Community building versus economic development versus building a local economy

The article "Philadelphia’s Market Street East searches for growth and renewal — with or without a new Sixers arena," has an interesting section on a community meeting where people who weren't into the arena concept suggested alternatives.  They don't want an arena, they want green roofs...

The Save Chinatown Coalition brought over 140 community members (plus a waitlist) to a hall at the Center for Architecture and Design for a community-sourced design workshop to envision alternative uses for the 1000 blocks of Market and Filbert Streets in Center City, where the 76ers are proposing to build a basketball arena. (Emily Cohen for WHYY)

From the article:

For three hours the ideas flew, more than a hundred people gathered at a forum to suggest what besides a basketball arena could go at 10th and Market: a library, high school, public pool, garden, playground, health clinic, night market, art space, apartments, shops, or maybe a community center where seniors and children would be welcome and safe. .

... “It’s the people’s response to a site that we think should have a lot of input from the public,” said Rashida Ng, a University of Pennsylvania associate architecture professor who helped lead the session, cosponsored by the Coalition to Save Chinatown. The goal was to identify the most compelling suggestions and generate renderings and cost estimates. 

No one spoke in favor of a Sixers arena. And no one was keen to knock down part of the Fashion District, given the taxpayer dollars it has consumed and the cost of demolition. Instead, people wanted to open its walls so pedestrians could more easily move between Chinatown and Market East. 

The Bok Building served as a model, the former South Philadelphia high school now home to a bounty of small businesses, nonprofits, and artists, attracting people from around the city to the spectacular views of its rooftop bar. 

The Sixers called the group’s proposals “unrealistic and unworkable,” not ones that belong on a struggling commercial street. “This exercise proved what we’ve said all along,” arena-project spokesperson Mark Nicastre said in an email. “There is no proposal for another project. There is no other private investment for another project. There is no public funding to commit to another project.” 

People at the forum said the discussion needed to move off an arena-or-nothing dynamic. A problem on Market East and in Philadelphia, they said, is the city government only contemplates the future in response to developers’ wishes. Amenities that improve citizens’ lives, like libraries and playgrounds, are seen as expenses, people said. 

Also see "Penn professors spearhead workshop reimagining uses for proposed 76ers arena site near Chinatown," Daily Pennsylvanian, "Community groups say forget 76ers arena plan" WHYY/NPR.

Philadelphia has advantages.  The Walking City urban form is the "urban technology" that supports active cities ("Transportation and Urban Form: Stages in the Spatial Evolution of the American Metropolis," "Department stores are an "urban technology" built for walking not driving," 2024).

While Philadelphia is still a poor city, and the wage tax encourages businesses to locate in the suburbs, it has more than one million people, is pretty walkable, the Center City is quite active with people, the Center City District business improvement district is one of the best BIDs in the country, etc.  But the key is people.  Philadelphia, though much smaller, is up there with NYC in terms of lots of people in its center.

Personally, I think an arena is probably an acceptable choice, especially as it likely will increase transit ridership to events--the team estimates that the 70% of trips to the current arena by car will drop to 40%, with the change due to shift to transit, because of the much better transit location of Market East.

The challenges are (1) reduce the likelihood of negative impacts on Chinatown, (2) figure out how to make Market East incredibly active, (3) especially wrt the ground plane of an arena ("How do you make the ground floor of an arena strengthen the area around it, rather than diminish it? | Philadelphia 76ers," 2023).

Principles that drive my approach to urban revitalization (that the average citizen never thinks about).  I think the alternatives proposed by the community are ridiculous.

Community building versus revitalization.  While my sympathies are for community-based approaches, lots of time they have limited economic return and may cost more money to build and operate than is received ("The Battle for McMillan Why is the plan to redevelop the site of a decommissioned water treatment plant in Washington, DC so controversial?," "Park View Residents Continue To Oppose Redevelopment at Bruce Monroe Park" Washington City Paper, also see ""Temporary" uses as a way to foil development: Bruce Monroe Elementary School site, DC | from school to park to housing").  

I call this community building, not revitalization. 

-- "You gotta have community building," 2007

-- "Arts-based revitalization, community building, network strengthening, commodification, and Artomatic," 2009

And like with multi-faceted arts centers, better economic return comes from those that are adaptively reused than built from scratch ("Developing Creative Quarters in Cities: Policy lessons from “Art and Design City Arabianranta, Helsinki," Urban Research and Practice, 2013, "The story of Cable Factory," "Inside the UK's new $292 million arts center," CNN, ""Arts district planning" in Arlington County | Many communities don't know the difference between arts as production and arts as consumption," 2021, Trans Europe Halles).

Cities cost money to operate.  Cities have to earn money to pay for all the things that people say they want.  An art gallery type building won't have near the economic return as a sports arena, provided it is super well planned.  (That doesn't mean don't do the art gallery building, it means don't treat it as a co-equal substitute to an arena.)

Similarly, a couple of suggestions from someone I know in Salt Lake.  Replacing the minor league baseball stadium with pickleball courts--they don't make money they cost money, at a big site 1.5 blocks from a light rail station.  Similarly, a school in her neighborhood is closing and she suggests it become a library, even though it's a good site for multiunit housing, when the main library is just a few miles away.

The average resident doesn't think about the big picture, certainly not the cost of running a city and needing to raise revenues as costs rise.  Plus they have a bias against development to begin with, think developers are monsters because they make profits, etc. 

I make this point often that planning engagements are set up to fail from the outset because planners have to achieve both city (or county) wide goals like economic development) as well as neighborhood specific objectives, while residents tend to take responsibility only for the latter.

Transformational Projects Action Planning  ("A wrinkle in thinking about the Transformational Projects Action Planning approach: Great public buildings aren't just about design, but what they do," 2022)  is an approach I push for thinking about master planning and the planning of big infrastructure projects, in how plans can be leveraged with anchor projects that push the goals of a plan from vision to implementation, and in big infrastructure projects, how complementary improvements can be driven across the related ecosystem, improving both the success of the project and the infrastructure system within which it is embedded. 

TPAPs should be implemented at multiple scales: 

1. neighborhood/district/city/county wide as part of a master plan; 
2. within functional elements of a master plan such as transportation, housing, or economic development;
3. within a specific project (e.g., how do we make this particular library or transit station or park or neighborhood "great"?); 
4. in terms of architecture and design; and 
5. program/plan for what the functions within the building accomplish.

Ultimately, buildings are envelopes or containers for what's really important: what happens on the inside and how they connect to, improve and extend the qualities of place around them.

Building a local economy -- I say there is a difference between building a local economy and economic development.  Many economic development planners don't know the difference.  

The difference comes down to the economic multiplier effect and the net revenue that remains local and recirculates within the local economy.

Graphic from the Lee's Marketplace website.

The capital flow from "economic development" tends to be outward, like the revenues touted from special events like the Super Bowl, most of the money is spent on transportation and lodging, which typically doesn't remain local.

The book Community Economic Development Handbook is very good on microenterprise development and the development of locally owned businesses and the differential impact on the local economy.

The Salt Lake Valley regional independent supermarket, Lee's Marketplace, has an excellent webpage on the impact of spending at locally owned versus chain stores--a Kroger affiliate is the largest supermarket chain in Utah--illustrating this point.

Economic Development.  A lot of economic development for cities centers around tax abatements and subsidizing developers ("Make eminent domain fair for all," Boston Globe).  

Sadly, in DC's case, once an abatement expires, many firms decamp ("CoStar Group Leaving DC HQ After 14 Years," Commercial Observer).  

The way it's supposed to work, in order to receive the benefits, the company has to meet conditions.  Often, they don't, and the development doesn't have near the value that was touted ("Tax incentives to attract business: Wisconsin's Foxconn debacle"). 

Note that I am not against TIF and abatements, just that there needs to be a balance between the public and private interest, and that the public interest should be a prominent element of the outcome.

Eckington is a small neighborhood in Northeast Washington that is tucked among Florida Avenue, Rhode Island Avenue and North Capitol Street. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad established its freight yards there, which encouraged the growth of a rich industrial sector, which remains today. (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/For The Washington Post) "In Northeast D.C., Eckington offers an oasis of calm amid commotion of the city."

Return on Investment. Return on Investment is the economic value received from an investment.

The point of incentives isn't to build dependence on government funding streams, but to generate positive economic return--greater value in the long run than the money "given up" or foregone ("Tax incentive programs underfund schools," 2024).  

In revitalization, one of the best examples for me ever was the NoMA Metrorail infill station ("Where We Live: NoMa, the wrong side of the tracks no more," Washington Post, "NoMA: the neighborhood transit built," Urban Land) in DC.  

Union Market at Dusk.  Washington Post photo by Craig Hudson.

The new buildings behind the old market building would have never been built without the addition of the NoMA Metrorail station.

It cost $120 million to build.  But has generated billions in new development, and, in 20 years hundreds of millions in tax revenues.  

This station has had significant economic impact on five areas around it.  

The NoMA district, Eckington across New York Avenue NE, the now thriving Union Market District ("All the places to eat and drink at Union Market," "Every night is a fiesta at El Presidente in Union Market," and "In a once-gritty D.C. market, these wholesalers’ world is slipping away" Washington Post, "Edens' latest megaproject aims to create 'northern gateway' to Union Market," Washington Business Journal), the small industrial area from the station east along M Street and New York Avenue, and the H Street residential north of H Street--I argue the station made people with choices willing to choose north of H Street when before they would not ("White people have flocked back to city centers," Washington Post).

Building the station cost a lot.  But just the impact on one area, the values of houses north of H Street increased 6x or more, close to a billion dollars for 1,700 houses.  Plus the economic impact on the other four areas, totaling in the billions of new construction.

Velocity of positive economic change from public investment. The other element that was educational for me was the velocity of change resulting from the new station.  Granted a lot of development was going on in DC at the time.  But the addition of this particular station sped up the velocity of development in those areas by at least 10 years.

Photo of the then Verizon Center. Toni L. Sandys,  Washington Post.

Another example of stoking the velocity of change is the CapitalOne Arena. 

I argued for years that the move by the teams to DC from the suburbs weren't the reason that the Downtown East End began revitalization.

Eventually I conceded that the move was a vote of confidence in urban living and commerce, and it helped reposition DC's image vis a vis the suburbs, just before residential choice trends began revaluing center cities after many decades of denigration ("Pollin: With Opening of MCI Center, 'I've Got Everything I've Ever Done in My Life on the Line'," Post, 1997, "Without Verizon Center, does Chinatown still thrive?," Washington Business Journal, 2016).  Probably a speed up of at least 10 years also.  

More recently a deck was built over part of I-395, for Capitol Crossing, a project that had been touted for 20+ years before it happened.  While a little far from the arena, the arena being an anchor helped move this project forward ("ENR MidAtlantic Project of the Year: Capitol Crossing Restores D.C.’s Historic Grid," Engineering News Record).  And decking freeways is still pretty rare, most places don't have the kind of economic return necessary to make it pay off.

Transit and economic development.  The velocity of change from NoMA Metrorail station was so significant it convinced me that the public investment with the fastest ROI, at least when done right, is in transit, shifting me towards transit and economic development, c. 2004.

But it's important to point out that there is plenty of transit investment that isn't all that great.  It's expensive to build.  Many transit oriented development projects are built in the wrong place. For example, instead of connecting people to existing places and to places you want improved, the Miami subway system was designed only for the places that needed to improve, making it hard to have much positive impact.   

H Street streetcar.  Flickr photo by BeyondDC.

And investments in bus don't have near the ROI that fixed rail transit does. (Note that Cleveland's BRT is touted for spurring development, but I believe they overstate the case.  Successful universities and medical centers are always growing, whether or not there is quality transit and I believe that the likelihood these new projects only started because of a new bus line is spurious.)

For example, I consider the DC streetcar "failed" from a planning perspective.  But arguably it has spurred about $1 billion in new development ("DC and streetcars #4: from the standpoint of stoking real estate development, the line is incredibly successful and it isn't even in service yet, and now that development is extending eastward past 15th Street," 2015, "Capital One Arena, Wizards and Capitals may move to Alexandria | Why not the RFK campus?," 2024).

This 1964 Esso London road map is an extremely rare example of a gas station map acknowledging a local subway system.  It's even more unusual in that it presents the actual map used by the transit system instead of rendering it differently.

Or single lines instead of networks--DC has a transit network, now 6 lines, while Baltimore, which was too late to the game to get more funding, only has one Metro line which is truncated, and a charming industrial light rail line that has minimal capacity to generate ridership over most of its route ("More remonstration about the molasses of change: Transit planning, Baltimore County, Maryland and Towson," 2022).

The monocentric subnetwork of the DC Metrorail system serves the core of DC.

Ironically, the DC Metrorail system wasn't set up to improve DC, but did because at the core of the system within Washington, 31 stations serve historic or now new neighborhoods (like NoMA, Southwest, etc.).  

So while the transit system was designed for suburban commuters, it helped the city more.  I argue that that section of the Metro operates "monocentrically" while the overall design of the system is polycentric, which doesn't help the city so much--BART is a great example of a polycentric system, although SF doesn't really need it because it has its own rail-based transit system. (This concept is discussed in Cities in Full.)

Transit oriented development.  The one thing to remember is that TOD can take a long time to be realized.  I know of projects that are still underway 20+ years in DC ("360 Apartment building + Giant Supermarket vs. a BP gas station, which would you choose?," and "The Takoma Metro Development Proposal and its illustration of gaps in planning and participation processes" ).   

-- Trans-Formation: Recreating Transit-Oriented Neighborhood Centers in Washington, DC | A Design Handbook for Neighborhood Residents, DC Office of Planning, 2002
-- Ten Principles for Successful Development Around Transit, Urban Land Institute, 2003
-- Station Area Planning: How To Make Great Transit-Oriented Places, Reconnecting America and Center for Transit-Oriented Development
-- Rails to Real Estate: Development Patterns along Three New Transit Lines, CTOD

Arlington County is a national best practice example in aiming to leverage density for extranormal community benefit (Encouraging Transit Oriented Development: Case Studies that Work, EPA, "Other Places Nipping At Heels Of Arlington’s Transit-Oriented Development," MobilityLab).

Phoenix has been good at proactive planning around affordable housing and transit rather than the more trickle down approach in the DC area  ("Light rail housing fund spurs 15 projects in metro Phoenix" and "Why you don't see more vacant lots along light-rail route," Arizona Republic).

And so does seeing the impact of investment from large scale transit systems.  It takes at least 30 years, at least it did for Metrorail, and that was at the core in DC and Arlington, although there were other positive examples.  30 years is a long time.  And academic research earlier than that didn't find a lot of benefits.

Obviously, places outside of the core benefited less during that 30 year period 

-- Understanding the Impacts of Transitways The Hiawatha Line: Impacts on Land Use and Residential Housing Value, Center for Transportation Studies, University of Minnesota, research brief, full document

But after 30 years, places outside the core that had less positive conditions, like Brookland, started to intensify development around the Metrorail station and the local microeconomies improved ("I worked on this 16 years ago... "Metro seeks development partner for Brookland-CUA Metro station"").

To better leverage the value of proximity to transit, density bonuses of at least a couple stories should be a standard policy.

Traffic studies for multiunit buildings at the Takoma Metrorail station find that only 25% of rush hour trips are by car.   

WMATA's 2005 study, Development-Related Ridership Survey, found significant car trip reduction associated with the buildings in Metrorail station catchment areas, even in areas outside the core.  Also see "The analysis of transit-oriented development (TOD) in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore metropolitan areas," Transport Policy, 2014.

The Willow and Maple development is a couple blocks from Takoma Station, off the main street.  It's three stories, but there is parking for every unit.

The Takoma Central apartment building is about 4 stories and a block from the Metrorail station  ("Takoma Central Apartment Building Trades For $51M," Bisnow).

Buildings this close to transit stations, even outside of the core, are logical choices for transit related density bonuses.  If anything, it should be required.

Fort Totten.

Scale and density at transit stations: don't move too fast/timing.  Most citizens think two stories is too high.  

Related to leveraging the value of transit infrastructure as a tool for economic development is timing.     

If done too soon, likely a development will be less intensely developed because construction finance uses current conditions for economic analysis versus longer term conditions.  Economic growth over time from transit access is hard to predict, and construction financiers don't care about the long term anyway.

Park Place Apartments, Petworth.

Good examples in DC are the difference between Fort Totten and Columbia Heights/Petworth (7 story buildings versus 3 and 4 story buildings).  There is tremendous opportunity cost in not building higher.  

It costs DC more residents, income tax, property tax, eyes on the street, customers for business, etc.  To my way of thinking, even 7-8 story buildings might not be tall enough.

Or Silver Spring has a bunch of rowhouses about one long block from the station (behind the McDonald's( built in the 1980s.  If the land were developed later, it would have been done more intensely.  Definitely not single family housing one block from the station in a commercial district with tall office buildings.

Ironically, residents successfully fought off similar proposals for rowhouses at Brookland in the 1990s ("The mix: It's the making of Brookland" Post, 1997) and Takoma in the 2000s ("Foes of Takoma Metro Project Say Glendening Sold Them Out: Town House Plan Isn't Smart Growth, Residents Contend," Post, 2000) did the city a favor, because now those sites are being developed more intensely.

Although this is difficult for developers.  Banks lend on the basis of current conditions, not the future.  And building around transit stations should be determined more by future conditions.