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| Western Perspective |
As more
people flock to the Rocky Mountain West,
wise land-use management becomes a necessity |
Last
week I wrote about how, before John Hickenlooper
became Denver's mayor, his private entrepreneurship
had contributed to the revitalization of the city's
Lower Downtown ("LoDo") district. I suggested that Hickenlooper
had now brought those same entrepreneurial energy and
skills to City Hall.
I've been arguing that private investment in large-scale,
mixed-use infill redevelopment is a crucial component
of any western strategy to contain sprawl. I'll wrap
up this series by making a few observations and inviting
our readers' thoughts about the politics of this issue.
A phenomenon as powerful and persistent as the ongoing
continental migration into the mountains would by itself
create a daunting political challenge for western communities
and states.
The challenge is only exacerbated by the equally persistent
(and profoundly wrong-headed) efforts of western libertarians
to drive a stake in the heart of local and state governments'
capacity to manage this unrelenting growth.
That feature of the political challenge is dangerously
present in the current round of "property
rights" initiatives making their way onto western
ballots.
In the face of these powerful demographic and ideological
pressures, the West has to be seriously engaged in the
business of mobilizing a political base broad enough
to sustain the kind of long-term progressive policies
the region must pursue if we are to fit several million
more people into the region in an ecologically and socially
acceptable way.
The work of broadening and consolidating that political
base is going on in a variety of ways across the region.
The old coalition of conservationists, hunters and anglers
that Teddy Roosevelt had played such a large part in
pulling together a century ago, had been cleverly picked
apart in recent years by the Wise Use Movement and its
allies, who had persuaded many of the "hook and bullet"
crowd that conservationists were out to lock up the
woods and shut down the resource industries that supported
many of those western sportsmen. But that old coalition
is being re-forged, and is once again becoming
a political force in the West.
State and local chapters of the League of Conservation
Voters, patiently analyzing voting records, interviewing
and endorsing candidates, and weighing in strategically
on key ballot issues, are having a noticeable effect
in many parts of the region.
There is another dimension to this political picture,
less obvious than the examples just mentioned, but maybe
as important in the long run.
If the insidious appeal of the "murder-the-government-beast"
libertarian ideology is to be effectively countered,
it will be in part because enlightened entrepreneurs
resist that siren song and persuade others to do the
same.
This is where John Hickenlooper's kind of politics becomes
so important. It would be ludicrous for anyone to charge
Hickenlooper with being "anti-business," given his background,
but beyond that, his background makes him acutely aware
that good land-use policies are at the heart of any
sound pro-business agenda in today's Rocky Mountain
West.
And if progressive land-use policies are to garner
the backing of a broad enough and deep enough political
base to carry the day, then that base must contain growing
numbers of entrepreneurs who have come to see that the
livability of western communities is now this region's
economic ace in the hole, and the key to sustainable
prosperity throughout the Rockies.
The good news is that a steadily growing number of
western cities are electing progressive leaders whose
own political bases have been built and broadened in
exactly that way.
Boise's Mayor Dave Beiter, Salt Lake City's Rocky Anderson,
and at a smaller scale, Missoula's John Engen have all
come into office or been kept there in no small part
because growing numbers of entrepreneurs in their communities
see a match between their own enlightened self-interest
and the policies of these progressive leaders.
Events like the Orton Family Foundation's PLACEMATTERS06
Conference are a crucial component of a long-term regional
strategy for managing the growth that continues to challenge
the West.
Such conferences will be even more successful if they
succeed in enlisting the wisdom and experience of progressive
developers, so that others can hear what makes their
projects work and what policy innovations would make
more of them possible. Those lessons would be re-enforced
by involving progressive political entrepreneurs, to
learn from them what it will take to build the political
base the West is going to need to make the most of our
region's possibilities.
If you know politicians or developers that fit this
description, encourage them to attend the conference,
or to send a representative.
And if you have thoughts on this subject, or a story
from your own community, please join this discussion.
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Denver's
thriving downtown redevelopment provides
a perfect setting for PLACEMATTERS06 |
Brownfields development
provides one avenue for redirecting some of the West’s
growth from sprawl to urban infill.
As I wrote in the opening column
of this series, these developments depend crucially
on private entrepreneurship to make them work. The same
is true of another expanding phenomenon in western cities:
downtown revitalization, which now increasingly includes
residential development in the heart of town.
My wife and I recently visited family
and friends in Denver. I kept asking people how Mayor
John Hickenlooper was doing, and kept getting favorable
reports about his leadership.
I was also encouraged several times to visit the Wynkoop
brew pub, which had been Hickenlooper’s claim
to fame before he ran for mayor in 2003. We enjoyed
a good meal and an even better microbrew, and then strolled
around the recently revitalized Lower Downtown (“LoDo”)
before catching the 16th Street trolley back to our
hotel.
A few nights earlier, we had attended
a Colorado Rockies game, so we knew that some of the
people on the street tonight were headed for Coors Field,
but I also knew (from having watched this once down-and-out
part of town come back to life over the past few decades)
that many of the people out on the street were simply
strolling through their neighborhood.
They lived here, in loft apartments and
condominiums that had been constructed, often in old
warehouses, above the shops, restaurants, and, yes,
brew pubs that had made LoDo into an attraction for
visitors like us, but also, far more significantly,
for thousands of people seeking the good life in the
West, not on a “give me room, lots of room”
ranchette, but here in this bustling, densely inhabited
urban setting.
If, as seems all but certain, the continental migration
into the mountains is going to continue for the foreseeable
future, then more and more of the newcomers (and more
of us old-timers, too) are going to have to be attracted
to the kind of urban living that can fit hundreds of
people on an acre of land. That’s going to have
to happen in big western cities like Denver, but also
in scale-appropriate ways in mid-sized cities like Missoula,
Mont., and in hundreds of smaller towns up and down
the spine of the continent.
So when something like the PLACEMATTERS06
conference gives westerners an opportunity to examine
the land-use practices of the West, part of the discussion
should be about what is making urban living more attractive,
and what other western towns and cities can learn from
a story like this one from Denver.
When societal norms come to define the
good life in ways that lead people to want to live spread
out across increasingly stressed landscapes, and when
we want to change those patterns of inhabitation in
more ecologically benign and sustainable directions,
how do we do that? In a variety of ways, many of which
will be examined at this conference.
Many of those methods have necessarily
to do with planning and regulation, and it is important
to continue to sharpen best practices in these arenas.
But in the end, people are going to live where they
enjoy living, and if we want them to live closer together,
they are going to have to see that it is possible to
do that in a way that makes their lives better than
they would otherwise have been. Which is another way
of saying that the market has to be a major, if not
the major tool of growth management.
This brings me back to the theme of entrepreneurship.
It is impossible to change patterns of inhabitation
unless some builders or developers are willing to risk
investment in residential markets that are relatively
unproven.
There is nothing to be gained by assuming
that they would do this for any reason other than making
money. These entrepreneurs are betting that people are
going to be willing to live (and to pay good prices
to live) in settings that standard wisdom says they
won’t want to inhabit. That’s the kind of
entrepreneurship that brought LoDo back to life, and
it’s that kind of risk-taking that will have to
take place across the region if there is to be any realistic
chance of containing sprawl.
Nothing succeeds like success, of course,
so we should expect success stories like LoDo to make
other investors in other localities less nervous about
this kind of mixed-use downtown redevelopment. But such
successes are not self-contained; their success depends
on their being surrounded by broader patterns of success.
A mixed-use downtown redevelopment initiative
can only work in the context of a city that works. Which
may have something to do with John Hickenlooper having
decided to take his entrepreneurial skills from the
brewpub to city hall.
Hickenlooper had been one of the first
to invest in LoDo. As one blogger puts it, “The
rebirth of LoDo owes much to the revered Wynkoop and
owner John Hickenlooper. When the only people that frequented
lower downtown were winos and street urchins, he had
the guts to turn this historic building [the J. S. Brown
Mercantile Building] into the town’s first brewpub.”
Running for mayor was a similarly gutsy
move, in which Hickenlooper risked the reputation and
good will he had built up through his private activities.
Politics is always entrepreneurial in the sense that
politicians are forever putting various forms of political
capital at risk with new initiatives, programs and policies.
Hickenlooper has been a very active mayor in those terms,
launching ambitious efforts to reduce homelessness and,
most recently, to triple the number of trees in the
city.
It’s this kind of bold but likely-to-pay-off
political entrepreneurship that we’re going to
need in western communities of all sizes if this region
is to maintain the high level of livability that makes
it such an attractive place to live, or to move to.
Cities that work in ways that can make
neighborhoods like LoDo work require aggressive light
rail and other transportation initiatives; they require
effective affordable housing policies; they require
metropolitan cooperation across jurisdictional boundaries.
None of this can be achieved without skillful political
entrepreneurship.
Conferences like PLACEMATTERS06
provide an excellent opportunity to bring progressive
local political entrepreneurs together with private
entrepreneurs like those who revived LoDo. What better
place to do it than in John Hickenlooper’s town?
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| Public
officials, private parties working in concert can create
sustainable communities in the West |
By Daniel
Kemmis
for Headwaters News
August 10, 2006 |
Back in the early ’90s,
during my first term as Missoula’s mayor, I worked
with the City Council to create a new urban redevelopment
district adjacent to the first such district, which
had encompassed Missoula’s downtown. The
second district stretched along both banks of the Clark
Fork River, immediately downstream from the downtown
heart of Missoula.
There were several reasons for creating
this new redevelopment district. The area was capable
of handling Missoula’s expanding commercial center
and the city, like so many others in the Rockies, has
added thousands of new residents throughout the’90s
and into this decade.
But the main reason I wanted that new
redevelopment district in place was because an old sawmill,
occupying more than 40 acres of prime riverfront property,
had finally closed. Whatever was going to happen
next on this substantial tract so near the center of
town, I wanted Missoula’s seasoned and successful
redevelopment agency to be available to make the most
of the opportunity.
I’ll return to the ongoing saga
of this old mill site, but first I want to observe how
typical of western cities and towns this kind of story
has become. This is a classic case of the transition
from the old western economy, driven by resource extraction
and related manufacturing industries, to the new economy,
producing prosperity out of amenities, not least the
attractiveness and livability of western cities.
As the continental migration into the
mountains, which has made the Rockies the fastest growing
region in the country, nears the end of its second decade,
the challenges of managing and guiding that growth have
become steadily more intense. The response to
those challenges takes many forms, but among the most
encouraging has been a steadily more sophisticated series
of workshops and conferences committed to helping the
region’s leaders and its citizens fashion effective
tools and policies to minimize the damage and optimize
the beneficial opportunities presented by this relentless
in-migration.
It is in the context of the upcoming PLACEMATTERS06
conference, which Headwaters will be covering with stories
and original columns (see sidebar), that I offer the
story of the Missoula mill site as an example of the
kinds of challenges and opportunities now facing so
many western communities. In a nutshell, what
this and similar situations provide is an opportunity
for major, mixed-used infill development of a kind that
can create a positive experience of urban living and,
in the process, slow some of the vectors of sprawl that
continue to afflict so many western cities, including
Missoula.
Often, these opportunities arise on what
are now called “brownfields” – urban
sites that have suffered one or another form of pollution,
usually from past industrial activity. That is
the case with the Missoula site, and, as in most such
instances, the environmental and bureaucratic complexities
of brownfield reclamation are among the major challenges
of making such redevelopment viable.
A few years after leaving
the Mayor’s office, I was asked by my successor
to serve on Missoula’s redevelopment agency board,
and it is in that capacity that I have had the opportunity
to be involved with this project for the last few years.
I won’t recount here the almost
breathtaking convolutions of financial, legal, regulatory,
social and political pathways we have had to tread to
come as far as we have with this project – and
there is more yet to come before any dirt actually gets
turned, let alone any buildings built. What I
want to focus on for now is the absolutely key role
of entrepreneurship and market mechanisms in such an
undertaking, and what I take to be some of the implications
of that fact for public policy and for public entities
like the Missoula Redevelopment Agency (MRA).
At this point in time, the MRA Board and
the City Council have recently approved a $3.6 million
bond issue so that developers can acquire a long-term
lease on the property, while the cleanup plan is approved.
Planning for a substantial riverfront park is also underway,
complete with the addition of a major segment of Missoula's
extensive riverfront trail system. Once the developers
obtain zoning and subdivision plan approval, a larger
bond issue will enable the mixed-use development itself
to proceed.
Our redevelopment agency has pushed hard
to seize the current opportunity, in part because we
found ourselves working with a pair of developers from
Missoula and from Boulder, Colorado whose vision of
what they wanted to accomplish fit extremely well with
the agency’s own vision for what should happen
in that key location.
From the outset, it was clear that the
public agency could not by itself make anything happen
on the site. This is true, not only because the land
is privately owned, but also because any meaningful
redevelopment of the site would have to be paid for
primarily from income generated by that redevelopment
itself.
Without the risk-taking that entrepreneurship
always entails, the urban redevelopment potential of
the site could not possibly be realized. Important as
planning and regulation are as sideboards to protect
the public good, no amount of planning or regulation
can, by itself, turn a site like this from its old economy
past to its new economy potential.
I believe that one of the implications
of this for the PlaceMatters conference in October is
that progressive entrepreneurs – developers, investors,
architects and builders – need to be as much a
part of these conversations as planners or elected officials.
In later installments of this series, I will turn to
some of the other implications of large-scale infill
developments for the western land use discussion.
For now, I invite our readers' reflections
on the role of private entrepreneurship and the most
promising examples of public-private cooperation in
addressing the West's urban land use challenges.
Daniel Kemmis
writes a column for Headwaters News that focuses on
issues common to the Rocky Mountain States.
Mr. Kemmis is a Senior Fellow at
the Center for the Rocky Mountain West at The University
of Montana. He is also the former Mayor of
Missoula, Montana, and a former Speaker and Minority
Leader of the Montana House of Representatives.
Mr. Kemmis is the author of three
books: Community and The Politics of Place;
The Good City and the Good Life; and This
Sovereign Land: A New Vision for Governing the West.
In 1998, the Center of the American
West awarded him the Wallace Stegner Prize for sustained
contribution to the cultural identity of the West. In
2002, This Sovereign Land was the top choice for the
Interior Department's Executive Forum Speaker Series.
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As part of its mission to serve the West, Headwaters News helps to publicize gatherings and conferences about the Rocky Mountain region, while also serving as an additional forum for discussion of the issues discussed. We did that last spring when we ran two Western Perspective columns in conjunction with the Sopris Foundation’s “Innovative Ideas for a New West” conference.
Headwaters News
will also be highlighting the
PLACEMATTERS06 conference scheduled for October
19-21 in Denver. The conference is organized
by the Orton Family Foundation.
Headwaters News, in collaboration with the New West Network, will feature several articles and editorials before, during and following the conference. We invite you to join that discussion.
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Analysis:
Conference works to
keep what's best in the West
By Shellie Nelson
editor
Headwaters News
Aug. 10, 2006
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PLACEMATTERS06, the name of the Orton Foundation's
annual look at the best land-use practices for
creating sustainable communities, is also the
attitude of many who inhabit the Rocky Mountain
West.
Community leaders from across the region and the
nation will gather in Denver in October to discuss
some of the underpinning issues of growth and
development in the region, including where the
energy for that growth will be produced, how to
accommodate the ever-changing needs and tastes
of the growing population, transportation needs,
and the growing momentum of citizen's initiatives
to revamp property rights laws.
more >>>
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