Dan Douglas’ European vision for our capital city

Up front, let’s stipulate that the fabulous things Dan Douglas envisions for downtown Raleigh aren’t all going to happenat least, not in every detail. And maybe in no detail: The state and the city have a long history of not working together. Add in the county, two public utility companies, three railroads and Triangle Transit, and the number of permutations for how this scheme goes awry are to the nth degree.

Still, everything Douglas is talking about in his plan is not only feasible, it’s there for the taking if Raleigh’s leaders can get together and commit to the goal of economic development on a world-class scale. Douglas, who wears his passion for cities and planning on both rolled-up sleeves, believes this to his core.

“It absolutely can be done,” he says. “We just need to think bigger.”

The “it” is a nonprofit development corporation similar to the one that created the Research Triangle Park a half century ago, but this time it is aimed at making North Carolina’s capital city the equal of any in the world for economic innovation and quality of life.

The state would be a partner in the corporation, as would the city, Wake County, Progress Energy and Public Service of North Carolina; also, the CSX, Norfolk Southern and North Carolina Railroad companies and Triangle Transit.

Combined, Douglas says, these partners own 120 acres of vacant or underutilized land in the prime railroad corridor that runs through the heart of the city and up Capital Boulevard to Atlantic Avenue. The partners would donate their land to the corporation, which Douglas calls Capital City Partners, giving it an enormous asset with which to leverage private and public developmentcommercial, residential and culturalon a grand scale.

The corporation would then hold an international competition to produce the best possible master plan for downtown development. This could include new public squares, transit stations, high-tech businesses, high-density housinga significant amount of it, affordablearts and cultural hubs: All this, to create a bustling, vibrant, walkable and green downtown.

By following the plan, the corporation and private developers would be drawn to the “transformative investments” needed for a great center city to emerge, generating new taxes for the government partners, new business for the railroads and utilities, and new revenues for the corporation to continue its work.

The number of jobs in downtown Raleigh, now about 40,000, could be doubled in the next two decades, Douglas estimates, and the number of people living downtown could increase from fewer than 3,000 to between 25,000 and 30,000.

Douglas’ thesis is attracting attention in policy circles for a couple of reasons. Until recently, he was Raleigh’s chief downtown planner and advocate. As director of the city’s Urban Design Center, he was widely considered to be the pied piper of downtown’s potential and a strong creative thinker.

Douglas relished the job, he says, and left only when KlingStubbins, one of the nation’s biggest architectural and engineering firms, offered him the chance to create a new corporate-level planning unit based in its Raleigh office. He’s now their “planner number one,” he says, a note of amazement in his voice, “building an international planning practice from 333 Fayetteville Street.”

The second reason is that nearly everything he foresees happening in downtown Raleigh, he saw for real somewhere in Europe when he traveled there two years ago on a prestigious Eisenhower Fellowship.

When Douglas returned, the bottom fell out of the U.S. economy, stalling Raleigh’s boom and giving it, as Mayor Charles Meeker says, some breathing room to plan for the next big wave of growth. Douglas used the time to consult with colleagues, refine his plan and crystallize the one big idea that could bring the rest of it to fruition.

Raleigh would go, as he foresees it, from languishing among the worst cities in the country in terms of wasted land and energya city built on sprawlto being the greenest city in the Southeast and among the greenest in the world. It would be transit-oriented, not just car-dependent. It would be the kind of creative city that drives and thrives in the world economy.

“If we’re the smartest, most creative community in the country,” Douglas said when he presented his plan to SPARKcon’s “Ideas Spark” audience last month, “we need to start acting like it.”

His Eisenhower Fellowship experience opened doors for him in Europe, and opened his eyes. In eight weeks, he traveled to 14 cities in five countries and met with 75 leaders, including the prime minister of Ireland and assorted royalty in Spain. Everywhere he saw cities taking charge of their futures with strong planning, rather than (as here) depending on the piecemeal choices of private interests.

These world-class cities are taking advantage of transit and energy-efficient design to create densely populated yet highly livable places, Douglas found. Public squares and affordable housing are required in every development. They help bring the cities to life.

Douglas had read about the European style for years; he’d heard about it at conferences and seen the PowerPoint presentations. But it was a different experience to view it close-up, especially in places he’d visited earlier in his career that were stunningly better. “That was the surprise,” he says, “to see that they weren’t just talking about it, they actually did it.”

Several cities had wrestled with the question of what to do with abandoned industrial land in their downtowns. It was the same problem Raleigh confronts with its old industrial corridor, which follows the train tracks through the western part of the city and into the downtown area before turning north up Capital Boulevard.

In Bilbao, Spain, city leaders created a nonprofit corporation called Bilbao Ria 2000, which began by accepting donations of land along an industrial riverfront, including several polluted brownfields. The corporation, which included the landowners, paid to clean it up, and it got the properties rezoned according to the winning master plan from an international competition.

A Bilbao official gave Douglas his favorite new saying: The only two entities in Spain that can print money, the official said, are the central bank “and any city government that upzones a property.”

Flush with its upzoned assets, Bilbao Ria 2000 entered into deals with developers for high-density residential and commercial projects. The profits helped pay for new streets, a riverfront park, a pedestrian overpass and the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum. Some went back to the corporation for future projects.

The result, Douglas says, is that 83 acres of abandoned land were transformed, and “Bilbao is now the darling of any international discussion of urban design.”

Douglas saw the model repeated on a bigger scale in Barcelona, where a nonprofit corporation assembled the equivalent of 110 city blocks, a land area equal to all of downtown Raleigh. Some of the Barcelona land had been used for railroad switching yards. Again, it was reminiscent of the Capital Boulevard corridor in Raleigh, which is flanked by the CSX and Norfolk Southern yards.

Barcelona’s master plan called for burying the rail yards and building the new city over them. It targeted “knowledge-intensive” businesses, including telecommunications and medical technology firms, with density bonuses to developers able to sign them up as tenants.

Barcelona has set a goal of providing 130,000 jobs for the areamore than three times the number of jobs in downtown Raleigh.

In Madrid, Douglas was fascinated to see an old municipal slaughterhouse transformed into a thriving arts, entertainment and retail venue. Its sizeabout 1.3 million square feetis roughly equal to unused space in buildings on the Dorothea Dix Hospital campus in Raleigh, he noted.

Freiburg, Germany offered a different lesson. There, on an old military base, the city created one of Europe’s greenest, densest districts. Like most of Europe, it adheres to a six-story limit on building heights. It features walkable streets, bike lanes and excellent transit, so efficient that 40 percent of resident families don’t own a car.

What all families do own is a home with solar panels on the roof. Heat and air conditioning is cheaper because of the district’s cogeneration facility. Some of the homes are located in co-op housing communities designed and built by the owners without a developer, reducing housing costs.

The before picture of the Freiburg district, Douglas says, looked like Capital Boulevard just north of downtown Raleigh. The after view cemented in his mind an image of what that area of Capital Boulevard could become.

In a report he wrote for the Eisenhower Foundation, Douglas pointed to lessons learned in each place. They included the importance to cities of preserving old buildings while supplying modern amenities like free wireless access, solar and cogenerated power, and efficient transit.

But the primary lesson, Douglas wrote, is that cities “must have the will to change.” If they do, then the second lesson applies: Complex public/private partnerships.

Every city he visited, Douglas wrote, was following a specific economic development strategy to attract the creative class of highly educated people and the companies they work for. All were convinced that to attract them, cities must be vibrant, efficient and green.

“It was exciting,” Douglas recalls. “And they all thought of Raleigh as a leader in the United States because of the Research Triangle Park. But it was also disappointing, because I realized that Raleigh as a city had no economic development strategy at all.”

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Back in Raleigh, Douglas looked for a way to focus the city’s political and business leaders on the challenge posed by Europe’s citiesand on what he views as Raleigh’s vast untapped potential to meet the challenge.

When he opened the books on land ownership within the rail corridor, he discovered what he thinks is the key to getting their attention: The city, the county, the state, the utilities and the railroads already own 120 acres of land there (map), most of it as miserable as that riverfront in Bilbao or the military base in Freiberg before they were turned into great urban places.

For example, Raleigh owns 18 acres along the west side of Capital Boulevard that it uses to park its garbage trucks and other vehicles. The county owns six acres, also with abundant parking, that abut the site of the planned Triangle Transit commuter-rail station at the State Government complex.

If the two governments joined hands and developed their properties according to a common master plan, Douglas thought, and the other owners did the same, imagine the effect they’d have on the privately owned land in the corridor.

To help them imagine it, Douglas started making a plan and picking the brains of everyone he knew who could help him. He took the best of what he heard. The result (map) is as stunning as the projects he saw in Europe.

For starters, he’d eradicate Capital Boulevard as we know it from Peace Street north to the intersection with Atlantic Avenue. In place of that grungy highway, he’d put in a tree-lined boulevard, with stoplights, sidewalks and cross streets that connect to a pair of new frontage streets parallel to the train tracks.

Ripping out the road and installing streets wouldn’t be cheap, Douglas says, but it would pay for itself many-fold as a platform for the same kind of dense, urban development as in Freiberg, with new offices, shopping, restaurants and entertainment in the mix with thousands of housing units.

Heavily polluted Pigeon Creek Branch, much of it buried in giant pipes, would be opened up and cleaned, becoming a featured waterway.

Triangle Transit railperhaps including a streetcar line up the middle of the new boulevardwould serve the corridor.

“North up Capital Boulevard is the path of least resistance for downtown expansion,” Douglas says. Developers know it, and they’ve been assembling privately owned tracts there and in the rest of the corridor for some time, anticipating the city’s push.

But to his knowledge, the vision for that area has been piecemeal because nobody has thought it possible to coordinate development among all the stakeholders for the entire 369-acre corridor. No one has envisioned the corridor’s enormous potential if a strong master plan is followed.

Douglas sees his plan as a way to psych up stakeholders and the public to commission a better one.

“Someone said that planning is nothing more than the organization of hope,” he says. “Our planning process should be just thatgetting citizens to share their hopes, and then working it through to reach a consensus, a vision and a strategy.”

The payoff for coordinated planning, Douglas says, is that “the sum of the parts is much greater” than would be realized if everyone acts aloneand everyone’s property values increase. But a downside, as Europeans know, is that without inclusionary zoning, low-income peopleincluding young folks, families and seniorsare gradually priced out.

Based on his experience in Europe, Douglas thinks every condo and apartment building in the downtown plan should be held to a 20 percent affordable-housing requirement. And he likes the Euro-style of development: Nothing taller than six stories, with densely concentrated buildings arranged around public squares.

The original plan for Raleighset out by legislator and land surveyor William Christmas in 1798platted the city around a center square (where the Capitol is located) and four other squares equidistant from it. Two remain: Moore Square and Nash Square. The others were taken by the Governor’s Mansion and a state office building.

Douglas’ plan pays homage to Christmas, placing nine additional squares throughout downtown, including two that would double as green roofs on top of new parking decks. Otherwise, his transit-oriented developments would dramatically reduce the need for additional decks beyond the current total of 40,000 spaces. Without transit, Raleigh would need about 80,000 more parking spaces to support the same number of jobs and housing units he’s projecting with it. That amount of parking would be nearly impossible to build, and even if you could, at $30,000 per deck space, it would cost $2.4 billion.

“Sometimes,” he says, laughing at the joke, “I call this plan a Christmas present for Raleigh.”

So what’s next? When Douglas spoke at SPARKcon, he was received with boisterous applause by an audience of creative-class types who grasped immediately what he was talking about. “His vision was rock solid, clear and beautiful,” said Aly Khalifa, a product designer and a SPARKcon founder-organizer. “It was just tremendous to have somebody who was so closely involved with city development speak so passionately about Raleigh’s future.”

State Rep. Deborah Ross (D-Raleigh), who heard Douglas speak to another group, thinks the prospects are improving for cooperation among state government and city and county leaders. She’s one of several state and local officials trying to make it happen with regular meetings, she said. “We have something to build on for future projects.”

The situation reminds Douglas of what happened when he came to Raleigh seven years ago. As the Urban Design Center’s first director, Douglas was charged with getting it off the ground as a vehicle for building the downtown. Meanwhile, Raleigh was starting its Livable Streets planning process to reverse two decades of downtown decline.

In nine months, Douglas managed dozens of Livable Streets meetings and spoke to more than 10,000 members (he counted) of civic groups, neighborhood groups, any group that would have him.

“Dan is a very creative thinker, someone who understands the value of place-making instead of haphazard development,” says City Councilor Thomas Crowder, who co-chaired Livable Streets. “His leaving the Urban Design Center is a big loss for the city, but I hope he’ll stay involved with our planningI know he will.”

Livable Streets resulted in a broad community consensus in favor of reopening Fayetteville Street, tearing down the old civic center, building a new convention center and otherwise paying to kick-start a renaissance downtown. It also won people over, Douglas thinks, to the value of planning.

As it did, the Urban Design Center emerged as the place where city officials and developers were always figuring, “what’s next?”

Douglas thinks Raleigh is ready for a second round of Livable Streets-style discussions, with the focus this time not on rectifying past mistakes but on joining the ranks of the world’s top cities.

Ideally, he says, Raleigh could send delegations to the same cities he visited in Europe. Alternatively, their leaders could be invited here. Either way, Raleigh needs to understand who it’s competing with for business.

Douglas argues strongly from the creative-class thesis, which holds that the world economy will be dominated in this century by knowledge-intensive businesses and the creative people who run them. Such people gravitate to lively cities, Douglas says. They don’t like working in isolation.

When Douglas thinks of Raleigh’s economy, he sees a wobbly-legged stool. For companies that still prefer a campus atmosphere, we have the Research Triangle Park. Those seeking an educational campus can choose NCSU’s Centennial Campus, which is going strong.

But when it comes to attracting the creative types who want to work in a vibrant city, what’s Raleigh’s strategy? Douglas’s answer: “We got nuthin’.”

Well, not nothing. Raleigh has enormous assets, Douglas argues, “if we put them together and use them” to chart a different path for growth.

“It’s not going to be easy, the good things never are,” he says, his cadence racing. “I mean, if it were, everybody would be doing it. But it’s the cities that say, ‘This is hard, but we’re going to actually do it,’ that are going to leapfrog ahead of all the other ones.”