www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvT3Ul50mW4

By Tracy Taylor, Triple Pundit

Not only are smart growth communities good for your quality of life, they are good for your pocketbook as well.  According to Market Acceptance of Smart Growth, a recent report by the EPA, smart growth communities not only see stable market prices over time, but they often see greater retail appreciation than the average suburban development.  Given all the grim news surrounding the housing market over the past years, this is a welcome bit of news to add to the already long list of benefits of smart growth.

Smart growth – what was once the buzzword of the future has already changed the way our neighborhoods look, the way our communities interact, and the way our residents feel about the place they call home.  Characterized by the centralized parks and open spaces, walkable lunch spots and coffee shops, and businesses within minutes of houses, smart growth communities encourage healthier lifestyles and a sense of community.  Less money is supposedly spent on gas, less gas equals less emissions, and less emissions equals cleaner air.  And of course, exercise increases as cars are kept parked in driveways and residents set off on foot or bike for their shorter commutes.

Full | Triple Pundit: EPA Smart Growth Developments Enjoy Stronger Resale Appreciation

This summer has been a blur and seemingly, far from over. Over the past 3 months, I’ve had the opportunity to explore the Southern states of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and South Florida. Some work, some play but overall an education.

My summer started out by having to go to Gulfport, MS for Naval Reserve training. Yes, after 8 years of active service, I’m still a part time warrior. In fact, I’m a builder in the Naval Reserves and apart of a Construction Battalion, commonly called Seabees (Sea or ‘C’ = construction, ‘Bees’ = Battalion). The position allows for me to expand my knowledge of the construction industry and continue service to my country. We’re largely rockstars. That’s all.

I apologize for my absence but I’m back (smile). My decision to relocate to Augusta, Georgia is coming full circle. Augusta is humming right now and it feels great to be back to work. The city was recognized as having one of the most resilient economies and its evident in almost every industry.

Since arriving in Augusta I’ve been on the hunt for the right development opportunity for Aribra and believe I’ve found it; in fact I’ve found two. I’ll be sharing more details as the project gets further along but in short, I’m soon to be proposing a mixed-use building I believe will compliment the existing community and serve as a catalyst for more development.  On the second site, I’m exploring a historic renovation and expansion of a Downtown building. It’s an exciting opportunity and looking forward to them taking shape.

Stay tuned for the next chapter of The Aribra Group’s story and you can be assured you’ll be hearing from me more now that I’m back to work. What were you able to get accomplished this summer that you’re proud of?

Andres Duany, famed architect for the firm DPZ and co-founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), is becoming part of the solution to the crisis in Haiti.  He has designed a basic cabin concept that can be pre-fabricated and built within days to house Haitians that remain homeless from January’s earthquake.  The cabin can house eight individuals, incorporates lessons learned from the Katrina cottage, and is context sensitive to the Haitian culture.  InnoVida Holdings LLC of Miami has announced that they will open a factory in Haiti to build these houses and donate the first 1,000 homes.

Duany can be heard describing these homes on NPR’s Here and Now.

From CNN Living | Americans Rebuild for the ‘New Urban Century’

In Charlotte, North Carolina, commuters zip along a sparkling new light rail system into a booming downtown district.

In Sacramento, California, construction workers hammer away at the next generation of green buildings.

And in New York City, rush-hour commuters pedal across popular bike paths that have spread like kudzu across the metropolis.

Those snapshots from cities across America offer a glimpse of the future. Americans are rebuilding their cities and communities to make people, not cars, the center of a more environmentally friendly lifestyle, urban planners and transportation experts say.

“We’re creating infrastructure for human beings, rather than automobiles,” says Michael Smith, CEO of Center City Partners in Charlotte, a group of business leaders that has helped lead a revival of the city’s downtown.

Creating a new infrastructure means new rules, experts say.

What’s on the way out: sprawling interstates, suburban living, long car commutes.

What’s now in: light rail, green space and vibrant downtown districts.

“As you look at the cities that are going to thrive in the next century, there’s a belief that we’re entering the urban century,” Smith says. “There’s a new urbanism that’s not about cul-de-sacs or expressways. It’s sidewalks, bike paths and parks.”

Where America is rebuilding

Smith points to downtown Charlotte as a prime example. During the past decade, downtown Charlotte has added new restaurants, art centers, the soon-to-be-opened NASCAR Hall of Fame and nightspots, Smith says.

Charlotte’s downtown growth was the result of good planning, Smith says. Thirty years ago, the city’s business and political leaders decided that Charlotte couldn’t sustain its suburban growth. So they began rebuilding downtown and eventually won public support to install a light rail system, he says.

Even the Great Recession couldn’t stop Charlotte’s downtown revival because the rebuilding projects had so much momentum, Smith says.

“We were fortunate to have 30 cranes swinging in our city center as we moved into the teeth of the recession,” Smith says.

What’s happening in Charlotte is happening across the country, says Kathleen Hughes, executive producer of “Blueprint America,” an ongoing PBS series that looks at the rebuilding of America’s infrastructure.

During her research, Hughes says she encountered plenty of communities that are using stimulus money for embracing light rail projects and pushing the revitalization of downtown districts.

“There’s a sense that America has been built out and spread out too far, and many of us live too far from our neighbors,” Hughes says.

Americans aren’t just rebuilding their transportation grid; they’re also embracing alternate forms of travel, others say.

Bike lanes are popping up in American cities, says Aaron Naparstek, founder of Streetsblog. It’s an online community for the Livable Streets movement, a coalition that seeks to transform cities by improving conditions for cyclists, pedestrians and transit riders.

In cities such as Portland, Oregon, or New York, it’s common now to see commuters biking to work, Naparstek says. In New York City alone, 300 miles of bike lanes have been added in the past four years, he says.

Naparstek says he can remember the moment when he thinks Americans’ attitude to cars shifted.

“I’m old enough to remember my dad waiting in the gas lines during the first OPEC [Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries] gas crisis,” he says. “To me, that was the beginning of the end for the American romance with the automobile.”

Rebuilding values as well as roads

As America rebuilds, new industries arise as well.

Oscar Ortega was a construction company foreman who made about $70,000 a year before he was laid off at the end of 2007. With a wife and four daughters, he performed odd jobs to stay afloat.

“I tried not to let it affect me,” he says. “If I walked around the home moping, it would affect my family. I tried to be as strong as I could.”

Then Ortega read about job openings at ZETA Communities, a green construction company in Sacramento, California. ZETA builds “net-zero” energy homes (homes that produce as much energy as they consume by using devices such as solar panels).

Ortega applied and got a call back. Two years later, he’s working as a green builder.

“I feel reborn,” he says. “That’s what the future is all about: staying green and saving the environment. This new construction is the wave of the future. I’m really excited to be a part of it.”

Americans are not only rebuilding their cities and homes, they’re also rebuilding their sense of community.

The Great Recession has also forced some to rediscover the value of community. Some of this has been done by establishing time banks, where members trade services that are tracked by hours rather than dollar value.

For example, one member of a time bank may provide an hour of tax advice to another. Another may weed a person’s garden for an hour. Each hour-long act receives a “time dollar” that can be used to purchase someone else’s labor.

Time banks are designed to build community, its founders say. It teaches people that everyone has value, even if they don’t have a job. Thirty-five states have time banks, group founders say.

“The idea is that nobody’s labor is worth more than anybody else’s labor. We’re all in this together,” says Judith Lasker, a time bank member and a sociology professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania who is writing a book about time bank organizations.

Some Americans are rebuilding their sense of values as well.

Matt Fredenberg of Alpharetta, Georgia, seems like a rarity in the Great Recession; he’s working in a thriving industry.

Fredenberg helps his mother and sister run a Senior Helpers franchise. The national franchise sends workers to homes to help family members take care of aging relatives. Their services range from light housekeeping to running errands.

Fredenberg, 26, says his family franchise has 120 employees after four years of operation. Business has been so good that he says “we’re hiring like crazy.”

But Fredenberg is not talking about parlaying his success into buying bigger and shinier toys. He says he wants to learn from the mistakes of his parents’ generation.

Fredenberg says he doesn’t own a credit card, uses coupons to eat out and shuns buying more than he needs. His friends do the same.

“Even with cars and houses, we realize that you don’t have to have the best,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be brand new and huge.”

Though times are now tough, Fredenberg says his generation is confident. Better days are ahead.

“People are willing to sacrifice some luxuries to be more practical,” he says. “We’ll come out of this. People are willing to do what it takes.”

From Next American City | American Poor Spread to Suburbia, but We’re not Ready

Let’s face it: American public policy has yet to respond to or even grasp the profound change in settlement patterns that has been gradually making its mark on the nation’s landscape over the past few decades.

Cities from Detroit to Des Moines have been pushing the gentrification of their downtowns, with generally positive results, and the results are well documented.

But more consequential to a far larger group is the mass out-migration of impoverished people from center cities into the suburbs, often in the same metropolitan areas. According to a recent Brookings Institute Study, the process is accelerating. Between 2000 and 2008, the percent of poor people living in the suburbs increased by 25%, compared to by 5.6% in central cities and 15.4% for the nation as a whole. More of the poor now live in the suburbs than in central cities: 12.5 million versus 11 million.

The out-migration of the lower-middle class has been just as notable.

From a transportation perspective, this change in the lifestyles of the poor will have a significant effect. Public transit works best when it’s in dense urban centers because it can provide efficiencies of scale by offering service to many people at the same time. This allows it to be cheap enough to satisfy most of the transportation needs of the poor—but only if they live in communities that can be adequately served by buses and trains.

When urban poverty was concentrated in the inner city, at least those who lived there were able to have relatively quick and convenient access via train or bus to the jobs in the downtown office core.

Unfortunately, the increasing presence of poor people in the suburbs means a growing share of the population that lives in sprawling neighborhoods where the provision of mass transit is limited at best—and cannot be expanded at a reasonable cost.

It’s worth looking at one particularly affected region—the Washington, D.C. metro area—to understand what’s going on. According to the Brookings report, the number of poor people in the region’s core cities, including Washington, Arlington, and Alexandria, decreased by 15,000 between 2000 and 2008, to 121,000. In the suburbs, on the other hand, the number of poor exploded by 40,000 to 251,000. Though the poverty rate in the central cities remains higher, the sheer number of poor people in the suburbs is much greater. And it means that the people living in transportation-rich inner-cities are becoming relatively wealthier.

An Urban Land Institute/Center of Housing Policy report from last year clarified both the causes and the effects of those changes. The primary explanation of the migration is the availability of low-cost housing on the suburban fringe in Maryland and Virginia; though lodging is still relatively cheap in many of the eastern parts of the District, suburban homes are both cheap and new. Even more attractive is the fact that suburbs promote the image of a crime-free, pastoral environment, a perception that unfortunately tends to fade away once too many poor people make the leap out of the inner-city core.

The high rate of foreclosures in Washington’s eastern and southern suburbs is indicative of the degree to which the lower-middle class has chosen to leave the inner city. The primary consequence of this move away from the dense core is an increase in transportation costs, primarily because of a corresponding increase in the use of private automobiles: the Urban Land Institute report documents an almost inverse relationship between housing prices and transportation costs. Suburban dwellers—rich or poor—find themselves in a situation where their only choice is driving relatively expensive cars.

When a family simply can’t afford to own and operate an automobile, the result is a massive reduction in mobility.

In this context, Celia Dugger’s recent article in The New York Times about Johannesburg, South Africa’s new bus rapid transit system seems particularly relevant. Her discussion of the difficulties of commuting for a nanny living far from the wealthy enclave in which she works is framed in terms of the long-term effects of apartheid, but her situation described could also be interpreted as yet another example of the class-based segregation that disrupts the lives of the working poor in many major cities.

Do U.S. cities provide adequate transportation for people in poor, suburban communities? Surely not in every case, since Americans of all income classes face increasingly long commutes that often don’t seem much different than that of the South African woman profiled in the Times article. Many metropolitan regions have developed in a way that requires a large percentage of the population to take hours-long journeys to get from home to work. This is not a problem confined to the southern hemisphere.

Are the American poor seriously limited by their place in the urban landscape? Can we build housing in a denser manner throughout metro regions, in both inner cities and suburbs, to ensure that we can provide adequate transit everywhere? Can we find ways to encourage the poor to stay in the cities, where they have greater mobility?

I don’t have easy answers to any of these questions, but current federal and local policy does not address the commuting needs of the suburban poor. Too many federal dollars are spent in an effort to attract people to cheap home loans and onto new highways—incentives that ultimately inspire people to move out of the inner-cities, where transportation is cheaper. Meanwhile, neither the federal government nor states have shown leadership in promoting a new way of thinking about and developing the suburbs, whose form remains stuck in the 1950s model, one that may be appealing but which is ultimately difficult to promote for people at the bottom of the income bracket.

Full | The American Poor Spread to Suburbia, but We’re not Ready

My husband, Bill, works for the Department of Defense as a civilian federal agent where his current day to day responsibilities involve protecting U.S. naval assets travelling throughout the Caribbean, Central and South America.  When the 7.0 earthquake rocked Haiti on January 12^th, he unpacked his bags for a scheduled trip to Panama and repacked them for the unexpected in Haiti.  Now, he has just returned after being there for almost a month.  Although his mission in Haiti wasn’t directly related to the urban and environmental issues that are the focus of this blog, some of the issues his team faced and the city he observed are definitely of interest to our readers.

Transportation Woes. Haiti’s transportation infrastructure was substandard to begin with.  When the earthquake hit, many bridges collapsed, the docks at the ports were heavily damaged and roads all over the city were blocked by buildings that were shook to rubble.  These obstacles increased the difficulty for aid to reach the Haitians in need.  Tasked with assessing ports, medical facilities, criminal threats, mass migration, allegations of orphan kidnappings, helicopter landing zones for aid distribution, and helping wherever they were needed, Bill’s team needed to move about steadily.  Initial travel proved to be difficult through the unfamiliar territory with a damaged road system.   At first, they hired locals more than eager  to earn some money to drive them around, navigate through the heavily damaged roads and translate from Creole and French to English when needed.   The people were friendly, gracious and excited to see help arrive.  Eventually, they were able to rent a car and find their own way around, as businesses began to reopen.

Haiti’s poor transportation system, washed out roads from mud slides of the past, and now earthquake damaged roads also caused horrible traffic.  It would take the team several hours to go only a few miles by car.  Gas scarcity and high prices also added to the complicated equation.  They were lucky to receive their daily ration of gas from the US military.

Given the high gas prices, normally five dollars per gallon, and extreme poverty that the Haitians live with, most Haitians primary mode of transportation is by foot.  Other common modes include bicycles and motorcycles.  Tap Taps are a popular way to get around.  These are independent trucks that operate as unregulated taxis.

Garbage Collection. Haiti lacks many of the basic city services that we take for granted.  Garbage and trash pile up on the side of the road.  When the pile gets big enough, they burn it.  The smell of burning plastic resonates through the air.  Port-au-Prince ranked 3^rd as the dirtiest city in the world in the 2007 Quality of Life Report produced by Mercer Human Resource Consulting.  The report ranks 215 cities throughout the world based on levels of air pollution, waste management, water potability, hospital services, medical supplies and the presence of infectious disease.

Water Pollution. The rivers that run through Haiti and the Caribbean waters that surround it are used for everything that you can imagine.  People wash their clothes in it, dump biological waste in it, bathe their children in it, and drink it.  The water’s edge along the coastline is covered in garbage.  The water running down the street gutter is brown.  Bill did not want to step in the gutter water for fear of what he would bring home on his shoes.  Just after that thought ran through his head, he saw a woman bend over and drink from it.

Deforestation. Most of Haiti’s countryside has been deforested and used to meet basic needs.  As was pointed out in past articles, the deforestation has led to a lack of wood to properly build buildings.  Without the proper support, the buildings in Port-au-Prince could not handle the magnitude of the earthquake, contributing to their collapse and the demise of over 200,000 people.

Recycled Clothing. Bill noted that a lot of their clothing looks like our old clothing.  Our clothing is apparently being recycled to them.  He saw a “Where’s the Beef” t-shirt and a “Frankie says Relax” t-shirt.  He even saw several people wearing my old alma maters t-shirts, Florida State and Georgia Tech.

Toys from Trash. Smiles were starting to come back to the children’s faces by the time Bill left.  With so little that they have, they still are children.  They still like to play.  They made kites out of trash bags, pull toys from empty water bottles and toy cars from old cans.

A World Community. On a brighter side, a tragedy like this does bring the world together.  Makeshift medical tents from teams of almost every country you can think of – Jordan, Canada, France, Germany, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Brazil, Israel, Russia, the United States, and so on – were cropping up all over the country.  Bill met so many amazing people that put their home lives on hold, hopped on a plane without a formal plan in hand to come help.  They came as volunteers, packed their own food and brought supplies, because their hearts led them there.  I am proud of many of our own friends and neighbors that did just that.

“Haiti Normal” as it is called, is starting to return.  Cleanup efforts have begun.  Markets are reopening.  Bill bought local art from vendors on the street.  In so many ways, the Haitian people live much more sustainably than us.  But in so many ways, they are destroying the environment that surrounds them.  With all eyes on Haiti, we can learn a lesson or two from them, while trying to help reverse the horrible cycle of poverty and environmental destruction they are stuck in.  Now it’s your turn.  As part of the international community that is helping Haiti, what do you think are the key pieces to rebuilding this country?

The current economic crisis offers a chance for a paradigm shift. We should not waste this opportunity by returning to the status quo that existed before the downturn or even pining for that unsustainable state. Instead, we should embrace rethinking our economy, and in particular our land use, development and construction policies.

We are already seeing some economic changes relating to the downturn. Prior to the economic freefall over the last year, savings rates had dwindled to literally nothing. With the modest level of recovery, some are bemoaning the lackluster spending on American consumers. What we are seeing is actually a rebound of more healthy savings rates rather than a continued hunger for excessive material goods fueled by debt financing. Count me as one who sees this as a long term win even if it means a slower recovery.

The downturn has had disparate impacts that in some markets are directly tied to land use policy. In urban style Arlington County, Virginia, the recession has certainly slowed business growth and hurt specific businesses. Overall, however, property values have dropped only very modestly in the midst of a global downturn. The 2009 budget actually called for a 4.4% budget increase while 2010 recommended a very modest 1.3% decline. These budget estimates reflect a modest drop in property tax revenues associated with a modest property tax increase and moderate value decreases.

By comparison, Prince William and Loudoun Counties experienced spectacular numerical growth fueled by huge sprawling single family subdivisions which feed into clogged arterial highways. These regions have suffered precipitous drops in property values and high foreclosure rates. For example, in 2006, Prince William recorded a total of 249 foreclosures. In 2008, this number jumped to 6,549. These jurisdictions are now struggling to shift their focus and development approach.

Transit oriented dense development has demonstrated a more sustainable environmental footprint and economic framework in challenging times. This intersection of economic and environmental sustainability makes the discussions blooming at places like Aribra and Build2Sustain so exciting and timely. Sustainability requires both economic and environmental consideration and in the end, both are truly symbiotic.

On one level, I see these changes and events as looking forward to the future. On another very different level, I see them as harkening to the better part of our nation’s past. I was raised in large part by my grandparents, children of the depression. My grandfather served in both World War II and the Korean War. Their generation, rightfully called the Greatest Generation, worked, fought, scrimped, and challenged our nation to success. It was these qualities of talent and character, coupled with a wealth of natural resources and a structural backbone of democracy and freedom that constitute what I associate with the phrase “American Exceptionalism”.

Over the last few decades, I believe we have strayed far from the ideals of the Greatest Generation. Deficit financing of excessive consumer goods does not match that generation’s value system. Folks who trumpet the theory that American Exceptionalism means we are “the best” and therefore can swing our global weight around do not get it either. It is not that we ever were or thought we were better than anyone else, but rather that the Greatest Generation did what they had to do and got it done. In fact, this co-opting of the Greatest Generation’s spirit in political discourse runs counter to the very concepts of humility and service that ran at the core of the Greatest Generation.

I think about these themes quite a bit in my daily life, my legal practice, and talks amongst friends. I was so struck when my friend and twitter pal James Bedell recently commented on this very theme in a post The End of American Exceptionalism. If this concept is about permanent US world domination, that is not reality in my book: what goes up, must eventually come down. I grew up pondering the theory of cost of empire and the fall of the Roman Empire. I was part of the guinea pig test history classes for Paul Kennedy’s widely respected The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, a tremendous book that still rings true decades later.

In the end, I agree with James that the world hungers for, loves and purchases our “culture”, but I believe to my core that what is perceived as American culture is part of the problem and not the solution moving forward. American Exceptionalism started and maintained from a very different set of core values, and those core values propelled us in large part to our success. In the end, it is about a more modest set of assumptions and expectations, values based on service and leadership rather than consumption and domination. These values in turn fit directly into developing a more sustainable model of growth and the economy moving forward. These values are ours to embody and demonstrate or to ignore and discard, so in the end, the question of whether American Exceptionalism is alive is up to us.

Photo, Flickr

I live a double life.

Most recently that life has been spent amid a cacophony of rumbling trains on the elevated subway line outside my window, the din of car horns from the drive-through fast food restaurant below my building, shrieks from emergency vehicles, bangs and clashes from the construction work on Columbia’s new campus across the way, shouts from passersby, and yes on rare occasions, gunshots.

In contrast, I spent the majority of my life – I’m only 35 – in rural America where the audible equivalent to my current urban context consisted of insects louder than the 1 and 2 trains rumbling above Broadway, roosters and wild turkeys announcing the coming daylight, solitary cars on the highway just down what use to be a dirt road when I was a kid, the distant haunting drone of the Silver Meteor or the Palmetto passing through town three miles west, and, though with more frequency but less suspicion, gunshots.

Lately, I’ve been giving a considerable amount of thought to just how these two extremes, both of which I love for peculiar reasons, are actually two sides of the same coin. On Wednesday, May 23, 2007, that coin got a tad bit weighted to one side as scientists from North Carolina State University and the University of Georgia projected that the earth’s human population, for the first time in history, had become more urban than rural.

Even as these scientists urged us to avoid placing greater importance on urban populations in light of these findings, much of academia rushed to exploit and skew this information with untold numbers of urban studies. Urban had become academically fashionable in a way it never had been before. In actuality, we’re not talking about some dramatic shift; the United Nations estimated that by 2010, less than two months from now, there will only be a 2.6% difference in favor of urban population numbers!

This isn’t a zero-sum game. Urban and rural communities are not in competition with each other – at least they shouldn’t be considered that way. Rural communities produce goods and resources that are then processed by our cities for both urban and rural consumers. Interestingly, researches suggest that if either had to sustain themselves without the other, “few would bet on the cities.”

But there’s a dark side to this relationship between urban and rural communities. NC State and Georgia researchers concluded that not only do rural areas have more than their share of poverty and low education attainment, but they also receive a disproportionate amount garbage, polluted air, contaminated water, and hazardous waste produced by their urban counterparts!

Urban America, regardless of its newly established majority standing, can not afford to continue dumping on rural America.  While one might go so far as to consider this immoral, I believe it’s just plain dumb. Cities need the resources provided by surrounding rural areas for their continuation. Conversely, rural America cannot be left out of the conversations that are going on across this country regarding infrastructure, sustainability, community empowerment, education, and the arts.  It just will not do.

As I continue to discover the similarities and differences between my double lives, I look forward to sharing them and making the connections more mutually meaningful. Moving forward, it’s quite clear there can be no healthy urban America without a equally healthy rural America.

Why do you prefer to shop and eat at certain places more than others?  Why do people in one neighborhood seem to all know each other while people in another neighborhood keep to themselves?  Why will you walk down main street, but drive from one end of the strip mall to the other to frequent different stores?   The design of place plays a major factor.  It affects your experience, your behavior, the value of the place, and of course the environment.

Below is a comparison of two retail centers designed very differently.  Both retail centers are located near each other in Atlantic Beach, Florida and contain popular locally owned and national neighborhood retail shops and restaurants.  The first example, the Atlantic Beach Town Center, has a pedestrian friendly design that encourages people to walk to and within the retail center, a fundamental element of sustainable design.  The second retail center is designed solely for customers to arrive by automobile, a common design flaw of unsustainable developments.

Atlantic Beach Town Center Design Elements:

• Buildings are setback from the street only enough to allow one row of parking, landscaping and the sidewalk.
• The landscaping and parallel parking along the street provide a buffer between the pedestrian and cars driving down the street, allowing the pedestrian to feel more comfortable walking down the sidewalk.
• The parking, landscaping, sidewalk, building pattern is mirrored on the opposite side of the street, framing the street.
• The buildings are to scale and in character with the surrounding neighborhood.
• The sidewalks are wide and made of dedication bricks.
• The angled parking in front of the retailers along the street is teaser parking, provided to allow for quick automobile stops (good for retailers).
• Parking is limited, encouraging bike and pedestrian traffic.
• Most parking is provided in surface lots located behind the buildings or buffered by landscaping.

Atlantic Beach Strip Mall Design Elements:

• The building is setback from the street to allow four rows of parking.
• Two sidewalks are necessary, one next to the street and one next to the building.
• The sidewalks are not connected, and therefore a pedestrian walking along the street has to cross through the parking lot to visit a business.
• Parking is plentiful, encouraging driving and creating unnecessary impervious surfaces and thus excess stormwater runoff.
• A minimal amount of landscaping is provided within the parking lot for aesthetic purposes, providing minimal shade for the cars and no benefits for the pedestrian.

Are there any other design differences you can find between the developments?  Look for future postings of “The Design of Place” with comparison pictures for different types of developments.