I’ve been writing a series on Brighton’s Land Banking initiative, addressing each aspect of the vision, including the six key values:
- Transformative
- Embodying Brighton’s small-town sense of place
- An inclusive, mixed-income community
- A vibrant, mixed-use community
- Connected
- Environmentally, economically, and equitably sustainable
Continuing that series, let’s talk about the value of adding a mixed-use, “complete community” on the edge of town.
Mixed Use
Traditional zoning by-laws emphasize a single use for each property. I still remember playing Sim City back in the 90’s and early 2000’s, dragging a green block across the screen for residential zones, and blue for commercial.
This is a very 20th century North American approach to building communities.
Historically, everyone worked from home: go back a few hundred years and most homes would be a single room that was part bedroom, part kitchen, part bathroom (a pot in the corner), and maybe even part stable; and work would be done wherever someone could find or make space for it. Moving forward in time, and in cities, a successful business could have a shop or office nearby, often on the ground floor of the same building where the proprietor lived upstairs. This model of a commercial space fronting onto the street with upstairs apartments became the norm for most European cities, and as evidenced by our downtown here in Brighton, was also the norm here in the 19th and early 20th century.
This is called a “mixed-use” model, with residential and commercial together. It allows people to live close to where they work, as well as living close to other places they’d like to shop or enjoy services. Such neighbourhoods are inherently walkable, and there’s a high enough population density to allow for transit, which makes it easy to get from one part of town to another.
So how did we get from that walkable neighbourhood to the Sim City model that dominated planning for most of the 20th century?
The Suburbs
In the postwar era North America experienced the rise of suburbia, which was made possible by the rise of the automobile. If you could easily drive from one place to another, then you could buy cheap land out in the country and build a more affordable house with a big yard, and still get to work a short drive later. This had two major effects on the way that we use land: our cities spread out more and more, creating large metropolitan areas around the downtown; and our cities hollowed out in the middle, because we needed more space for cars. Neighbourhoods that had been mixed-use, with rows of shops with floors of apartments above them, often became neighbourhoods of commercial high-rises surrounded by parking lots. We come to associate cities with traffic jams, because so many people who work there need to drive to get there. Whole neighbourhoods that are packed during the day are completely deserted at night, because they’re purely commercial districts with no housing.
Meanwhile, the suburbs have a real limit: commute time. You can only see the benefits of suburbia (big yards, peace and quiet, cheap land) for a few generations, until the edge of the suburbs is too far from the city’s downtown to allow for commuting. Then the suburbs begin to densify, with land becoming more and more valuable based on its proximity to the city. The big yards become smaller, there’s no peace and quiet because everyone has to drive everywhere and cars are noisy, and a home in the suburbs becomes almost as expensive as a home in the city.
But suburbs aren’t just expensive for the people who live there; they’re also very expensive for the municipality, because it takes a whole lot more roads and pipes to service the suburbs than it does to service the same number of people living in the higher density neighbourhoods of a downtown core. This leads to unsustainable municipal spending patterns that I couldn’t possibly explain better than this video does:
Mixed-Use in Brighton
Brighton currently has one mixed-use neighbourhood: the east end of Main Street, where we still have buildings from the 19th century that have shops on the ground floor and apartments upstairs. It’s the heart of our community, our only truly walkable neighbourhood, and the most characterful part of town. It’s what we think of when we think about “small town charm”. And for some reason, we stopped building neighbourhoods like this.
Like most municipalities in North America, we followed the zoning pattern that separated uses, putting all of the Residential together, all of the Commercial together, and all of the Industrial together (away from the other two). While it still makes a ton of sense to keep industrial separate (let’s not put uses that have the potential to explode right in the middle of a bunch of people!), it really doesn’t make sense to keep residential and commercial apart, mostly because of traffic.
Traffic is far and away the thing that I hear about most from residents. Either I’m hearing about too many people driving too fast, or I’m hearing complaints about speeding tickets or curb extensions designed to slow them down. I hear about how our little town is getting too big which, when I press for details, is really about how busy and noisy the streets are (again, that’s a car problem, not a people problem). One way to reduce traffic is to start transit services, but we lack the population density it takes to run cost-effective transit; there just aren’t enough people who would take a bus to make the bus worthwhile, but the only alternative to a bus in such a spread-out community is a car. We all need groceries, and the No Frills parking lot is insane right now with pre-Thanksgiving shoppers stocking up; and the only people who can conceivably walk to No Frills for their groceries are afraid to cross the street there because of the sheer volume of traffic.
Meanwhile, the people who live in the mixed-use neighbourhood downtown can walk to get groceries, books, clothing, spa treatments, professional services, or go to a park. The space is designed for people to be walking there: we have good sidewalks and crosswalks and traffic lights to make it safer for them. And very occasionally we actually shut that stretch of Main Street down for the biggest events of the year. Businesses along that stretch thrive without requiring the same volume of traffic, because so many residents can walk to them. (This fact also insulates them from things like road closures, which hit the commercial businesses in the Industrial Park really hard this year. Even if Main Street was closed for construction, people could still get to the shops there.)
The Land Banking Initiative
When council was considering the concept of the land banking initiative, this was on my mind. The concept of the initiative was maybe too simple: council should buy land to help facilitate affordable housing. Developers frequently ask us for land, saying that if we give them land for free they can build housing on it and pass the savings along to the buyers, and this initiative could have been as simple as that; but that doesn’t address the long-term affordability problem, if we just continue to build suburban sprawl. If we went down that route we would only be adding to the traffic and taxation volume we all love to hate.
Rather than building another subdivision on the edge of town, continuing the development pattern all of North America has been shackled to for the better part of a century, we thought we’d use the opportunity that owning the land provides us to get with the times, embracing the cutting edge of planning policy–the kind that looks back to the better neighbourhoods we built in the 19th century, but now with the benefits of the technologies of the 21st century. We have the chance to build a walkable, characterful neighbourhood, like our downtown. But we can make it a higher-density neighbourhood than our downtown is, allowing us to achieve the benefits of density: lower infrastructure costs per person (which means less tax increases), more opportunity for transit, and more foot traffic for the businesses in this neighbourhood.
If our Land Banking neighbourhood was purely residential, we’d be creating a traffic headache by adding that many homes to our town. But by making it a walkable neighbourhood with amenities right there, including access to groceries, we’re creating a place to live where people don’t need to leave in order to work or shop. Which is not to say that people can’t or won’t leave their neighbourhood, only that it will be convenient enough to stay and they won’t be required to drive into town every day.
Conclusion
So what do you think? Do you prefer subdivisions, or would you prefer something a bit more integrated and interesting? (It’s okay if you prefer subdivisions, some people still do! But we have plenty of those.) Can you think of a mixed-use neighbourhood in another town or city that stood out to you as being both walkable and livable, with things to do but not overwhelmed by traffic? Let me know in the comments!
Mixed use commercial is a municipal planners pipedream, usually concocted by representations of plans submitted by developers wanting more density. Most MU developments fail because the necessary commercial elements are not available to home owners until a critical mass is there to sustain a market.
If you could legislate commercial activity around the residences to be built then MU will succeed, but if commercial chases the residences it is too late to create a ‘walkable’ community from scratch!
Hi Ben,
There’s a lot to unpack there, including a lot of assumptions that I don’t think hold up.
First: developers don’t want density, at least not the ones around here. They make a very good living building single family detached dwellings, and building at higher density requires a lot more financial outlay and timeline on their part that doesn’t really justify the slightly higher profits for them. The recent move toward slightly higher density (in semis, towns, and now stacked towns) has been at the request of municipal planners and councils. So no, mixed-use is definitely not “concocted by…developers wanting more density.” It’s municipalities who want all of the benefits I mentioned in the post.
Second: Who says most mixed-use communities fail? Where? What constitutes failure? In my post I pointed to Brighton’s downtown as our most vibrant neighbourhood, and it’s mixed-use. Of course, it’s well established. But all neighbourhoods take time to become well-established. From a real estate perspective, there’s no comparison between parts of Brighton that have mature trees and no traffic, vs the neighbourhoods that have tiny saplings and bake in the sun and still have truck traffic from the construction that’s still occurring down the street. The test of a neighbourhood is how well it works once it’s established, and fifty years from now we’ll either have more subdivisions or we’ll have something else, depending on what we build today. I’d prefer to have walkable, interactive neighbourhoods.
Third: you’re right that there needs to be a “critical mass to sustain a market” (i.e., there needs to be enough residents who will shop at a business for it to stay open). That also takes time. On the west side of town we have a few new apartments, and part of their plan had been to have ground-floor commercial space. I have since learned that the owners of the building have already repurposed that ground-floor commercial into communal space for residents because they could not find a commercial renter for the space. But the buildings are brand new, they haven’t had a chance to become truly established yet, and the commercial space there would have been an isolated shop rather than a part of a whole mixed-use area. One of the benefits of having a nonprofit organization (like the municipality) behind a development is that it can come with the patience it takes to establish a functional neighbourhood. (Also, I suspect that part of the incentive for that apartment building to revert the commercial space to resident communal space is that it would also allow them to reclaim the commercial parking spaces to meet resident demand.)
These are all growing pains. If we choose not to address them proactively, then we end up with other pains instead: sprawl, which is massively expensive for taxpayers and results in less integrated and characterful neighbourhoods. For some reason in North America we just accept sprawl as a given, rather than seeing it as the result of our planning models (and lending models, and profit models).