From the Jan/Feb 2007 issue of New Urban News

More developers, better results:a lesson in orchestration

Philip Langdon

 Courtesy of Philip Langdon
The Holiday neighborhood in Boulder and Beerline B in Milwaukee achieve an intriguing mix, with public guidance.

The most acclaimed early examples of New Urbanism were brought into existence by individual developers — Robert Davis, who worked his magic on 80 acres of Florida sand; Henry Turley, who gave Memphis the congenial Harbor Town; and Joseph Alfandre, who founded Kentlands amid the single-purpose subdivisions of suburban Maryland.
Today, however, some of the most interesting new urbanist work is being carried out by groups of developers. By involving multiple developers, a sizable project can often be built more speedily, and it can incorporate great variety — in the kinds of buildings it includes, in the uses it accommodates, and in its range of styles.
Two prime examples are the Holiday neighborhood in Boulder, Colorado, and the Beerline B project in Milwaukee. Both projects consist of parcels developed by a variety of companies or organizations, under the coordination of a public agency.
In November, New Urban News visited Holiday, a recently completed 27-acre neighborhood at the northern edge of Boulder. For 20 years, starting on the night in 1969 when people came to watch “Easy Rider,” this stretch of land was occupied by the Holiday Twin Screen Drive-in Theater. By 1989 the theater shut down, and in 1997 the city bought the land, selling it the following year to the city’s housing authority — Boulder Housing Partners — which commissioned Barrett Studio Architects to plan a mixed-income neighborhood on the site.
Today, a little more than four years after ground was broken, Holiday is a quirky and complex neighborhood. Where it meets Broadway — a principal north-south thoroughfare served by quick, frequent buses to downtown Boulder — a small commercial center has been constructed, its brick buildings reminiscent of small-town main streets a century ago. The Broadway section of Holiday has wide sidewalks and on-street parking; it beckons to people driving by, while making the thoroughfare calmer — a new urbanist pattern pioneered by Orenco Station in Hillsboro, Oregon.
From Broadway, the commercial center runs east on Yellow Pine Avenue for only a short distance, just enough to supply residents with a restaurant and bar, a bakery/cafe, and a few service businesses within walking distance. The buildings’ ground floors are reserved for retail or offices; upstairs there are offices or living quarters. Residences that face south have terraces or balconies on that exposure so that occupants can take advantage of the sun; the north face is flatter, more minimal.

MANY HOUSING CHOICES
At a park shaped like a quarter-circle, Holiday makes a transition into an essentially residential neighborhood, one offering many choices of how to dwell. Some houses, especially those designed by the local Wolff Lyon Architects, are in Victorian, Foursquare, and other traditional styles. Others are contemporary, with angular forms that jab at the sky, or galvanized metal cladding that glints in the sun, among other bold effects. There are detached houses, duplexes, rowhouses, carriage houses, live-work units. No single aesthetic dominates. Exploring the neighborhood’s sidewalks and mid-block pedestrian passages, a visitor is apt to be struck by the many visual contrasts, but also by the human scale. Porches embellish traditional and contemporary houses alike (though some of the contemporary dwellings’ porches look cramped — too shallow for gatherings).
One part of Holiday consists of Wild Sage Cohousing, a mini-community of 34 homes gathered around a grassy courtyard and a curved-roof commons building, built by Jim Leach’s Wonderland Hill Development Company. On a one-acre site immediately adjacent to Holiday, Wonderland Hill is establishing Silver Sage, a cohousing project designed for an older clientele by McCamant and Durrett Architects and Bryan Bowen Architects.
Another part of Holiday is Northern Lights: 14 units (six duplexes and two carriage units) developed by the Affordable Housing Alliance on a site measuring just under an acre. Wolff Lyon gave Northern Lights many pleasing details, so although the houses are lower-cost, they don’t look barebones. For instance, Tom Lyon designed decorative trim, which was made by residents as part of a sweat-equity arrangement organized by Habitat for Humanity.
Several units in Northern Lights look onto a green space that doubles as a drainage basin during rainy periods. Among the unusual house designs is a Foursquare dwelling containing units arranged back to back; the two-unit house has two fronts, one facing a minor street, the other looking onto the green area.
For artists, Holiday offers Studio Mews, a live-work section along a pedestrian walkway. To achieve “sustainability,” the Holiday development has solar panels, passive solar designs, high-efficiency appliances, and other “green” components. As relief from Boulder’s high housing costs, 138 of the 333 units are affordable, with deed restrictions to keep them that way.
New urbanists John Wolff and Tom Lyon played key roles in Holiday, acting as developers of the commercial segment, Northern Lights, and a residential section called North Court. The housing authority chose seven developers in all, including Coburn Development, Peak Properties & Development Corp., and Naropa University, a Buddhist-oriented local institution eager to obtain student and faculty housing. The combination of developers gave the Holiday neighborhood an assortment of ideas and expertise.
“The housing authority’s role was to orchestrate the design process and take it through entitlement, negotiate affordability, and put in the infrastructure,” Wolff says. Prepared land was then sold to developers. The housing authority accepted a smaller financial return than would have been demanded by a master developer from the private sector. Residential prices have ranged from $104,000 for an affordable one-bedroom unit to $740,000 for a detached house.
Challenges found clever solutions. Because the city’s authorized floor area ratio did not allow the commercial center to be two stories throughout, Wolff and Lyon interspersed one-story elements between the two-story portions; the single-story businesses are farther back from the sidewalk, facing well-defined outdoor courts. Wolff and Lyon placed individual garages here and there on parking lots, breaking up the expanses of pavement.
New urbanists often talk about having many designers in a project, to give it variety. The Holiday neighborhood suggests that variety can also spring from having multiple developers. With multiple developers, there’s a greater likelihood of contrasting approaches to matters such as plans and styles.
In Holiday, the contemporary buildings are the ones exhibiting the most conspicuous flaws, which range from awkward proportions to problematic materials. Some of the galvanized metal cladding is already dented, which raises questions about its suitability as a material for housing. Other contemporary dwellings appear to be durably built and satisfying to inhabit. On the whole, Holiday is one of New Urbanism’s freshest recent products.

MILWAUKEE MODERN
Under John Norquist, mayor for 15 years, Milwaukee started in about 1998 to plan the redevelopment of Beerline B, a corridor that took its name from an old rail line north of downtown that had served an assortment of breweries and other industries. The city controlled most of the 20 acres in the corridor, and acted as agent for other public agencies that held title to the rest of the land, says former planning director Peter Park, who now heads community planning and development for Denver.
“We hired Dan Solomon and John Ellis [of Solomon/WRT in San Francisco] to work on neighborhood charrettes to design a new neighborhood, setting the stage for private investment,” Park says. Taking the lead for the municipality was the Department of City Development, which encompasses planning, permitting, economic development, the public housing authority, the redevelopment authority, and city-owned real estate.
Many streets in the corridor had dead ends; the city decided to link them together where possible, connecting the formerly industrial lowland along the Milwaukee River to the bluffs of Brewers Hill, where old mansions stood. Regrading and new trails and staircases also helped overcome the separation between the neighborhood on the bluffs and the development envisioned below.
“We wrote a simple form-based code, setting four building types,” says Park. The redevelopment plan “aimed to achieve good-quality pedestrian connections, build out the street-wall, and put in sidestreets for access to the river,” notes senior economic development specialist Allison Rozek.
“Having the plan prepared with the community created a degree of certainty for developers,” Park observes. “We sent out RFPs in parcels as small as we could [often under two acres], to encourage multiple developers.” Height restrictions were included in the planning, to preserve views and build predominantly outward rather than upward, thus creating consistent street-walls and preventing a situation in which one tall building might saturate the market.
Guided by the code, developers produced their own take on what would be appropriate. Among the proposals winning approval — the city awarded sites through developer competitions — were condominium townhouses, stacked flats, and side-by-side duplexes designed to look like mansions. The competitions “raised the bar,” says John Vetter of the architecture and development firm Vetter Denk. “You had to win them. It brought a higher level of design to a market that was starving for it.”
Some of the first projects adopted a traditional aesthetic, but today “if there is a dominant style, it would be ‘modernism,’” says Larry Witzling, president of Planning and Design Institute (PDI), which worked with Vetter Denk on River Homes (see photo, main page), 42 contemporary units on both sides of the new, contemporary Milwaukee Rowing Club. Modern design, with many different permutations, seems to have found an enthusiastic audience. “People are looking for something different from the suburbs,” says Brian Peterson, a PDI principal who lives in Beerline amid empty-nesters, young couples, and people in other stages of life.
Private investment has poured in — more than $200 million since 1999. Over 1,000 residential units have been built or approved. The city has encouraged reclamation of this former brownfield corridor by spending about $25 million in tax-increment finance funds on infrastructure, including construction of the Marsupial Bridge that carries motor vehicles on its upper level and pedestrians below, crossing the river. Restaurants and other retail, mainly aimed at neighborhood residents, have started to arrive, and prices have shot up. “There’s housing from $140,000 to $1.5 million,” says Vetter.
Some of the buildings required inventive techniques to deal with slopes or other challenges. “Because of the brownfield condition, the buildings at River Homes are about four feet above grade,” Peterson says, noting that they have attractive stairways, steel railings, and views.
The Park Terrace rowhouses, by Vetter Denk, act as retaining walls against the bluff; they have what Park describes as “great street presence” where they front on the street. On top of two floors of living quarters are a garage and a multipurpose room, at the same level as a rear alley. Across the alley are detached houses. In Beerline, “There are some garage doors on the ‘street,’ but they look good, and because they are infrequent they are acceptable as a different type of character for a block of two,” Witzling says.
The development is now mostly complete, and in Park’s opinion, “It has the potential to mature into an interesting urban neighborhood.” Designers, developers, and city officials say the multi-developer approach and the code have paid off. “My sense,” says Park, “is that the development happened faster than if we had a single master developer. It created competition. In terms of product, we pushed innovative design, which gave it a competitive edge.”
This article is available in the January/February 2007 issue of New Urban News, along with images and many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue.