Life in One Place

December 10, 2006. On the Pike

I ran into my friends from the Bike Advisory Committee, of which I was a member. They said, didn't I want to join them on the county board bike ride? (They get the board members out on bikes and show them what needs fixing in the way of bike access.) And I said no no no!

But now I am getting embroiled in questions about the density of potential development along Columbia Pike, which is the main drag a block from my house. It's a tempest in a teapot, really. But I'm for increases in density (uses less energy, might get people to drive less) and most of my neighbors are against it. And even more I'm for using data and analytical tools to assess the potential impacts of any proposed changes, rather than just saying it will be awful, it will be like Calcutta, parking will be terrible, the schools are already overcrowded, it will create a great big wall along the avenue and get rid of the affordable housing (my neighbors have said all of those things) without actually analyzing which of these dire consequences might really happen and how dire they will in fact be.

This all came up because Columbia Pike is, to put it bluntly, rather ugly. And property values are lower than in other parts of Arlington. Everyone would like to see it become more attractive, trendier, walkable, and bikeable, with more chic shops and fewer payday lenders, used car dealers, fast food restaurants, and storefronts offering “envios de dinero a Honduras.” But we want all that without losing the affordable housing that lines the Pike or our cachet as a neighborhood with great ethnic diversity. Except for the county, which would like to see higher property values, as they lead to higher tax revenues, and more funds with which to provide all the services that we all want.

Just after I left Arlington in 2002, the county organized a Columbia Pike charrette, an intensive design session at which community members sketched out what they wanted the Pike to look like in the future, how they wanted it developed, what kinds of housing and businesses they wanted in the area, and how many people they wanted in the neighborhood. The result, after several years of intense

meetings (which I missed), was agreement on a vision for the Pike, of a main street for the community, where people could walk along lively, interesting streets lined with a dense pattern of shops, sidewalk cafes, and leafy trees, instead of walking on streets crowded only with cars, past a scatter of stand-alone 7-11s, McDonald’s, and used car lots, fronted by wide parking lots and sidewalks interrupted every few feet by driveways.

The vision was embodied in something called a “form-based code,” which is the latest new city planning tool designed to encourage developers to transform bleak suburban strip development into interesting urban neighborhoods. Instead of specifying what may be built in each place using narrow zoning – residential of this size, commercial of that size, industrial of the other size – a form-based code, or FBC, specifies the size and shape of buildings but leaves more flexibility about what may go inside them and how it will be laid out. Developers who follow the FBC are guaranteed an easy approval

process. In Arlington if they want to do something else, they must go through a lengthy and risky process called “site plan review,” which can take a long time, and stands a reasonable chance of being rejected. But of course it could also end up with permission to build something bigger, denser, and more profitable. So sometimes it’s worth the risk.

The FBC on Columbia Pike uses the metaphor of a Main Street to describe the motivating vision. It allows relatively high density – ten or twelve stories - in one area, termed the town center, and moderate density in several others, termed village centers, western gateway, and similar names. Between those centers, it stays with rather low density, though still requires that new projects present a solid line of buildings along the streetscape instead of scattered structures. Although people are expected to drive to this Main Street, parking is to be hidden behind the stores and accessed, if I understand the regulations correctly, through the alleys rather than from driveways off the Pike. Moving away from the Pike itself, heights drop to three or four stories to create a transition to the areas of single-family homes and garden apartments that fill out the community. So one street off the Pike, townhouses are permitted on streets designated as “local.” Beyond them, the FBC no longer applies, and parcels are zoned primarily for single-family homes.

The vision was embodied in something called a “form-based code,” which is the latest new city planning tool designed to encourage developers to transform bleak suburban strip development into interesting urban neighborhoods. Instead of specifying what may be built in each place using narrow zoning – residential of this size, commercial of that size, industrial of the other size – a form-based code, or FBC, specifies the size and shape of buildings but leaves more flexibility about what may go inside them and how it will be laid out. Developers who follow

the FBC are guaranteed an easy approval process. In Arlington if they want to do something else, they must go through a lengthy and risky process called “site plan review,” which can take a long time, and stands a reasonable chance of being rejected. But of course it could also end up with permission to build something bigger, denser, and more profitable. So sometimes it’s worth the risk.

The FBC on Columbia Pike uses the metaphor of a Main Street to describe the motivating vision. It allows relatively high density – ten or twelve stories - in one area, termed the town center, and moderate density in several others, termed village centers, western gateway, and similar names. Between those centers, it stays with rather low density, though still requires that new projects present a solid line of buildings along the streetscape instead of scattered structures. Although people are

expected to drive to this Main Street, parking is to be hidden behind the stores and accessed, if I understand the regulations correctly, through the alleys rather than from driveways off the Pike. Moving away from the Pike itself, heights drop to three or four stories to create a transition to the areas of single-family homes and garden apartments that fill out the community. So one street off the Pike, townhouses are permitted on streets designated as “local.” Beyond them, the FBC no longer applies, and parcels are zoned primarily for single-family homes.

The controversy concerns a proposal to permit construction of multi-family structures on the “local’ streets as an alternative to townhouses. The proposed multi-family buildings would have to have almost the same physical form as the townhouses – same height, length of buildings, number of entrance, windows in the face, and so on – but they could be divided differently inside to create a set of apartments instead of a row of townhouses.

This proposal has caused an uproar. Many say that it will lead to parking nightmares. It will cause great overcrowding in the schools. It will lead to the construction of buildings that will not match the relatively low-density garden apartments that provide most of the affordable housing in the community. It will lead to replacement of those garden apartments, and thus effectively getting rid of any affordable housing along the Pike. It will create creating traffic congestion on the Pike. One person has even claimed that it will cause our neighborhoods to become as crowded as Calcutta. (He has never been to Calcutta, nor, I suspect, to any other densely populated Third World city.)

But no one seems to have actually looked at the numbers, to see what might really happen. What’s more, I don’t think anyone wants to. On all sides of the fray, people are sure they know what the impacts will be, and don’t want to be confused with any attempt to even approximate the facts.

Me, I went to a community meeting and hurled myself into this tempest with both feet first – all four feet, since I think I’m a lot like a bull in a china shop. The folks who are again density are mad at me because I’m unabashedly in favor. The people who support it probably think that with friends like me, who needs enemies? And everyone who worked on the FBC over the past four years is wondering where on earth I came from. Though interestingly, one of the more outspoken and irrational

opponents of just about anything that the county proposes, the one who threatened that we will be like Calcutta, agrees with me on many of the Pike issues, and has stuck up for my right to be part of the debate even though I’ve been away for four years.

I don’t know where this will go. Maybe nowhere, in fact. These things have a way of flaring up, creating a big fight, and then dropping off as quickly as they started. In this case, I think everyone got into to the business of buying Christmas presents and navigating the holidays, because I haven’t heard a word about it since I charged my way through that community meeting. And that was a while ago.

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