Bringing Development Out of Downtown

The Washington, D.C., playbook can serve as an example for how to engage communities outside the core in planning for successful mixed-use development, including substantial commercial uses that might normally be found downtown.

As America emerges from the current fiscal crisis, U.S. cities will provide a virtual scorecard for how public officials, urban thinkers, and community leaders either rose to the challenge of doing more with less or gave in to the temptation of policy retrenchment and disinvestment. The Obama administration’s place-based policies are giving cities and regions incentives to be creative and entrepreneurial in meeting current challenges.

Washington, D.C., has focused on playing to its competitive strengths and diversifying its economy. This has included policies to rebrand the District as a creative, innovative, and international city. It also required a new perspective on the city’s physical development strategy. As is the case in many U.S. cities, D.C.’s downtown is almost fully built out, so accommodating new growth in nearby neighborhoods presents both a challenge and an opportunity.

D.C.’s downtown and its recent development history offer an object lesson in how commercial, mixed-use development should be accommodated in other neighborhoods outside downtown. At the end of the 1980s, the District had a relatively healthy downtown by most standards, with higher rents and lower vacancy rates than those found in the region’s other areas of office concentration. But every evening and all weekend, with few evening diners and little to attract people to downtown at night, the area emptied out and restaurants and other retailers struggled to survive on a largely lunch-only crowd. Department stores faltered and began to close, movie theaters vanished, and most other businesses were closed by 6 p.m.

In the early 1990s, the city established an overlay district that incentivized creation of a more balanced mix of uses, including retail, hotel, residential, entertainment, arts, and cultural uses. That overlay district began to have a significant effect on the eastern and western edges of downtown, where there were larger parcels of land that were vacant or that could be redeveloped. Cultural and entertainment venues— including the Verizon Center sports arena, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, and the refurbished National Portrait Gallery/Smithsonian American Art Museum—came in first under the overlay, quickly followed by new retail and residential space and hotels.

Today, more than 8,000 people live downtown, and a vibrant mix of destinations and amenities brings visitors and sustains residents and workers. However, this vibrancy is most pronounced at the edges of downtown, where the greatest opportunity existed to broadly mix uses on large redevelopment sites rather than to incrementally infill small sites in a solidly commercial core.

Efforts to bring development out of downtown have been hugely informed by these efforts to retrofit downtown with a mix of uses. The District’s 2007 Comprehensive Plan lays out a vision for an inclusive city that is driven by an economy that is diversified and accessible—both physically, that is, near transit, and economically for people at a range of skill/knowledge levels—and is composed of distinctive, sustainable neighborhoods with multiple transportation choices and everyday destinations within walking distance. Neighborhood development can push the city toward its sustain-ability goals by creating mixed-use centers where it is possible to live, work, and shop without getting into a car. These opportunities are not unique to D.C.; many cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, and Denver have taken the initiative to be creative in their neighborhood development approaches.

A half dozen D.C. neighborhoods served by transit and adjacent to the central business district have now been identified as places where growth from downtown can be accommodated. Many have distinctive amenities like a riverfront and some existing residential uses in architecturally interesting buildings, and all have a significant amount of vacant or redevelopable land. The District’s playbook can provide an example of how to engage communities outside the core in planning for successful mixed-use development, including substantial commercial uses that might normally be found downtown. The following are elements found in that playbook, which was adapted from John Kotter’s widely read 1995 Harvard Business Review article “Leading Change: Why Transformations Fail.”

Communicate a sense of urgency.
The fact that Washington’s downtown is built out and economic growth must be accommodated in new areas of the city or go elsewhere creates a sense of urgency. D.C. also faces another urgent challenge: a lack of taxpaying residents. Forty percent of the land in the District is off the tax rolls because it is owned by federal or nonprofit entities. While D.C. has the largest percentage influx of daily commuters of any city in the country—a 72 percent daily increase
in the population, or more than 400,000 people—the municipality cannot tax their income at the source. From a fiscal perspective, new neighborhood development offers a potential trifecta: income taxes, property taxes, and sales taxes. These revenues are vital for funding investments in schools, infrastructure, community improvements, transit, parks, and affordable housing—all of which make neighborhoods being revitalized a much more attractive place for new and existing residents.

Develop a vision for the future.
It is critical to articulate the role of neighborhoods in a city’s future economic and physical growth. The District identified these emerging neighborhoods ringing downtown as the new “center city.” In 2008, it developed an action agenda describing the world-class qualities these emerging neighborhoods needed—including distinctive, rich in transportation, walkable, sustainable, equitable, and endowed with excellent public space—in order for them to them to be on par with the best neighborhoods in the world. l Establish a broad coalition. Cities need to identify players and partners that share the vision and can help translate it into action. Innovative engagement techniques, including social media and Web 2.0 applications, that draw a wide range of stakeholders can help broaden the dialogue and bring new participants to the planning and implementation process. In the District, the NoMa (North of Massachusetts Avenue) Business Improvement District was a valuable partner in developing and advocating for the plan to create a new high-density neighborhood near Union Station.

Leverage catalytic projects.
In choosing where to plan or invest, cities need to identify planned or proposed projects that can be leveraged to create additional opportunities. For instance, the $3 billion Department of Homeland Security consolidation at St. Elizabeths Hospital will be a catalytic project for Ward 8, one of the most distressed areas of D.C. The District is using this investment to bring economic opportunity and new amenities to the surrounding community.

Generate short-term wins.
Cities should develop plans that lead to implementation by identifying short-term action items that can be accomplished with available resources. It cost D.C. very little to establish a business improvement district in the Capitol Riverfront neighborhood, but this small investment created a business and civic anchor that supported and encouraged the arrival in the area of new residents and workers.

Change systems and structures.
It is fine to be a clever exceptionalist— once. But if cities find that something in one particular project or plan does not work, they should change it for everyone. For example, when municipal parking provided to attract a new big-box tenant in Columbia Heights proved to be excessive when it was only two-thirds of what zoning required, the city decided to change its zoning regulations to remove parking minimums near transit and allow sites to contract for parking off site.

Bringing development out of downtown is a challenge, but the potential to bring together a lively mix of uses that most downtowns have not actually experienced for generations is a great opportunity for planners and developers alike. This beyond-the-core development must be anchored by high-quality transportation choices, a real walkable urbanity, distinctive architecture, and natural amenities. It should also include a robust mix of uses. If done well, it can offer high-quality experiences for both work and life competitive with established districts that can usually offer only one or the other.