Time to reform Tacoma's Crossroads Centers
Despite efforts to promote more pedestrian-friendly design and mixed-use development compatible with cities, the dominance of car-centric infrastructure ultimately undermines community goals.
Tacoma has spent a lot of energy and effort to revitalize its downtown into a vibrant urban center and to plan for future growth in its mixed use growth areas. These centers are meant to provide walkable commercial services, densifying environments, with added opportunities for housing, public amenities and access to robust public transportation.
Growth centers are classified into three broad categories: Regional Growth Centers, Neighborhood Centers and Crossroads Centers. There are only two Regional Growth Centers: Downtown and Tacoma Mall, which represent the largest areas in the city with the highest levels of land use intensity in terms of commercial and residential development.
Neighborhood Centers are those areas like the Lincoln District, South Tacoma Way, Proctor, and Lower 6th Avenue. They tend to have unbroken street frontage, complete and wide sidewalks, street furniture, a mixture of restaurants, retail, and services, and actively discourage excess parking facilities. Historically they were neighborhood centers served by streetcars prior to 1938. People have incentives to access businesses in these centers with modes other than the car due to their inherent pedestrian-friendly design and compact geometry.
So, what are Crossroads Centers? The Tacoma Municipal Code defines the CCX district, one of the principal components of Crossroads Centers, like this:
To provide for commercial and retail businesses intended to serve many nearby neighborhoods and draw people from throughout the City. These areas are envisioned as evolving from traditional suburban development to higher density urban districts. Walking and transit use are facilitated through designs which decrease walking distances and increase pedestrian safety. Uses include shopping centers with a wide variety of commercial establishments; commercial recreation; gas stations; and business, personal, and financial services. Residential uses are encouraged in CCX Districts as integrated development components.
Traditional suburban development
First, let's consider what "traditional suburban development" is in order to understand what the city is trying to "evolve from." What typifies that type of development pattern?
Typically, it involves the following characteristics in my experience:
- Single-uses over a large area with low-densities and no real center.
- Buildings that are frequently set back from the street, with parking lots and driveways prioritized over pedestrian access.
- Retail comes in two forms: large format big box stores and strip commercial.
- Limited opportunities are available for public discourse, recreation, or exercise.
- The businesses in these districts tend to be chains, without represented labor and with non-local ownership.
- Residential tends to be segregated from these areas.
- An alternate version of suburban development on the commercial side is the office park, with space for a single employer.
What are crossroads centers evolving from this model?
The City's approach to taming and evolving suburban commercial development is to focus on design regulations to "reduce walking distances and increase pedestrian safety." The principal way that CCX does try to improve the pedestrian experience is to encourage building frontage along the sidewalk and to put parking in the rear of the lot, and ensure that if buildings are set back from the street that there are adequate pedestrian walkways that make it safer for someone approaching a building from the street to access a business. This does not mean that the primary entrance to a store is from the sidewalk, just that it could be. This addresses part of characteristic #2, involving building setbacks, but driveways are still present and parking lots can be nearly limitless in size.
CCX zoning does allow for multiple uses. Retail, office, and residential are all allowed to exist within the same district, which partially addresses the single-use characteristic #1, but does not address the lower level of density.
This is where attempts at reform generally end and the inertia and power of market forces tends to overwhelm the community vision of a more integrated and inclusive center.
The described intent behind CCX zoning is meant to "draw people from throughout the City." What this implies is that people will travel longer distances to arrive at these destinations and will use some mode of transportation (other than walking) that implies longer travel distances. Without a robust transit system or a complete bicycle network, the default travel mode in the United States is by car. The effect of this tendency towards the default mode of transport, comes with it the default suburban market-driven model, which emphasizes the maximization of space for commercial transactions and minimizes everything else.
CityNerd explaining the various impacts Drive-Thrus have on cities and people
What does that mean? If your in-person commercial transactions are dependent on volume and customers are arriving at a business via a certain mode of transportation, you want to try to maximize the amount of access via that mode. So what does a developer do? They incorporate as many design elements as possible to facilitate the flow of that type of traffic. For cars, this means using a site design that maximizes the amount of space on a parcel for drive-thru service and vehicle parking.
The effect that this has is several-fold and stops dead in its tracks any attempt at evolution from the suburban tradition: it increases the likelihood of collisions between users of the street on the sidewalk and drivers crossing paths at driveways, it reduces the real density of the "center" due to the size of the parking lot, it reduces the number of uses from many to one, and the excess of impermeable surface on the lot sometimes requires that part of the parcel be used as a stormwater detention pond. None of the uses supports opportunities for public discourse, recreation, or exercise, and this type of development is generally not undertaken by local businesses. The public may end up with only a small fraction of an area with a building that the public may use or enter, with the rest of the lot covered in infrastructure to handle automobiles and their impacts.
This leaves a growth center for cars, not for people. 🫳🎤
What puts the nail in the coffin of the gestures at reform is the explicit provision of gas stations for cars, the source of more than 40% of the city's greenhouse gas emissions, literally baked into the description of the "mixed use" zoning district. 🤯
There is no explicit provision for grocery stores or street trees or water fountains or affordable housing, but where the City wants to emphasize growth and development, we must make sure people have access to fossil fuels. 🙄
The Imperative of Updating Commercial Zoning
As we've seen, the current CCX zoning district in Tacoma is intended to evolve from traditional suburban development patterns, but it falls short. Despite efforts to promote more pedestrian-friendly design and mixed-use development compatible with cities, the dominance of car-centric infrastructure ultimately undermines community goals.
To truly create vibrant, walkable, and sustainable commercial centers, the City of Tacoma must update its commercial zoning regulations to prioritize people over cars. This means rethinking the way we design our streets and updating commercial zoning to:
Enforce parking maximums: Limit the amount of parking that can be built in commercial centers, especially in areas slated for high capacity transit.
Require minimum lot coverage and a minimum floor area ratio: Ensure that buildings are built to a minimum size and density, reducing the amount of empty space and promoting more efficient use of land.
Incorporate green infrastructure: Mandate the inclusion of trees, rain gardens, and other green features to mitigate stormwater runoff and improve air quality in a way that improves the pedestrian experience.
Require mixed-use development in centers: Ensure that commercial projects include a mix of uses, such as residential, retail, and office, to create vibrant and dynamic areas that support local businesses and residents.
By updating commercial zoning regulations, but especially in Crossroads Centers, the City of Tacoma can create more sustainable, equitable, and people-friendly areas that benefit both residents and businesses. It's time to move beyond the outdated 20th century suburban model and create a new vision for commercial development that prioritizes community, sustainability, and good urban design.
