This morning Rollin Stanley, St. Louis’ Director of Planning & Urban Design, spoke at the opening plenary session of the Missouri American Planning Association Conference. Stanley took the place of Mayor Francis Slay.
Stanley alluded to spending another week in London coming up shortly — winning another award from an organization that doesn’t disclose the number of entries? Click here to read last year’s post. The topic this time? Who knows. I’m sure I’ll have to do another sunshine law request to get a copy of what is touted as a city-saving plan.
But Stanley’s talk this morning was really good. He is, in fact, a really great public speaker. This morning he talked about changing demographics and how we all need to watch out for it. He indicated that increasingly we will see more and more single person households and how the country will be quickly adding another 100 million people. This led to density — and specifically the need for increased density. Or densification as term goes in planning circles.
He is right, of course. Stanley talked about the need for tax revenues to help support city services. He showed the census tracts for the Central West End and how the population has dropped since the 1970s — some 30% if I am not mistaken. A dropping population cannot support local jobs and retail services.
Yet the city continues to build low-density, often single use, projects in highly urbanized areas. Downtown St. Louis has the urban character is does not through good planning but through the re-use of existing buildings. Buildings our current zoning codes wouldn’t likely allow to be built today.
Another speaker on the plenary this morning was the Chief of Staff to Chicago’s Mayor Daly, Lori Healey. Healey shared real projects that demonstrated, for example, Chicago’s commitment to becoming a green city. Stanley, however, could only illustrate what we are not doing — pointing to the attempt to build a high rise building at the NE corner of Lindell and Euclid — that was stopped due to neighbors. Stanley pointed out the location’s proximity to transit and other amenities and asked, “If we can’t build a high rise here, where can we build a high rise?”
Of course we all know that we can actually have good densification without having high rise buildings popping up on random corners. I’d personally much rather see dense corridors, with localized transit like frequent bus service or streetcars, occupied by 4-8 story buildings their length than the occasional high rise. This discussion of what we build, where we build it and how we fund it needs to happen quickly. As you might suspect, this is really about zoning.
Much of the city is zoning one or two family. Basically, we’ve zoned ourself into low density housing. Sure, there is nothing wrong with single family housing but not everywhere. Our major commercial streets needs to be denser — excellent locations for multi-family housing.
Stanley is a smart man, he understands zoning and urbanity. Unfortunately, he has no power and seemingly little influence without our ward based politics in this city. Hell, he can’t even get nice urban projects built blocks from his house, much less throughout the city. So while he talk on the need for densification was good I just have to wonder how far he will get in city hall. Good luck.
