Agenda - Planning Commission - 03/03/2011

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ASK THE AUTHOR JOIN US ONLINE! Go online during the month of January to participate .` in our "Ask the Author" forum, an interactive feature of Zoning Practice. John Jacob and Tommy Pacello'will- be available to answer questions about this article. Go to the APA website at www.planning.org and follow the links to the Ask the Author section: From there, just submit your questions about the article using the e-mail link. The authors will reply, and=Zon- ing Practice will post the answers cumulatively on the website for the benefit of all subscribers. This feature will be available for selected issues of Zoning Practice at announced times. After each online discussion is closed, the answers will be saved in an online archive available through the APA Practice web pages. About the Authors John Jacob is a professor and extension specialist at Texas A&M University. He is the director of the Texas Coastal Watershed Program, and holds a joint appoint- ment with the Texas A&M Sea Grant Program and with Texas AgriLife Extension Service through the Department of Recreation, Parks, and Tourism Sciences. His current project, Coastal CHARM (Community Health and Resource Management), focuses on enabling coastal communities in Texas to improve quality of life in cities and towns while preserving and enhancing the natural coastal environment. Tommy.Pacello is an attorney and a planner from Memphis, Tennessee. He is an associate with the Austin, Texas, firm Code Studio, where he specializes in implementing plans using innovative zoning and form -based codes. Pacello has most recently been working on the_Louisiana Land Use Toolkit, a model devel- opment code for the state of Louisiana, the second phase of which will include a set of Louisiana specific coastal development ordinances. Follow this project at www.landusetoolkit.com. The unique urban, character and durability of its construction have made Venice, Italy, into a very resilient coastal city, in spite of permanent flooding over of the city as a result of subsidence. There are 10 often -cited principles that define smart growth (see sidebar for the "coastal" list). In our view, the first two prin- ciples underlie all the rest: compact form and mixed uses. Without some minimum amount of density, there is no walkability, and there are no distinctive, attractive communities with a sense of place that are not walkable. A mix of uses characterizes vibrant places and is a key element of walkability. Density alone does not endow vibrancy to a place. Think of large apartment complexes with no commer- cial streets or districts nearby. A mix of uses is what makes a place interesting. Virtually all of our most loved and vibrant coastal cities exemplify the io smart growth principles, in large part because they were laid out and established well before the advent of the automobile. They had no choice but to be walkable. A Charleston or a Savannah could not emerge where separation of uses was man- dated. We would find New Orleans completely uninteresting if it were nothing more than a collection of big box stores in a sea of parking lots separated from residential districts. Density and mixed use have endowed pre -automobile coastal cities with character and durability, two important attributes that give the best cities a lasting sense of place. Venice, Italy, for example, has been subject to coastal subsidence that would have de- stroyed a lesser city. It is a city with such an outstanding sense of place and character that its citizens have long been dedicated to its defense. The durability of its construction gives them something to defend across the centuries. Its character gives them some- thing they want to defend at all costs. Contrast Venice with the Brownwood subdivision in Baytown, Texas, just east of Houston. The scale is quite different from Venice's, but the reaction to a similar amount of subsidence is illustrative. Brownwood was a very neat and tidy Soo -unit subdivision of comfortable suburban homes. Brownwood is the poster child in the Houston region of what happens when subsidence results from excessive withdrawals of groundwater. Brownwood was abandoned in the early 198os as it subsided and was inundated by the adjacent Galveston Bay. In the end ®The Brownwood Subdivision in Baytown, just east of Houston, was inundated as a result of subsidence, but had neither the durability of construction to withstand the flooding nor the sense of place that would have enabled its citizens to rise to its defense, although some attempts at diking were made. ZONINGPRACTICE 1.11. AMERICAN PLANNING ASSOCIATION I page 3