Transit-oriented development: a tale of three cities

The San Francisco Bay region, Charlotte, NC, and Portland, OR, are moving forward with transit villages. If you want to see how transit will shape development in the 21st Century, you need to look at three regions that are the current leaders in transit-oriented design. In the San Francisco Bay Area, a well-established commuter rail network has left isolated islands of parking lots in its wake. There, transit- oriented development (TOD) is being used as a remedial tool to reintegrate stations with the surrounding communities. In Portland, the light rail lines have been far less disruptive and dovetail with a regional plan that encourages higher density development. There, TODs are emerging both as infill and greenfield projects. In the Charlotte, North Carolina, region, the rail system has yet to be built, but local governments and private developers are anticipating its coming and building neighborhoods with transit-oriented design. The TOD concept defies clear definition. The label has been applied to everything from a single high-rise apartment building next to a station, to mixed-use neighborhoods of several hundred acres. A list of selected TODs compiled by New Urban News is limited to current new urbanist neighborhood development projects connected to rail transit (see page 5). Twelve such projects are under construction or completed nationwide and 17 more are in various stages of planning. Nearly half the projects are located in Oregon, North Carolina, and California. TODs replace parking lots In the Bay Area, TODs are small, typically 10 to 20 acres, and the primary sponsor is the local transit agency, Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART). In a sense, BART is trying to repair some of the damage caused by the rail system, which in some cases ripped through existing communities and forced the demolition of housing. “TOD is an opportunity for us to knit the stations back into the community,” says Jeff Ordway, BART’s manager of property development. BART has talked about TOD for the last decade, but only now is the trend taking hold as Fruitvale Transit Village has begun construction and Richmond Transit Village is slated to break ground next year. Despite the current housing crunch and booming economy in the region, BART has struggled to set projects in motion. “TOD is not a gold mine,” says Ordway. “These projects are extremely complicated to put together and very difficult to finance.” Covering the cost of replacing surface parking with garages is one of the most difficult issues. When the developer pays for parking structures, BART now agrees to credit the cost against lease payments on the land. The density and type of development may also prove controversial. “BART has regional goals for higher densities, and cities usually have goals for lower densities. They have to meet somewhere in the middle,” Ordway says. Since local economies are driven by tax receipts, many land use jurisdictions prefer revenue-generating development such as big-box retailers over housing. “The jurisdictions are torn between wanting to see a sustainable community built around the BART station and their absolute need to balance the budget,” Ordway says. For the transit agency, TOD is an opportunity to raise revenue through long-term ground leases and increased ridership, but according to Ordway, BART’s board has also finally come to accept that TOD can achieve a series of “soft objectives” that benefit the larger community. These include knitting the station back into the neighborhood fabric, reducing car trips by providing goods and services at the station, and improving safety with more “eyes on the street.” TOD as a revitalizing agent In the case of Fruitvale Transit Village, developers hope that a pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use development next to a station will do more: help resurrect a neighborhood left in steep decline by suburban migration. Though more than 30,000 commuters use the Fruitvale station every day, there is little in the neighborhood to encourage them to linger. The vision to replace 10 acres of parking with shops, community services, and apartments originated with the Unity Council, a not-for-profit community development corporation, which has been joined by BART and the City of Oakland in the development effort. Close to half the funding for the $100 million project comes from federal grants, which have leveraged contributions from private investors. As designed by McLarand Vasquez Emsiek & Partners of Irvine, California, Fruitvale Transit Village will link the BART station with International Boulevard, the neighborhood’s traditional retail corridor. The first phase consists of two blocks of connected three-story buildings separated by a pedestrian plaza, which provides direct access to the station. Parking is available in a stand-alone garage and in the interior of the blocks at the street level. On the second and third levels, the parking is topped by courtyards, offices, and residences. While the Unity Council hopes that transit riders will stop to spend time and money in the transit village, the project is also conceived as a center for the area’s multi-ethnic population. Several community service facilities, among them a 40,000-square-foot health clinic and a 7,500-square-foot library, promise to make Fruitvale stand out among TODs. In addition, the project will feature 25,000 square feet of offices, 25,000 square feet of restaurants and retail, and 50 loft apartments. A second phase will add 220 units of mixed- income housing, and the city has donated land adjacent to the site for a senior housing complex funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. A new neighborhood in Richmond Of BART’s other TOD ventures, Richmond Transit Village looks like it has the greatest potential to create an actual neighborhood. In contrast to Fruitvale, the emphasis is on housing — 231 for-sale townhouse units on a 13-acre site divided by the rail corridor. Approximately 9,000 square feet of ground floor retail will be spread over several corner properties along Nevin Avenue, the pedestrian core of the project. An additional 15,000 square feet will front the first level of a parking structure along an arterial road. The alley-loaded townhouses have minimal yard space, but six small parks throughout the neighborhood provide shared public space. Rather than building walls along the rail corridor to reduce noise, designer Calthorpe Associates has chosen to create a separate building type for the edge lots. These “single-aspect” townhouses concentrate living space toward the front, and small, fixed windows in the rear walls help reduce noise levels, explains Joe Scanga, the project manager at Calthorpe. Richmond Transit Village will also feature standard townhomes and live/work units along Nevin Avenue. The project includes both a BART and an Amtrak station, and $12 million in public funds will pay for the construction of a new intermodal facility and police substation. Richmond Transit Village will be developed by the Olson Companies of Seal Beach, California. Elsewhere in the region, the Pleasant Hill BART station in suburban Contra Costa County is surrounded by several high-rise office buildings and a garden apartment complex, but the development has not attracted any significant retail activity, says Jim Kennedy, the county’s development director. The county has hired new urbanist consultant Peter Katz to organize a charrette for a new center at the station. Housing and rail grow together In contrast to the Bay Area, TOD developers in Portland have been able to get ahead of the curve because land- use strategies have been shaped by the location of the city’s three MAX light rail lines. Building around light rail is also easier because the trains do not require dedicated corridors and can run on city streets. The transit agency Tri- Met estimates that $2.4 billion have been invested along the MAX lines. The climate has been right for both local governments and private developers to get into the fray. In Gresham, at the end of the Eastside MAX line, residents did not see the potential of light rail when the line opened in the late 1980s and rejected a downtown location for the station. Today the city is moving its downtown to the rail, building the Gresham Civic Neighborhood on a 62-acre site straddling the station. On the west side of Portland, Orenco Station was already planned when the MAX line to Hillsboro opened in 1998. The 190-acre project has become one of the premier examples of a new urbanist community with links to transit, but it also illustrates the limitations of light rail’s power to attract retail development in a suburban setting. To ensure the viability of the town center, the developers placed it along an automobile artery about half a mile from the light rail platform. Charlotte region gets ready It may still be years before Charlotte’s $1.1 billion rail transit system gets built, but it has already had an impact in the towns where the trains are scheduled to stop. Forecasting housing needs for the next 25 years, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg 2025 Land Use Plan estimates that 60,000 transit-oriented apartments, condominiums, lofts, and single-family homes will be built in the region. The first transit-oriented neighborhood to be built in Huntersville is Vermillion, developed by the Bowman Development Group. As in Orenco, the station will be set away from the center of the community, but future commuters will get there either by walking or by a shuttle bus that will loop through Vermillion. A more direct link with transit is planned for the Cornelius Town Center. The proposed station will be flanked by a new town center, where some retail and civil buildings have already been completed, and a neighborhood with 950 residential units, as well as office and retail. Additional TODs planned for the region include Anchor Mill and Caldwell Station, also in the Huntersville area.