Plan Baton Rouge turns words into action

State, city, parish, and a local charitable foundation work together to revitalize the downtown of Louisiana’s capital using principles of the New Urbanism. Four years after the charrette, nearly 80 percent of the team’s recommendations have been addressed. Plan Baton Rouge was set in motion by a lecture. When architect Stefanos Polyzoides, a founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism, spoke in Baton Rouge in the spring of 1997, he galvanized civic leaders with his call for using new urban principles to transform the empty storefronts and surface parking lots that defined the downtown landscape. Polyzoides spoke at the invitation of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation (BRAF), the city’s leading charitable foundation, and its board immediately seized on the momentum. Eight months later, the city, East Baton Rouge Parish, the State of Louisiana, and BRAF had agreed to share the cost of a charrette, and Duany Plater- Zyberk & Co. (DPZ) was hired to lead the week-long workshop that produced Plan Baton Rouge in June of 1998. The charrette did not result in a grand, physical vision for filling in the ill-used spaces downtown. Instead, the team of designers and consultants distilled the public input into 104 recommendations aimed at bringing back a lively, pedestrian-friendly downtown. These ranged from proposing changes in projects already in the pipeline, to suggesting alternative government procedures, to reintroducing two-way traffic on many one-way streets. In essence, Plan Baton Rouge and BRAF pursue a “magnet” approach to smart growth: Instead of stressing regulatory changes, the plan identifies areas where public action can leverage sustained private investment. Since 1998, the state and other public agencies have poured $300 million into downtown, and the private sector has responded with $100 million and more is on the way. Groundwork and timing Generating the recommendations is one thing, implementing them is quite another — many an ambitious new urbanist vision plan has died in political infighting or regulatory quicksand. But Plan Baton Rouge had many things going for it: a high level of public involvement, 10 years of groundwork done by the city’s Downtown Development District, the planned relocation of state office buildings, and the backing of respected foundation with a $230 million endowment. By all accounts the charrette was a resounding success. “I know of no other seven-day period in any American city when so many people from all walks of life came together to consider their city’s future ... For once, citizen participation was more than a slogan,” wrote Alexander Garvin in Planning Magazine in October 1998. Garvin was an implementation expert on the charrette, which also included retail expert Robert Gibbs and traffic planner Walter Kulash. Andres Duany’s final presentation drew a crowd of 700 people, and more importantly, the public has stayed interested. “I have a ‘leadership committee’ of 2,000 people who have come to us to get involved,” says Elizabeth “Boo” Thomas, executive director of Plan Baton Rouge. When BRAF’s Planning and Development Committee first discussed the feasibility of a new urban plan for downtown, it realized that to succeed, the planning had to build on previous efforts, says Cordell Haymon, a Baton Rouge business executive and chair of the committee. The Downtown Development District (DDD) had been formed in 1987 and had made some headway in cleaning up downtown and promoting renovation of older buildings. Its Baton Rouge 2000 plan called for new riverfront and residential development, an expansion of the convention center, and the consolidation of the state government’s operation downtown — all items that would be central in Plan Baton Rouge, and many of which the DDD is responsible for implementing today. Executive Director Davis Rhorer helped pass the 1990 legislative act that required the state to house most of its activities in the downtown complex now known as Capitol Park. The state will invest approximately $150 million in the complex, which will include 1.2 million square feet of office space and bring 3,000 workers downtown. In that regard, the timing of Plan Baton Rouge was fortuitous. “It caught the development of Capitol Park when it was still in the planning stages and we were able to influence the outcome,” Haymon says. “Instead of a ‘fortress state government’ where the buildings turn in on themselves and show citizens the back, the plans got turned around and now face the community,” Haymon adds. And Capitol Park gave Plan Baton Rouge the initial energy it needed to make citizens and private investors believe that something was really changing downtown. The final piece in the puzzle is BRAF. Founded in 1964, the foundation has acrued enough credibility and social capital to go beyond investing its endowment in worthy real estate projects and take on a leadership role in Plan Baton Rouge. Thomas notes that BRAF initially planned to fund her office for six months, but four years later, it still pays all the operating expenses. More importantly, Thomas says, the foundation has helped open doors. “The amount of collaboration that has taken place between the city and the state is unprecedented in Baton Rouge.” Rapid progress The high level of cooperation combined with the sustained public interest help to explain the plan’s strong early performance. Thomas reports that action has been taken on close to 80 percent of the recommendations. Some have been successfully implemented, some have evolved, and a some have been shelved as unattainable, at least for the moment. Pedestrian activity is back downtown, where almost all the available historic properties have been renovated and occupied, Haymon notes, and the same can be said for the adjacent residential neighborhoods Spanish Town and Beauregard Town, where property values have soared. Construction in Capitol Park began in 1999, and two major office buildings have been completed to date. As recommended in Plan Baton Rouge, the 540,000 sq. ft. parking garage adjoining the LaSalle Building invites more than cars. Ending a 38-year absence from downtown, the YMCA has built a 10,000 sq. ft. facility on the ground floor of the garage, and several food outlets also attract pedestrian traffic. A year after opening, the YMCA has 1,600 members. Later this summer, the Galvez Parking Garage will open with an even more extensive retail presence. The permanent, public Main Street Market will include a farmers’ market, food stalls, and art galleries. To encourage workers to frequent the market, the state has decided not to build a cafeteria in the Galvez office building. On the riverfront, a planetarium and science center is nearing completion, and the 150,000 sq. ft. expansion of the Centroplex convention center designed by Washer Hill & Lipscomb and LMN Architects is expected to begin construction this fall. One of the most anticipated projects is the development on the so-called Arts Block, which connects to Third Street, historically Baton Rouge’s main street. The charrette identified an old car dealership building on the site as possible venue for a local arts center, but according to Thomas, “the idea took wings” when Louisiana State University (LSU) scrapped designs for a suburban art museum and decided to relocate it downtown. BRAF will develop and manage the property in partnership with the state, which has put up $25 million for the $50 million project. To date, BRAF has raised all but $4 million of the remainder from private sources. The existing building anchors the development with a cultural center, office space, a restaurant, and retail space, while the surrounding new buildings will add the LSU museum, a 300-seat performing arts auditorium, and other performing arts venues. Work on the Arts Block is expected to begin in October 2002. Remaining obstacles Not everything in Plan Baton Rouge has moved as smoothly as these large-scale projects. In the charrette, Walter Kulash recommended the conversion of almost all one-way streets to two- way traffic, but a subsequent transportation study funded by the state and the city reversed many of these recommendations. In addition, neighborhood associations have rejected some plans for addition of on-street parking and conversion. A few streets have been converted to two-way and several hundred on-street parking spaces have been added. Plan Baton Rouge won an unexpected victory, however, when the state and city agreed to fund the redesign of a high-speed curve on River Road. As a result the 55 mile/hour traffic has been slowed to 20 miles/hour, improving access to the convention center area. New residential development has also lagged behind, Thomas says. Downtown currently has about 2,000 residents, but the DDD and Plan Baton Rouge want to bring another 2,000 residents to the area. A private developer has bought a abandoned motel on River Road and plans to replace it with 131 luxury condominiums. While this project can lead the way for similar projects, Thomas acknowledges that mixed-income housing is a long way from being realized. Plan Baton Rouge wanted to build such a project on a prime site adjacent to the historic neighborhoods, but property owners were unwilling to sell at a reasonable price. “The struggle to get a smaller project off the ground has been very frustrating,” Thomas adds. New homes downtown combined with planned municipal parking garages are needed to drive new commercial construction that Plan Baton Rouge hopes will fill many of the surface lots that still leave gaping holes in the urban fabric. Code reform has seen little progress, but “we discovered that the Baton Rouge code is not so bad after all,” Thomas says. “It allows for mixed-use projects downtown and it doesn’t require a lot of parking.” Setbacks aside, Plan Baton Rouge is a model for how a private foundation can exert influence by focusing citizens and public agencies on a common goal. “This community has gone through an incredible educational process,” says Rhorer of the DDD. “People had written off downtown, and that is no longer the case.” And for BRAF, the city core is just the beginning. “Plan Baton Rouge was and is committed to spread new urbanist principles beyond downtown and into the rest of the city,” Haymon says. “The core was simply the logical place to start.”