Reinventing Our Downtowns, Part 1

It’s not just The Loop, or Midtown, or LoDo, or the Golden Triangle. Traditional office districts across the world that attempt to fit back into their 2019 forms are struggling. This is a moment for local governments to boldly reconsider what our downtowns can be.

The Chicago Tribune’s editorial board has the situation right. Their astute editorial notes that the traditional five-day work week has been truncated, at least with in-person presence. Now, the biggest worker presence occurs Tuesday through Thursday, and Friday is a particularly quiet day, week after week. The most likely long-term scenario is that this trend continues; there may never again be the concentration of Central Business District workers that we used to see.

With the infrastructure in place, transit nodes, and excitement of discovery that they offer, our former “Central Business Districts” have enormous potential to meet the world of 2023*. But attempting to remain simple 9-to-5 office hubs, relying on a dwindling number of lease renewals and ancillary daytime worker spending, is not enough.

Park(ing) Day 2022 brings a burst of activity to Glenarm Place in downtown Denver.

This is the time to begin working with developers on office-to-residential conversions, seeding new social spaces indoors and (especially) outside, and facing the future of work.

(*This is the first of three posts offering my thoughts on how to help this transition along, continuing through the New Year).

The Southwest Ecodistrict: Washington, DC Reimagines Another Neighborhood

Continuing my blog catch-up theme of finally writing about events I attended last fall, the DC Office of Planning came to visit the American Planning Association’s monthly “Tuesdays at APA” gathering in November. Their presentation detailed major projects proposed for southwest DC to improve the area’s connectivity to the National Mall and the nearby waterfront and make federal spaces more sustainable, per Executive Order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve building performance.

The DC Office of Planning, along with the National Capital Planning Commission and the National Park Service is currently engaged in a long-term reimagining of part of the city’s Southwest quadrant. One project just approved is the Maryland Avenue SW small area plan, and another, longer-term initiative is the Southwest EcoDistrict. I will be talking mostly about the latter in this post but they are complementary and inter-related.

Map of the Southwest Ecodistrict area. Note that the railroad tracks and Maryland Ave. together form one of the sight lines toward the US Capitol, which is just off the map to the upper right. Courtesy of Google Maps.

This fifteen-block area is the home of multiple federal agencies, including the FAA, NASA, and the Department of Energy, and is bounded by Independence Avenue and the National Mall to the north; see the map above for context. If you have visited DC and been to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, the Sackler Gallery, or the National Botanic Gardens, you have been in the general vicinity of the proposed ecodistrict. However, there are relatively few attractions actually within this area–whether for workers or visitors–and that is something this plan seeks to change.

Part of L’Enfant Promenade in Southwest DC. The concrete office building surrounded by a large concrete plaza is a typical sight in this area, and something the Ecodistrict wishes to improve with mixed-use, energy-efficient buildings and livelier streets with many types of activity. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Elvert Barnes.

The proposals for the eco-district include: analysis of existing infrastructure and modernization at a district rather than building or block level, the return of the Maryland Avenue corridor to a usable street for pedestrians and autos, and improved pedestrian connections to nearby neighborhoods. These will all pave the way for the addition of residential units, hotel rooms, and retail/restaurants. The proposed rezoning of the area to the DD-4 designation would allow offices to be retained, while adding these multiple new uses. At the same time, the area must still accommodate existing CSX freight trains and the Virginia Railway Express commuter trains, which has a busy station near L’Enfant Plaza.

Many of the buildings here were built in the mid-20th century modern style, and are showing their age. They will be due for either major upgrades or demolition soon, so this is a good time to think about money-saving possibilities for the long term. For example, a district energy system (which provides power and heat to many buildings from a central point) or mixed-use buildings, possibly with retail on the ground floor and residences above. I know that lots of folks lament the flood of newly constructed condo and apartment buildings in the last few years and protest that we don’t need more, but this is slightly different. There are very few residences in this part of town, at the same time that the Census Bureau tells us droves of new folks are moving into the District. Building residential components into SW is an excellent opportunity to entice some of those new residents to a neighborhood that is centrally located, walkable and well-served by transit, and will hopefully have more services like grocery stores available in the medium- to long-term.

Trains pass underneath L’Enfant Promenade. A critical transportation link that must be maintained in SW DC. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Matt Johnson.

The Maryland Avenue small area plan, which was just approved and adopted by Council this week, is actually a separate but complementary project. I attended another public meeting last summer specifically about that, but I mention it only in passing here because I’m focusing on the Ecodistrict project. It is an interesting placemaking attempt on its own in addition to improving an important transportation corridor.

Finally, if you live in DC and wish to comment on the Southwest Ecodistrict plan, the DC Office of Planning will hold a public meeting on Thursday, July 19th at 6:30 p.m. at their building, 1100 4th St. SW. If you’ve never been, I encourage you to go; their offices are quite nice and almost directly on top of the Waterfront Metro station.

Flickr photos reposted under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.

Wrap-Up of the 2011 National Rural Transportation Peer Learning Conference

For three days last week  I helped to staff this annual conference with RPO America, which marked its fifth year in existence. This year’s event was held here in Washington, D.C. Notwithstanding a minor earthquake the day before its start and an approaching hurricane the weekend after it adjourned, the conference went quite well. Transportation planners from 33 states and Washington, D.C. representing rural planning organizations (RPOs), councils of government (COGs) from small metros, state DOTs and two branches of the federal government (EPA and USDOT) came to share best practices from their organizations.

In two and a half days we covered a lot of ground, by there were two sessions in particular that I found especially useful:

1) Connie Shade from the Lower Savannah Council of Governments led a session on mobility in rural areas and small metros. With the recent triumph of a new and expanding transit system serving Orangeburg and Calhoun Counties in South Carolina under their belt, the organization was able to present the Cross County Connection as a model. The 30 or so people in the room had a lively conversation about the nuts and bolts like how to set up and fund such a system. However, I found the most interesting topics to be about the details of keeping a transit system running. For example, how can you attract people who have not previously used transit? Solutions mentioned ranged from marketing campaigns to engage people needing medical transportation to “wraps” on bus windows that make them appear to be more populated.

The Cross County Connection was also recognized as one of the 16 Excellence in Regional Transportation Awards in advance of the conference, and was one of two to win the brand new Trailblazer Award, chosen by their peers as one of the most innovative rural transportation projects of the year. Congratulations to the Lower Savannah COG for this honor!

2) Kathy Ruffalo also provided a legislative update, to bring the current mess that is Congress’ attempt to reauthorize surface transportation legislation. Congress will reconvene next week, and according to Ruffalo, here is what we can expect. After a summer in which debate over raising the nation’s debt ceiling and how to pay down the deficit “sucked all the air out of the room,” attention to other issues was hard to come by in Congress. Even so, both the House and the Senate were working on versions of a new transportation bill, to replace SAFETEA-LU, which expired almost two years ago and has been continued via short-term extensions since then.

The House’s version of the bill, headed by the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, is a traditional six-year authorization, and will propose only spending that can be met by the Federal Highway Trust Fund, which would entail a deep cut in the amount of funding allotted to transportation. By contrast, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is proposing a two-year bill, with funding levels continued at the same level as currently. This would mean that Congress must locate about $12 billion in addition to the proceeds of the Highway Trust Fund. The one thing that both houses do agree on, fortunately, is an expansion of the TIFIA loan program. As a strong advocate of maintaining and upping the quality of our existing transportation infrastructure, this is a bright spot in the long slog of reauthorization.

Another issue is that the federal gas tax will also expire on September 30th of this year. This unfortunate coincidence means that Congress will need to act to extend this as well, or the government will be unable to collect this much-needed revenue. After the impasse over FAA reauthorization meant millions in airline ticket taxes were not collected earlier in the summer, no one in Washington appears to have the appetite for another such obstacle. Ruffalo pointed out that the Simpson-Bowles Deficit Commission did recommend a 15-cent increase in the gas tax, giving legislators more authority to recommend a much-needed revenue generator.

The takeaway for planners in RPOs is that transportation is in fact on the minds of Congress, whether or not it appears that way. However, in order for effective programs to result from the next surface transportation bill, there must be consensus on a timeline, and a funding source must be identified. It all comes down to that.

Disclaimer: I work for NADO, which organized the conference, but these views are solely my own.