18 x 60 shot gun cottage for Columbus

Do you know where your town comes up with the money needed to repave streets, expand the sewer plant, pay cops, firefighters, teachers, and bus drivers?  Most municipalities rely upon a combination of sales taxes, utility bills, impact fees on new development, and the big reliable source of money for the General Fund and Capital Project: property taxes.  Property taxes are assessed according to the value of the buildings on a parcel.  The more a building is worth, the more taxes the building owner pays.  Once a building is built, there is a good chance that it will be the basis of the property taxes that will be collected for a very long time.  It makes sense for a municipality to know how much taxable value-per-acre a given pattern of development yields, since there is only so much serviced, develop-able land within its borders.  Joe Minicozzi of Urban3 does a good job of explaining this fairly obvious math in this video .

The straightforward little two bedroom cottage above is proposed on a 37.5' X 135' lot  in city with a minimum lot width of 50 feet.  There are lots of existing platted lots with water and sewer taps in an established and desirable neighborhood that are less that 50' wide.  A vacant lot in the neighborhood pays about $70 a year in property taxes.  Removing the minimum lot dimension from the local zoning code would make it possible to build modest houses like the one shown above, but like many places, the city foolishly decided to downzone its established neighborhoods a couple decades ago.  That downzoning in favor of a more suburban model damaged their tax base.  There are roughly eight 37' X 135' lots in an acre.  If this little two bedroom cottage sold for $135,000 X 8 lots to the acre, the result is $1,080,000 in taxable value per acre.  Compared with the taxable value per acre of the biggest fanciest Super WalMart in the same zip code at $520,000 per acre.

When a developer builds a shopping center of residential subdivision these days, it is fairly typical for the developer to turn ownership of the new streets, sewers and other utility infrastructure over to the municipality.  If the taxable value of the new development does not produce enough money to pay for the repaving of the street or the repair and replacement of the other infrastructure when it wears out, this turns out to be a lousy deal for the municipality.  The developer has essentially given the municipality a free Great Dane puppy.  Unless that dog gets a job, it will be a long term financial drain.

Getting senior staff and elected leadership to recognize the looming cost of replacing and repairing infrastructure in parts of the city that cannot pay their way is going to be difficult. Coming to terms with this structural and systemic failure cannot be done with short term impact fee patches. The problem is bigger and more expensive than what can be laid off on new buildings. The source of the problem comes from building a place with the wrong pattern of development over decades. If you build in a way that spreads civilization too thinly, (Auto-only Sprawl) what gets built cannot support the repaving of roads or the repair and replacement of other infrastructure, let alone paying for cops, fire fighters, schools, parks, libraries, and public health services. If towns and cities create big backlogs in infrastructure repair that they cannot pay for, the financial burden becomes so great that people elected to two or four year terms end up just ignoring the problem and resisting any effort to do the honest math that will force folks to face how much taxes are going to have to be increased to cover the repair and replacement costs that are coming down the line.  This is big money with big consequences.

If you cannot do the math to understand the taxable value per acre of serviced land, you should not be in local elected office or running a municipal department. I recognize that this is typically a problem of ignorance and not one of deliberate malice, but the effect is the same in either case. We have to build differently to provide folks with greater opportunity, but we also have to build differently because towns and cities cannot afford the financial fall out of the wrong development pattern. A town going broke while while elected officials and senior staff are ignorant is unfortunate, but kinda understandable. Going broke when you know better is borderline criminal.

So what pattern is your town going to build in?  Is anyone doing the math?

Last weekend I was working on a charrette crew that included my colleague and partner, Bruce B. Tolar.  Searching through my hard drive today I came across my (improvised) remarks from when the New Urban Guild gave the 2015 Barranco Award to Bruce, the Developer/Builder of Cottage Square in Ocean Springs Mississippi.

"For those of us who knew Michael Barranco and were there for the Katrina charrettes, this is a person who really made a mark on our lives, not just because we showed up and did work together, but because his character was such that it was like playing in a pro-am: You really upped your game when playing around Michael. Very genuine. No artifice. No phoniness. He was genuinely concerned about every person he ever met, and wanted everyone’s life to be better. He decided that architecture was his way to do that.

With his passing, there is a hole in the CNU, but the New Urban Guild offers the Barranco Award to practitioners who are that kind of stand-up guy. It’s about the character with which you comport yourself. It’s about how hungry you are to learn. It’s about how much you care about your community. It’s about how much you love and encourage your fellow-citizens. With that said, I’d like to introduce you to this year’s award-winner, Bruce Tolar, through some of his work. <begin slides of Bruce's projects>

The original Katrina Cottage which by itself was great, but Bruce took it out of the total chaos and mayhem and bad financial circumstances that were pretty much an everyday deal in Ocean Springs at that time, and all along the coast. And from nothing, he created the peaceful excellence of Cottage Square, where he put the pieces together into something amazing which that community cherishes. It has even become a tourist destination. Imagine that: an interim housing solution after a hurricane has become a tourist destination!

So Bruce pulled together all the Katrina Cottages that were built as prototypes for demonstration purposes and brought them to Cottage Square. And he made something out of the pieces, just as we all try to do, which is to aggregate a great place from small incremental parts. It is a modest place, with gravel sidewalks; a place where you can operate a tiny business out of those tiny buildings. And the community that has formed there has become a real anchor to Ocean Springs. From there, Bruce launched an expansion, which was an incredibly ambitious project in a place governed by FEMA… <cough> <laughs and applause> … a terrible environment to work under, but he is doing amazing, excellent work with modest little pieces.

He reached out to nonprofits in the area; he connects with so many people; he’s been in that town forever, serving on many boards; and the idea that there was something to be done after a hurricane, and fixing civilization in general, was a natural thing for Bruce. The people love this neighborhood. The nonprofits he’s been working with have been tremendously empowered by seeing one guy’s ability to put people together and make things work. Bruce is the best design caulking gun you can imagine, pulling everything together on modest means and making things happen. So with that, I’d like to present this year’s Barranco Award to Bruce Tolar."

If you are traveling along the Gulf of Mexico between New Orleans and Mobile you should give yourself a treat and stop to walk around Cottage Square.  It is a special place built in tough circumstances by a remarkable guy.

Warning! Planning Geek stuff ahead....

Most state have a law on the books that requires municipalities to adopt a Comprehensive Plan (called a General Plan in California) that will guide local investments in transportation, schools, parks, fire trucks, hospitals, and sewer plants.  Once the Comprehensive Plan (Comp. Plan) has been adopted, the municipality is supposed to revise their local zoning codes and development ordinances to bring them in line with the goals and policies of the Comp. Plan.  So the Comp. Plan is the big idea, the thoughtfully considered suite of policies that should guide the finer-grained rules and regulations that developers are required to follow if they want to build something.

Here's a common problem.  After going through a long string of cathartic public meetings, charrettes, visioning sessions, etc. to prepare the Comp. Plan, Downtown Master Plan, Corridor Plan, etc., the mere mortals that staff the local planning department or sit on the planning commission and the city council are kinda burned out.  The unglamorous task of revising the zoning code tends to get delayed or forgotten.  Sometimes there is  just no money in the budget to get the zoning code revisions done.

If developer shows up proposing a project that is in line with the general policies of the new Comp. Plan but violates the specific rules of the old zoning code, the only path forward is some sort of Planned Development Permit (PD), Planned Unit Development (PUD), or some similar additional process designed to allow greater flexibility that is allowed under the letter of the zoning code.  PD's and PUD's require require additional applications, additional review by the planning commission, and typically a public hearing.  In the meantime, if someone wants to build some crappy project that violates the policies of the new General Plan, but is specifically allowed under the old zoning code, they could do that as an as-of-right project. That's just bullshit.  Imagine how local residents who participated in all those visioning workshops for the Comp. Plan are going to feel when they see that crappy project get built.

I think that putting this statement on the front cover of every Comp Plan to save people a lot of time, money and frustration:

"WARNING! This is a feel good scam. We have no intention of actually changing the rules to allow you to build any of it without special permission and a number of public hearings with local residents who have not read this document."

If your community wants to see the vision of their Comp. Plan actually get built, get serious about changing your zoning code.