8th St master plan demonstration project

This article is by TC planning commission chairman Fred Wilmeth and me. It is appearing simultaneously in this month’s Traverse City Business News.

This year Traverse City is working with the neighborhoods and the investment community to implement our new master plan, and make the 8^th Street corridor the city’s next great place. 

 The Traverse City Master Plan is both a quality of life tool and an economic development tool.  It is organized around two ideas. 

 First, we are a city of interwoven neighborhoods.  The characteristics of these neighborhoods are what residents value about living in the city. 

 Second, the best way for land use planning to protect what we value about neighborhoods is to focus regulation on intensities.  More specifically, on containing nuisance effects from spilling over from one neighborhood to another – impacts like noise, traffic, lighting, and size. 

 The right kind of regulation protects assets and therefore property values, while the wrong kind inhibits creativity and stunts growth.  By focusing on intensity and being less prescriptive about use, the Master Plan promotes the location of jobs, goods, and services near residences while protecting residential quality of life.  The aim is to protect what we care about, and build on it.

The success of any plan is measured by what we accomplish.  With that in mind, we are focusing on 8^th Street between Garfield and Union Streets as the place to launch this new approach.  A demonstration project, if you will. 

Why 8^th Street?  Because of the challenges and opportunities it offers.  On one hand, portions of the corridor look like the “before” picture in a redevelopment success story.  The physical street between Old Town and Woodmere is in rough shape, traffic speeds are high, and occupancy rates are low. 

But there are also bright spots.  There are businesses succeeding by simultaneously serving the high density of nearby residents and the high number of vehicles passing through the corridor.  These businesses exist in harmony with adjacent residential neighborhoods.  They offer goods and services to the neighborhoods and the many people passing through.

We’ve made infrastructure investments at both ends of 8^th Street, with the stimulus project on the east and the Old Town parking deck on the west.  At the center are public improvements including the library, Hull Park, the reconstruction of Woodmere as a complete street, and the Boardman River pedestrian bridge.

The Front Street Central Business District still stands as the model for the city supporting redevelopment with public improvements that support private investment.  The success of most of our redevelopment efforts is a product of a successful CBD.  Old Town, Garland Street, and the bayfront (coming soon) owe portions of their success to their proximity to the CBD.  Given the public investments already made in and around 8^th Street, it is the logical next place to extend and continue these successes.

 Starting in April, the city plans to put significant resources into implementing the Master Plan on 8th Street.  We’ll start by using a $100,000 federal grant to design and engineer a “facelift” for the stretch west of last year’s stimulus project, and a zoning overlay for the whole corridor based on intensity.  The idea behind the facelift is to make 8^th Street a pleasant place where people want to be.  The idea behind the overlay is to foster creativity while protecting the neighborhoods from impacts beyond those they experience now. 

 There are other resources out there, if our partners want to play.  The city has $750,000 from MDOT for reconstruction of the bridge at Boardman Street, as well as sale proceeds coming from the Depot property.  TCLP could work with us on pedestrian scale street lights and utility undergrounding. 

The County Brownfield authority has almost $1 million in unused grant money coming back from the Old Town deck that could be put to work along the 8^th Street corridor.  The six neighborhood associations that touch 8^th Street can help design the project.  The TC Chamber can help make the business case.

It is a simple strategy, really.  Take what has worked and build on it.  If we do it right, we get a refurbished mixed-use corridor at the heart of the city – our next great place.  And a template we can repeat in other parts of the city.

The Planning Commission will be discussing the first step in the 8th Street project – hiring the design/engineering firm – in April.  The master plan can be found at http://www.ci.traverse-city.mi.us/departments/planning/20090715approvedmasterplan.pdf