“Three years after its completion, most of the storefronts remain vacant” in a mixed-use development next to a BART station in Pleasant Hill, California, reports the Contra Costa Times. “Projects that combine housing with retail space are a poor fit for the suburbs,” the paper reports one expert as saying.
Mixed-use developments are the gold ring on the land development merry-go-round for urban planners, most of whom don’t really understand land development. They think that mixed-use developments will lead people to walk more and drive less and therefore try to force them onto neighborhoods, particularly near rail transit stations, using prescriptive zoning.
In the Pleasant Hill case, the developer was probably required to build 34,000 square feet of commercial space in order to get a permit to build 422 luxury apartments. But a few hundred two-person families is not enough to support that much retail space, and people who enter and exit the nearby BART station are too intent on getting to work or home to stop and shop. According to commercial real estate broker John Cumbelich, the Pleasant Hill development could support, at most, about 5,000 square feet of commercial space.
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Combelich also points to parking problems associated with the mixed-use developments planners want developers to build. Either there isn’t enough parking to support retail or parking is in a foreboding that discourages potential customers, especially at night. “Customers want to pull up in front of their destination,” he says. Planners fantasize that the customers will walk or take transit, but there simply aren’t enough of those to support the retail spaces planners insist upon.
Portland has had the same problem with its mixed-use developments. Cascade Policy Institute analyst John Charles says that developers put the retail spaces in because the zoning requires it, but they don’t expect to lease it or make any money from it. Of course, that means they have to make more profits from the housing they build to cover the cost of empty spaces, but planners never seem to mind when they run up the cost of housing.
San Francisco Bay Area planners are counting on mixed-use developments to solve the region’s housing and transportation problems over the next 30 years. Plan Bay Area calls for putting close to 80 percent of all new housing and 60 percent of all new jobs in such developments. Unfortunately, one thing planners are very good at is not learning the lessons from previous planning failures.
I am a notorious tight-wad. Shopping mostly in big-box or used/thrift stores. In other words: “Using my car.” I love the idea of living above a store I shop at, and walking to work, but it isn’t going to happen while I have kids or unless I give up my tight-wad ways.
Same old, same old, planners have neither risk nor reward and so are emotionally unable to do the detailed and careful analysis that a developer must do or go broke.
Why do we keep trying variations on Stalin’s 5 year plans? Even worse, why do we constantly re-attempt Stalin’s 5 year plans with book learned but pig ignorant theory driven fadinistas who take no risk whatever?
Bend the risk reward curve by moving planners on government payrolls off their defined benefit pension plans onto 401Ks getting everybody’s future dependent on the success of the private economy,
Let’s see if the usual suspects show up to provide a strident defense for the usual planner screw ups. Anyone? I’m hearing crickets, buddies.
Okay I’ll bite. I believe that planning and growth management have their place in helping conditions that allow communities to thrive or at the very least, conditions that the community desires. A common mistake is looking at great communities across America and trying to recreate them in different places with different contexts. Great places cannot simply be built on an empty plot of land. It takes great people. There are too many disney-landesque recreations of historic row house neighborhoods in Boston or Chicago that exist because of the failure to recognize historical context of these great places. I agree with antiplanners that planning often glorifies the old to it’s own demise (or to the demise of city coffers).
Unlike some absolutists, planners and antiplanners alike, I will not defend my position to any end (I’m more of a pragmatist than objectivist). There are many examples of poor planning, I admit it, but I still believe that planning has it’s place. And despite what some of my absolutist opponents might say, they too are secretly comforted by planning (particularly those that live in suburban scale neighborhoods and frequently drive on interstate highways).
So someone plopped down a couple apartment buildings onto what was a park and ride surface lot, forgetting that the surrounding transportation context was still that of a park and ride, i.e. completely auto-oriented and hostile to pedestrians. Little wonder that the development doesn’t get enough foot traffic from the surrounding area, which has a respectable population density of around 7,500 people per square mile, and with far denser concentrations right around the station.
forgetting that the surrounding transportation context was still that of a park and ride, i.e. completely auto-oriented and hostile to pedestrians
Wow, speaking of the usual planner talking points! Stop smoking the mixed use pipe dude and come off the planner power high. Let people live the way they want to live (ie, in suburbia like 80% of the US lives), and not like assholes like Danny Boy want to make them live.
Hey Bennett, I actually agree with your post, and no, you weren’t the guy/guys I was calling out.
“Let people live the way they want to live (ie, in suburbia like 80% of the US lives),… Hey Bennett, I actually agree with your post, and no, you weren’t the guy/guys I was calling out.”
Well I’m calling you out. Why are you under the impression that suburban communities and towns have no planning department, planners or worse, homeowners associations and covenants? Why do you think that euclidian zoning somehow doesn’t apply to SF suburban style developments? You may want to live there but don’t fool yourself, planners share in the culpability of your track home utopia.
I think you missed my point, metrosucks. I was simply observing that the transportation infrastructure around this station was self-evidently made for the convenience of motorists, so trying to incorporate loads of urban-style street-level retail was unlikely to be successful, at least in the short term. I was actually agreeing with the Antiplanner, but for slightly different reasons. The AP criticizes “planners” in general without mentioning that the entire transportation context of the area – the BART tracks and station, the wide arterial roads, the nearby course of I-680 – were all the result of government planning. If certain planners want “urbanism” in this context, they seem to be at odds with the transportation planners, with the result that development objectives are contradictory and self-defeating, and the commercial space sits empty.
I didn’t even mention “mixed-use” in my comment – I happen to think it’s an unhelpful term that impedes clear thinking about land use. Stores naturally get placed on the ground floor of apartments when foot traffic is high, if zoning doesn’t forbid it. However, someone who has an aesthetic fetish for this particular land use pattern can easily get carried away and start mandating it even where the demand does not exist.