Mike Eliason on "Corridor" Zoning
A Guest Post
I recently attended the Cascadia Innovation Conference where we had many stimulating discussions about the future of the region. These included thoughtful conversations about ways to reduce construction costs, improve affordability, and knit the region together. I am grateful to the organizers for the experience.
But the one “big idea” at the conference really bothered me. The headline speakers suggested that we convert strips malls (awesome!) to millions of housing units (yay!) along enormous roads (WTF!?).
In fact, the bigger the road, the more housing. Four lanes = four floors. Six lanes = six floors. I thought about writing a piece about this, but then, I realized Mike Eliason would do a much better job of it.
Mike is the person who taught me (and countless others) about one of the greatest unlocks in housing: single stair buildings, also called “point access blocks.” In fact, I wrote a popular piece about how these allow you to “have your housing and tree shade too.” He is an architect who spent years practicing in Germany and he is the author of a new book on low-carbon ecodistricts, Building for People. It is now available from Island Press.
The opinions expressed here are his own.
Corridor Zoning in Cascadia?
By Mike Eliason
The Cascadia Innovation Corridor Conference is an annual event hosted by the organization of the same name. The CIC’s event usually has one or two decent ideas (high speed rail connecting major cities – a long overdue climate win) and pairs them with really bad ones (new cities in exurban greenfields – a climate disaster). Unsurprisingly, the entire premise of the CIC is top-down urban planning, an undemocratic process with the undertaxed corporations and visionless politicians debating how others will live in the future. This isn’t Vienna’s top-down/bottom-up approach – where the city directly engages with residents on how and where they should live – but rather Robert Moses, with a touch of greenwashing thrown in.
One of the proposals from this year’s conference has taken the title a little too literal. The presentation was based on a report titled, ‘A Grand Boulevard Housing Solution for Cascadia.’ The ‘Grand Boulevard’ is a land use concept that has been making the rounds in much of the North American planning world – but it is a concept fundamentally antithetical to livability, walkable neighborhoods, climate adaptation, and public health.
The report calls for ‘upzoning undervalued strip commercial lands, mixed-income housing would be integrated in locations close to existing services and jobs, away from climate hazard zones, and along corridors that could accommodate new transit technologies.’
There are two main problems with this approach. First, these corridors are, for the most part, state highways or massive arterials and freight routes. These are the last places we should be focusing dense, affordable housing. Second, we don’t need to accommodate new transit technologies – we already know the technologies that work (frequency is freedom, dedicated bus lanes, transit priority at intersections, protected bike networks, e-bike subsidies, etc.).
The report states that with 13,000 acres (20.3 square miles) along these corridors stretching from Portland to Vancouver, there would be space for 1.4 million homes. That’s 108 homes per net acre – which may sound high, but this is really a moderate level of density.
This proposal is not that different from what the Mayor’s One Seattle’s comprehensive plan update has already enshrined - limiting dense, affordable housing on to the most toxic, noisiest, and most dangerous streets in the city - immediately falling away to detached houses half a block or a block off the arterial. It’s an approach that puts renters directly into harm’s way.
As I discuss in my new book on Island Press, Building for People, there are numerous problems with planning cities around this concept. Not only will this plan fail to move the needle on affordable housing – but the infinitesimally narrow swaths of land where affordable housing is allowed will put our most vulnerable residents directly into harm’s way on the loudest, most toxic, and dangerous streets in our region’s cities. From an equity, quality of life, and livability standpoint – I cannot imagine a plan less forward thinking and visionless than this.
From a public health perspective – there are so many problems I don’t even know where to start. The air pollution associated with motor vehicles is associated with lung cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, asthma, COPD, diabetes, and mental health conditions. The effects of air pollution will be amplified by extreme heat and climate change – ensuring the negative public health outcomes of these streets increase over time.
Chronic exposure to noise pollution is another issue with this concept. The majority of our multifamily housing in the US is in massive, double loaded corridor buildings – similar to hotels. These position units directly on the street, with no ability to mitigate the noise pollution associated with vehicular traffic. Chronic noise exposure is associated with numerous health conditions including annoyance, sleep disturbance and deprivation, cardiovascular issues, and even Alzheimer’s disease. None of this is new, we have known about this for decades – and yet our approach to urban planning does nothing to mitigate or avoid these issues, in fact it amplifies and exacerbates it. Corridor zoning policies show little concern for the health, safety, and well-being of the residents who will live on them, and is an affront to walkable urbanism and livable cities the world over.
Speaking of walkability - from a mobility standpoint, focusing density on arterials is incredibly problematic. The linear aspect stretches amenities, restaurants, and communities much further apart than they would be in a moderately compact district or neighborhood – and actively prevents walkability. These arterials and highways quite literally divide communities. Living in these neighborhoods requires crossing massive public rights of way to just achieve basic errands. These roads are also associated with a high number of crashes and deadly incidents. Simply prioritizing transit on these streets is not enough to make them safer, as we have seen on Aurora and MLK in Seattle.
From an economic standpoint, it also doesn’t induce the thriving and livable places we keep professing that we want to prioritize. Corridors involve high volumes of vehicular traffic passing through. These aren’t sticky streets where people want to see and be seen, where businesses can thrive – like the increasing number of pedestrian zones found in cities that prioritize quality of life and livability. Rather, they are liminal spaces where shops will struggle to thrive, and people will have few opportunities for interchange and exchange with their neighbors. The work of Donald Appleyard from Livable Streets really hammers this point home: low traffic neighborhoods allow community interaction to thrive, whereas high volumes of traffic stifle them.
Fundamentally, there’s another significant problem with this proposal. It preserves the region’s racist and classist status quo around land use – one that is autocentric and rooted in exclusion. I understand this may be an easier sell to some politically – but it’s at great expense, and with massive negative outcomes and effects, to everyone else.
We need a massive re-think of how we re-intensify cities and neighborhoods in this country. Moving from one that is autocentric and actively harmful, to one that prioritizes public health, community, affordability, and climate adaptation. Point Access Blocks help solve this problem. Another approach would be to prioritize dense, mixed-use, and car-light ecodistricts. There are a number of wonderful examples in planning throughout the world, but I will note that the most visionary are so far removed from our status quo in the US – we lack the ability to even comprehend how much higher quality of life in these neighborhoods could be.
One such project is Utrecht’s Merwede, a 60-acre car-light district that will feature abundant open space and nature, car-free streets, a broad mix of housing types and typologies for 12,000 residents. There will be space for jobs and commerce, restaurants, and culture. Schools, and daycares will be co-located as well. The quality of life here will be vastly different from almost anything in the US. This is the very sort of place we should be building around light rail and BRT stops. I hope this next class of electeds will prioritize climate-adaptive, livable, and high quality neighborhoods over poor quality wins.