"He is challenging his early demise as an illegal takings issue." (caption by Chris Conrad, Snowmass Village, CO)

Here’s a bit more about the company from the Zucker Systems website (http://zuckersystems.com):

“The need for major change in both public and private organizations is essential. We are beyond the days of moving from one management fad to another. What is required today is a fundamental shift based on a changing environment and a new information age focus.”

“Zucker Systems’ work is based on the premise that there is a difference between normal and maximum productivity in an organization and that difference relies on the skill of the manager.”

“Zucker Systems was created by its President, Paul Zucker in 1982. To our knowledge, it is the only national organization and management firm that specializes in analysis of planning, building, engineering and related departments. We have worked with over 100 cities, 40 counties, and 20 non-profits in 29 states and the Cayman Islands.”

Click here to sign up for their excellent email updates.  The Zoning Guru also highly recommends Mr. Zucker’s training workshops for planning directors (“Complete Management Course for Planning Directors“), for those among our readership working in public sector planning management positions.

© 2009 Building Place – Rodney C. Nanney, AICP (www.buildingplace.net) – All rights reserved. Contact us here for information regarding reprinting, redistribution, or other use of original material. Excerpts may be quoted with proper attribution and a link to this website.

Today, there is a growing understanding that communities wishing to preserve the agricultural economy and unique character of our rural places must do more than simply respond and react to development pressures. Planning for the future of rural Michigan communities and expanding local choices for food production is part of the mission of Building Place.  Planning for agriculture and local food sourcing should be part of local community planning, whether your community is urban or rural in character.

Store Wars: The Organic Rebellion. Not long ago in a supermarket not so far away…

Planning for Agriculture

With agritourism flourishing, it’s an exciting time for agriculture in Michigan. Sustaining the momentum requires careful planning – the kind of planning that considers every detail from property taxes to road rules.  Building Place Consultants specialize in rural planning and development, and are ready to  help local government leaders get up to speed on the latest developments that impact agricultural planning, including:

• The Michigan Right to Farm Act, GAAMPS and ocal land use regulations - how to promote home gardening and diversify income for farmers while protecting neighbors from potential nuisances
• Farmland preservation options and challenges
• Roads 101 - emerging issues are in agriculture and transportation
• Farm markets and agri-tourism
• Ways to grow the local rural economy
• The future of agriculture in Michigan

To learn more about how Building Place can help your community plan for agriculture or include value-added agricultural activities in your zoning ordinance, contact us here.

Click here to sign up for your email alerts

We’re pleased to be your online resource for jargon-free information on community planning, zoning, and local economic development topics!

If there is a topic you would like us to cover in the Building Place Notebook, leave a comment here or send us an email and we’ll get right on it! In the meantime, here are some tracks that may interest you:

• Economic Development
• Planning and Zoning Fiction
  
• Zoning
• Development
• Law
  

Regards,

Rodney C. Nanney, AICP
The Zoning Guru

Mr. Nanney currently has several openings available to speak on these and related topics before your local business or community group.  Possible topics include:

• “Getting the Most Out Of Your Town’s Planning/Zoning Department”
• “Nine Golden Rules of Defensible Decision-Making”
• “Downtown Revitalization – Five Simple Things That Matter Most”
  

He has spoken before audiences large and small, and as diverse as church groups, college students, and elementary-age children.  An engaging public speaker, he is prepared to tailor his subject and remarks to your group’s needs, interests, and priorities.

Mr. Nanney is also an experienced leader and facilitator of training and educational workshops on community planning, zoning, and land development topics.  His current workshops include:

• What Every Local Elected Official Needs to Know about Community Planning and Zoning
• Zoning Without Boundaries – Implementing the Place Zoning Model
• Ordinance Enforcement
• Defensible Sign Regulations
  
• What are “Granny Flats” (Accessory Apartments) and Why are they Important?

Click here for more information, or to contact Mr. Nanney today about customizing a talk, workshop or individualized training session for your next meeting, conference, or gathering.

© 2009, 2010, 2011 Building Place – Rodney C. Nanney, AICP (www.buildingplace.net) – All rights reserved. Contact us here for information regarding reprinting, redistribution, or other use of this material. Excerpts may be quoted with proper attribution and a link to this website and the author.

What makes your downtown an indispensable place?

This is the essential question that should drive local economic development planning and project implementation in downtown areas:

• Potential residents ask this question when looking for “just the right home.”
• Potential business owners ask this question when looking for the perfect location for their new retail store, service business, office, or research and development center.
• Potential visitors ask this question while deciding where to go on Friday night.

Years ago, “downtown” served as the indispensable community and commercial hub for surrounding agricultural areas – the place to be for all ages.

Many small town centers provided a market for farm products, a source of products and services for farmers, and railroad access to other markets.

“County seats” and the downtown areas of larger cities served as the central gathering place for the surrounding region, complete with government offices, schools, and a variety of entertainment venues and “watering holes.”

Today, technology, transportation improvements, and market changes have vastly increased the available choices for people to spend their time and money.  Residents now commute to work and shopping across the metropolitan region.  Business is conducted on the Internet, and most historic downtowns have been relegated to a niche market.

We know what once made downtown indispensable, but that old model will not work today.  What we need to know is…

What will make “downtown” an indispensable place in the 21st Century?

To retain existing businesses and create new investment and growth opportunities, communities must do more than just respond and react.  Implementation of an effective and coordinated economic development strategy is an essential part of making your downtown an indispensible place to work, shop, live, visit, and own a successful business.

The following are five steps for success in making (or re-making) your downtown into an indispensible place:

1.  Building a strong framework for success first involves organization.

This can be accomplished through a local Chamber of Commerce, business association, or Downtown Development Authority (DDA) if one has been established.

2.  A successful downtown should make effective use of available economic development tools, including:

• Economic development planning – listening and looking for new opportunities
• Implementation of a focused business retention and attraction program.
• Physical improvement projects, such as parking, lighting, signage, barrier-free access, and facade improvements.
• Coordinated hours of operation and special events.
• Promotional website/blog and other coordinated advertising/promotions.
• Ongoing communication and coordination between City officials and the business community.

3.  A successful downtown needs local leadership and management.

The most successful downtowns are those that have someone who is responsible for managing projects, maintaining desired services (like a website), and coordinating communication.  This could be a city planner or other city official, a DDA director, a contract employee, or a manager hired by a private business association or chamber of commerce.

4.  To be successful, downtown businesses, developers, and potential investors should not have to fight City Hall.

For a downtown to be successful, all aspects of the community’s economic development program (zoning, master plan, development review, housing, recreation, CDBG, DDA, etc.) must effectively work together toward the same goals.

Too often, a community’s antiquated zoning ordinance places unnecessary roadblocks and overly-complicated approval processes in the way of creative redevelopment opportunities.  A comprehensive ordinance update by a competent planning consultant with economic development experience may be a good first step to a brighter future for your downtown.

5.  Long-term success requires ongoing evaluation and adjustment.

As circumstances change and your economic development strategy begins to bear fruit, it is important to evaluate what works best and what needs to be adjusted.  Downtown stakeholders (elected and appointed local officials, business owners, etc.) must be prepared to adjust quickly to changing conditions and new opportunities.

Click here for more information on this topic, or to learn how Building Place Consultants can help your downtown become an indispensible place.

© 2009 Building Place – Rodney C. Nanney, AICP (www.buildingplace.net) – All rights reserved.  Contact us here for information regarding reprinting, redistribution, or other use of this material. Excerpts may be quoted with proper attribution and a link to this website.

About the Author

As the principal planner and Zoning Guru for Building Place Consultants, Rodney C. Nanney, AICP is an innovative provider of solutions to community planning, zoning, and local economic development challenges.  Mr. Nanney is a recognized zoning expert and the creator of the Place Zoning model for mixed-use neighborhoods and walkable communities.

An accomplished writer and public speaker, he also has the all-to-rare gift among planners of being able to effectively communicate planning and zoning concepts in plain language.  He has spoken before audiences large and small, and as diverse as church groups, college students, elected officials, and elementary-age children.

Contact Mr. Nanney today about speaking at your next meeting, conference, or gathering (see below or click here to email Mr. Nanney directly).

How to revitalize a neighborhood?  By listening to its residents.

Community planners and planning consultants (like many “experts”) can easily fall into the trap of listening too little and talking too much.  Planning is not like medicine, and planners should beware not to find themselves in the position of saying, “I know what’s best for you, now take this medicine and you’ll be all better soon.”

The following tale is adapted and summarized from “Polishing Up the Diamond,” an excellent article from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business – Center for Social Innovation.  What it offers for professional planners is a reminder to avoid the ‘expert trap’ - often the most successful ideas for making a place better come from those that live and work there…

Moving In

The goal of the Jacobs Family Foundation was to revitalize a rough San Diego, CA neighborhood called “The Diamond.”  A common goal for a charitable foundation, but the method they used to accomplish this goal was most uncommon.

The foundation chose not to repeat the usual planning and community development model, which is to:

1. study the neighborhood;
2. have ‘experts’ come in and develop the master redevelopment plan; and
3. effectively tell the residents what was good for them.

“The neighborhood had been studied to death…and little had come from it,” the project director noted.

Instead, the foundation moved itself into the neighborhood, establishing offices in an abandoned grocery store and buying a 20-acre abandoned factory site.  Then they did something even more remarkable:  The foundation decided to ask the residents what they wanted built on the property.

Foundation employees worked with residents to build trust.  The director reported that the hardest part for the foundation employees was to actively listen – to “stop trying to solve people’s problems and let go of being the expert.”

Surprising Direction

Ultimately, they were able to arrange numerous “living room” meetings (about 200 in total) to talk with neighbors about what they needed.  Surprisingly, few said they needed more of the social services (gang or teen pregnancy prevention, etc.) – things that previous studies had focused on as most important.

The foundation found that the residents “often didn’t know the name of the neighborhood, their council members, or more than a handful of their neighbors.  They lacked basic public services – streetlights, curbs, sidewalks, and trash pickup.”  However, what residents wanted most in the neighborhood was “a grocery store and a nice sit-down restaurant.”

The consensus was for the former factory site to be redeveloped as a commercial center.  The foundation formed working teams of residents to determine every aspect of the development, even the name.

New Businesses, New Attitude

Today, Market Creek Plaza is open, employing neighborhood residents in a major grocery and a locally owned restaurant offering authentic Southern cuisine, with a full bar and outdoor patio.  Wells Fargo, Starbucks, a box, ship, and copy shop, and a gift shop round out this new neighborhood center.  Another mixed-use project is currently in the works, following the same development model.

As the project developed through the efforts of the residents, other positive things began to happen in the neighborhood:

“I didn’t have a purpose before this work,” said one resident. “I didn’t care.  No one cared.  Everyone else was throwing trash in the street, why shouldn’t I? Now I know that this is my neighborhood and is where I will raise my children.”

Click here for more on the latest neighborhood projects, and the Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Innovation.

To discuss how Building Place can help you with your neighborhood or downtown revitalization efforts, click here to contact us today.

© 2009 Building Place – Rodney C. Nanney, AICP (www.buildingplace.net) – All rights reserved. Contact us here for information regarding reprinting, redistribution, or other use of original material. Excerpts may be quoted with proper attribution and a link to this website.

Proximity, association, and accessibility between home, work, and leisure activities are essential factors in building places with a strong sense of community.  In the book A Pattern Language, author Christopher Alexander advocates for a comprehensive change in the nature of zoning.  He envisions a work – home relationship where…

• Every home is within 20-30-minutes of many hundreds of workplaces;
• Many workplaces are within walking distance of children and families;
• Workers can go home casually for lunch, run errands, work half-time, and spend half the day at home;
• Some workplaces are in homes; there are many opportunities for people to work from their homes or to take work home; and
• Neighborhoods are protected from the traffic and noise generated by “noxious” workplaces.

Associated uses build communities

Examples of associated uses for residences

In place of single-use zoning districts that tend to isolate people and places, the Place Zoning model emphasizes that new uses must be located near compatible associated uses.

“Associated uses” are activities that complement, support and provide benefits or services to other compatible uses in the community.

When combined and interconnected in close proximity, associated uses form the essential building blocks of community life.

For more information on this topic, click here or copy and paste the following link in your web browser:  http://www.buildingplace.net/place-zoning.

Building Place is currently scheduling a limited number of workshop presentations about place zoning and state-of-the-art land development regulations that work for your community.

Contact us here to reserve one for your community.

© 2009, 2010, 2011 Building Place (www.buildingplace.net) – All rights reserved.  Contact us here for information regarding reprinting, redistribution, or other use of this material. Excerpts may be quoted with proper attribution and a link to this website.

Ask The Zoning Guru

Are you…

• a planning commissioner with a burning question about your zoning ordinance?
• a zoning board of appeals member wrestling with a difficult decision on variance petition?
• an elected official or municipal staff member looking for a clear answer to your zoning conundrum?

You’ve come to the right place.  The Zoning Guru is here to help.

Leave a question or details of a zoning conundrum in the “Comments” box below, or click here to email The Zoning Guru privately.

If you send an email, please include “Ask The Zoning Guru” in the subject line.

© 2009 Building Place (www.buildingplace.net) – All rights reserved.  Contact us here for information regarding reprinting, redistribution, or other use of this material. Excerpts may be quoted with proper attribution and a link to this website.

All four sessions were well attended, and all four venues were top notch. It was a pleasure to have the opportunity to present our “Nine Golden Rules for Defensible Decision-making” workshop, and to have a few extra minutes to talk about what Planning Commissions should be doing right now during this period of very tight budgets and little development activity.

If you would like to invite Building Place Consultants and Rodney Nanney out to make a presentation to your community group, check out our Speaking Opportunities page or click here to contact Rodney directly.

Unfortunately, the art and creativity side of community planning tends to too often be lost under a sea of legalities, zoning administration, and other more mundane, day-to-day tasks.  This is especially evident in the area of planning literature, where the vast majority of articles deal primarily with the technical side of planning.

The author of the following piece, Rodney C. Nanney, AICP, is pleased to make better use of the right side of his brain by publishing another in our “planning fiction” series:

What you need to know: It’s 2027.  Automobiles have been gradually outlawed, except for emergency use, after an Islamist/neo-fascist terrorist group detonated a 100-megaton nuclear device in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia five years earlier.  The bomb caused a  series of chain reaction explosions and firestorms within the country’s oil producing infrastructure, culminating in an unanticipated but titanic detonation of the country’s underground reserves which obliterated most of the Arabian peninsula and destroyed or contaminated 90% of the world’s remaining oil reserves.

I Have a (Planning) Dream

(excerpted from the April 28, 2027 keynote address at the annual conference of the American Planning Association in Washington, D.C.)

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest APA conference in the history of the organization!

Three score years ago, a great American named John C. Portman, Jr. designed the first buildings of what would later become known as Edge City architecture. We now recognize that, with the demise of the automobile as the primary means of transportation in the United States, this momentous accomplishment, decried at the time, actually laid a new foundation that now stands before our profession as a series of endlessly fertile fields, ready for planting.

We have come to this hallowed shrine of city planning, the nation’s capital, to remind America’s planners of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of traditional planning practices.

Now is the time to make real the promises of urban design.

Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of site plan review to the sunlit path of urban infill design and re-development.

Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of automotive dependency to the solid rock of urbanity. Now is the time to make the promise of community a reality for all God’s children.

It would be fatal for us, as a profession, to overlook the urgency of the moment. The endless sea of obsolete asphalt will not pass away until there is a new renaissance in urban design that ends the artificial isolation of suburban sprawl architecture by infilling new life among the islands of older structures.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, lamenting the loss of our car culture. I say to you, my friends, that even though we face difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day on the fertile fields of suburbia will rise new communities, walkable, accessible and full of life.

I have a dream that one day my own children will live in a nation of great urbanity, where their lives will not be determined by their access to transportation, but by the limits of their creativity and ingenuity.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, the isolated buildings of our Edge Cities, surrounded by endless parking lots, shall be re-connected into the web of our community, with boulevards, accessible public transit and pedestrian-friendly streets.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that across this great nation will rise, from the depths of these dead spaces on the urban fringe and shining like strings of jewels, new urban places, new communities and new life.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I will take back with me to my day-to-day life as a planner.

With this faith we, the planning profession, will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.

With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our auto-centered urban environment into a beautiful symphony of community life.

With this faith, working together, struggling together, we will rebuild this ‘land of the Pilgrim’s pride.’ If America is to be a great nation, this must become true!

And when this happens, when we rebuild suburbia, when we re-integrate the isolated office tower back into the great urban landscape, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children will be able to gather together in peace in our new urban spaces, singing together those immortal words,

“Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”

Click here to read other entries in our “planning literature” series. Your comments are welcome (see comment box below).

What do you think?

© 2009 Building Place – Rodney C. Nanney, AICP (www.buildingplace.net) – All rights reserved. Contact us here for information regarding reprinting, redistribution, or other use of this material. Excerpts may be quoted with proper attribution and a link to this website.

About the Author

As the principal planner and Zoning Guru for Building Place Consultants, Rodney C. Nanney, AICP is an innovative provider of solutions to community planning, zoning, and local economic development challenges. Mr. Nanney is a recognized zoning expert and the creator of the Place Zoning model for mixed-use neighborhoods and walkable communities.

An accomplished writer and public speaker, he also has the all-to-rare gift among planners of being able to effectively communicate planning and zoning concepts in plain language. He has spoken before audiences large and small, and as diverse as church groups, college students, elected officials, and elementary-age children.

Contact Mr. Nanney today about speaking at your next meeting, conference, or gathering (see below or click here to email Mr. Nanney directly).