Metro Pulse/Commentary/Unnatural Unions

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The urbanization of cornfields and cow pastures

by Matt Edens

So, while the rest of the country is lined up across the aisles about the issue of gay and lesbian marriage, guess what I spent last week debating via email with a friend I occasionally have political arguments with.

Why, zoning, naturally. Yes, I really am that pathetic. And no, there isn’t a cure.

Still, it could be worse. The whole argument got started when I read something on this friend’s blog (“Dude, I’m at least getting paid for this....”). It revolved around the announcement of the new Northshore Town Center, the “New Urbanist” inspired development at the corner of Pellissippi and Northshore. My friend the blogger took considerable umbrage over the fact that the development—built on a greenfield site way out amongst the sprawl of West Knoxville—was calling itself “new urbanist.” After all, something built out on a cow pasture can’t be urban, can it?

Actually it can, more or less. Speaking strictly from a design standpoint—as opposed to, say, radio programming—“urban” has to do with the scale and density of development. It doesn’t really have anything to do with where the city limits are. Big chunks of what’s officially Knoxville are as suburban in scale as Karns or Seymour (including a surprising amount of East Knoxville). And it is entirely possible to build brand new “urban” spaces on cow pastures, cornfields and even virgin forest. After all, how do you think downtown Knoxville, Fourth and Gill, and Fort Sanders got here? Suburbia and, uh, urbia are simply two different development patterns. It’s just that the fact the middle class overwhelmingly lives in the ‘burbs means that the debate gets muddied up by a lot of “epater les bourgeois” baggage.

Taken purely on its merits as a design, Northshore Town Center is surprisingly “urban,” even if it is new. There are to be offices and apartments over the shops, houses in walking distance of the stores, and sidewalks connecting them all. Hell, if you lived there and worked in one of the offices, you could annoy people by bragging constantly that you’ve gone a week and a half without getting in your car (which, as far as I can tell, is the true litmus test for downtown living).

Still, the guy with the blog did have a point. Wouldn’t it have been so much better if the developer had built his 800,000 sq. ft. of office/retail space and 720 housing units on some brownfield site in the center city? Yes, it would. Heck, a private downtown developer pulling off a project a quarter of that size would be a major win for Knoxville.

Why hasn’t it happened? Well, the market’s not entirely to blame. Fourth and Gill, Old North and downtown have all proven that there is actually a growing demand for homes priced over $150,000 in center-city Knoxville as well as middle- and upper-end rentals. The availability of land is one factor. Northshore Town Center is a 141-acre development. To put that kind of real estate deal together in the center city would involve, oh, about 141 transactions with 141 separate owners. Out in the greenfields you just cut some farmer or his heirs a check.

So why not break it up, spread it around? There are lots of vacant lots scattered around the center city, even in ‘hoods where the market for old houses is going like gangbusters. Well, that’s where zoning gets in the way. The Town Center and Traditional Neighborhood Development zones that are facilitating deals like Northshore come with minimum sizes (10 acres for the TND) that are hard to come by in the center city. So even if you want to build something that looks and feels like Fourth and Gill or the Old City, the zoning code is essentially set up to produce West Hills and Kingston Pike—even if you’re trying to build in the Old City and Fourth and Gill. Our existing zoning codes and the center city simply don’t go together. The two are as mismatched a pair as apples and oranges, cats and dogs, Michael and Lisa Marie.

Luckily, it doesn’t have to be a messy divorce. Nashville handled it quite deftly four years ago by creating what they call the Urban Zoning Overlay. Which, unlike Knoxville’s historic and conservation overlays, is a pretty broad piece of legislation. Nashvillians simply took a map, drew a boundary around the urban parts (essentially the city limits around 1930 or so) and, while keeping the base zoning—the stuff that, for instance, says, “Yes, you can put a house here, but not a steel mill”—wrote a whole new set of requirements tailored to fit a denser urban landscape: shallower street setbacks, increased lot coverage for buildings and reduced parking requirements, etc.

But does it work? Well, I first found out about Nashville’s zoning solution when an architect friend sent me a newspaper blurb about a new urban-scaled Wal-Mart soon to be built in East Nashville.

An urban Wal-Mart? Now that’s an unnatural union.