Master Street Plans

Robert Studiveville: Okay, everybody, we're going to get going. So, welcome to "On the Park Bench," a public square conversation brought to you by the Congress for the New Urbanism. Today, we have master street plans, and we have David Green. Paul Knight was supposed to be here, but I'm going to be giving his presentation. So, it's moderated by myself, Robert Studiveville. A couple of notes: consider getting CNU-accredited. Sign up for CNU. The benefits of accreditation provide a marketable credential to employers and clients, seeing you as an accredited professional. Certificate listing on the CNU.org public member directory as CNU-accredited. Go to cnu.org/getinvolved/get-CNU-accredited. And, please mark your calendars and join us for CNU 35. CNU 35 will be in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, June 15th through 18th, 2027. Go to cnu.org/CNU35 to find out more. Today, we're going to discuss one of the most effective city-making tools in history: master street plans. When you think about the history of planning in America, some of the most powerful and enduring plans were the L'Enfant Plan for D.C., the 1811 plan for Manhattan, the Oglethorpe plan for Savannah, and the William Penn Plan for Philadelphia, all of which have shaped these great cities through centuries of change. And yet, Master Street Planning was abandoned by cities in the middle of the 20th century. We're going to learn why that was the case, and why this tool remains highly relevant today for infill, greenfield, and retrofit sites. We're going to talk about how and why cities should use this tool again. Our guest today is David Green. He's a principal of ARUP, based in the New York office, and a master planning urban design leader with over 30 years of experience in large-scale planning and urban design projects. Focusing on sustainable design, David led a CNU legacy project in Rogers, Arkansas, that was presented at CNU 34 in May. That Rogers project applied a master street plan to a post-war suburban commercial district. Now, I'm going to give another biography, because Paul Knight could not be here today, but I'm going to be giving his presentation. So, Paul Knight has worked in planning and urban design since 2011, currently as a senior planning associate at Historic Concepts, an architecture and planning firm. Paul could not be here today, unfortunately. Paul is not feeling well, but I'm going to be giving his presentation. Of course, if there's any errors, they are mine and not Paul's, but David's going to be stepping in, backstopping me a little bit on that. So, I have to... Can you see that, David? Can you see? Okay. We still just got the other presentation up. Okay, I'm going to stop sharing and then start sharing again. Yep. Okay. Okay, once again, Paul Knight, Historical Concepts, Doug Allen Institute. And what are cities made of? Cars, dumpsters, sewers, sidewalks, billboards, trees, buildings, streets, people. But what are least permanent and most permanent? Obviously, billboards, cars, dumpsters are least permanent. Then sidewalks, people, trees, and buildings and sewers can last for centuries, but they're not the most important permanent thing. And I'm sure that all of you can guess what the most permanent thing is, and that's streets. So, we have this great diagram that Paul did that gives the layers of urbanism, from the most permanent to the least permanent. And, we have cars, traffic lights, swing sets, lasting maybe 10 years. People, trees, almost a century. Buildings, and that's over a century. And then we have a division between the private and the public realm. The public realm lasts longer: the parks, the monuments, the buildings, the infrastructure could last several centuries. But then you have boundary lines and streets lasting over a millennium. Here we have a Google Earth view of Imola, Italy, which is somewhere in central Italy. And you have public rights-of-way, clearly have property lines. And these were the rights-of-way or the platted lines that were set by the Romans, something like 2,000 years ago. And as you can see, they still align with the current streets and the current property lines 2,000 years later. So, you have Savannah in 1734, and the famous Savannah. This is, you know, a grouping of blocks around a square in the famous Savannah's 22 squares. And you have the blocks, you have the thoroughfares, you have the area for the square, and a few buildings built in 1734. And then by 1853, you have most of the blocks built out. You have the square, but the streets are still there. And then 1994, similar situation, a couple of blocks have been vacated, but they've been redeveloped in 2013, grouped around a square. Where do the streets get their resiliency? One, from collective ownership. It's difficult to change when there are multiple actors involved. Privately owned properties rely on public streets for access. The legal network of ownership locks streets into place. And then there's... they're an inherited asset, and this asset grows over time: utilities, street beds, network organization. Streets are long-term works in progress that receive investment over time. It's more economical to work with existing infrastructure. Here we have San Francisco in 1906, just after the earthquake and fire. Almost all of the buildings are destroyed, but the streets are still there. A couple of different views, but now all of these... all these blocks are rebuilt. They were rebuilt very quickly with these same streets. And we have a block from Oak Park, Illinois. And another block exactly the same size and dimensions from Amsterdam in the Netherlands. And we have the same exact block in Buenos Aires. And what you see in these three cities—they're obviously much, much different cities: Amsterdam, Oak Park, Buenos Aires—they have different building types, they have different character, different architecture. These same blocks can be built out in an infinite number of ways. And here you have a plot on a block, 60 by 120 feet. It could have a skyscraper, it could have one house in an outbuilding, it could have a parking lot. And some quotes: "The street plan has always been regarded as the foundation of all city planning," Frederick Law Olmsted. "Streets and squares demand the greatest care and attention in the planning of a city. They need to be discussed first," Otto Wagner, *Modern Architecture*. "Streets are the primary structural unit of the city," Doug Allen, *History of Urban Form*. "Subdivide first. Buildings and land uses come later," Richard Degenhart, *10 Lessons for Designing Cities*. And here we have two really important seminal federal pieces of legislation: the Standard City Planning Enabling Act, which was 1925, and a Standard State Zoning Enabling Act, 1926. This was right at the beginning of zoning. And it defined a comprehensive plan. The comprehensive plan was defined first by the streets and by the public infrastructure: public ways, public buildings, public property, public utilities. And at the very end, it said, "as well as a zoning plan." Zoning is the application of common sense and fairness to the public regulations governing the use of private real estate. Once again, public came first, private came second in the comprehensive plan. But this was, in fact... okay, reversed at some point. But as we're seeing, the Standard City Planning Enabling Act was all about the public realm, and it came first. And the zoning came second; it was about the private realm. This, of course, was reversed in just about 20 years later in a court case involving New Haven. I don't know if David's going to talk about that in your presentation at all, but... But, they essentially wrote master street plans out of comprehensive plans. And once again, the layer of urbanism from all the things you have in a city: the streets are the most permanent, lasting over a thousand years. Master Street Plan, Zoning Plan—that's the way it should be. Here we have Manhattan, and the famous 1811 plan in Manhattan, which laid out the streets which were... which set the course of the city for the last 200 years. And we have the original streets that were there before the 1811 plan. And then you had the streets set out in the 1811 plan. They were all surveyed and platted, but they weren't built right away. And then you had an area that was not planned at all; this went over, you know, the environmental features. And in 1812, very little of it was built. You had just the streets that were in existence prior to the 1811 plan, and one street that went north all the way through the island. And then by 1834, you started to get this built out. 1852, much is... about half of the island had been built out. And by 1874, much of the island had been built out in terms of its streets. It was still developing all of the buildings. All this frontage was created in 1811. And finally, in 1942, it went all the way to the top of the island, was extended in that area that was not planned. And what you had was a century and a half of building that was enabled by that master street plan. Oh, if you just go back and see how orderly, how it makes sense that this plan was put together for the city. And if you... if you compare that to what happened in Atlanta, when you did not have a master street plan, this is what happens when you don't have a master street plan, because private developers who have short-term interests are responsible for the streets. I'm going to stop sharing and hand it over to David. So, you can share now. David Green: Okay, can y'all hear me? Robert Studiveville: Yes. David Green: Great. So, that was great, Rob. It's funny, but I've given this presentation in some form or other with Paul for the last 10, 15 years, so it's good to have a little pinch hitter in here. So, I'm going to get a little bit more into the legal issues, and I've got a couple of things I'm just going to follow up with what Rob was saying when we get down to New York. As he was saying, I've always had this... I don't know, ever since I was in graduate school back in the late '80s and early '90s, maybe I could never figure out why we weren't just drawing streets when we were laying out towns and places and cities. And over the last 35 years or so, I've done a lot of digging into the sort of legal reasons, the conventional reasons, the planning reasons, etc., etc. And I always just sort of tell people, and I'll say this again at the end, that, like, all I care about is that we have small blocks in a city, and beyond that, everybody can just argue about what they want. I don't care. It's just a... You know, if we don't get that, though, we're really struggling. But there's a lot of difficulty in getting that done for a number of reasons. And so, this came from a dream that Ryan Gravel's wife had one night. I worked with her years ago, and we used to talk about this all the time when we were younger, and she said, "How we divide up our land is more important than what we do with it." And this really is at the heart of this sort of process. So, you know, as Rob's explaining what happened in New York, it's important to understand that the only legal manifestation of the plan was the subdivision plan and blocks, and then ultimately in blocks and parcels. There was no land use superimposed over it. There was no designation of what this thing was going to be used for other than what was public. And this goes all the way back to the way that, you know, Romans laid out a town with the civic centers, the key public buildings, the streets, all the way out beyond the Pomerium, beyond the wall, to the agricultural Herculanea that Rob was describing in that one view. So, this is my favorite map, the one on the right. And what it describes is the actual uses on the ground in the city of New York. And then the map on the left is a detail of that that you can find on the city planning website that shows you the actual use of each parcel. And you can still see the clear remnants of the 25-foot by 100-foot parcel, all going back to Gunter's Chain, of course, which we won't get into today. But it's interesting because there's no way, if you think about it, that you could plan in any way whatsoever what's happening on these maps. It would be impossible. This stuff unfolded organically and incrementally over time in a way that there's almost no way that the people that laid the original plan out, that Randall, could have understood as he was sort of laying this out and surveying it. But in the crazy world we have, we take something which works in this very interesting way where we've got richness, diversity, sustainability, resilience, et cetera, and we try to superimpose something on it. So, we're actually retroactively saying that what's happened in New York is a bad thing, right? That laying the streets out and then letting the city unfold incrementally and organically is bad, so we're going to superimpose this idea of zoning. And I'm going to come back to this with the enabling acts and just talk about the sequence through which those were adopted by the Hoover Commission, well, by the federal government as a result of the Hoover Commission. And so, this just describes, again, the idea that the only thing that was set up in this process—and this is representative of any and almost every planned city, at least in the Western world, right? Almost every planned city dating back 4,000 years. Now, this doesn't look like London. It doesn't look like medieval Paris, because those cities weren't planned from a central authority. They grew as small blocks, but they grew in a way that was more random and incremental at the framework level. But it's where laying out streets and planning streets currently, we would do well to look back and understand how these worked, right? And everything Paul said through Rob about them being the longest lasting elements of the city. Once we determine where they are, they can last for centuries. And we know this. But for some reason, there's always been this idea that we need to zone things. And so it didn't all start, but the sort of main zoning code that we see come in was the Building Zone Resolution of 1916. And we know that it's from the Equitable Building and the Financial District, which is right there, as I'm sitting right next door to it, giving this lecture and this presentation. But what's interesting about this, and I'm not sure how many people know this—just a slide aside, I spent a decade probably teaching the history of all of this stuff. And so I had to go back and sort of dig in and read why all this stuff came about the way that it did. And what was interesting about the 1916 Building Zone Resolution, and I haven't been able to find another zoning code that's like this, it actually was organized around the streets. So, it took the existence of the streets as an *a priori* condition and said, "Okay, the streets exist outside of the use. We've got this grid structure, whatever the street structure is. We're now going to lay out the uses." And in this case, there were only three use categories: there was residential, commercial, and unrestrained, which was essentially industrial. And you can see that the way that they did this, it's fascinating. If you look at use rule A on the bottom left-hand corner, the street was first, and then the unrestricted faced each other, the business faced each other, the residents faced each other, and they all coexisted on the same street, or it could be the next block. But the idea was that the change in use happened at the back boundary line, or in some cases, in some cities, the alley. That completely flipped, and we started projecting uses on blocks and then driving block size by the use that was projected and understanding the requirements of transportation and safety and all the other stuff that led to the craziness that we've had in the last 100 years. But it's important to remember that in 1916, we weren't disconnecting, we weren't disengaging the idea of use from the nature and character and quality of the street, both in its physical manifestation and in its operational manifestation. This all changes in the 1920s primarily, and it's represented through... and the years here are important: 1926, with the *Euclid v. Ambler* case. I mean, there's so much glib response about the *Euclid v. Ambler* case, and people are constantly saying it's... it was a horrible thing, that all these terrible things. It had a couple of really bad things, ended up had a couple of really good things, and unfortunately, in our common law practice that we have in the United States, we got rid of some of the good things and kept some of the bad things, I would argue. So, you know, Sutherland, who was actually a very astute justice and wrote an amazing decision, and if you haven't read it, you should, in detail. But he simply said that a nuisance—and this is all coming from nuisance, which is exactly why the Building Zone Resolution was put in place in New York because of the shadows that were casting and the impact, negative impact that the Equitable Building had on its neighbors—but he was saying it might... it might merely be a right thing in the wrong place, like a pig in the parlor instead of the barnyard. And it was through this and the protection of single-family neighborhoods that all uses were expunged. And in his... not in the decision, but in his writings, he actually talks about the fact that people would come back and put appropriate uses back into these neighborhoods, but it was his job to get rid of all of them and let people who did this for a living, essentially, planners, come back in and tell them what they needed to put back in. That, of course, didn't happen for about another 100 years, unfortunately. But the key to the decision, the process in terms of the way it negatively affected the way that we think about laying out cities, was the setting up of use districts. And so this is U3... sorry, U2, U3, and U6. And the idea here is that we've got high intensity, which was industrial. We've got a kind of buffer condition, which is a kind of commercial area with U3. And then U2, which is a sort of mix of light commercial and residential. And this was to buffer the industrial from the residential, which isn't necessarily a bad thing per se, right? But what this did, and it's... I cannot overstate the importance of this, it disengaged the idea of use from the physical boundaries that we set up in the world. So these... the area of the buffer is completely fabricated. There's no... it's not tied to the pre-existing public rights-of-way. It's designating use transitions with buffers on private property, which means use now takes precedence over the locations of streets, right? And this is the beginning of this radical transformation. I mean, this was a radical transformation that we had in the way that we planned cities, because now everything is predicated on use. And one thing I wanted to say, when Rob was saying that the Zoning Enabling Act was '26 and the City Planning Enabling Act was '25, what actually happened—and if you read back through the histories of these, and a lot of this was impacted by the Euclid case, because the Hoover Commission knew that zoning was going to be an issue—the Zoning Enabling Act actually got adopted. There was a draft in '24, and it got adopted in '26 alongside the decision for the Euclid case. It wasn't until two years later, in 1928, that the City Planning Enabling Act got adopted. And so what that meant was, and I know this sounds crazy, but you have to imagine that you're back there when all of this stuff is happening in 1926. The federal government and the Supreme Court are both saying that use is the thing that's driving the way we plan cities. And then as an afterthought, or at least as a perceived afterthought, two years later, they say, "Yeah, by the way, it would be a good thing to project streets and put in place this kind of master street plan." And the City Planning Enabling Act is super short. I think the citations are actually longer than the text. And again, it's important to read these things because this is exactly where all of the conditions that we find ourselves in today come from. And so again, I'll just reiterate what Rob was saying before, is that the plan shall be made in accordance with the comprehensive plan, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, to promote health and general welfare, et cetera, et cetera. And this was all to say that we need to lay out the physical framework of the city first, identify where these key public buildings go. They talk a lot about ports and other things. This is exactly again what the Romans did. And it will prevent haphazard or piecemeal zoning, which is what we have pretty much across the entire country, right? It's not hard to understand what came about. And so, at this point in time, what had previously been the main driver of the way we frame cities and plan cities, the subdivision process—and so that transforms in the 20th century into the subdivision ordinance, right? The regulations that describe how we subdivide land—is then changed. And again, this is what happens on the back of, on the back of the legal decisions that were made in the 1920s. We start to look at... And again, I can't overemphasize how important this was, that there are a bunch of planners, transportation engineers, et cetera, et cetera, figuring out what to do. And they're saying they decide what type of road should be made, and what it should be made from. They do so by predicting the amount and type of traffic that will use it. And the only way that they can do that is by declaring uses on the parcels. And this is the point at which, through all of this program, this is the point at which we start to see the public framework, the public rights-of-way, designed from a performative standpoint in a problematic way, based on projected uses. And we know from Paul's diagrams that the uses are the most fungible and least lasting element of the city. So, we're basing the most permanent parts of the city on the most impermanent elements of the regulation of planning of cities. And just to reinforce this, this is why this stuff was so hard. And so the CIAM, through the Athens Charter, picks up on this in the 1930s and starts talking about the dangerousness of streets that have both pedestrians and automobiles. And there's this whole, if you haven't read it—again, this is the basis of so much planning theory throughout the 20th century and into the first couple of decades of the 21st century—that they were actually setting this up as what they call a menace, right? So that we should remove all the pedestrians from the public rights-of-way and just have cars go through there. And if you think this isn't something which is totally embedded in planning—and I don't have this slide in this presentation, I probably should have—but if you know who Robert Whitten, as he was going around in the 1920s doing the first comprehensive plans for cities, and there's a great example in Cleveland and Atlanta. And his recommendations for downtown and downtown Atlanta in 1922, right in the downtown where the grid was, was we should have grade-separated intersections so that we can allow twice as many cars to go twice as fast. That was the logic in 1922 of the way we were starting to transform thinking about streets as a planning tool. No longer about the physical framework that was prior to all of these uses, but something which was actually driving performance. And so, I've got a couple of really quick examples. So, this is the Atlanta Beltline. We did the master street plan for this back in, I think it was adopted in 2004. And I just say, this is what we were constantly running up against was these, you know, big parcels that were industrial, that were getting redeveloped, reconnected to the neighborhood. And people would think about these as projects, right? It's the way, by and large, most people, including in the planning profession, think about opportunities. But in fact, this parcel was 11 New York, 12 New York City blocks. And so imagine with the diagram below that you were walking up to a bunch of people in a neighborhood and saying, "What do you think this should be?" And it was 12 blocks of New York. That's essentially the same area. It makes absolutely no sense. And so, if we rethink this and we drop the street network in first, we can then go back in and we can identify these individual things, think about what they need to be developed as. But if we don't do that first, we end up with these giant use-driven... And this is exactly what's happened across the U.S. Very quickly, this is just some research that we'd been working on when I was back at Georgia Tech. And it's interesting because you look at pre-regulation block sizes and post-regulation block sizes—regulations which are supposed to regularize. And so the standard deviation in the 1928 block was 0.79. The standard deviation, and this is only for like second-ring suburbs, it doesn't even get into the exurbs, was 6.14. So the deviation was six orders of magnitude. While it was being regulated, prior to it being regulated, it was less than one order of magnitude. And then at the same time, the blocks were getting larger and larger and larger, and this is because they were organized around zoning requirements. And so whatever the land use was that was placed on this, you had to have circulation requirements, et cetera, et cetera, that were driving these things to be bigger and bigger and bigger. So, back to the Beltline, we had 6,500 acres of land that we had to figure out what to do with. And so we somehow convinced the city of Atlanta to adopt this thing. And the logic was simply that we had things like this large industrial area or these big sort of, you know, mid-century kind of multifamily, you know, internally-oriented projects. And we got everybody to understand that the most important thing was simply laying out the block structure. And then once you do that—and we all know this, right? I'm not telling anybody anything on the call that they don't know—we then laid in potential uses, right? And one of my great friends, Elizabeth Williams, always asks me, "Well, once you have mixed-use zoning, why do you have to have zoning at all?" as a rhetorical question. I always thought that was great. Anyway, so you've got this, and so what we then did in each of these is we pre-tested all of the block structures we set up so that we knew that we could get a huge number or a huge variety of different projects, so that developers couldn't come back and say, "We're going to get rid of the street because we can't fit a multifamily building in there," or whatever. And you know how that goes, it's all a kind of transactional sort of process where, well, you know, "We'll get rid of a street, but we'll make the building brick," right? Because all that stuff when it's in the zoning ordinance is all sort of equivalent, which is a slight problem. So, we actually produced—and this was done initially with students and then moved into the professional world—but we produced a master street plan for the city of Atlanta that was adopted into the zoning ordinance, the overlay district for the Atlanta Beltline. And this has actually been in operation, and I left Atlanta in 2014, moved to London, came back and visited like 10 years later. And I thought none of this would have happened, but I found out that a whole bunch of these streets have actually been put in place. And this is important because when I gave this first, the very first presentation on this to city officials, I had hired the zoning administrator from the city of Atlanta. And right when I was finished, he leaned back in his chair—he was this really nice old man—he leaned back in his chair and he said, "David Mabor, that's all very nice, but you know that's illegal." That was what we were up against. Everybody was saying that this was illegal. And I said, his name was John, I said, "Well, John, let's just put that aside for a moment and pretend we can do this." And it turns out that it's not really illegal, that there are ways to do this, but it's something that we're told over and over and over again. And so, in a sort of parallel to this, it's really not about planning the future. It's about managing the future. And that's one of the things I'm trying to get people out of their thinking that we have to identify everything that's coming down the road. What we really want to do is set the street framework in place, and then manage development exactly like is happening outside these windows still today in New York. You can do this at a much larger scale. And so I've spent a lot of time studying the land ordinances of the 1780s in the U.S. And so when I was in charge of the master plan for the country of Kuwait, I convinced the country to lay in a national ordinance that it was a grid 100 meters by 100 meters. And this is important for the master street framework, because what this did, in the same way that the land ordinance did here in the United States, is it set in place a series of lines of survey lines that then ultimately became public rights-of-way. And so it might not be the most beautiful thing in the world, but what it does to the greatest extent possible is allow for and in fact incentivize people to build more highly connected street networks and then tracking and managing use changes over time. You're not projecting that in the future. And so this was a project in North Carolina, quite a big project, and we were able to go in, and I bring these up because this stuff can happen, right? This was the... I love this. This is the coolest thing I think I've ever done, other than the master street plan. It's just a street plan. So, we got this district created in Cary, North Carolina, which is doing nothing more than projecting street plans. It has no density cap. We're managing traffic impact. It's a performance-based street network. The only use requirement is that we don't have more than 80% of either non-residential or residential, which, fine, I mean, that's just saying that you don't want to have just, you know, all multifamily or all office. And then we just set up a very simple criteria where we're looking at street types, initial block sizes, the method for tracking it as observed, not the sort of, you know, trip generation, which gets us into all kinds of different problems with street layouts, and then initial program distribution. So again, all we were doing was saying, this is the entire use requirement for the project that... and there's a logic behind this, that a minimum of 25,000 square feet of non-residential uses are provided per 100 multi-family dwelling units. If you try to use that as a logic, it gives you an incredible amount of freedom without ending up with just a single-use area. And so the zoning code, right, the zoning code is primarily just block size, build-to lines, height, and ground floor transparency, right? And we had to add some stuff into that to get it all through, but this is by and large the logic of the entire project. And so, again, it's just putting the street plan in. We don't know how long that's going to take to do. We don't know what the uses are ultimately going to be, but it puts something in place. And this was a quick analysis. I didn't put it all in here, but this is just the difference between the Georgia Tech campus if it had unfolded on the left with a requirement for a street plan, as opposed to what's on the right, which was no requirement for that. And so you ended up losing all of the sort of public connectivity, public rights-of-way. And in fact, a lot of the streets in the plan on the left were there and were taken out as the campus unfolded. I know campuses are different than cities, but it's the same idea, right? It's this preconceived notion that streets are bad. And I know that probably most of the people on the call right now don't think that, but I can tell you in no uncertain terms that the majority of the population of this country and most other countries believe that streets are something that should be avoided, especially connected streets. And so I just did this very simple diagram years ago. It says, this is just the way we regulate the world, right? We have a master street plan. This is Philadelphia, it could be anyone that we look at. And then this is from the Haussmann Paris, because it's a cool little diagram. We've got next comes the standards for public works, so how we design streets. Next come building standards, so how the building faces the street, right? Is it set at the property line? Is there a build-to line? Is there a setback? And then development controls, which is all the stuff that happens in the buildings, which I don't really care about. As long as it's not creating a nuisance for its neighbors, put whatever you want in there, right? That, in my mind, should be the default to allow the street plan to take precedent. And then, lastly, this was a subdivision ordinance that I created, I don't know, 20 years ago. And it's just a block definition, and then the perimeter of any block with a number. And I would... I would challenge anybody on this call to try to make a bad place out of that. You might not make a great place, but it's really hard to do that, you know, if the block perimeter is 2,000 feet, and that's all the only thing you regulate. It's really hard to make something that's not connected, right? It would be impossible, in fact, to produce most of the suburbs and exurbs that we have in this country, but it just by and large doesn't exist in this country. We can find examples, but they're so few and far between, it's unbelievable. So, I'll just say, lastly, a little bit of a story. I moved to New York about four years ago. The first place I lived was on East Broadway, and this is East Broadway. And I've been using this image for like 20 years in presentations. And I find it's every morning when I walk to work for the year I lived over there, I got to walk down my image that I use. And I show this because the streets, you know, pre-existing condition, but then this is the perfect physical manifestation of the subdivision ordinance, right, of the subdivided plan. It's the 25-foot by 100-foot parcels, each one being individually developed with no regard for use distribution, no regard for style. It's just making use of the parcel on an individual incremental basis and describes the kind of richness and variety that can come from simply laying in place a street plan. And this could never happen if it was a use-generated project. So, legal issues, conventional issues, professional issues. I mean, we have a profession that's trying to maintain a certain status quo in many respects. We're fighting against all of these things, and hopefully, maybe in the next 20 years, we'll start to look at street plans as the primary way that we plan cities. I'll stop there. Robert Studiveville: Great. Thank you very much, David. And I'm just going to make a couple of announcements. We've got a couple of questions in the Q&A, but if you want a question put to David, put it in the Q&A function of Zoom. And also, David's going to be giving away some historical planning texts to attendees. I believe how we're going to do it is just email three of the attendees and let you know that we're going to pick them at random, and let you know that you won a text. And David, you described the three texts. David Green: Sure. And I think we're actually going to make an announcement and figure it out, but we've got *The Master Plan* by Edward Bassett, first edition. *Proceedings of the Fifth National Conference on City Planning, Chicago, 1913*, that Olmsted chaired. It's the original edition. And then *Replanning Small Cities, Six Typical Studies* by John Nolan, who is a master, and his second edition. So they're all nice, good condition books, and I'll send those to whomever we end up selecting. And one of the folks that works with me here in the New York office is supposed to be sending me a note of who the three people are, so we'll announce that as soon as I get it. Robert Studiveville: So David, I remember seeing the Beltline presented when CNU was in Atlanta, and I believe was that 2010? David Green: Yeah. Robert Studiveville: Something like that, 2010, 2011. But I remember seeing those streets that you had laid out, and I was astounded and actually really excited about that. And it's good to know that they were actually... some of these streets, or many of these streets, were actually built. That is amazing. And so the power of just putting something on paper... David Green: Exactly. Robert Studiveville: ...is tremendous. David Green: Yeah, yeah, you got it. Absolutely. That's the key. I'll talk a little bit about that if you want me to. Robert Studiveville: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or on a computer. But let me just, like, you know, some people may still be confused, because, I mean, you gave a couple of examples in Atlanta and Cary. But a lot of people may still be confused: how do you create a master street plan? How does the city do it, and when should a city create a master street plan? David Green: Well, historically, they were supposed to do it as part of the expansion process. So if you read the City Planning Enabling Act, it really talks about the initial planning of the city, laying out a street plan. And then as the city... and this is interesting, as the city grows, those streets are extended and connected. And that... that's something that happened conventionally and a bit organically, you know, throughout history up until we got into the sort of regulatory structure that we're in now. And so you're doing that incrementally. But the beauty of projecting the streets—and this is really interesting, and it's a key part of the City Planning Enabling Act, which has been superseded by some bad precedent law—but there was actually a stipulation that when you're laying the streets out, and there's a legal framework for this, that the folk... because you're laying it out over public property, right? I'm sorry, private property. I mean, all of Manhattan was private property when Randall laid his grid out, right? I mean, it's an interesting history. But then what it does is it tells the landowners that this is where the streets are coming. We will compensate you for those streets, but if you build in those projected rights-of-way, you will be required and responsible for removing any structures built in those areas. So what it did was it protected the streets moving forward. There was political will and some revenue that was generated in Manhattan that allowed this to happen, but through a number of legal cases that changed that. Individual property rights took over by and large. And what we ended up seeing was the idea of taking, superseding the idea of putting streets in for the public good. I will go back and say there are a couple of elements of the decision that Sutherland wrote that contradict that, that I wish we would get back to as a strategy, but they haven't really been picked up. So what we had to do, like with the Beltline, is we had to analyze things like where property lines were. And so then what you could do is you could project streets in those areas where there might be property lines so that the setbacks could hold that land from being developed. And so let's say you needed to get a 60-foot right-of-way, you could do side yard setbacks of 30 feet on each of those parcels so that people couldn't build. And then one person might develop, the next person could develop, and then that street could be put in place. There are also strategies where if there was an entitlement required, in order to change the zoning on that particular piece of property, you'd be required to add a street in. This is where it gets difficult, though, because once it's embedded in the zoning ordinance and not the subdivision ordinance, it's very open to the transactional discussions as you're going through the entitlement process. And so I used to jokingly say that people would gladly get rid of streets to get more bricks on buildings. And when you're sitting in front of a neighborhood, you're saying, "Okay, we're going to get rid of this street, but we're going to make our grocery store on this giant parcel with parking in the front brick so that it looks historical." Like that's just exactly the opposite of what we should be doing. So there are legal issues and conventional issues that cause it to not work. But it should be happening now, right? The cities, you know, the comprehensive plans, sorry, are by and large—and I'm just going to say this—are by and large worthless, right? They don't tell you what to do. The original comprehensive plan was the City Planning Enabling Act. It tells you exactly what to do. And when we're doing a 10-year plan, we shouldn't just be saying, "This is going to be residential, and this is going to be commercial, et cetera, et cetera." We should be laying out the street network, right? That's exactly what we should be doing, even if we're only laying out major thoroughfares and then setting up subdivision criteria for the individual streets. It's the way we made cities for 3,000 years, right? It's just... it's and so you have to work around the legal process, and this stuff can change, right? Because we again, we're not in a civil law system, we're in a common law system. So once the city lays out what the public rights-of-way are going to be, and you say that they have a legal right to do so... Robert Studiveville: How do the streets get built? Would the city even, you know, be the one responsible for building those streets? David Green: So, in some cases, the city builds the streets. If they're trying—and so there's a lot of economics behind this—in some cases, the cities build the streets if they're trying to use the infrastructure as a development catalyst, which is by and large what streets were 100 years ago. I mean, the railroads built towns and laid out streets at the stations, you know, that they were putting up across the country to drive economic development. There was a whole section of them that was just around land speculation, right? So there was an economic basis for it. Or they can get... and this is a key thing that changed back maybe probably 25 years ago. We were able to get developers to build streets using private money, but to municipal Department of Public Works standards. And then those streets—and it gets a little strange here—but those streets could either stay as private streets. So like the streets in Atlantic Station in Atlanta are private, right? Or they could be turned over, deeded over to the city, and then become part of the public rights-of-way network. The challenge with this is in the current situation we have now, everybody's so anti-tax. It's hard to get people to want to pay the money to maintain the streets. But if they're not turned over to the public, to the municipality, it causes problems, right? So the first time I went to Atlantic Station, I was standing on the street taking a picture, and I'm not making this up, right? Some security guard walks over to me and says, "I'm sorry, sir, but you're not allowed to take pictures." I was like, "What do you mean? I'm standing in a public street?" And he goes, "No, I'm sorry, sir. These are not public streets." And it's just a little bit of a, you know, an indication of the difference between something being privately held and something being publicly held. There's no... there is no silver bullet in this, I will say that. Robert Studiveville: Let me start to get to some questions from the audience. And again, use the Q&A function of Zoom. First question is from Alex: "Do master street plans work best for smaller scale residential and mixed use? What about large industrial uses?" David Green: Yep. Robert Studiveville: "Or do we just break it for those instances that don't fit? For example, the Atlanta airport or large chemical plants?" David Green: So, I can tell you exactly the issue with that. So the problem is we think everything should be big, and we think we're going to subdivide it. That never happens. It's much easier legally and conceptually to aggregate or combine lots or blocks. And so the idea is you start with a default, which is the thing you're looking at on the screen right now, but that's got to have Yankee Stadium somewhere. So, legally—and this is gray area, but legally—the government can't regulate itself, right? So anything the city owns, they can come in, and if it's for the public good, they can aggregate, you know, 100 blocks in South Atlanta for the Atlanta airport, or, you know, 20 blocks to put the new Mets Stadium in. They have the opportunity to do that. And so what it's doing is it... so it can be used for any density, any level of development, but the idea is setting up the smallest increment of development first, right? So one thing that people don't realize is that the key thing to the not wasn't just the block layout and the street layout for New York, but it was also the individual parcels, right? And there's a whole... the whole report for the Commissioner's plan is three pages long, right? But they talk about the ability to develop very small developments on a 25-foot by 100-foot parcel. Nobody in their right mind, you know, in the way that land works, nobody would have gone back in, or it would have been very difficult to take the block on the right that you see on the screen, as long as you're still seeing it, and say, "We're going to make it 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10," you know, "20 buildings down the block," which gives it its vibrancy and resilience and all sorts of other things. And so they had to start with the parcel, and then when they needed to build the Empire State Building, they aggregated half a block or they combined half a block of parcels. It's a great question, but it's the same everywhere. And so the default is the small parcel. And the... the outlier is the big thing. And you could take a whole area and you want to make it industrial, that's fine, do it, right? But... but we can't start with that and say, "Well, we've got to accommodate industrial, so let's make all these areas big." But that is the default, right? Robert Studiveville: Yeah. Kylie asked an interesting question, and you recently did the plan at Rogers, which I mentioned, which was in a suburban area, like a commercial suburban big box strip shopping center area. So, what advice do you have for incorporating these ideas into suburbs we're working in that are already predominantly cul-de-sacs and large blocks? David Green: It's so hard. So the thing about Rogers is it wasn't really suburban. It was actually a kind of suburbanized. It was sort of like what happened when the Romans left Damascus, and it was taken over. And so there are remnants of the Roman city in Damascus. Well, not so much now, but there are remnants of the Roman city in Damascus. But now what it was was this great network that had been put in place, and then a lot of the streets were taken out, etc. In Rogers, we had a great... the city actually wants to take the lead on rebuilding the streets. And so it was very easy. And so in these sort of first-ring and even some of the second-ring suburbs, when you still got this framework that sort of ties back at least, you know, in most cases to the quarter section that we had in the land ordinance, you can start to recreate these connections. But this stuff is... is physically so embedded in for larger suburbs that it's almost impossible to reconnect these things, even to the extent that, you know, looking back through, I was looking through the subdivision ordinance from 1957, and they made it illegal to extend a cul-de-sac, right? So, there's this craziness about, you know, disconnection and all the justifications, everything from the Enlightenment through to, you know, BS public safety for the reasons that we, you know, made cul-de-sac subdivisions. It's very hard and expensive to do it, and it's legally very difficult. And so, depending on the level to which it's not... you're not able to reconstruct or insert a kind of connected network of streets in, you have to think that it's going to be much more tactical. And the reality is, I mean, so much of the land that we've developed in the United States, so much of the land we've developed in the United States is essentially unadaptable unless we just pull everything out, right? And I'm not really sure how we get around that. I think, in my mind, it's looking back and thinking if we'd been making these decisions in 1950, we could have had a crystal ball and changed our mind. We'd be changing things that happened 50, 60 years later. So I can't think about this in many cases in terms of what's going to happen in 10 years, but what's going to happen in 50 years. And a lot of these times, it's just like the simplest thing in the world is buying two back-to-back houses on cul-de-sacs and connecting them up, if you can do it legally. And I know that sounds weird, maybe, in a way, but these things are set up to be... to be incredibly fragile, right? You can't go in and drop a gas station in the neighborhood. You can't extend the suburbs. I mean, it's just... it's all organized against... Robert Studiveville: Yeah. We have a lot of non-residential uses in the suburbs too that are often larger blocks that, you know, buildings go out of business, you know, the commercial strips, the big box stores, the office parks. Are these more amenable to creating a master street plan? David Green: They're more amenable, absolutely, because single family is embedded in what we're doing. And again, go back to Sutherland, read the decision. But so the problems, like, there are two really big problems with things like strip shopping centers. One, the infrastructure is not running in a rational way. There are some... some folks, I'll follow up with anybody that wants to know, but there are some folks out in Dallas that are doing some interesting things where they're actually following existing infrastructure. But once you've got to pull all the sewers out and everything else and reset a street network, it becomes incredibly expensive. The other thing, and I know most people probably don't realize this, but in 1958, the federal government changed the depreciation rate for retail businesses to 15 years from 38 years. And what that did was it made retail land something which was actually part of the operating budget as opposed to the capital investment. And so it's weird, but at the end of 15 years, by and large, you could actually rebuild and make another capital investment further out than renovate what you were existing in. And this is why we have all these crazy places. And yes, it's easier to do. And I don't mean to be pessimistic about this, because I'm very optimistic about the future, generally. But there's just so much of it, right? So we can point to these, like, interesting things that have happened, but just think objectively about the number of these suburban parcels that have been restructured. I mean, even a lot of the best greenfield development that we see around the country is greenfield, right? It bypasses the underutilized or dead malls or strip shopping centers and moves to the greenfield because that's where you can put in place exactly what you want. So there's some interim step in there that we have to... we have to work out, and it's financially and legally difficult right now. Robert Studiveville: One more quick question, then we'll get to the planning texts. And this is a good one: "Can you speak to the difference in outcome benefits between establishing street design standards versus laying out a street master plan as a long-range planning method?" David Green: Yeah, that's a great question. So one of the things that we did in the Cary project went exactly to that situation. And originally it was supposed to have this big recreation center on a large lot because it was big that would have been community-focused, but the referendum didn't pass. And so the developers have now gone in and they're making smaller blocks, moving it around. So what we did is we set up the Bay Street plan, which was a demonstration of what would happen. But then we also allowed for modifications, but we put in place rigorous criteria about block sizes, about intersection frequencies. And we tested this, right? This is one of the things I did when I was working on a master plan in Mecca. We put in place a subdivision program that was performance-based, and then see how bad people could mess it up, and by and large, it actually worked pretty well. So there is a performance characteristic, but what I've found to be the best situation is have a plan projected, right, which gives you a baseline, and then have those particular performance criteria. The thing that doesn't happen—and this is a whole other discussion—the thing that doesn't happen is this stuff doesn't get tested rigorously enough to know that you're not going to get unintended consequences coming from the performance criteria, but that's a really, really good question. Robert Studiveville: Why don't we go to what you... what we promised on the... on the historic texts and the three that we're going to be giving away? David Green: Oh, I don't think the guy that I have here in the office who's supposed to be looking at this can't get access to the... He did. No, no, I think we sent it to him by email. Oh, here we go. Okay, I've got it. We've got it. Oh, go back. Alright, sorry. Altaf Mulla, Joseph Pobaner, and Kevin Clark. And we'll send *The Master Plan* to Altaf, the 1913 planning documents to Joseph, and what was the third one? Oh, yeah, the *Typical Cities* will send to Kevin. And so Altaf, Joseph, and Kevin, if you can just send me an email with your information, I'll mail those to you this weekend. My email address is [email protected]. You can find... find me on LinkedIn. So yeah, congratulations. I'll get those out. So cool. Robert Studiveville: All right, excellent. Going back, let me just ask a quick question because I think it's important, because, you know, relating to New Urbanism, because we've always been... New Urbanists have always been about creating street plans. You know, that's part of what we do. But what is the difference between a master street plan and a master plan in general? Because oftentimes, they just put out the master plan in general, and it has all the uses, it has all the details, it has the stuff that's not permanent, you know, less permanent. And why is the street plan as a separate exercise important? David Green: So, I will give you a very specific answer to that. It's important because if it sits alone and prior to everything else, it carries with it both legal and perceptual priority. And so, as long as the master... the street plan is being put in place first—and I say this sort of tangentially—it is sacred, right? So Randall's laying out of the island of Manhattan is the single most important regulating document in the history of New York. It wasn't a master plan, it wasn't all these other things. But once you conflate all of that, then folks are looking at the uses going on a block as being as important as the street. And I know we can tell ourselves that we write reports, and we tell people in text that this is the most important thing. But we all know in the real world that just doesn't happen. And this is exactly why I was surprised at the street framework plan and the zoning ordinance in the city of Atlanta worked so well, because it's open to that transactional change, because it... it means that the streets are just as important as the amount of brick on a building, because both of those things are being regulated. And reading through the document, you would have no way of knowing that. But if there's a prior document that's adopted by the city, which is sacrosanct, you know, in quotes, that then carries the highest level of priority. And that's the key: getting perceptual and legal prioritization for the street plan. But once you start adding all the additional stuff, you lose it, right? You just can't... you cannot possibly manage that process. Robert Studiveville: So, this... this video is going to be put onto the CNU website in another day, so people can go back and watch it. But we're going to continue to ask some more questions. David Green: Sure. Robert Studiveville: "The Master Street plans presented are all fully grid. Are there any examples of master street plans that took topography and natural elements into consideration?" David Green: Absolutely. I mean, these are... I mean, the great, you know, like the Olmsted's plans, original subdivision layouts were all master street plans that took huge efforts to align with... with topography. And there's nothing... So there's nothing sacred about having the rectangular grid in any way whatsoever. But there are two things that come as a result of not doing that. One is you limit the opportunity for different kinds of buildings to be built, because I know this sounds kind of crazy, but you might, you know, have some strangely shaped blocks, which then preclude you from putting something like a kind of conventional residential building on that. Or if you do that, you end up with setbacks that don't allow you to activate the street as much as you might want to. But you would know that going in, right? You would know going in that you were going to have these constraints, and you could... you could test for that. But there's no inherent... there's no inherent conceptual difference between curved streets and rectilinear blocks. The only thing I would say that's critical there is the perimeter of the blocks and the connectivity of the streets, because it's got to be walkable, right? And that's why I always say, I just want small blocks, because it's the most amenable to walking. But yeah, sure, let's make some curved streets. Why not? Robert Studiveville: Mike asks, "Are there any communities that notably moved from a developer-driven streetscape master planning large subdivisions, planned unit developments, to a master street plan overlay on the remaining undeveloped tracts to ensure more orderly, dense, city block type development?" David Green: I don't... I don't think that's happened in the United States in the last 100 years. There are a bunch of people on the call, well, I don't know how many are still on there, but probably some folks can tell me I'm wrong about that. But I can't think of a single one. There was a... Robert Studiveville: Yeah. A Texas city, Bastrop, Texas, that adopted some kind of a street plan, but I'm not sure if it's been implemented or to what extent. David Green: And what's interesting is like the fact that you can think of, and I remember when you were writing about that, Rob, but you can... like it should be, "Oh, well, there are the 50 of them going on right now in North Carolina," right? But that's not the answer. The answer is that we could maybe think of three, right? I don't know, but it's not going to be very... it's not going to be anything that matters really. Robert Studiveville: Well, you gotta start somewhere. David Green: Yeah, no, absolutely, 100%, 100%. Robert Studiveville: Kevin asks, "When we're making a master street plan, should we be also making a master trail slash non-motorized connection plan?" David Green: Very good question. 100%. Yeah, I would think of it, I call it a master street plan just because of ease of understanding, but it's really a master right-of-way plan. And so, for instance, the one we did in Cary, we had a trail that was designated. We had a wooner that was designated, and those were both public rights-of-way, but not technically streets. And so, yeah, absolutely. Yep. And in fact, when you're doing a master street plan, you're looking at, like, different types of streets, and one of those types of streets could be, like, a bike-ped street, or it could be a transit street, or it could be all kinds of... Robert Studiveville: Yeah. So we should be thinking about streets in somewhat differently. Street isn't necessarily something where a car drives down. David Green: Exactly, exactly. Robert Studiveville: So Alex asks, "How do you effectively test block patterns?" David Green: Oh, so... Well, over the years, I've just been working on computational analytics. And so we run, like, we'll set up... we were just doing a project in a city up in Canada, and they had a very specific typology that they use. And so we just set up a number of models that would fit on the blocks we were projecting, and then we found out where we were getting conflict. But it's fairly straightforward. And I always used to use years ago the fact that you've got a, you know, you're testing for multifamily, so you've got a two-bay deck, 120 feet, 10 feet on either side for ventilation, and then 35 feet on either side for the depth of the unit. Which means you've got about a 240-foot width block to accommodate what's going to happen on the project. So you're looking at residential, it works well for office, hotel, etc., etc. And so what we did was we just tested the different building typologies to make sure they would work. And then try to find the smallest block that accommodated the highest degree of different project types. And to somebody's point before, if it's a big industrial building or a stadium, you're not doing that, right? But this is not rocket science, right? I mean, look. The plan that's in front of you, again, accommodated everything from single-family houses to the Empire State Building, right? The only reason we don't build the Empire State Building today on a parcel of land that's 200 feet by 400 feet, is we've got to have inordinate amounts of parking and all kinds of other services, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Robert Studiveville: Is there any online link to the Cary South Hills plan? Yeah, good question for Mary Madden. But, I think, you know, that's pretty much it in terms of our questions. I think it was a great discussion today. And I'm very sorry... David Green: What a great discussion. It was me rambling. Robert Studiveville: Well, you did do a lot of talking, but I think I really think it was very good talking, and there was a lot of great information presented. I'm sorry that Paul could not come and could have had more back and forth, but I... I wanted to thank everybody for joining us today, and thank you, David. Congratulations on those three who won the planning texts. David Green: Yeah, yeah. And remember to email me so I get your contact information. All right. Thanks, Rob.