Are you concerned about your community? Do you spend time trying to find answers to complex problems that both rural and urban communities face? Have you struggled to find the most effective starting point for renewing older neighborhoods suffering from disinvestments? You’re not alone. The number of forces working against redeveloping older neighborhoods is overwhelming. So many policies, public and private, have over time devolved to reward undesirable outcomes. Tax and land use policies have encouraged development patterns that isolate poverty, increase public costs to unsustainable levels and consolidate business in an ethic of abandon and resettle.

Growth patterns impact health, safety and welfare for all citizens. Unsustainable policies are so ingrained in all of us that low-density isolation development is marketable and receives preference from financing institutions. A 2000 National Governors Association publication by Joel Hirschhorn, Growing Pains – Quality of Life in the New Economy, presents information about these undesirable growth outcomes as well as responsive initiatives across the country that NGA classifies as New Community Design. In 1920 the average density of cities, suburbs and towns was 6,160 people per square mile. The average density of development since 1960 is 1,469 people per square mile. We have shifted our settlement patterns to an average of 60% suburban with some larger cities as high as 75% suburban. Hirschhorn summarized the current laws of development as:

“Law No. 1: Population increases are accompanied by much larger increases in land consumption and somewhat larger increases in residential dwellings and private vehicles.

Law No. 2: As distance from urban cores increases and population density decreases, the rate of growth increases for population, land consumption, residential dwellings, and private vehicles.

Law No. 3: Rapid suburbanization and urban decay are mirror images of the same phenomenon.”

The dilemma resulting from these laws of growth is “the greater the number of people who want to live in a low-density living environment, the more difficult it will become to do so. At the same time, urban decay makes it difficult for those who prefer to live in an urban environment to do so as well.” The result is reduced freedom of choice. Perception is not always reality. Gated communities and new urbanist suburban developments, “new burbanism”, are furthering isolationism as fulfilling the ideal lifestyle. These are mythical lifestyles where families, settling homogenized low-density neighborhoods in once picturesque fields of green, spend more time alone in vehicles and often have more vehicles than family members. It is simply not a sustainable pattern of growth.

We need an alternative. How do we create marketable models for living options that are more fulfilling, richer in diversity and accessible to more people? How do we alter systems that fuel growth? Can we initiate policies that provide greater rewards for reinvestment and disincentives for abandonment?

Mixing uses is emerging as an effective strategy that offers a desirable, community-building quality of life for both urban and suburban living. The idea of placing business, housing, shopping, recreation, education, religious, cultural and governmental functions in a variety of diverse, compact arrangements produces many socio-economic benefits and new opportunities. This more compact development pattern can achieve higher quality development at lower public and private cost. Mixed-use projects are more complex than current traditional real estate products. However, these projects appear to have greater staying power and greater long-term profitability than the easier to understand single-use products that flood communities beyond saturation limits.

Mixing uses is a strategy to revitalize older areas and to focus newer low-density growth toward the efficiencies of compact development. Like so many upstream ideas the problem is often figuring where to start a new direction. Planning is critical in uncovering new opportunities. Finding the idea, determining the catalysts and organizing implementers is the initial work. Among the places to look and test the feasibility of implementing mixed-use projects are: locations where employment is concentrated, around stable institutions in deteriorating neighborhoods, recycling vacated mall / big box properties in older suburban areas and locations in rural communities that connect new growth to historic town centers. We are currently in the early stages of several exciting mixed-use projects that will become catalyst to stimulate reinvestment in communities. Stay tuned.

The following are links to several sources and stories that reinforce the value of mixing uses:

An article in Affordable Housing Finance, Mixed-use projects spread across the country by Bendix Anderson discusses several mixed-use projects.

A Smart Growth News article, Urban Mixed-Use Projects Curb Sprawl, But Need to Show Profits Threatens New Ventures, discusses some of the challenges and the long-term viability for mixed-use projects.

Transit-Oriented Development: Moving From Rhetoric To Reality, by Dena Belzer and Gerald Autler is a 2002 Brookings Institute publication concerning the public value and challenges of mixed-use development around public transit and alternative modes of transportation.

Another Brookings publication, Financing Progressive Development, discusses the short-term bias of conventional financing and the long-term financial benefits and higher quality of sustainable development.

A National Governors Association document, New Community Design to the Rescue, presents ways to eliminate institutional barriers to mixed-use, mixed-income and walkable development.