It Takes a Village

Drive around the outer reaches of metro Louisville and you won't have to look far to find backhoes and graders doing their thing. An apple orchard becomes a cul-de-sac. A cornfield is turned into a big-box discount outlet. A stately farmhouse is replaced by a gas station, dry cleaner and burger joint.

Reflective glass encases another new office park, next to a new strip shopping center, just down the road from a new cineplex, which adjoins a new car dealership, which abuts a new collection of chain restaurants that serve colorful drinks in collector glasses. Around each is a sea of parking punctuated by islands of spindly locust trees and reddish mounds of cypress mulch refreshed every third Tuesday by private work crews in khaki uniforms.

Getting to any of these places frequently involves a frustrating slog through ever-thickening traffic. The stoplights take too long, and there are more all the time. What used to be a 10-minute drive now takes almost 20, and billboards that shout "COMING SOON! NEW HOME SITES!" prompt mostly groans from passersby, because they just mean more traffic, more stoplights, more delay.

Occasionally a pedestrian disturbs the landscape by walking at the edge of the roadway--usually an older person, a housekeeper, a fast-food employee, or someone who for whatever reason doesn't have a working automobile. Walking along the edge of the pavement is dangerous and humiliating and uncivilized. But that's what you do when you don't have sidewalks.

It's a tired old story that has been told countless times over the last half-century, in Louisville and in virtually every other community in the nation.

It's called sprawl.

Now comes a new development that will work from a different model. Norton Commons, its developers say, will be like nothing ever built in metro Louisville--well, at least like nothing built here in more than 50 years. The first project built under Jefferson County's new Planned Village Development ordinance will include 436 acres in Jefferson County and another 159 acres in Oldham County.

The project is planned for the former WAVE farm, a large piece of property held by the Rev. Al Shands and Mary Norton Shands and located north of I-71 between Chamberlain Lane and KY 1694. Nearby are the Snyder Freeway and KY 22. It's called the WAVE farm because years ago, WAVE-TV and radio aired farming-related shows from there. Mary Shands is the daughter of George W. Norton Jr., who started WAVE, and Jane Morton Norton.

Construction on the first buildings is scheduled to begin this fall. When fully developed 15 or more years hence, Norton Commons is expected to include more than 2,800 housing units, 360,000 square feet of office space, and 200,000 square feet of retail. The massive community will have plenty of company of a more conventional nature, in nearby new developments such as Springhurst, Glen Oaks, The Summit, and Springdale. By 2020, the number of people living along the Snyder from I-71 to I-64 and out to the Oldham County line is expected to pass 42,000--about triple its 1990 population.

Whether Norton Commons is the antidote to sprawl, or merely the same poison with a new flavor, depends on who is doing the tasting. But what's clear is that Norton Commons will include many features not found in suburbia today:

Streets will join together generally in a grid pattern, enhancing traffic flow and increasing connectivity. They will also be narrower, to slow cars down and increase safety for children and others on foot.

Lot sizes will be smaller, putting houses closer together and, so goes the thinking, increasing interaction between neighbors.

Most of the buildings--but not all--will resemble those from the turn of the last century or earlier. Most will be at least two stories tall.

Front porches and balconies will be favored over rear decks.

Housing costs will encourage a multitude of incomes, ranging from $500-a-month studio apartments to $1 million single-family homes.

Instead of the garage-with-attached-house facade so common nowadays, homes here will have garages to the rear, allowing access from alleys.

In some cases, "granny flat" apartments will rest atop garages, as in the carriage houses of days gone by. In others, shopkeepers will live in apartments above their businesses.

More than one-quarter of the project--about 160 acres--will be set aside as park land or other common green space. The development's greater density makes it possible.

Small shops, restaurants, meeting halls and other establishments will be not on the highways surrounding the project but instead concentrated in two "village centers."

Sidewalks will proliferate.

The conventional "separation of uses" philosophy that has governed development since World War II has been discarded. In its place will be a neighborhood orientation that places retail, dining, recreation and even offices and government services within walking distances of homes. Foot traffic trumps automobile traffic.

"We know there will be some trips that have to leave the area and get on (KY) 22 or whatever, but we'll try to capture many of the trips here," says David R. Tomes, who is developing Norton Commons along with Rodney J. Henderson and Charles A. Osborne Jr. The men, partners in Triad Development Co., estimate a traffic "capture rate" of 30 to 40 percent--or more, if a neighborhood school is added to the mix--meaning they expect that many people will stay within the development to work, shop, eat and play, rather than pile in the car every time they need to go somewhere.

But wait a minute. This doesn't sound so new after all. Isn't this what we call a city?

Of course it is, Tomes says. Only he prefers the word village. "For about 4,000 years we grew in a village pattern, and about 1940 all that changed," he says. "This is a throwback to the old way, because it works."

Architect Andres Duany, the designer of Norton Commons, repeatedly offers the simplicity of classic urban design--intentionally dense, vibrant and interconnected--in proclaiming how America can restore its quality of life. By focusing on humans, rather than cars, his thinking goes, we spend less time stuck in traffic jams and more time with our families and friends.

Duany, co-founder of a planning collective known as the Congress for the New Urbanism, and his architect partner and wife, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, are the world's foremost exponents of what is called Traditional Neighborhood Development, or TND.

Their firm, Duany Plater-Zyberk, has drawn attention from the time of its founding in 1980. Its best-known early design is the 80-acre resort hamlet known as Seaside, Fla. (seen in the Jim Carrey movie The Truman Show). Another noted development by the firm is Kentlands, a 356-acre undertaking at Gaithersburg, Md. (with a companion project, Lakelands, now under way).

Duany Plater-Zyberk has designed approximately 150 other TND projects around the globe. While most are what Duany calls "new towns," like Norton Commons, many others are redevelopments of blighted urban and suburban areas. He says Norton Commons will be a "calm-down"--more architecturally conservative--in comparison to Seaside.

Norton Commons is one of more than 300 New Urbanism projects in the United States--half of them still under construction, and others only now in the planning stage, according to Philip von Platen, associate editor of the New Urban News in Ithaca, N.Y. (and, coincidentally, a former Louisvillian). He says the movement is still too new for its impact to be easily measured. "It'll take decades before we can really assess the impact they will have," he says.

Still, most TNDs have done well. Diane Dorney, an eight-year resident of Kentlands and the editor of its newspaper, the Town Crier, says its housing prices have doubled in its first dozen years of life. Dorney says Kentlands' centralized commercial district is booming too, including a wine shop, coffee shop, eight-screen movie theater, supermarket, restaurants and more. And because the businesses are integrated into the neighborhood, they enjoy a customer commitment that is often missing from shops that occupy highway strip centers.

Laying the groundwork locally for Norton Commons required several extraordinary steps. In 1997 the development team conducted a 10-day "charette," or public discussion, to determine how to build on the gently rolling fields. After that the team worked with Jefferson County officials to enact a change in its zoning law. Without it, many of the development's most important elements--mixed uses, small lots and apartments with storefronts--would be, quite literally, illegal. In other words, such charming, historically significant neighborhoods as the Highlands, Crescent Hill and Old Louisville could not have been replicated under the old zoning code.

By the time Jefferson Fiscal Court voted last August to rezone the land from R-4 to the new Planned Village Development zone, there was little rancor--from neighborhood associations or anyone else.

Part of Duany's pitch has been that recombining residential zones with workplaces, retail and services is not only possible, but necessary if we are to advance that elusive commodity known as "sociability." For those living close to work or school, time that might be lost in commuter traffic can be replaced by, for example, a more leisurely dinner at home. Someone living in a TND is more likely than the typical suburbanite to encounter his neighbor as he walks or bikes to the hardware store. The hardware-store operator can walk to the pizza parlor across the street after work, where he might encounter the head of the PTA for the neighborhood school his daughter attends.

Who lives in a TND? While these new concepts are designed to welcome people of all socioeconomic levels, the reality so far is a little different, based on the experience of Kentlands, the best-established TND in America. A 1999 study on the Washington, D.C.-area "village" found that residents there were overwhelmingly white (90 percent), college-educated (95 percent with at least some college), living in a household with children (72 percent) and well-to-do (average household income was $115,000).

"We have all ages covered here," says Dorney. "We also cover every ethnic background you can think of. However, the community is not diverse as far as skin color."

Adds Dorney, "We read books. We hear stories from our parents and grandparents. The close-knit communities of the old days always sounded better to me. And I think most of us know that societies work best when we work with others. All kinds of others."

Tomes and Henderson say they became Duany converts after visiting Seaside in the late 1980s and hearing him speak at seminars. They have begun building Asbury Park, a nearby residential development that includes some TND features, but Norton Commons is their first true New Urbanist project. And both men speak with the fiery passion that often grips recent converts to a social cause.

"Homebuilders are finally starting to embrace the term 'smart growth,'" Tomes says. "What we've done the last 30 to 40 years has not been good for us as a society."

Smart growth "promotes an understanding of what affects your life versus what affects my life," Henderson adds.

Other Duany supporters are just as outspoken, probably none more so than author James Howard Kunstler, who praises Duany extensively in his treatise on suburbia The Geography of Nowhere and its sequel, Home From Nowhere.

Kunstler, a former journalist who lives in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., says New Urbanism is vital to America because "it returns to a vocabulary of principles and practices that are necessary if we're going to create places that are worth living in. There are too many places in America that aren't worth caring about, and we can't continue that way, or we're going to end up as a nation not worth defending."

Kunstler says sprawl--or what he prefers to call the "national automobile slum"--contributes to boredom, depression, road rage and a sort of nationwide confusion in distinguishing the good life from hucksterism. Suburbia was sold early on as a way to enjoy the benefits of rural living while still having easy access to the larger community, he says, but like most things that sound too good to be true, such a best-of-both-worlds is not workable in the long run. Not when everyone else has the same idea.

A community can only be spiritually rewarding when its citizens acknowledge their earthly limitations and interrelate with one another, he says. In Kunstler's mind, conventional suburbia ignores this truth and suggests that we can somehow be liberated from the responsibility we have to our environment and to one another.

Kunstler has even suggested that the on-going spate of school violence may have its roots in the "anomie" that festers in America's hodgepodge of unorganized, unconnected development. Fueled by youthful energy and nowhere to direct it, teens may lash out at what they perceive to be a loveless, faceless, purposeless world.

"The fact of the matter is that there are huge numbers of environments that induce enormous depression and anxiety, and teenagers have the worst time with it," Kunstler says. The New Urbanism, he says, attempts to restore respect for our institutions and our public spaces, and therefore our history, our values and our fellow citizens.

Kunstler, who has visited Louisville for two public-speaking engagements in recent years, says he only wishes that Norton Commons would not consume another piece of rural acreage. He would prefer to focus inside Louisville before taking new land.

Location is also one of the chief concerns of Jack B. Dulworth, chairman of the Louisville and Jefferson County Planning Commission. Dulworth cast one of two dissenting votes when the commission approved the project 5-2 in May 2000.

"Why plop down a brand-new city way out there? Talk about sprawl," Dulworth says. "This should be within city limits." He says a better example of New Urbanist philosophy is the transformation of Park DuValle in Louisville's West End, where block after block of decrepit, crime-ridden, public-housing structures have been demolished and replaced by a quiet, mixed-income neighborhood. There, unlike Norton Commons, "infrastructure was already bought and paid for," he says.

Dulworth says he appreciates Norton Commons' pedestrian-friendly nature and open spaces. But he says it's too far from major employment centers and downtown activities, and he is skeptical of the promised traffic "capture" there.

Tomes says he supports inner-city revitalization, but says cities "have got to make the equation easier." He says it's difficult to assemble the land necessary in the city to make a sizable project feasible. Tomes hopes Norton Commons will foster a new way of thinking about urban design in greater Louisville, so that developers find the central city as attractive as the suburbs.

As for infrastructure, Tomes says water and sewer lines are already serving neighborhoods all around Norton Commons, so a massive new expansion is not required. He also says Triad is contributing $700,000 to road improvements, most notably to turn KY 22 into a five-lane boulevard between the Snyder and KY 1694.

Duany says people need not choose between a rebirth of the city and thoughtful new development on the periphery. "You need both," he says. "It's not one or the other. Louisville cannot absorb all its growth in the city."

It's naïve to expect that the WAVE Farm could remain untouched, Duany says. "Development is going to happen there anyway," he contends. "Do they really think if I don't do it that developers will just stop? One has to say, yes, a farm is being lost, but something of equal value is being gained. What's not acceptable is losing farms and getting suburban sprawl."

There are some project neighbors who take issue with Duany's equal-value argument. Teresa Krebs, who lives on Wolf Pen Branch Road, spoke against the development in a public hearing before the planning commission last year, saying the wildlife and scenic beauty of the area will be forever damaged. "What about leaving the land the way it is?" she suggested. Saying your development is better than that offered by another developer "sounds like a little child saying I'm not as bad as someone else."

But many others in the immediate vicinity support Norton Commons. Bob Bordogna, vice president of the Wolf Pen Preservation Association, says: "You can fight all these things or you can try to encourage quality developments. And this one looks like a pretty good deal to us." Bordogna praises Duany, Triad and the Shandses as "quality people" who listened to concerns about environmental impacts and made changes as a result. He says he is "counting on these people to live up to their reputations for integrity."

Monte Lucas, who lives in the adjoining Glen Oaks subdivision with his wife and two children, says he likes the Norton Commons plan because it's a "one-caste subdivision where everybody mixes together." He says he wishes his own neighborhood were as welcoming to diversity.

Mary Shands met Duany when he visited her health spa in the Bahamas about 10 years ago. She says Norton Commons is "such an exciting thing --I can hardly wait--because it forms communities with all different kinds of people, all different ages."

Even the National Association of Home-builders, once a formidable foe, has begun to embrace certain tenets of New Urbanism and other so-called "smart growth" policies.

At this year's NAHB conference, held in the traffic-choked capital of American sprawl known as Atlanta, builders unveiled new homes that were more understated than the often-derided "McMansions" of recent vintage, were built on empty lots in older neighborhoods (called "infill" construction), or were designed as "live/work" spaces. Henderson and Tomes say the New Urbanism seminars at NAHB conferences have grown from tiny gatherings of true believers a decade ago to among the most popular discussions this year.

Chuck Kavanaugh, executive vice president of the Home Builders Association of Louisville, says he's excited about Norton Commons and supports New Urbanism--as long as it remains a choice and isn't forced on the rest of the home-buying public. "I don't think you can pick one way for everybody to live," he says.

In the 1990s, approximately 25,000 housing units were constructed in Jefferson County, Kavanaugh says--the vast majority in conventional suburbs outside the Louisville city limits. For many years now, "people have opted for a less dense situation--and they still opt for a less dense situation," he says. "We're not going back to the way we used to live."

While the NAHB's 1999 Smart Growth Report acknowledged that Americans are beginning to express concerns about sprawl's effects, it noted that surveys still show that most want a detached, single-family home in the suburbs.

That's because the issue is strictly theoretical to many people taking such surveys, Tomes argues. But walk them through a New Urbanist development--or a charming older neighborhood in Charleston or Savannah or Louisville--and suddenly the emotional appeal of such communities becomes real. Suddenly the dreaded D-word--density, with all the slums-of-Calcutta nightmares that term seems to evoke--doesn't seem so bad.

"Do you know what the density of St. James Court or the Cherokee Triangle is?" Tomes says. "It's like 10 to 15 units per acre. And we recognize those as wonderful neighborhoods. People aren't living on top of each other like sardines. They're enjoying their neighborhood. And that's what we hope to re-create."

Cary B. Willis

This story first appeared in Louisville Magazine, July 2001. Republished with permission.