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Christiane G. Karas specializes in ecologically conscious
properties. including active solar and passive solar construction,
in Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Baja California, Mexico
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| Planning for an Uncertain Future, Part Seven |
| Bill Hudson | 7/29/10 |
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| Back to the News Summaries |
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Read Part One
On Tuesday night, I attended a joint meeting of two local planning commissions: the Town Planning Commission and the County Planning Commission. For as long as I can remember, these two commissions have operated in a disconnected fashion; each had, many years ago, developed its own separate community plan and its own Land Use Code with its own separate zoning descriptions.
The main focus of the Tuesday night conversation was a proposed development located just north of the Highway 160-Highway 84 intersection — a 384-acre parcel that banks up against the San Juan River on the south boundary and rolls on up to the north and east, into pine-covered hills. The conceptual sketch shows maybe 1,000 or more new dwelling units — some in high-density, mixed-use commercial and residential zones, some scattered onto one-acre parcels among the wooded hills.
If it is approved by our local planning commissions and by the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT), a new bridge located at the highway intersection and crossing the San Juan will connect the development to our existing town.
 The proposed subdivision, presently going by the name River’s Gate, had been sketched with high density mixed use — commercial and residential up to 16 units per acre — positioned across the river from the existing River Center commercial area at the east end of Pagosa’s current downtown. The density then decreases as the subdivision spreads up across the hills to the north, reaching a lower density of about 1.5 units per acre.
The nine commissioners had maps spread all over the table and were trying their best to get the “big picture” of what type of development we, the community, want to see happen east of downtown. Do we want a strip of commercial development along the highway — similar to what Pagosa has seen grow up all along the 5 mile stretch between the west end of “downtown” and the west end of "uptown"?
Do we want to see a line of budget motels and fast food restaurants — so typical of other small towns throughout the West — welcoming visitors as they enter Pagosa Springs from Wolf Creek Pass?
“I don’t want to see hotels that far outside of town,” argued Town Planning Commission chair Kathy Lattin. “I want [the tourists] to come into town. I want them to park their cars and spend their money downtown.”
Most of the planning discussions I’ve heard over the past five years have been disparaging of “strip type” commercial growth — individual commercial buildings, each with its own parking lot facing the highway, each with its own architectural style, each with its own entrance. It’s a type of development that works pretty well in a culture where people never walk more than fifty feet or so: from their vehicles to the business entrance.
Over the past few years, the phrase “mixed use commercial” has been thrown around to describe a different type of development where businesses and residences are blended together in a neighborhood — an appealing alternative to strip commercial, where residents and shoppers will supposedly walk from place to place, where a different healthier type of lifestyle would be free to develop. This “mixed use” model is supposed to emulate the type of pedestrian friendly neighborhoods that arose quite naturally in towns and cities during the first half of the 20th century, before the automobile became the dominant form of transportation in America.
Speaking for myself, I live two blocks from one of the busiest intersection in Pagosa Springs. During a five minute walk from my house, I can stroll past two school buildings, three churches, three barbers, two saloons, a bakery, two thrift stores and four of Pagosa’s largest motels. And a brand new hot dog stand.
Historically, Pagosa’s downtown developed without the “benefits” of the kind of planning and zoning effort I saw at work around the joint meeting table on Tuesday evening. And it developed before the advent of the three-car garage. Historic downtown Pagosa retains a “pedestrian pace” to its design — except for the major highway, Highway 160, running directly through its middle. And the planners and zoners recognize that pedestrian pace as something we might want to emulate, going forward — as a superior model for a community that truly “feels like a community” instead of like a strip mall.
We’ve seen a handful of attempts here in Pagosa Springs, to create this pedestrian type of mixed-use development. The largest attempt, the Aspen Village development across the highway from the Pagosa Springs Golf Course, offers a clear example of how difficult it is to make such a pattern work. Almost all of the lots in that subdivision remain vacant after five years of trying to market the project. A much smaller “mixed use” project in the heart of downtown Pagosa — the Towne Terrace building — is likewise mostly vacant.
But the conversations around the planning table on Tuesday were filled with dreams of sculpting the future of Pagosa development to match some kind of “right direction”. The planning tools that are supposed to keep things going in the “right direction” are the zoning categories, the planning maps, the rules and regulations.
As I understand it, these zoning categories and rules and regulations are meant, in part, to keep incompatible uses from clashing with one another. People with secluded 35-acre parcels want to remain secluded — and want to be surrounded by other 35-acre parcels, and safely removed from mobile homes and affordable apartments and modest little houses with too many children playing in the yard. That’s human nature. The people with too many children, meanwhile, want to be protected from the creeping encroachment of commercial buildings and light industry — and frightening levels of truck and automobile traffic, noise, and three-acre parking lots.
In other words, we all supposedly want to be surrounded by land uses exactly like the use to which we happen to be putting our own property. Or at least, that’s the argument that I hear put forward. And our governments, bless their little hearts, have promised us that they will do their best to protect our selfish desires.
That is to say, planning and zoning is governmental confirmation that our selfish desires are good and proper.
Then a developer walks in promising jobs and economic development, with a monstrous plan that conflicts with our little individual property dreams, and our government leaders fall all over themselves to negate the community plan that supposedly protected me, and my property, from “incompatible” development.
It’s a problem.
But it’s pretty much a theoretical problem at the moment. Developers have continued to walk in the door with monstrous proposals, since Pagosa began its economic decline in 2007, but no one yet is moving any dirt. The truth is, Pagosa’s future might be, at the moment, just a little too uncertain for anyone to make a big investment here.
I did a search of the MLS property listings this morning, and Pagosa Springs shows more than 120 commercial buildings for sale or lease, mostly along the Highway 160 corridor. That listing does not include the numerous prime downtown parcels currently owned by former Pagosa resident David Brown — parcels that were already bargain-priced a year ago.
Does anyone think the revival of the Pagosa economy is right around the corner? Is there a way to “plan for stagnation”?
Read Part Eight... |
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