Nimbyism alive and well in PA township

Proposal to build neighborhood faces uphill battle. For close to two years, developer Joe Duckworth has been seeking approval for Woodmont, a traditional neighborhood development (TND) planned for a 42.6-acre vacant site in the affluent Lower Moreland Township outside Philadelphia. But the resistance from residents and some officials has been strong and deep. Duckworth has invited residents to Kentlands to see New Urbanism in action and he has threatened to develop the site with an uninspired by-right plan — so far, neither strategy has moved the project forward. The story of Woodmont is a cautionary tale; it is a testament to the enduring opposition that designers and developers may still encounter when they propose development that shakes the status quo. Woodmont is not a radical proposal by any stretch of the imagination. The plan proposes a modest neighborhood of 107 single-family homes at a net density of nearly 4 units/acre. The plan calls for 8 acres of nature preserve and 4.5 acres of parks and other public spaces. According to Neal Payton of Torti Gallas/CHK, who designed the master plan, the political realities dictated a proposal in which retail was limited to a convenience store and the number of connections to exterior roads was reduced. “And those elements haven’t even been approved yet,” he says. “This is not a plan that pushes the envelope in terms of New Urbanism.” But for many residents in this first-ring suburb, the narrow streets, the short setbacks, and the garages accessed from alleys called up memories of the urban Philadelphia neighborhoods they had left behind for the ranch homes in Lower Moreland. According to Diane Mastrull, who has covered Woodmont extensively for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Duckworth’s proposal was met with strong opposition when he first presented it at a public meeting in March 2000. Duckworth declined to be interviewed for this article. A vocal critic William Hamburger, a member of the township’s planning commission, voices many of the common objections to the TND proposal, and the presence of retail tops his list of grievances. “The store is ill-conceived; there won’t be enough homes to support it,” he says, adding that if such a store were to attract pedestrian traffic from a nearby office development, it would increase the risk of someone getting hurt crossing a busy road. “I don’t necessarily object to the smaller lots, but I question whether the narrower streets will be safe,” Hamburger says. The township’s zoning mandates that streets be 30 feet wide, but the standard in Woodmont would be closer to 20 feet. Alleys are problematic because homeowners often don’t maintain them properly, and because they are magnets for crime, Hamburger argues. As for the claim that TNDs promote community, he says that “it works if the neighbors are good neighbors, but what if they play loud music until 2 o’clock in the morning?” In an indication that the rhetoric against conventional suburban development may have backfired, he adds that what he really objects to is the denigration of “our neighborhoods, with buzzwords such as ‘cookie cutter’.” All in all, Hamburger says, he is open-minded about the TND concept and sees a lot of good in it — it’s just that the location is wrong, that Woodmont is out of character with the rest of the community. Persuasion by example? In public meetings, Duckworth’s presentation had fallen on deaf ears, his slides of streets and homes in prominent new urban projects had failed to make his plan more palatable. In an attempt to sway the many opponents of the plan, Duckworth offered residents a free bus ride to Kentlands, the new urban project in Gaithersburg, Maryland. According to the Inquirer, Duckworth had high hopes that Lower Moreland residents would see his proposal in a new light, once they had a firsthand experience with a new urban community. More than 60 written invitations went out, but on the morning of the trip in June 2000, only four people showed up. Hamburger was one of those who was eager to see TND in action, but the experience did little to change his mind about Woodmont. “I saw things that I liked,” he says. “The individual houses were attractive and so were the landscaped medians on the wide streets, but how can I be sure that Duckworth is going to build something like that?” And some of the details Hamburger liked best — the picket fences and the brick sidewalks — were among the aspects the developer said he did not want to emulate in Woodmont, Hamburger says. At the end of the day, Duckworth had little to show for the effort and needed a new strategy for changing hearts and minds. The by-right gambit In January 2001, Duckworth, made a last-ditch effort and submitted a by-right plan that would require no zoning changes and no new ordinances. The idea was to illustrate how the current zoning would produce a dull, conventional plan with only half the amount of open space — in this case cut into disconnected pieces on the edge of a property laid out with monotonous rows of homes with attached garages. If Duckworth had hoped that the by-right scenario would prompt residents and officials to prefer the TND alternative, he was disappointed. As a matter of fact, Hamburger was pleased that the retail was gone, and any criticisms raised at the meeting were minor. A Montgomery County planning commissioner, quoted in the Inquirer, simply urged Duckworth to “deviate from this plan. Do something more creative.” Almost a year after this public meeting, the original plan for Woodmont has neither been approved, nor outright rejected. The township has no new proposal on the table, but the Board of Commissioners is considering a draft of a zoning ordinance amendment that Duck-worth presented at a meeting in December. The cost of researching and writing the amendment has been covered by Duckworth. With his 25 years of experience in the Philadelphia real estate market — Duckworth started his career with Toll Brothers and later founded Realen Homes — and his Arcadia Land partnership with Seaside developer Robert Davis and Christopher Leinberger of Robert Charles Lesser & Co., Duckworth would seem ideally suited to successfully develop a very modest TND in a suburban community. However, it is a testament to how deeply a community can be invested in the status quo, when even single-family homes projected to sell for $250,000 to $400,000 raise fears that property values will drop in nearby neighborhoods, and when plans for alleys spark concerns about crime and trash. In whatever guise it may appear, Nimbyism remains a powerful force.