On the Park Bench - CNU29.Design for (Physical) Change

welcome everyone to on the park bench we'll be getting started shortly we're going to wait for folks to enter the webinar first so give us just a few minutes and we'll get going all right it looks like people are starting to join we're going to get started in just a minute just give us a couple more a couple more attendees entering in all right thank you everyone for joining us today this is on the park bench a public square conversation my name is mallory batches i'm the director of strategic development for congress for the new urbanism and today's webinar is entitled cnu 29 designed for physical change uh on the park bench a public square conversation is brought to you by the con the congress for the new urbanism it presents interactive conversations that thought leaders in new urbanism and allied industries can provide an opportunity for audience engagement in real time the webinar series is intended to be a platform for cnu members to engage debate and collaborate on the pressing and emerging issues we're all facing right now and so please reach out to us if there are topics you'd like to hear about or speakers you would like to see on this platform like i said today's conversation is cnu 29 designed for physical change and i'm joined by nathan norris camille cortez and frank starkey and this webinar today will be moderated by garland woodson oops let's see there whoops there we go uh the the webinar topic today describes one of the three tracks of our upcoming congress cnu 29 design for change this will be our last virtual congress good news uh and we'll be offering five days of programming around the new and ongoing issues that cities face in these extraordinary times of change the registration rates for cnu 29 are the lowest they've ever been and you'll be able to collect professional continuing ad credits as you always can and you'll have access to the session archives for six months afterwards so we encourage you to register for this incredible opportunity to connect to learn and to share and i really look forward to seeing everyone at cnu29 may 17th through 21st i also want to let you know about upcoming webinars that we have on the on the park bench series on tuesday may 4th next week we'll have the authors forum again and this time we'll be celebrating the 50th anniversary of life between buildings with yon gayle the you know for many of us new organists an instrumental uh book that taught us so much about the social interactions that we see in the public realm and then tuesday may 11th we'll have our final in this series of anticipatory webinars ahead of the congress with cnu 29 designed for social change that'll be moderated by todd zimmerman with karen perolic marquez king and jennifer hurley as panelists and uh as i said these sessions are intended to give you an idea of what conversations and what uh topics are gonna be discussed at cnu29 in our upcoming congress if you saw last week's webinar you heard um our panelists discuss the urgent need for policy change to design for policy change and and why that's these are critical topics that affect the work of new urbanists and today we're going to talk about the critical need to design for physical change and i'm really looking forward to this conversation and with this i'm going to turn this over to garland woodson your moderator for today and uh enjoy the conversation everyone thank you mallory uh and before i introduce our speakers i just wanted to give a little more of a um a sneak tease of of this year's cnu's uh physical track uh and so i'm gonna uh run a little poll here and uh and please enter your answers into the chat and so the poll is which of these is a real physical track session title at cnu this year is the answer number one climate change 101 preparing for mass relocation is it number two small developers and cute design is number three irmo design 101 how to design buildings cities regions and neighborhoods people love is it number four international european latin america antarctica and beyond or is it number five united streets of america post pandemic 15-minute city interweaving green space tactical place making and the remix walkable suburban missing middle housing you can pick your uh your choice and uh and place it in the chat and with that i am going to introduce our speakers um so first we have camille cortez who is a urban designer with dpz and a co-founder of uh the place initiative next up after camille we'll have nathan norris who's a recovering attorney and a leader with city building partnership llc followed by frank starkey who's a real estate developer and architect with people places llc camille take it away thanks garland all right one sec please share my screen all right okay sorry about that okay well there are plenty of organizations working on climate change very few of them recognize the role that urban design and growth management play in reducing emissions and adapting to migrating climate and population place initiative a group recently born from cnu this past year hopes to make this a priority we are looking to establish partnerships and grow leadership around changes in policy design and advocacy to achieve people-centric solutions to the climate-driven challenges of our future cnu and its members have an essential role to play in addressing climate change cnu's strategic plan addresses this directly quote cnu will continue to address the relationship between the built environment and climate impact to achieve more resilient places and regions mitigating future climate risk and adapting to changing climate conditions working collaborative collaboratively with state and local governments we will further advance existing new urbanist strategies that not only ensure survival but a rich quality of life cenu is uniquely positioned to deliver new urbanist principles as a strategy for addressing climate change vulnerabilities we all know that climate change is a looming issue and as a movement we have not recently addressed it head-on the strategic plan provides a foundation to work from but the movement is led by its members we must be the change we want to see tapping into cnu's broad body of knowledge to ground rapidly progressing policy decisions and a framework influenced by the charter design and urbanism are critical components in climate policy physical change cannot occur without the policy change which is why policy reform has been a big focus for place initiative in what form is growth permitted and does that contribute to future resilience and reduction in greenhouse gas emissions where should growth occur within a region how can disinvested cities benefit from climate migration these questions are relevant while analyzing current design strategies and policy cnu has long advocated for change to support a resilient future but is it alone luckily cnu is not alone other global organizations have built upon our framework and have connected to to it with their own local and regional concerns and considerations despite some members hard work we are not yet in lockstep with our allies one of our greatest allies is the united nations and their their new urban agenda which parallels our own charter place initiative hopes to connect the charter and the new urban agenda along with cnu members who have been hard at work in this arena implementing the new urban agenda is an enormous unmet challenge in many ways similarly the charter is an unmet challenge that we frequently return to finding it continues to serve as an unassailable goal yet there is a power in this new global agreement pushing a new paradigm for urban development centered around human beings and the public spaces where they interact this is why police initiative is partnering with the world urban campaign a program of the un habitat and cnu to host a virtual urban thinkers campus also known as utc from the un standpoint we can develop ideas to contribute towards an updated new urban agenda strategy that focuses more specifically on the role of urbanism in reducing demand for energy while building more equitable resilient human communities from the cnu standpoint we can develop bottom-up and top-down strategies to rapidly increase our image and begin implementing changes yesterday our events core days will take place monday and tuesday the week of cnu and will focus on discussions of urbanism's role in climate response and physical design including tools and strategies incorporating resiliency and adaptation transportation natural and working lands and socially equitable development we aim to bring new voices to the movement and to expand on climate innovation the event is an inclusive opportunity to share learn and innovate the result will be an action plan to tackle our world's biggest issues our way we sought this partnership since the world urban campaign is a coalition focused on urban change in order to achieve sustainable places their mission is to contribute by developing solutions and to take direct action in cities implementing the new urban agenda to accelerate sustainable development goals by 2030. the utc is conceived as an open space for critical exchange between urban researchers professionals and decision makers who believe that urbanization is an opportunity to drive positive future impacts it is also intended as a platform to build consensus between partners and a means of proposing shared solutions to our climate future through place initiatives utc events we are seeking broad solutions yet are focused on barriers to change here in the us such as code reform efforts we now have essentially the adoption of the charter of the new urbanism by many other names at a global scale but about implementation we need to increase increase tool sharing some of this will proceed at the level of governments but as we know at cnu bottom-up change is key to growing a culture of change professionally and informally cnu's focus has been on research into practice but what do we know about improving public spaces and how to even protect them against erosion or destruction which is happening in too many places how can we share this knowledge what are the tools that can be used locally and how can we accelerate the tools developed by new urbanism collaborators be adapted and made more suitable to other contexts outside of the us how about various form-based codes new street design standards financial tools scenario modeling tools and design models there are new urbanists working effectively overseas but you would hardly know it by the discussions that the congress is as it is too often the case with other organizations so bringing a utc into the cnu will allow for more engagement to occur eyes to be open and collaboration for a common cause to occur cnu is on the right track leading with ideas research and practical tools but unless we're in the venues where we can share our efforts will have very limited impact our goal is to get as many people into the utc as possible from as wide a setback upset of backgrounds as we can we are actively looking for proposals for quick five-minute lightning lightning presentations and anyone is welcome to submit an idea proposal work sample or other innovation that may help to advance change at the intersection of climate equity and urbanism if you'd like to learn more about place initiatives shoulder events and are interested in registering and participating please visit visit the events tab on our website place initiative.org it will be free and open to all who register thank you on the park bench for having me today i look forward to seeing audience folks at the shoulder event thanks thank you camille and i've placed the link in the chat to register for that uh event the place initiative climate summit and to propose to to speak there uh before we move on uh so the answer to the the initial question um is boringly um just number one climate change 101 preparing for mass relocation we will have to get into the remix of walkable suburban missing middle housing at a later date because that was actually a mashup of about 10 different session titles that you can look forward to at the this year's congress um so without further ado uh nathan take it away sure thanks garland uh i'm not going to be as polished as camille but i just wanted to give you a quick overview of uh how the uh the urban guild who is uh putting together seven different sessions in collaboration with the cnu um has broken these down into three different categories that might interest you or more importantly uh be of interest to people who you may know that should be participating in uh some of these sessions these sessions the first group is essentially what i would call sort of 101 level uh instruction on building design urban design and illustration and as we know in too many places we still don't have very good designs so whether it's politicians planning commissioners local planners or designers there's always an opportunity for people to really benefit from the 101 offerings that we have so we're going to once again do the how to design buildings people love session with steve nuzon leading the way this year with lauren kelly as well as gian lloyd pena redondo who will be critiquing that session as they we always have somebody critiquing these sessions and that's a very very awesome sort of overview of how people should approach design of buildings from a uh from a big picture perspective and then get down into the details so it's really good for people who really don't know where the beginning or the end is of good design and so it's going to explain it in lay person's terms how to approach it on the urban design that's sort of the same thing jeff dyer will be leading that session fortunately we'll have mallory botches on that as well um and that's going to be how to design cities and neighborhoods people love with the emphasis also on the region and that's going to be again once again for a group that may not have high literacy as it relates to all the principles of new urbanism or how people go about within the new urbanism designing places that people will love this is sort of giving a very broad understanding of how that that happens and then gets into some of the details having to do with things like block design and like the third key uh session that's made for that really 101 group which may or may not be you is that how do we illustrate the built environment why do we do that i talked about it as the most important aspect of the planning is are the the eye candy that gets generated and today because of computers there's so much more to what is possible and not only is what is possible to illustrate plans but to actually help inform the planning process during the planning process so those three sessions are all built about that we have another segment which is for all the advanced folks you know people like frank starkey who so have been around this for decades he just you know he's he may not need to sit in on an hour-long session on suburban retrofit instead what he needs is ellen dunham jones to come in and for 10 minutes tell him what he may have missed over the last year and so we have what we call the urban design update sessions and there's two of those one will be uh uh you know covering affordable housing with megan o'hara uh post covent planning with andres uh suburban retrofit with alan dunham jones matt lambert we'll be talking about streetscape design and then we'll have andrew von maurer in architecture so that's just ten minute snippets of what you might have missed in the last year on these topics as opposed to a deep dive the the second group is equally compelling we've got john anderson talking about incremental development you've got michael lydon on tactical urbanism bob gibbs on retail which is a you know he's going to be pressed for only talking about changes in retail in 10 minutes over this past year but then we have eliza harris giuliano on transportation design jennifer hurley in public engagement and then the irrepressible howard in blacks in the third talking about civic space design so those are sort of the quick updates for the more advanced crowd and then i think the two interesting sessions that are a little different that i hope to see carried on as we move forward in subsequent congresses one is going to be for the incremental development crowd as as many people know um there's a large large large number of people who are just interested in small-scale and criminal development and so this year ashley walton ali thurman quinlan and gian lloyd pena redondo are going to talk about how to avoid the common uh mistakes with incremental development design specifically focusing on proportion issues massing issues things of that nature where we see a lot of missed opportunities so that's going to be more of a hands-on thing but really geared toward the incremental development group and if you know some people in your community who could benefit from that that'd be a good one the one that i personally am sort of looking forward to because of the lack of knowledge amongst really the new urbanists about these projects or they haven't been to them yet are two really innovative what i call third generation traditional neighborhood developments and this is a focus on what is the next generation of buyer uh in the form of the millennial and the gen z and how does that impact building type building styles the planning etc so we're going to have rob parker and lou oliver talk about the triloth project which is in south atlanta also known as pinewood forest previously and then we're going to have blair humphreys and sam day talk about the wheeler district and angie figueroa from beach town in galveston texas which is a dpz project there she's going to be actually a generation z person who's going to critique what the old folks are talking about so that's going to be a pretty good session because if you haven't seen the the building types and the the stylistic approaches they're taken on on those two projects then you're really missing out so uh without further ado frank you're ready to talk about here's so sure i'll talk about what i'm going to talk about i'm pinch i'm pinch hitting here so i don't have the inside track on the content that's coming up in the congress but i think nathan just gave a really good rundown of that and uh and camille of course is talking about a fantastic shoulder event that's happening right before which i encourage everybody to attend i'm looking forward to participating in part of that myself i wanted to talk from the perspective of somebody who works every day and and building things uh in in the new urbanism world i cut my teeth to developing a legacy tnd starting in the late 90s called longleaf and in the last five or six years i've been working on infill fulfill refill development in newport richie florida i'm extremely focused in one particular town that's a pre-war town that has all the great urban bones but hasn't been re-discovered yet and we're working hard to to rediscover it and and fulfill the promise of the original plan uh which is pretty great but was never really built out but that taps into a whole lot of of questions and and issues and matters that are important to new urbanists that we need things like the congress annually to get together and discuss questions about gentrification questions about equity and how to how do we increase the participation of the members of the community who exist in forming the next phase or the next stage of life of their community as opposed to outside developers coming in with big expense accounts and big performance and big exotic capital uh to develop places so i'm looking forward to continuing as as as always happens at the congress great conversations with brilliant people about and thoughtful people who are working in a lot of different interesting places on different questions and and to to get uh to hone my skills and and uh sharpen my perspective on what i can be doing in my own work as a developer and as an architect in us in one particular town in one particular state in the country um that's i i don't know that i have a whole lot more to to add than that um but if there are any questions or uh uh nathan and camille and garland have comments to add i think that would be a good place to go from here cool well thank you frank appreciate it um and going back to my introductory question uh and my response i didn't mean to imply that climate change 101 preparing for mass relocation would be a boring session a contraire that's going to be in my top five sessions to catch this year uh it's just that the title of that session maybe perhaps was not as titillating as the title of session number five um so i'm gonna dive into some provocative questions uh for our distinguished panel uh so and and uh and so let me just dive right in uh question number one uh what sorts of climate tests should all new projects be subject to and what i mean is as professionals we have the opportunity to lead by example even if we can't convince regulating jurisdictions to adopt forward-thinking policy that includes climate tests soon enough to be relevant uh we might instead seek to ask an answer for every project we work on questions such as will this project result result in a net increase or decrease in greenhouse gas emissions uh per capita or in total uh compared to what compared to a 1990 or 2005 baseline for where for the jurisdiction that it falls within how might the design for this project need to change to ensure that it will be adaptable and resilient uh to any potential changes and hazards that it may face over the coming century will it survive 10 feet of sea level rise will it survive wildfire hazards will it survive increased flooding we'll provide homes and businesses for climate refugees how does this project help to provide access to the lowest rungs on the economic ladder and economic opportunity for those who need it most or how does this project increase access to housing affordable for those who most need it uh so i'm seeding these as possible questions and uh i'd like to hear from you um do you think that we as professionals have a role in articulating these climate tests and subjecting our own projects that we work on whether it be for ourselves or for clients to them as we seek to make the case for the projects and build them out i'll dive in on that real quick uh the um the the environmental performance of the environmental benefits of new urbanism or urbanism have always been primarily implicit in what we don't do rather than explicit in what we do build the way that lead is explicit about the environmental benefits of the materials of the material chain of custody for example of where that where the lumber comes from and you know tracing it back to the original forest um it's very explicit but sometimes as we know can result in um green buildings and ungreen locations whereas urbanism creates locations that are that are green in their performance just by their by their um over by their a more holistic view of the interactions between commercial uses and residential for example and transportation being minimized et cetera so that i think that a challenge for new urbanism is to make its um performances relative to climate subjects as well as just local environmental impacts local and regional environmental impacts to make those performances more explicitly understandable and measurable in order to be able to answer the kind of questions that you're raising but for a lot for you know we've generally kind of let it go not unsaid but unmeasured and unemphasized that what we're building is implicitly green i mean we you know we know for example that the average manhattan resident uses dramatically less resource inputs than the typical suburban resident um but that's a that's a rare statistic that gets that what we all sort of know intuitively or implicitly from what we do so i think we need to be become more measured um without becoming overly regulatory because that that can frustrate um the box checking um is what um has led to suburbanization in a large degree so um that's so i think becoming more explicit about how urbanism benefits and has has impacts that are that are beneficial in the equation on climate is helpful isn't is necessary and it also is necessary so that we can see where it comes up short or where it doesn't address things that need to be added into the equation so i i heard this stuff is important but let's not distill it all the way down to on the level of box checking because um box checking is sort of what got us into this mess and we need to still leave room for creative thinking and creative solutions to these problems yeah nathan i would offer one box and it would be block size and then i wouldn't worry about anything else if we can just get small block size then you know i don't think that's too onerous necessarily um but if if you were you know if you were to impose some sort of regulation that would be my regulation it would be um you know one sentence on one page that's otherwise blank that just is block size what's your ideal block size nathan well it obviously varies upon your context but uh i'm generally a fan of the you know when you're in the 300s and 400s once you get out of that then i get unhappy and if you get smaller than that then i get unhappy so i'm not moving to portland soon but you know no offense to it but you know give me give me three three hundreds and four hundreds and i'm happy by 200 right you like a rectangle not a square uh yeah i do prefer rectangles but no i want more than two and i want it you know uh although i'm not opposed you know once again in the context not opposed to if you give me 330 by 330 or something i can i can make that work but uh just in the gym we just need to get in the general ballpark i would not want to be on my box saying that it must be this i'd say it's a range and i could go let's just say uh 200 to 450. generally happy with that if if all the blocks are that size and that would go further than probably anything else even though that doesn't complete that doesn't create a fantastic neighborhood on its own it just creates the opportunity for it to redevelop into a great neighborhood after the first person screwed it up okay so we heard from frank um don't don't distill this down to too many check boxes leave room for creativity or from nathan just one check box please make it a block size camille what's your reaction to uh climate and equity tests for for our professional projects um well i think i mean i think that policy has a lot to do with it and you know i'm not a builder or developer i work you know for an urban design company that deals with a lot of these issues but i feel like you know you have to target the root cause which is in encoder form and you know in jurisdictions and you know i think that can influence what we're able to accomplish to have more equitable development and you know providing places and downtowns for climate refugees i mean we're seeing that a lot here in portland and how um you know portland is is really handling the homeless homeless population and trying to you know make spaces like through through small like tactical projects like uh you know like the homeless villages that are coming up now so i i think that a lot of i think that as as builders we need to you know find the loopholes that will allow for for those types of developments to be able to be built and and really advocate and push against uh local uh uh local city policies to to allow for that to be easier to build okay thank you i uh i see a mix of different perspectives on this policy and uh and i see that we're going to have a very um interesting set of conversations both at the place initiative climate summit and at cnu this year around these topics um so next i'm going to run through a list of ideas that might help to open up new opportunities for climate response housing availability and economic opportunity and we can discuss each one off the cuff uh until we run out of time so the first idea i'm going to toss out to our distinguished panel is the idea of accessory commercial units um so for decades we've we've heard of accessory dwelling units which is when you have a primary residence you have an accessory residence either built into that space in the basement or in the attic or in an annex or in a separate building but what if uh accessory commercial units were a thing what if you could have a commercial use uh in what was formerly a solely residential use neighborhood and as we know the concept of zoning and creating um solely residential neighborhoods was enacted um during world war ii and after world war ii partly as a form of economic segregation to enact racial segregation in this country when racial segregation was outlawed through the explicitly so accessory commercial units pros cons is a way to introduce economic diversity into our neighborhoods or is it just one way to provoke the nimbies it'll certainly provoke the nimbys but that's not necessarily a bad thing it's what i like about it is that it returns a true free market sensibility to the street level and to the to the urban fabric which is as you pointed out is was artificially distorted out of our urban mix for a long time and it you know will obviously favor some locations some parcels in some locations that have higher traffic for example than others but it also helps create a a way to take advantage of that higher traffic and also to mitigate the impacts of that higher traffic on the on the residents on the residential um living in those neighborhoods so i i think it's a a necessarily normal thing that should be permitted in regular neighborhoods and it's and it's also you know a way to really reintroduce micro um micro scaled um extremely fine-grained mixing of of economic production as well as dwelling which has been artificially separated for too long thanks frank nathan you have any thoughts on accessory commercial uses sure you know it reminds me of john nolan everything's uh you know has a place but everything must be in its place um it's all about the context it's a it'd be a horrible idea if you tried to say we need to allow that anywhere let's say in our city because then it's going to have unintended consequences which will result in more exclusion of people and that's essentially when you know you have to sort of look at development history and see what changed after world war ii one of the things was you know starting really robustly in the 70s once you've got these homeowners associations that are sort of these private governments you're going to create the incentive for everybody to create a private government even if they don't have one in order to handle the management issues so that's why i would be very cautious about where you do it you you do it where there's actually a benefit to the neighborhood where it can serve as an amenity in other places it's just going to cause people to say no we want to exclude everything because you know because uh doing neighborhood development is not just about the design it's also about the management you know that's why i always you know when i go to communities they want to talk about alleys and they'll say allies are bad and i'll say well you know what makes an alley bad to you you know and we we we dig down to it and ultimately it gets down to all you know if they're willing to state their actual beliefs that um the some creep made too much noise down the street from them you know and guess what they're in a place that doesn't have any homeowners association to clamp down on that sort of stuff and the local government won't do anything to to keep the noise down so either you're going to be in a place where everybody's happy with noise or you're going to have some person hating alleys and then trying to fight against them so i'm really big into not trying to fight nature so to go with it so that would be what i would do is i would go ahead and say encourage it in some neighborhoods that would be open to it where it could serve this in an amenity and but don't try to enforce it everywhere and and and use that small space as an area that can serve as a prototype of how it can work so that somebody doesn't you know it's like when you do form-based codes and they say okay we're going to make all the buildings come all the way up to the street what if the street is a strode in a horrible you know multi-lane suburban arterial then all those businesses are ruined by bringing all the buildings up so it's it's all about context to me so i hear that um nathan you're taking the the smart growth approach to accessory commercial units of let's put them in the places where they're the most location efficient and solve for um that efficiency maybe put them there in walkable areas but but not out in the hoa dominated suburbs where they're just going to be a stick in the hornet's nest and maybe not provide that much benefit um camille what's your take well i'll start off by saying that i'm working in an accessory commercial unit um working out of a home garage converted into an office that is pretty awesome um and i see that you know with code but i think a lot of people are going to be wanting to work from home more um as that's just you know what we've been shifting to um and um i think that uh sorry um yeah so sorry i lost my train of thought i'm gonna jump to someone else i think the fact that you think i think the fact that you work in one is fantastic um but and you're i think we also related to what nathan was saying um you know you're a professional office in a so you're not you know you're not having a lot of customers coming and going and deliveries and um trucks backing up and parking in the street or the alley to to uh drop things off and you're probably not generating much smelly garbage so so those kind you know the context to nathan's point context matters but so does the what we mean by commercial because there's there's working from home and also you're in a multi-purpose person office but a lot of commercial offices or commercial businesses that would be home based are a little bit slightly more intensive than a what a you know typical home-based business you know it's not it's not just having a laptop on a desk in your in your hallway or your spare room but they're also not full-blown retail uses or food and beverage uses that have customers and things like that so i you know some of those some some things can happen in even in um gated cul-de-sac kind of communities without raising the hackles of the neighbors necessarily unless they're just philosophically opposed to the idea of commercial economic activity in their neighborhood but that's got a that that is not the same in the same category as having a a real heavy-duty commercial use right i mean so this is a really this is a pretty low intensive uh area but we do have a couple of main streets that are just you know a couple blocks down and um and we're in the monteville neighborhood which is like an up-and-coming neighborhood and and we think that you know there are some businesses along the street that we live on and and hope that you know if more more homes you know converted uh in garages into offices that this could become like a new commercial node in the neighborhood um and sorry for my brain fart i remembered what i wanted to say earlier um i was just going to say that we're working with a client um who we we were designing um a mu street so that uh these units with garages faced onto like a tight pedestrian way and the client encouraged us to you know pop those garages out and and convert them into working spaces so that you know i i just think it's pretty progressive that that um you know people in suburban colorado are beginning to think about how how to bring you know that that commercial uh sense into into more residential um areas to make you know the community more active and vibrant so i'm hearing that maybe there's a difference between a home office with a few employees in it and the irish pub that i want to open um behind my house on the alley um so uh so maybe but then this opens up the question you know as new urbanists we're kind of fans of form based codes but what i'm hearing is that when it comes to accessory commercial units maybe some kind of use regulations need to be in the mix what do you guys think about that well use restriction in which way i'm i'm not sure what i would see the benefit being and sorry if i cut someone off i think nathan was gonna say something okay i was just gonna say in in most places to get something like this adopted it's going to have to come with certain uh predictability about uh use so i would say be prepared to have that that the uses lined out because otherwise people are going to have have concerns about what it could be and then if the neighbors can't actively manage it and the local police aren't going to manage it for you then um it's going to be a disaster so yeah i would definitely expect without making a value judgment i would expect and be prepared to have the uses lined out just as much as the form there was a proposal that i remember andres duane mentioning years ago about ambient standards as as opposed to use regulations in other words that you could basically regulate the activities based on whether they emit noise smells fumes vibrations um traffic um yeah whether it's foot traffic or or vehicular traffic those kinds of things that are more measurable and enforceable than whether it's a a particular kind of use or not and also it doesn't fall into the trap of um if you look at any city's zoning list of of uses they probably have things like pool hall or billiard billiard lounge or video arcade things that are that are really not very relevant uses anymore and they probably don't cover things like medical marijuana dispensaries or cell phone repair stores so if you have ambient standards theoretically that should be a more enforceable and clear standard that really gets at the heart of what people want regulated which is what's emanating from that building as opposed to what's going on inside it yeah and i'd like to add on to that garland if you don't mind uh jim peters is the guru of uh the the uh responsible hospitality institute and that's essentially the organization that helps people with best practices manage the nighttime economies as it's called where a lot of cities now are adopting because of gem things like nighttime mayors of cities and uh the biggest issue isn't coming up with the ambient standards the biggest issue is who's gonna enforce you know because if you set it up just so you know it gets very complex really quick you can have a law on the books but if nobody's there to enforce it it's as good as not being on the books and so i think that becomes the uh the ultimate challenge in any of this is the management of those spaces otherwise you're going to end up just where we ended up you know 60 years ago we started banning everything that caused a problem and uh and and that's where we need to be a little smarter about it but yeah it's easier to regulate a use because it's a it's a one-time decision as opposed to a nightly measurement with a sound exactly because when i had to manage it downtown that i thought it was pretty simple we had you know we had all the standards and the cops like i don't want to do this you know because then i've got to have my meter my sound meter checked and i got to do this and i got to do and and they just we've got bigger things to fight and so that's what the responsible hospitality institute is they create actually a shadow bureaucracy to deal with these things but it's i'm just pointing out it's not easy at all but it's a it's an interesting process good thanks i can imagine like neighborhood groups also contributing to you know regulating or you know watching out for that like we know like our neighborhood has like a lot of uh like uh safety groups and um like the business association uh is forming groups to you know to focus on on safety and improve businesses so i wonder if that's something that we like could be offloaded to residents if it was you know that's really wishful thinking but yeah i just always feel like a lot of like the threat like thriving places like is stemmed from like community from community you know i think that's a really good point and um it reminds me of uh in my neighborhood just a block half of my house at 30th and alberta alberta street's a thriving retail street in in portland oregon and uh and a motorcycle bar opened up and you know they're kind of a shi-shi motorcycle bar but their clientele do ride harleys and and they they start doing cookouts and there's a line some people in the line were wearing masks and so now the neighbors including the neighboring businesses have started to complain about the noise from this new business and so what happened was the alberta main street which is the business association staged an intervention where the neighboring two businesses the pizzeria and the irish bar had an intervention with the owner of the motorcycle bar and had a little set down talking to welcome to the neighborhood here's the rules of engagement for doing business in alberta street i haven't heard any complaints since then but that doesn't mean they're not coming but i think maybe that's a more productive model to have peers be part of the conversation and to have more of a sort of a mediation type approach to these where it's the pure businesses i don't know what the stick is in that relationship but the carrot is don't you want to be friends with your neighbors if you're going to sign a 10-year lease to do business you know 10 feet away from them for for the next decade um so thank you um i think this is adding some some definite complexity to this issue and that's exactly what we expect from the uh cnu uh group is to think through these these issues in a more deep way so i'm going to toss out one more issue since we have a little bit of time left um and this one is houseboat fourplexes so you know in a time when we're facing a 10-foot sea level rise and that means that the water is going to be rising into what we think of as traditionally urban dry land areas do we need to be thinking more about developing on the water's edge in ways that are more resilient and that can float up with the tide um and so house boat floor fourplexes is is one response it's a mixture of uh of missing middle and and houseboats which is something we we haven't built a lot of new in this in this country recently but was rather popular um in previous decades but how do you even regulate a houseboat fourplex what's that regulated by the international marine code like the boat code you know it's like what are the questions that we would need to think through around these and are there any prototypes we could look to or emerging leaders i don't i don't know about the um i i think that's going to be a different conversation in seattle than it is in florida because the coastal areas in florida when the tide goes up it goes in much faster than it goes um up because the land of the land is low whereas where you have a steeper bank um it's going up so as as you know with coast with sea level rise and there's there's kind of a vague notion that the coastline moves i don't think that's that happens as cleanly as as the diagrams that show you know two-thirds of florida inundated um it doesn't just happen that you know now that lakeland suddenly has beach frontage because you have all that shallow land that's just going to be soggy for a long time before it actually becomes ocean and um so i don't know how that functions in a from a long-term standpoint as sea levels are increasing in a place like florida where the land is is pretty i don't know that it's uh i don't know how it functions as a solution to um for for longer than a few years to changes in sea level but that's a that's a question i have i'm not saying it's it's a so context is really important because as the water rises it does different things being water depending on what it's it's coming up against um yeah that's it's important to keep in mind that um that west coast uh steep cliff situations uh and changing topography are very different from the the flat coast uh context of florida and and and probably much of the atlantic seaboard right uh nathan what are your thoughts on this i love houseboats so i'm all for the houseboat four plex so but no i don't have any uh i don't have any epiphanies or anything associated with it but i i believe in creative solutions to a lot of these things i'm surprised there's not you know i grew up in i knew people who lived on houseboats and they thought it was a pretty cool lifestyle and so you know why not you know i like it fantastic camille when do you think we can expect a houseboat fourplex designed by a dpz i don't know i mean i'm surprised that no one has you know talked about this yet i love him you know i'm ready to put some sales on it and just go up um no but i i think that i think we should be looking at technologies that are you know advancing you know houseboats and and you know that's something that i think that we should be talking about because you know who knows what you know places like miami what types of solutions they're going to be coming up with you know 20 30 years down the road and that could you know definitely be something to start looking at so it's quite provocative garland and so this leads my next uh my next one which is you know you step out the front door of your house built fourplex into your your new floating community and you're hungry um can you have a floating food cart pod to go eat at is this a thing yet do we have do we have floating food cart pods already out there in the world i'm just not hooked to it i'm pretty sure asia has a lot of floating food markets ah so i'm hearing that we need to ask this question the international session okay okay garland it sounds like you already have your presentation ready to go so don't wait for dpz just go do it camille oh no i i just think it's great i mean i i love that i think the you know food trucks are like has a huge culture in portland and you know i think that like cities should you know take advantage of like you know the waterfronts and i would love to see you know something like that pop up here um so maybe we should we should be looking at asia for president all righty uh book some international travel here to go check out those precedents snap some photos eat some examples frank what if what if instead of floating fourplexes in water we float them in the seas of parking lots that we have indeed uh plenty of opportunities for that and that leads into my next question which is um uh you know so um when you're looking to sell product right you and and you're looking for something that's attached um a fee simple attached product is a town home right but then under fha uh freddie mac um you can get a mortgage for one to four units so my question this is just obviously leading to the logical conclusion of this um is a stacked townhome fourplex a thing is there any legal reason why you can't do that are there any examples of that having been done out there in the wild you saying one above each other side by side so two over two uh yeah either way did you say you're sitting on a single lot single tax parcel but you've got four units but then you've got a common wall to the next tax lot on either side as in a normal town home but yeah say it's a daylight basement two stores and uh and an attic uh with with dormers so one one per level that gets that's a legal question i'm not qualified to answer i have i have heard um lawyers talk about air rights townhouses that are divided by a plane um one owner owns from that plane to the sky the other owns from that plane to the center of the earth so it's on so you're taking this p simple property and dividing it in half horizontally um but as far as i know you can only do that once so you couldn't stack multiples um that way but that's you know again that's that's a legal question i i see so you're saying it'd have to be a condominium to create those four legal units or um or say maybe an owner want to live in one and rent out the other three then it's just a question of tenure so garland i think that that has actually been around for for a while i think that one of our uh one of dpc's projects in lakeland's um uh has some townhomes so i can look into that and see if we have um if we've done any more of those or or what sounds good i look forward to hearing more follow up on that all right i'm going to take a left turn into urban street design strategies to close out the session with a question about career intersections as in leon and uh and and so this is something that's come up in the past but my question is um you know howard blackson's talked about um uh career intersections with the blackson twist um whatever that might be and uh and he's made a proposal for this in his neighborhood of san diego but do we have examples of this sort of uh use of of offset intersection to create plazas in public space here in america that you can point to already can you give a quick um a little bit slightly more color on what a career what a career intersection so i'm going to uh to attempt this and correct me if i get it wrong but my understanding of the career intersection is it's um it's a three-way intersection where you t off there you go that's it and um and you t off to create a plaza to one side of the intersection and what this is the the the career intersection with the blacks and twist and what howard's done here is he's taken a four-way intersection and he's twisted it to create two three-way intersections side by side to create public space on either side of those now offset intersections is that am i basically getting the gist of it here so this is howard's proposal for his his neighborhood in san diego so a career intersection would be similar to that but with one leg cut off right presumably so do we do this i mean camille is this something that you see um built into dpc's plans are already is is this already part of our design language that we're putting out there in the world or is this still one of those emerging ideas that's looking for its its first prototype to be built in america yeah i'm not sure i mean i really like the way that the those faces are formed but i i haven't seen like intersections coming together like that not in our work anyways there probably are places that are similar to that are getting at the same concept and new and new town plans um you know probably by you know they're probably not too hard to find those precedents but i think that it looks like the the suggestion there is that in an existing grid gridiron street network to introduce those kinds of intersections as a way to europeanize it um to uh to create that sort of wiggle in a intersection um though that those those precedents i'm not sure of but i would i would have to call up victor dover um or john massengale to ask the experts on on all things street sounds good well maybe we can dive into that a little bit more at this year's congress um and with that uh we are at time so i want to thank everyone for participating this has been a fabulous session of on the park bench thank you garland so much i i on behalf of cnu i want to thank all of the panelists today for sort of giving us a taste of the conversations and the topics that folks are going to be talking that these specific folks will be talking about uh at cnu29 and that we hope that our our members and our audience will register and participate as well at the congress i also want to thank uh the the audience today for for listening in i hope you enjoyed this on the park bench uh please remember that next week we have a great we have a great webinar lined up and and one final time i want to thank camille cortez frank starkey nathan norris and i want to thank garland woodsong for moderating today thank you all for your insights and everyone have a great day thank you everyone thank you mallory thanks carl thank you thanks everyone go buy a houseboat