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Urban Land - October 2004 - Inside ULI

Hudnut Speaks at Newly Formed ULI Oregon/SW Washington Forum

The following article, “Former Indianapolis Mayor Sings Praises of a Town Center,” by Jeffrey Mize, appeared in the September 17, 2004, edition of The Columbia (Portland, Oregon). It is reprinted with permission.

When Bill Hudnut became mayor of Indianapolis almost 30 years ago, his city’s downtown would empty at 5 p.m. when workers left for homes in the suburbs.

The tendency for growth to gravitate away from the inner city was so ingrained that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development actually moved its Indianapolis office to the suburbs, Hudnut said during a panel discussion this week.

Hudnut, who served as Indianapolis mayor from 1976 to 1991, said he sought to reverse decades of suburban flight so Indianapolis’s core did not become the empty hole in an otherwise plump growth doughnut.

“We wanted to be a cookie, a Danish pastry, solid all the way through, with a lot of sweetness,” he said.

Hudnut came to Portland to speak at a forum organized by the Oregon/Southwest Washington District Council of the Urban Land Institute, a nonprofit education and research group on growth and development issues.

The topic for Tuesday’s inaugural forum was town centers, such as Orenco Station in Hillsboro, Oregon, Vancouver’s emerging downtown and Anthem Park along upper Main Street.

There are different definitions for town centers, which also are called urban villages. The base features are a mix of uses, residential and business, in a high-density environment that incorporates different aspects of urban life.

In theory, town centers allow people to live, work, shop and play in one location, thereby reducing the need to build roads, sewers and infrastructure to serve growth that keeps pushing farther into the suburbs.

One of the unintended consequences of sprawl, which typically involves low-density development and single-use zoning, is a loss of community identity, Hudnut said.

“All you get there are these cookie-cutter suburbs where everyone is dependent on the car,” he said.

Delton Young, a Seattle psychologist who works with adolescents, has documented suburbia’s “debilitating consequences” on young people, namely the loss of personal connections and a sense of community, Hudnut said.

“Most suburbs are the antithesis of true places,” Hudnut said. “The suburbs really suffer from too little concentration of activities.”

Hudnut suggested that government officials seeking to develop town centers should learn from other regions’ successes and lay out of a careful plan that incorporates people into the process. Town centers also require flexible zoning that embraces an assortment of uses and sound market analysis and financial plans, he said.

“It takes political will, it takes backbone, it takes courage,” Hudnut said. “That’s what public leadership is all about, creating positive change.”

Tuesday’s forum, attended by more than 100 government officials and developers from across the Portland-Vancouver area, didn’t delve into the negative issues associated with town centers, including the perception that public/ private partnerships dole out too many incentives to developers.

Steve Burdick, Vancouver’s economic development manager, sat on the panel along with Mayor Royce Pollard and elected officials and developers from other parts of the region.

For a community to build town centers, it needs political leadership, developers experienced in mixed-used projects and lenders willing to finance such projects, Burdick said.

Some east Vancouver residents believed the city was pumping all of its money into downtown and neglecting other areas, Burdick said. City officials were able to counter this perception by showing how much they were spending on parks, roads and other infrastructure on the east side, he said.

Pollard briefly reviewed the city’s successes in turning around its once-dormant downtown, including the thousands who recently attended the Taste of Vancouver and the Vancouver Wine & Jazz Festival in Esther Short Park. “If you don’t understand the importance of town centers and keeping your people at home working in the area, then you have never tried crossing the I-5 Bridge at 7:00 or 7:30 in the morning,” Pollard said.