Retrofitting suburbia - Ellen Dunham-Jones

[Music] [Music] [Applause]

We've had the last 50 years, we've been building the suburbs with a lot of unintended consequences. I'm going to talk about some of those consequences and just present a whole bunch of really interesting projects that I think give us tremendous reasons to be really optimistic that the big design and development project of the next 50 years is going to be retrofitting suburbia.

So whether it's redeveloping dying malls or reinhabiting dead big box stores or reconstructing wetlands out of parking lots, I think the fact is the growing number of empty and underperforming retail sites throughout suburb gives us actually a tremendous opportunity to take our least sustainable landscapes right now and convert them into more sustainable places. In the process, what that allows us to do is to redirect a lot more of our growth back into existing communities that could use a boost and have the infrastructure in place, instead of continuing to tear down trees and tear up the green space out at the edges.

So why is this important? I think there are any number of reasons, and I'm just going to not get into detail but mention a few. Just from the perspective of climate change, the average urban dweller in the US has about one-third the carbon footprint of the average suburban dweller, mostly because suburbanites drive a lot more. Living in detached buildings, you have that much more exterior surface to leak energy out of.

So, you know strictly from a climate change perspective, cities are already relatively green. The big opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is actually in urbanizing the suburbs. All that driving that we've been doing out in the suburbs has doubled the amount of miles we drive. It's increased our dependence on foreign oil; despite the gains in fuel efficiency, we're just driving so much more. We haven't been able to keep up technologically.

Public health is another reason to consider retrofitting. Researchers at the CDC and other places have increasingly been linking suburban development patterns with sedentary lifestyles, and those have been linked with the rather alarming growing rates of obesity shown in these maps here. That obesity has also been triggering great increases in heart disease and diabetes to the point where today a child born today has a one in three chance of developing diabetes. That rate has been escalating at the same rate as children not walking to school anymore, again because of our development patterns.

And then there’s finally the affordability question. I mean how affordable is it to continue to live in suburbia with rising gas prices? Suburban expansion to cheap land for the last 50 years, you know, the cheap land out on the edge has helped generations of families enjoy the American dream.

But increasingly, the savings promised by “drive till you qualify” affordability, which is basically our model, those savings are wiped out when you consider the transportation costs. For instance, here in Atlanta, about half of households make between $20,000 and $50,000 a year, and they are spending 29% of their income on housing and 32% on transportation. I mean, and that's 2005 figures; that's before we got up to the four bucks a gallon.

None of us really tend to do the math on our transportation costs, and they're not going down anytime soon. Whether you love suburbia's leafy privacy or you hate its soulless commercial strips, there are reasons why it's important to retrofit. But is it practical? I think it is. June Williamson and I have been researching this topic for over a decade, and we found over 80 varied projects, but that they’re really all market-driven.

What’s driving the market in particular? Number one is major demographic shifts. We all tend to think of suburbia as this very family-focused place, but that's really not the case anymore. Since 2000, already two-thirds of households in suburbia did not have kids in them. We just haven’t caught up with the actual realities of this. The reasons for this have a lot to do with the dominance of the two big demographic groups right now: the Baby Boomers retiring, and then there’s a gap, the Generation X, which is a small generation.

They’re still having kids, but Generation Y hasn’t even really started hitting child-rearing age. They’re the other big generation. But as a result of that, demographers predict that through 2025, 75 to 85% of new households will not have kids in them.

Then the market consumer research of asking the Boomers and Gen Y what it is they would like to live in tells us that there is going to be a huge demand, and already we're seeing it, for more urban lifestyles within suburbia. Basically, the Boomers want to be able to age in place, and Gen Y would like to live an urban lifestyle, but most of their jobs will continue to be out in suburbia.

The other big dynamic of change is the sheer performance of underperforming asphalt. Now, I keep thinking this would be a great name for an indie rock band, but developers generally use it to refer to just underused parking lots, and suburbia is full of them. When the post-war suburbs were first built out on the cheap land away from downtown, it made sense to just build surface parking lots. But those sites have now been leapfrogged and leapfrogged again as we've just continued to sprawl, and they now have a relatively central location.

It no longer just makes sense that land is more valuable than just surface parking lots. It now makes sense to go back in, build a deck, and build up on those sites. So, what do you do with a dead mall, dead office park?

It turns out all sorts of things in a slow economy like ours. Reinhabitation is one of the more popular strategies. So this happens to be a dead mall in St. Louis that’s been reinhabited as art space. It's now home to artist studios, theater groups, dance troupes. It's not pulling in as much tax revenue as it once was, but it's serving its community; it’s keeping the lights on.

It's becoming a really great institution. Other malls have been reinhabited as nursing homes, as universities, and as a variety of office space. We also found a lot of examples of dead big box stores that have been converted into all sorts of community-serving uses as well: lots of schools, lots of churches, and lots of libraries, like this one.

This was a little grocery store, a Food Lion grocery store, that is now a public library. In addition to, I think, doing a beautiful adaptive reuse, they tore up some of the parking spaces, put in bioswales to collect and clean the runoff, put in a lot more park sidewalk to connect to the neighborhoods. They’ve made this what was just a store along a commercial strip into a community gathering space.

This one is a little L-shaped strip shopping center in Phoenix, Arizona. Really, all they did was give it a fresh coat of bright paint, a gourmet grocery, and they put a restaurant in the old post office. Never underestimate the power of food to turn a place around and make it a destination. It's been so, so successful they've now taken over the strip across the street, and the real estate ads in the neighborhood all very proudly proclaim “walking distance to La Grand” because it provided its neighborhood with what sociologists like to call a “third place.”

If home is the first place and work is the second place, the third place is where you go to hang out and build community. Especially as suburbia is becoming less centered on family households, there's a real hunger for more third places.

So the most dramatic retrofits are really those in the next category, the next strategy: redevelopment. Now, during the boom, there were several really dramatic redevelopment projects where the original building was scraped to the ground, and then the whole site was rebuilt at significantly greater density as sort of compact, walkable urban neighborhoods. But some of them have been much more incremental.

This is Mashpee Commons, the oldest retrofit that we found, and it’s just incrementally over the last 20 years built urbanism on top of its parking lots. The black and white photo shows the simple 60s strip shopping center, and then the maps above that show its gradual transformation into a compact mixed-use New England village. It has plans now that have been approved for it to connect to new neighborhoods across the arterials and over the other side.

So that, you know, sometimes it's incremental, sometimes it's all at once. This is another infill project on the parking lots, this one of an office park outside of Washington, DC. When Metro Rail expanded transit into the suburbs and opened a station nearby to this site, the owners decided to build a new parking deck and then insert on top of their surface lots a new Main Street, several apartments, and condo buildings, while keeping the existing office buildings.

Here is the site in 1940; it was just a little farm in the village of Hyattsville. By 1980, it had been subdivided into a big mall on one side and the office park on the other, and then some buffer sites for a library and a church to the far right. Today, the transit, the main street, and the new housing have all been built, but eventually I expect that the streets will probably extend through a redevelopment of the mall. Plans have already been announced for a lot of those garden apartments above the mall to be redeveloped.

I mean, transit is a big driver of retrofits. So here's what it looks like: you can sort of see the funky new condo buildings in between the office buildings, the public space, and the new Main Street. This one is one of my favorites, Belmar. I think they really built an attractive place here and have just employed all green construction. There are massive PV arrays on the roofs as well as wind turbines.

This was a very large mall, a 100-acre super block; it’s now 22 walkable urban blocks with public streets, two public parks, eight bus lines, and a range of housing types. So, it’s really given Lakewood, Colorado, the downtown that this particular suburb never had. Here was the mall in its heyday; they had their prom in the mall; they loved their mall.

So here's the site in 1975 with the mall. By 1995, the mall has died; the department store has been kept, and we found this was true in many cases: the department stores are multi-story, they're better built, they're easy to be readapted. But the one-story stuff, it’s really history.

So here it is at projected buildout. This project I think has great continuity to the existing neighborhoods. It’s providing 1500 households with the option of a more urban lifestyle; it’s about 2/3 built out right now. Here’s what the new Main Street looks like; it's very successful, and it’s helped to prompt eight of the 13 regional malls in Denver that have now announced plans to be retrofitted.

But it's important to note that all of this retrofitting is not occurring just, you know, bulldozers are coming and just plowing down the whole city. No, it’s pockets of walkability on the sites of underperforming properties, and so it’s giving people more choices, but it’s not taking away choices. But it's also not really enough to just create pockets of walkability; you want to also try to get more systemic transformation. We need to also retrofit the corridors themselves.

So this is one that has been retrofitted in California. They took the commercial strip shown on the black and white images below, and they built a boulevard that has become the main street for their town. It’s transformed from being an ugly, unsafe, undesirable address to becoming a beautiful, attractive, dignified sort of good address.

I mean, now we're hoping we'll start to see they've already built City Hall, attracted two hotels. I mean, I could imagine beautiful housing going up along there without tearing down trees. So there are a lot of great things, but, you know, I'd love to see more corridors getting retrofitted. But densification is not going to work everywhere; sometimes regreening is really the better answer.

There's a lot to learn from successful land banking programs in cities like Flint, Michigan. There's also a burgeoning suburban farming movement, sort of victory gardens meets the internet. But perhaps one of the most important regreening aspects is the opportunity to restore the local ecology, as in this example outside of Minneapolis. When the shopping center died, the city restored the site’s original wetlands, creating lakefront property, which then attracted private investment, the first private investment to this very low-income neighborhood in over 40 years.

So they managed to both restore the local ecology and the local economy at the same time. This is another regreening example; it also makes sense in very strong markets. This one in Seattle is on the site of a mall parking lot adjacent to a new transit stop, and the wavy line is a path alongside a creek that has now been daylighted. The creek had been culverted under the parking lot, but daylighting our creeks really improves their water quality and contributions to habitat.

So I've shown you some of the first generation of retrofits. What's next? I think we have three challenges for the future. The first is to plan retrofitting much more systemically at the metropolitan scale. We need to be able to target which areas really should be regreened, where should we be redeveloping, and where should we be encouraging reinhabitation.

These slides just show two images from a larger project that looked at trying to do that for Atlanta. I led a team that was asked to imagine Atlanta 100 years from now, and we chose to try to reverse sprawl through three simple moves—expensive but simple. One, in 100 years, transit on all major rail and road corridors. Two, in 100 years, thousand-foot buffers on all stream corridors.

It’s a little extreme, but we've got a little water problem. In 100 years, subdivisions that simply end up too close to water or too far from transit won't be viable, and so we created the eco-acre transfer to transfer development into the transit corridors and allow the regreening of those former subdivisions for food and energy production.

So the second challenge is to improve the architectural design quality of the retrofits. And I close with this image of democracy in action. This is a protest that's happening on a retrofit in Silver Spring, Maryland, on an AstroTurf town green. Now, retrofits are often accused of being examples of faux downtowns and instant urbanism, and not without reason.

You don't get much more phony than an AstroTurf town green, I have to say. These are very hybrid places; they are new but trying to look old. They have urban streetscapes but suburban parking ratios. Their populations are more diverse than typical suburban areas, but they're less diverse than cities, and they're public places but that are managed by private companies.

The surface appearances are often like the AstroTurf here, you know, they make me wise. So, you know, I mean, I'm glad that the urbanism is doing its job. The fact that a protest is happening really does mean that the layout of the blocks, the streets, and blocks, the putting in of public space—compromised as it may be—is still a really great thing. But we've just got to get the architecture better.

The final challenge is for all of you. I want you to join the protest and start demanding more sustainable suburban places, more sustainable places, period. But, you know, culturally we tend to think that downtowns should be dynamic, and we expect that, but we seem to have an expectation that the suburbs should forever remain frozen in whatever adolescent form they were first given birth to.

It's time to let them grow up. So I want you to all support the zoning changes, the road diets, the infrastructure improvements, and the retrofits that are coming soon to a neighborhood near you. Thank you.