C) A proven hometown developer sees, through personal experience, the economic upside to these sorts of high quality, smart growth developments -- which yield results consistent with the wishes of current residents and the desires of potential residents and businesses-- but plainly feels there is no effective mechanism in place in Franklin by which he can execute them.
Franklin City Attorney Jesse Wesolowski immediately recognized that Carstensen was talking about Traditional Neighborhood Development -- a community design that has seen success across the country -- and pointed out that the concept has been included the Franklin UDO since 2003.
True enough. However, here is the sum total of the Franklin UDO's language regarding Traditional Neighborhood Development:
Page 3-61
“Part 3: Zoning Districts: District Establishment, Dimensional, and Use Regulations”
Planned Development District: Traditional Neighborhood Development Intent. Proposed developments contemplated by an applicant to include design features described as “Traditional Neighborhood Development” in Wisconsin Statutes 66.1027 (1)(c), as amended, may be considered for approval as a “PDD Planned Development District” under the applicable procedures and standards described under Section 15-90208 of this Ordinance and at locations and with conditions determined appropriate by the Common Council with recommendation from the Plan Commission. The document identified as “A Model Ordinance for Traditional Neighborhood Development” dated April 2001 as published by the University of Wisconsin Extension pursuant to Wisconsin Statutes 66.1027(2), serves as the nonexclusive guidebook to assist in further defining the various aspects and elements of the for of URBAN design, along with such other sources of guidance the Plan Commission and Common Council may choose to consult.
No incentives. No guidance. Frankly, no real interest. (You can download the above-referenced Wisconsin "Model Ordinance for Traditional Neighborhood Development" pdf here.)
If a developer who has been building in Franklin for 30 years (and clearly has the ear of persons at every level of municipal government) is unaware of the very possibility of executing much-needed Traditional Neighborhood Development projects here, does that possibility even exist?
At the November 23rd meeting of the Economic Development Commission, developers representing an expansion proposal by Franklin Automotive appeared before the Commission asking if there might be incentives or subsidies we could provide for their project. I suggested -- since I am largely against financial subsidies -- that their development be given priority and other process/application incentives in return for their re-visioning of their proposed mundane "multi-tenant buildings" as an amenity capable of adding value to the surrounding neighborhood. Unfortunately, all of the "new" EDC members were absent that evening; my proposal aroused no enthusiasm among the long-timers who were present.
I'll try again at tomorrow night's EDC meeting ("Incentives" are again on the agenda) -- after all, I now have the words of Franklin's leading hometown developer to cite.
More later ...
John, (way) back in July of 1992, while I was a member of the Franklin Architectural Review Board, I wrote a letter to then Franklin Mayor Klimetz. We were reviewing the plans for what is now; the apartments on the southeast corner of 76th Street and Drexel Avenue.
At the time I was trying to persuade others that the parking lots should be located behind the buildings and that the structures should be placed near the roads. The developer had photographs of a similar development that he had done that way and they were very similar to your “preferred” example above. The purpose of the photos was to demonstrate the aesthetics of the buildings however, I believed that the site layout was very well done. I think I recall that the sample development was from Middleton, Wisconsin.
As I recall, the site at 76th Street and Drexel Avenue was originally zone for some type of commercial use and that this developer had to have the parcel re-zoned to residential. I stated in my letter that “…every effort should be made to maintain the residential flavor of the neighborhood. With two large parking lots in front of the buildings this may as well be a commercial site.”
Well, with Tuckaway Country Club located right behind the development site, and one of their fairways overlooking the area where parking lots behind the buildings would have been sited, my arguments went nowhere.
Posted by: Scott Thinnes | February 23, 2010 at 09:21 AM
Hindsight is a handy crutch for many, but you have the added authority of having been on record via your letter nearly 20 years ago!
We are truly paying now for yesterdays' laissez-faire policies with regard to development.
My attempt to address that sort of thinking at last night's EDC meeting went down like a lead balloon. Not even DISAGREEMENT. A sleepy assembly, to say the least.
Posted by: John Michlig | February 23, 2010 at 10:58 AM
Middleton Hills is much nicer than Franklin. I would never have guessed that they were pretty much around the same age.
Posted by: id scanner | December 21, 2010 at 07:10 AM