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LUTC PKT 09-16-1996City of Federal Way City Council Land Use/Transportation Committee Committee of the Whole September 16, 1996 5:30pm Mel0I 1 . 1. CALL TO ORDER 2. PUBLIC COMMENT (3 minute limit) 3. BUSINESS ITEM Mayor's Institute for Urban Design 4. OTHER ITEMS 5. FUTURE MEETINGS/AGENDAS 6. ADJOURN City Hall Council Chambers Committee Members: City Staff. - Phil Watkins, Chair Greg Moore, CDS Director Ron Gintz Sandy Lyle, Administrative Assistant Mary Gates 661-4116 CITY OF vv DATE: 12 September 1996 TO: Phil Watkins, Chair Land Use/Transportation Committee FROM: Stephen Clifton, Development Services Manager Barbara Simpson, Landscape Architect SUBJECT: Mayor's Institute on Urban Design The intent of this meeting of the Land Use/Transportation Committee is to discuss and then determine the focus of a case study to present to the Mayor's Institute on Urban Design. Attached is a briefing paper on the Mayor's Institute on Urban Design and possible alternative case studies to present to the Institute. Also attached is a copy of the City Center Chapter of the Comprehensive Plan and recent urban design articles. All City Council members and the Planning Commission have been invited to the meeting. THE MAYORS' INSTITUTE ON CITY DESIGN: Briefing Paper Agenda item: To discuss the focus of the case study to bring to the Mayors' Institute Mayor Skip Priest has been invited to attend the seventh meeting of the Mayors' Institute on City Design:West in Berkely, California, November 14-16, 1996. The Institute brings together six or seven mayors who meet with a comparable number of outstanding national urban designers. Each mayor brings a case study for discussion, critique and suggestion, and each of the designers gives a presentation on urban design. The Institute is funded by the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkely and the Design Program of the National Endowment for the Arts. On September 24th Professor Donlyn Lyndon, a coordinator from the Institute will visit Federal Way. He will assist in considering the nature and scope of the Case Study. A tour of the city is scheduled and supporting background materials such as plans, maps, slides, local histories, extracts from the Comprehensive Plan and news articles will be assembled as background information for the case study. Purpose of the Mayors' Institute The Institute began in 1984 at a symposium called "The Politics of Design" at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. It explored urban design from a politician's viewpoint, examining the experience of two mayors who had put their political and bureaucratic reputations on the line by becoming deeply involved in design. The concept for the institute was that city design policies could be effectively guided to provide good urban design, address issues of livability and scale and promote higher quality development. In 1990 Mayor Ertel of Federal Way attended the Institute. The case study looked at how to develop the Federal Way Shopping Center on SR99 into a pedestrian -oriented environment. Mayor Ertel summarized her findings and results from the Institute at a City Council Meeting. No action was taken and the site was eventually redeveloped into Pavillions Center. Federal Way: Goals to be Accomplished at the Mayors' Institute It is hoped that by participating in the Institute that one major goal can be accomplished: to identify concrete ideas to get from the Comprehensive Plan to construction. How do we get from a twenty year conceptual plan to a ten year implementation plan? How do we inject some realism into the task of fashioning urban design for Federal Way? The following are the kinds of points and questions the City may wish to consider bringing to the Institute: ■ The City has limited public financial resources that can be applied to redesigning and rebuilding Federal Way's retail area. ■ What amenities and incentives attract investors? ■ What attracts customers, employers, employees and citizens? ■ What are the key public actions which will need to be taken to solidify future development of a well-designed and economically healthy retail area? ■ How can we use our Comprehensive Plan and Design Guidelines to shape redevelopment of our retail area? ■ How can we envision public/private partnerships to redesign properties such as SeaTac Mall? ■ What fosters Civic/Community pride in its retail area? Alternative Case Studies for Federal Way 1. SEATAC MALL CORE AREA REDEVELOPMENT This case study would focus on the area along S. 320th in front of SeaTac Mall as an east/west central spine for civic amenities. Two existing proposed plans for the area could be presented for analysis: the draft plan SeaTac Mall has introduced and the plan that the City of Federal Way has proposed. 2. COMPREHENSIVE PLAN CORE AREA REDEVELOPMENT This case study would focus on the land north of S. 320th with 20th Ave S as a north/south central spine for civic amenities. The existing Comprehensive Plan core area plan would be presented for analysis. 3. DISTRICT PLAN A case study which looks at how the central area of Federal Way has the beginning form of districts such as "entertainment", "international", "civic" and how civic amenities could be distributed in the districts to create a unique character and image for the city. 4. PACIFIC HIGHWAY S. CORRIDOR PLAN Pacific Highway S. (SR99) is scheduled for major redesign by the State Department of Transportation. Pacific Highway S. includes north and south gateways to the City, many of the city's commercially zoned properties, and properties in need of redevelopment. The case study would analyze how to redesign the corridor to enhance the image of the city and encourage high quality redevelopment. 5. SR99 and S. 320th PLAN How could these main streets be improved in terms of function and aesthetics? Should they remain focused on the automobile with civic amenities focused elswhere or should they become more pedestrian -oriented and be transformed into central focal points? 6. TRANSIT CENTER PLAN This case study would look at where to locate the future transit center.This includes a future light rail station, transit/transfer station and park and ride. It would analyze primarily where this core amenity should be sited and how it will influence the City's future development. All of the above case studies would be looked at from the standpoint of implementation priorities and recommendations.for phasing and funding. Attached are the City Center Chapter of the Comprehensive Plan and recent urban design articles. d� �� ❑' }T , �� co ED PiJ LLJ ! I e• anV a Z 't 3AV • � a r , I � f- -3AV HIOE ca, Dc? N i x p CV) r YO O ' i I S;'AMH �IdIOVd TATTLE TIMES OPINION MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 1996 J A M E S V E S E L Y/ Times associate editorial page editor Bellevue's downtown: None dare call it grim THE Great Chess Skir- mish at the Crossroads mall in Bellevue is one of those little glimpses into what gets people steamed that can also act as a meta- 'i phor for something larger. In this case it does: why Crossroads is booming and why downtown Bellevue a few miles away is in an identity crisis. Stroll toward the Crossroads food court from the QFC some evening and watch the fun. At six chess boards, a hockey game is likely to break out at any moment. The people who, play this level of exuberant, competitive chess are, shall we say, motivat- ed by the spirit of the game. The spirit was )ngest this time at the large chessboard ...ch knee-high pieces and an eight -foot square. Naturally, there was foul language and a fistfight. The result is more rules for chess play- ers, a new chess clock and the kind of after - fight camaraderie known so well in the Marine Corps. But key to the resolution of the fracas is the attitude of the mall manag- ers — stay and play chess. Oh, if only Bellevue were so lucky. Tooling past the Fulcrum of the East Side — the corner of Eighth and Bellevue Way — the average shopper may not register the dimensions of Bellevue's angst, but it is real and serious. Downtown Bellevue is a city- scape in search of its soul. So much so, some serious folks are meeting regularly to try to put a downtown of skyscrapers and empty sidewalks into human scale. The state's fourth-largest city wants to find something that smaller towns have kept and large cities have rediscovered: that elusive sense of place. "We know it's grim," said one member of the Downtown steering committee, "but we also know it can be fixed — the real question is how." Grim is not a word most people would use to describe Bellevue. But a walk from the grand Bellevue Regional Library toward Bell Square is a very long walk, indeed. Long not in distance but in boredom. The city is up above, divorced from its sidewalks, either by height or landscaped barricades. Only on Old Main, where cheek by jowl are the small galleries, cafes and nautical paraphernalia shops, does Bellevue become a town. Old Main is about the only hope right now for a fistfight over a chess game. Downtown Bellevue is also looking in the teeth of competition. There's no doubt Bellevue is a retail destination, but Red- mond is creating a new center -city, Kirkland is going the Sausalito -Tiburon route toward blue -water chic while Issaquah is a Jeep - Wrangler kind of place, an edge city to Bellevue's urban core. Factoria is its own center, with service and shopping density that draws activity away from Eighth and Bellevue Way. OK, OK, the only fistfights in Factoria would be between rival muffler shops, but that's another story. Downtown Bellevue has to do something to make itself more than a video -return stop after 6 p.m. and the closest answer is at Crossroads mall, where there's a movie theater and a chance to browse a little. It's not Pike Place Market, but nobody from the Eastside would be nuts enough to go all the way to Seattle for some urban ambience anyway. The answer has to be a Bellevue solu- tion. One way to find it is to ask where mistakes were made in the past. I put that question to Phil Kushlan, Bellevue's former city manager. Kushlan ponders the question about past mistakes for a moment and then puts his hand up to shield his eyes as though search ing the horizon. "Superblocks," he says.' Kushlan's view is that the downtown blocks are too big, and they sure are. Even walking the pedestrian space along the, brick -lined bus corridor through downtown' is a trek between outposts. Downtown_ Bellevue is a place to ride in, either in a car or an elevator. Bellevue is also without waterfront, and; in the land of water -view, chutney -with-"" your -salmon dining, that's a real d,sadvan tage. Dee Dee Brochu, a member of the downtown steering committee who liyes with her family on Cougar Mountain, says what a lot of people say: When out-of-towin: visitors arrive, why do a lot of people bypass Bellevue to go out to eat? No water to look at. In 1967, the city had a chance to buy. 14I', i acres on the shores of Meydenbauer Bay: &.` $750,000, but the price was considered' ridiculous, Kushlan recalls. And so decisions.' are made and cities are left with them- { decades later. "Everyone thought of themselves in 30 - story buildings," Kushlan says. "But if they were right, where are the cranes now. ` There aren't any. Nothing new is going up, or at least way up. Downtown Bellevue. i has about five million square feet of com- mercial space, (compared to 28 million in downtown Seattle), all of it renting at good occupancy rates. But that's not the future anyone sees anymore. As far as anyone. can tell, the future is high-tech conversations'in comfy, low-tech surroundings. "People-. space," as it's called, the kind found around a chess board, in the nooks and crannies- of urban life. If downtown Bellevue has a nostalgic heart, it may be pumping just east of Bell' Square at the Dairy Queen on Eighth, near: the shores of the rumbling majesty -of Interstate 405. The Dairy Queen has picnic, tables and leafy shade trees and human, scale. It and a few other places in Bellevue. are things taken for granted, but once gone are measured differently, as something in- tangible lost. James Vesely's column focusing on Eastside issues appears Mondays on editorial pages of The Times. Title. I . vloi I Ak rz ILrr-t,�4 ■ NOW ■ ONE ii ONE Now ■ONE -�PM No ' 4 2.95 c- 53 CO 395525 3 Home From Nowhere by JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER Can the momentum of sprawl be halted? America's zoning laws, intended to control the baneful effects of industry, have mutated, in the view Of one architecture critic, into a system that corrodes civic life, outlaws the human scale, defeats tradition and authenticity, and confounds our yearning for an everyday environment worthy of our affection AMERICANS sense that something is wrong with the places where we live and work and go about our daily business. We hear this unhappiness expressed in phrases like "no sense of place" and "the loss of community." We drive up and down the gruesome, tragic suburban boulevards of commerce, and we're overwhelmed at the fantastic, awesome, stupefying ugliness of absolutely everything in sight—the fry pits, the big -box stores, the of- fice units, the lube joints, the carpet warehouses, the parking lagoons, the jive plastic townhouse clusters, the uproar of signs, the highway itself clogged with cars—as though the whole thing had been designed by some diabolical force bent on making human beings miserable. And naturally, this ex- perience can make us feel glum about the nature and future of our civilization. When we drive around and look at all this cartoon archi- tecture and other junk that we've smeared all over the land- scape, we register it as ugliness. This ugliness is the surface expression of deeper problems—problems that relate to the issue of our national character. The highway strip is not just a sequence of eyesores. The pattern it represents is also eco- nomically catastrophic, an environmental calamity, socially devastating, and spiritually degrading. It is no small irony that during the period of America's greatest prosperity, in the decades following the Second World War, we put up almost nothing but the cheapest possi- ble buildings, particularly civic buildings. Compare any rich- ly embellished firehouse or post office built in 1904 with its dreary concrete -box counterpart today. Compare the home of a small-town bank president of the 1890s, with its massive masonry walls and complex roof articulation, with the flimsy home of a 1990s business leader, made of two-by-fours, Sheetrock, and fake fanlight windows. When we were a far less wealthy nation, we built things with the expectation that THE ATLANTIC NIONT111.1Color Paintings by Robert Crawford I I� 43 i 93 What's Wrong With dential areas, and thus accessible to most S. Houses too close together. These 2 people only by car. structures violate minimum side -setback t This Picture) 2. Arboreal interference. Traffic depart- requirements. In many residential areas t The town below seems like a pleasant nients in many cases deem curbside trees there must be at least twenty feet mum no MONEENE hazardous to motorists. between dwellings, eliminating the pos- ry obstacles that the building of such a a. No parallel parking allowed. The sibility of row houses. t town today might encounter—a compos- preference has shifted to off-street lots 6. House too small. Many newer com- ite from communities across the country. and driveways.munities have minimum -square -footage 4. Not enough parking. Typically, three requirements, which effectively dictate The Violations: to five parking spaces are required per that only people of a certain income 1,000 square feet of commercial space. level may live there. 1. Stores too convenient for local resi- Many commercial buildings today may 7. Park too small. New parks must fre- dents. Newly erected commercial not be more than one story high because quently meet a minimum -size test; main - buildings must often be in a they don't have enough parking space taining one big park is cheaper than zone separate from resi- to be taller. maintaining several smaller ones. 4 9 14. 2 d MEN 0 on SON me mum no MONEENE e ter. ..f ■■■■■E. :t,f 9 the new stuff that America was about to build. The town de- molished it with a kind of mad glee. What replaced the hotel was a strip mall anchored by, of all things, a Grand Union su- permarket. This shopping plaza was prototypical for its time. Tens of thousands of strip malls like it have been built all over America since then. It is in every one of its details a perfect piece of junk. It is the anti -place. What had been the heart and soul of the town was now converted into a kind of mini–Outer Mongolia. The strip - mall buildings were set back from Broadway 150 feet, and a parking lot filled the gap. The street and the buildings com- menced a nonrelationship. Since the new buildings were one story high, their scale bore no relation to the scale of the simply throw away the past. The owners of the supermarket that anchored the mall didn't live in town. They didn't care what effect their design considerations had on the town. They certainly didn't care about the town's past, and their interest in the town's future had largely to do with technical- ities of selling dog food and soap flakes. What has happened to the interrelation of healthy, living patterns of human ecology in the town where I live has hap- pened all over the country. Almost everywhere the larger patterns are in such a sorry state that the details seem irrele- vant. When Saratoga Springs invested tens of thousands of dollars in Victorian -style streetlamps in an effort to create instant charm, the gesture seemed pathetic, because the larg- town's most important street. They failed to create a street er design failures were ignored. It is hard to overstate how wall. The perception that the street functioned as an outdoor ridiculous these lampposts look in the context of our deso- room was lost. The space between the buildings and the street now had one function: automobile storage. The street, and consequently the public realm in general, was degraded by the design of the mall. As the street's importance as a public place declined, townspeople ceased to care what hap- pened in it. If it became jammed with cars, so much the bet- ter, because individual cars were now understood to be not merely personal transportation but personal home -delivery vehicles, enabling customers to haul away enormous vol- umes of merchandise very efficiently, at no cost to the mer- chandiser—which was a great boon for business. That is why the citizens of Saratoga Springs in 1953 were willing to sacrifice the town's most magnificent building. We could 46 Public buildings deserve architectural embellishment in order to express the dignity of the institutions they house and to honor the public realm of the street. They also deserve important sites late°streets and the cheap, inappropriate new buildings amid their parking lots in what remains of our downtown. The lamppost scheme was like putting Band-Aids on someone who had tripped and fallen on his chainsaw. The one -story -high Grand Union strip -mall building must be understood as a pattern in itself, a dead one, which infects surrounding town tissue with its deadness. Putting up one- story commercial buildings eliminated a large number of live bodies downtown, and undermined the vitality of the town. One-story mall buildings became ubiquitous across the United States after the war, a predictable byproduct of the zoning zeitgeist that deemed shopping and apartment liv- ing to be unsuitable neighbors. SrPTEMBE.lt 1996 The one-story build- l' Ings of a strip anal!, remole behind their vast parking lots, do a poor job of defining public _ space void of the room itself. Where I live, Saratoga Springs, New York, a magnificent building called the Grand Union Hotel once existed. Said to have been the largest hotel in the world in the late nineteenth century, it occupied a six -acre site in the heart of town. The hotel consisted of a set of narrow buildings that lined the outside of an unusually large superblock. Inside the block was a semi-public parklike courtyard. The street sides of the hotel incorporated a gigantic verandah twenty feet deep, with a roof that was three stories high and supported by columns. This fagade functioned as a marvelous street wall, active and permeable. The hotel's size (a central cupo- la reached seven stories) was appropriate to the scale of the town's main street, called Broadway. For much of the SEPARAT14 year the verandah was filledZONRN with people sitting perhaps eight feet above the sidewalk grade, talking to one another while they watched the pag- eant of life on the street. These verandah -sitters were protect- ed from the weather by the roof, and protected from the sun by elm trees along the sidewalk. The orderly rows of elms performed an additional architectural function. The trunks were straight and round, like columns, reiterating and reinforcing the pattern of the hotel fagade, while the crowns formed a vaulted canopy over the sidewalk, pleasantly filter- ing the sunlight for oedestrians as well as hotel patrons. All these patterns worked to en- hance the lives of everybody in town—a common laborer on his way home as well as a railroad millionaire rocking on the verandah. In doing so, they supported civic life as a gen- eral proposition. They nourished our civilization. When I say that the fagade of the Grand Union Hotel was permeable, I mean that the building contained activities that attracted people inside, and had a number of suitably em- bellished entrances that allowed people to pass in and out of the building gracefully and enjoyably. Underneath the ve- randah, half a story below the sidewalk grade, a number of shops operated, selling cigars, newspapers, clothing, and other goods. Thus the street wall was permeable at more than one level and had a multiplicity of uses. The courtyard park that occupied the inside of the six -acre block had winding gravel paths lined with benches among more towering elm trees. It was a tranquil place of repose— though sometimes band concerts and balls were held there. Any reasonably attired person could walk in off the street, pass through the hotel lobby, and enjoy the interior park. This courtyard had even -more -overt characteristics of a big outdoor room than the street did. It was much more en- closed. Like the street fagade, the courtyard fagade featured a broad, permeable verandah with a high roof. The verandah functioned as a mediating zone between the outdoor world and the world of the hotel's interior, with its many public, semi-public, and private rooms. One passed from public to private in a logical sequence, and the transition was eased at each stage by conscious embellishment. The order of things was, by nature, more formal than what we are accustomed to in our sloppy, clownish, informal age. The layers of in- tersecting patterns at work in 'AUSED BY this place were extraordinarily 'ODES rich. The patterns had a quali- ty of great aliveness, meaning MULTI -FAMILY HOUSING they worked wonderfully as an ensemble, each pattern do- ing its job while it supported and reinforced the other pat- terns. The hotel was therefore a place of spectacular charm. It was demolished in 1953. Although nothing lasts for- ever, it was tragic that this magnificent building was de- stroyed less than a hundred years after it was completed. In 1953 America stood at the brink of the greatest building spree in world history, and the very qualities that had made the Grand Union Hotel so won- derful were antithetical to all T 111. ATLAiNTIC MONT 111. 1 45 7- P- �- & - Z yAi✓d r r � r i..�.i/ / �J`/. yr // , r //�/+•/ ,� �/ � � /i !7... / /�' ,,` `..� %�ia� iii �/ i ✓.l �i f l t' f4 i I" • am / • ,. min' r " r i 4i / iiiii///%//T/,il T / i� �/ '/L /// /ii ..• .s.. /iii / �s�/:•"'%//� %%l `I �� '(///!.�'�%!/l/l!� i. w•''r %^l. IJ. G.L � �1��/ ilfi� �`II ;iii. �, f%��'i�' %�' � ��,� ,i rr, "ra ionvrrr,.r,rii1//l�dC////O//%///l//////%/rll/!!Gl%///l///f✓/ //!///U/O/%O.G/....../•'%///!%////////O//%%%//// './/!//!l/%/l///iF:-i��rramoi/ioiiiimiiiiiioir i they would endure. To throw away money (painfully ac- quired) and effort (painfully expended) on something certain to fall apart in thirty years would have seemed immoral, if not insane, in our great-grandparents' day. The buildings our predecessors constructed paid homage to history in their design, including elegant solutions to age- old problems posed by the cycles of weather and light, and they paid respect to the future in the sheer expectation that they would endure through the lifetimes of the people who built them. They therefore embodied a sense of chronologi- cal connectivity, one of the fundamental patterns of the uni- verse: an understanding that time is a defining dimension of existence—particularly the existence of living things, such as human beings, who miraculously pass into life and then inevitably pass out of it. Chronological connectivity lends meaning and dignity to our little lives. It charges the present with a vivid validation of our own aliveness. It puts us in touch with the ages and with the eternities, suggesting that we are part of a larger and more significant organism. It even suggests that the larger organism we are part of cares about us, and that, in turn, we should respect ourselves and our fellow creatures and all those who will follow us in time, as those preceding us re- spected those who followed them. In short, chronological connectivity puts us in touch with the holy. It is at once hum- bling and exhilarating. I say this as someone who has never followed any formal religious practice. Connection with the past and the future is a pathway that charms us in the direc- tion of sanity and grace. The antithesis to this can be seen in the way we have built things since 1945. We reject the past and the future, and this repudiation is manifest in our graceless constructions. Our residential, commercial, and civic buildings are constructed with the fully conscious expectation that they will disinte- grate in a few decades. This condition even has a name: "de- sign life." Strip malls and elementary schools have short de- sign lives. They are expected to fall apart in less than fifty years. Since these things are not expected to speak to any era but our own, we seem unwilling to put money or effort into their embellishment. Nor do we care about traditional solu- tions to the problems of weather and light, because we have technology to mitigate these problems—namely, central heating and electricity. Thus in many new office buildings the windows don't open. In especially bad buildings, like the average Wal-Mart, windows are dispensed with nearly alto- gether. This process of disconnection from the past and the future, and from the organic patterns of weather and light, done for the sake of expedience, ends up diminishing us spir- itually, impoverishing us socially, and degrading the aggre- gate set of cultural patterns that we call civilization. Destroying the Grand Union Hotel HE everyday environments of our time, the places where we live and work, are composed of dead pat- terns. These environments infect the patterns around them with disease and ultimately with contagious deadness, and deaden us in the process. The patterns that emerge fail to draw us in, fail to invite us to participate in the connectivity of the world. They frustrate our innate biological and psycholog- ical needs—for instance, our phototropic inclination to seek natural daylight, our need to feel protected, our need to keep a destination in sight as we move about town. They violate hu- man scale. They are devoid of charm. Our streets used to be charming and beautiful. The public realm of the street was understood to function as an outdoor room. Like any room, it required walls to define the essential 44 srr ri:m U1:u 1996 11. Sidewalk cafe not allowed. Restau- 1:3. Group housing. In some places there 17. No driveway. Individual dwellings rateurs and other vendors may be subject are sharp limits on the number of unre- may be required to have at least two off - to a variety of sidewalk restrictions. lated people who may live together in a street parking spaces. 1). Street too narrow. It must be consid- single dwelling unit. lit. Illegal fence. Ordinances often cover ered wide enough for large fire trucks to 14. Aesthetic deviance. Communities the permissible size and placement of maneuver. often have regulations governing the size fences in front yards. 10. School too close to town. Segregated- of signs and sometimes even the size and 19. No perpendicular signs allowed. land -use practices may confine education, style of the lettering. Such signs are commonly deemed an religion, and business to distinct 15. Too many buildings. In certain zones intrusion or a menace. zones. less than half and sometimes as little as 20. Not allowed to run a business out 11. Apartments above commer- one fifth of the area may be occupied by of a house. Doctors, dentists, and gallery cial space. They violate com- structures. owners (and lemonade vendors?) beware. mon "single -use" provisions. 16. Cupolas and steeples not allowed. 21. House too close to road. Setback , 12. Sidewalk too narrow. Five These are frequently ruled out by maxi- rules bar too -snug relationships between is feet is a typical requirement. mum -height stipulations. residences and the sidewalk. -£ 4+ } ��' ref :. �•' ,..., ti r !{ r � t�e' rx a"bar � s r 1 ;'+� t . �.s t, &eM fi is .'t r i; i Creating Someplace LMOST everywhere in the United States laws prohib- it building the kinds of places that Americans them- selves consider authentic and traditional. Laws pre- vent the building of places that human beings can feel good in and can afford to live in. Laws forbid us to build places that are worth caring about. Is Main Street your idea of a nice business district? Sorry, your zoning laws won't let you build it, or even extend it where it already exists. Is Elm Street your idea of a nice place, to live—you know, houses with front porches on a tree -lined street? Sorry, Elm Street cannot be assembled un- der the .rules of large -lot zoning and modern traffic engineer- ing. All you can build where I live is another version of Los Angeles—the zoning laws say so. This is not a gag. Our zoning laws are essentially a manual of instructions for creating the stuff of our communities. Most of these laws have been in place only since the Second World War. For the previous 300 -odd years of American history we didn't have zoning laws. We had a popular consensus about the right way to assemble a town or a city. Our best Main Streets and Elm Streets were created not by municipal ordi- nances but by cultural agreement. Everybody agreed that buildings on Main Street ought to be more than one story tall; that corner groceries were good to have in residential neigh- borhoods; that streets ought to intersect with other streets to facilitate movement; that sidewalks were necessary, and that orderly rows of trees planted along them made the sidewalks much more pleasant; that roofs should be pitched to shed rain and snow; that doors should be conspicuous, so that one could easily find the entrance to a building; that windows should be vertical, to dignify a house. Everybody agreed that communi- ties needed different kinds of housing to meet the needs of dif- ferent kinds of families and individuals, and the market was allowed to supply them. Our great-grandparents didn't have to argue endlessly over these matters of civic design. Nor did they have to reinvent civic design every fifty years because no one could remember what had been agreed on. Everybody agreed that both private and public buildings should be ornamented and embellished to honor the public realm of the street, so town halls, firehouses, banks, and homes were built that today are on the National Register of Historic Places. We can't replicate any of that stuff. Our laws actually forbid it. Want to build a bank in Anytown, USA? Fine. Make sure that it's surrounded by at least an acre of parking, and that it's set back from the street at least seventy- five feet. (Of course, it will be one story.) The instructions for a church or a muffler shop are identical. That's exactly what your laws tell you to build. If you deviate from the tem- plate, you will not receive a building permit. Therefore, if you want to make your community better, be- gin at once by throwing out your zoning laws. Don't revise them—get rid of them. Set them on fire if possible and make a public ceremony of it; public ceremony is a great way to an- nounce the birth of a new consensus. While you're at it, throw out your "master plan" too. It's invariably just as bad. Replace these things with a traditional town -planning ordinance that prescribes a more desirable everyday environment. The practice of zoning started early in the twentieth cen- tury, at a time when industry had reached an enormous scale. The noisy, smelly, dirty operations of gigantic factories came to overshadow and oppress all other aspects of city life, and civic authorities decided that they had to be separated from everything else, especially residential neighborhoods. One could say that single -use zoning, as it came to be called, was a reasonable response to the social and economic experiment called industrialism. After the Second World War, however, that set of ideas was taken to an absurd extreme. Zoning itself began to over- shadow all the historic elements of civic art and civic life. For instance, because the democratic masses of people used their cars to shop, and masses of cars required parking lots, shopping was declared an obnoxious industrial activity around which people shouldn't be allowed to live. This tend- ed to destroy age-old physical relationships between shop- ping and living, as embodied, say, in Main Street. What zoning produces is suburban sprawl, which must be understood as the product of a particular set of instructions. Its chief characteristics are the strict separation of human ac- tivities, mandatory driving to get from one activity to another, and huge supplies of free parking. After all, the basic idea of zoning is that every activity demands a separate zone of its own. For people to live around shopping would be harmful and indecent. Better not even to allow them within walking distance of it. They'll need their cars to haul all that stuff home anyway. While we're at it, let's separate the homes by income gradients. Don't let the $75,000 -a -year families live near the $200,000 -a -year families—they'll bring down prop- erty values—and for God's sake don't let a $25,000 -a -year recent college graduate or a $19,000 -a -year widowed grand- mother on Social Security live near any of them. There goes the neighborhood! Now put all the workplaces in separate of- fice "pa'rks" or industrial "parks," and make sure nobody can walk to them either. As for public squares, parks, and the like—forget it. We can't afford them, because we spent all our funds paving the four -lane highways and collector roads and parking lots, and laying sewer and water lines out to the hous- ing subdivisions, and hiring traffic cops to regulate the move- ment of people in their cars going back and forth among these segregated activities. The model of the human habitat dictated by zoning is a formless, soul -less, centerless, demoralizing mess. It bank- rupts families and townships. It disables whole classes of de- cent, normal citizens. It ruins the air we breathe. It corrupts and deadens our spirit. 50 Sl, PT F.11 It G It 1991; The construction in- dustry likes it, because CURRENT ZONING it requires stupendous ODES amounts of cement, as- phalt, and steel and a lot of heavy equipment and per- sonnel to push all this stuff into place. Car dealers love it. Politicians used to love it, because it pro- n duced big short-term prof- l� its and short-term revenue c' gains, but now they're all mixed up about it, because the voters who live in sub- Commercial sprawl urban sprawl don't want more of the same built] around them—which im- plies that at some dark level suburban -sprawl dwellers are quite con- scious of sprawl's short- comings. They have a word for it: "growth." They're now against growth. Their lips curl Apartment complex when they utter the word. They sense that new con- struction is only going to make the place where O O O U they live worse. They're convinced that the future - - is going to be worse than U3 o the past. And they're right, because the future has been getting worse throughout their lifetime. Housing subdivision Growth means only more traffic, bigger parking lots, and buildings ever bigger and ugli- er than the monstrosities of the sixties, seventies, and eighties. So they become NIMBYS ("not in my back yard") and BANANAS ("build absolutely nothing anywhere near any- thing"). If they're successful in their NIMBYism, they'll use their town government to torture developers (people who cre- ate growth) with layer upon layer of bureaucratic rigmarole, so that only a certified masochist would apply to build some- thing there. Eventually the unwanted growth leapfrogs over them to cheap, vacant rural land farther out, and then all the new commuters in the farther -out suburb choke the NIMBYS' roads anyway, to get to the existing mall in NIMBYville. Unfortunately, the NIMBYs don't have a better model in mind. They go to better places on holiday weekends—Nan- tucket, St. Augustine, little New England towns—but they think of these places as special exceptions. It nev- er occurs to NIMBY tour- ists that their own home places could be that good too. Make Massapequa like Nantucket? Where would l park? Exactly. These special places are modeled on a pre -automo- bile template. They were designed for a human ®� scale and in some respects Un FEZI MT rrT maintained that way. Such City blocks a thing is unimaginable to °C7p ❑ us today. We must design S Q O O d Dd o be - C90651 1 for the automobile, be- cause ... because all our qOL90 00 QFQ X00QFQ o pDD0I�D e laws and habits tell us we 0 0QO o 0°�H � must. Notice that you can P 4 °b ° 0 �0 get to all these special D pQ dQ flQ c&D o D places in your car. It's just CD 00W d a nuisance to use the car a ° OD00 p while you're there—so n n -ED F -,-J you stash it someplace for Small town the duration of your visit and get around perfectly happily on foot, by bicy- cle, in a cab, or on public [�° Lu. transit. The same is true, opo o by the way, of London, 0 ° Paris, and Venice. The future will not al- low us to continue using cars the way we've been accustomed to in the un - village precedented conditions of the late twentieth century. So, whether we adore suburbia or not, we're going to have to live differently. Rather than being a tragedy, this is actually an extremely lucky situation, a wonderful opportunity, because we are now free to redesign our everyday world in a way that is going to make all classes of Americans much happier. We do not have to come up with tools and techniques never seen before. The principles of town planning can be found in ex- cellent books written before the Second World War. Three-di- mensional models of the kinds of places that can result from these principles exist in the form of historic towns and cities. In fact, after two generations of architectural amnesia, this knowledge has been reinstalled in the brains of professional designers in active practice all over the country, and these de- signers have already begun to create an alternate model of the human habitat for the twenty-first century. 54 SBPTGMBER 1996 What's missing is a more widespread consensus—a cul- tural agreement—in favor of the new model, and the will to go forward with it. Large numbers of ordinary -citizens haven't heard the news. They're stuck in old habits and stuck in the psychology of previous investment; political leadership reflects this all over America. NIMBYism is one of the results, a form of hysterical cultural paralysis. Don't build anything! Don't change anything! The consensus that exists, therefore, is a consensus of fear, and that is obviously not good enough. We need a consensus of hope. In the absence of a widespread consensus about how to build a better everyday environment, we'll have to replace the old set of rules with an explicit new set—or, to put it a slightly different way, replace zoning laws with principles of civic art. It will take time for these principles to become second nature again, to become common sense. It may not happen at all, in which case we ought to be very concerned. In the event that this body of ideas gains widespread acceptance, think of all the time and money we'll save! No more endless nights down at the zoning board watching the NtMBYs scream at the mall developers. No more real -estate -related lawsuits. We will have time, instead, to become better people and to enjoy our lives on a planet full of beauty and mystery. Here, then, are some of the things citizens will need to know in order to create a new model for the everyday environment of America. The New Urbanism HE principles apply equally to villages, towns, and cities. Most of them apply even to places of extraor- dinarily high density, like Manhattan, with added pro- visions that I will not go into here, in part because special cases like Manhattan are so rare, and in part because I be - Americans pay premium prices to vacation in towns with traditional streets like this one on Nantucket. Trees, fences, railings, tvalls, lampposts, and front gardens help to .scale and shape the civic space lieve that the scale of even our greatest cities will necessari- ly have to become smaller in the future, at no loss to their dynamism (London and Paris are plenty dynamic, with few buildings over ten stories high). The pattern under discussion here has been called vari- ously neo -traditional planning, traditional neighborhood development, low-density urbanism, transit -oriented devel- opment, the new urbanism, and just plain civic art. Its prin- ciples produce settings that resemble American towns from prior to the Second World War. 1. The basic unit of planning is the neighborhood. A neighborhood standing alone is a hamlet or village. A cluster of neighborhoods becomes a town. Clusters of a great many neighborhoods become a city. The population of a neighbor- hood can vary depending on local conditions. 2. The neighborhood is limited in physical size, with well-defined edges and a focused center. The size of a neigh- borhood is defined as a five-minute walking distance (or a quarter mile) from the edge to the center and a ten-minute walk edge to edge. Human scale is the standard for propor- tions in buildings and their accessories. Automobiles and other wheeled vehicles are permitted, but they do not take precedence over human needs, including aesthetic needs. The neighborhood contains a public -transit stop. 3. The secondary units of planning are corridors and dis- tricts. Corridors form the boundaries between neighbor- hoods, both connecting and defining them. Corridors can in- corporate natural features like streams and canyons. They can take the form of parks, nature preserves, travel corridors, railroad lines, or some combination of these. In towns and cities a neighborhood or parts of neighborhoods can com- pose a district. Districts are made up of streets or ensembles of streets where special activities get preferential treatment. .{ j THU ATLANTIC MONT11L) 55 The French Quarter of New Orleans is an example of a dis- trict. It is a whole neighborhood dedicated to entertainment, in which housing, shops, and offices are also integral. A cor- ridor can also be a district—for instance, a major shopping avenue between adjoining neighborhoods. 4. The neighborhood is emphatically mixed-use and pro- vides housing for people with different incomes. Buildings may be various in function but must be compatible with one -iother in size and in their relation to the street. The needs of ,aily life are accessible within the five-minute walk. Com- merce is integrated with residential, business, and even manu- facturing use, though not necessarily on the same street in a given neighborhood. Apartments are permitted over stores. Forms of housing are mixed, including apartments, duplex and single-family houses, accessory apartments, and outbuild- ings. (Over time streets will inevitably evolve to become less or more desirable. But attempts to preserve property values by mandating minimum -square -footage requirements, out- lawing rental apartments, or formulating other strategies to exclude lower-income residents must be avoided. Even the best streets in the world's best towns can accommodate peo- ple of various incomes.) 5. Buildings are disciplined on their lots in order to define public space successfully. The street is understood to be the pre-eminent form of public space, and the buildings that de- fine it are expected to honor and embellish it. 6. The street pattern is conceived as a network in order to create the greatest number of alternative routes from one part of the neighborhood to another. This has the beneficial effect of relieving traffic congestion. The network may be a grid. Networks based on a grid must be modified by parks, squares, diagonals, T intersections, rotaries, and other devices that re- -ve the grid's tendency to monotonous regularity. The streets exist in a hierarchy from broad boulevards to narrow lanes and 56 In America the street is the pre-eminent kind of public space and Main Street is the pre-en►inent kind of street_ Buildings meet the side►valk edge, forming a wall that gives Main Street the feeling of an outdoor room. People can live and ►work in the upper stories above the shopping alleys. In a town or a city limited -access highways may exist only within a corridor, preferably in the form of parkways. Cul-de-sacs are strongly discouraged except under extraor- dinary circumstances—for example, where rugged topogra- phy requires them. 7. Civic buildings, such as town halls, churches, schools, li- braries, and museums, are placed on preferential building sites, such as the frontage of squares, in neighborhood cen- ters, and where street vistas terminate, in order to serve as landmarks and reinforce their symbolic importance. Buildings define parks and squares, which are distributed throughout the neighborhood and appropriately designed for recreation, re- pose, periodic commercial uses, and special events such as po- litical meetings, concerts, theatricals, exhibitions, and fairs. Because streets will differ in importance, scale, and quality, what is appropriate for a part of town with small houses may not be appropriate as the town's main shopping street. These distinctions are properly expressed by physical design. 8. In the absence of a consensus about the appropriate decoration of buildings, an architectural code may be de- vised to establish some fundamental unities of massing, fen- estration, materials, and roof pitch, within which many vari- ations may function harmoniously. Under the regime of zoning and the professional overspe- cialization that it fostered, all streets were made as wide as possible because the specialist in charge—the traffic engi- neer—was concerned solely with the movement of cars and trucks. In the process much of the traditional decor that made streets pleasant for people was gotten rid of. For in- stance, street trees were eliminated. Orderly rows of mature trees can improve even the most dismal street by softening hard edges and sunblasted bleakness. Under postwar engi- neering standards street trees were deemed a hazard to mo- torists and chopped down in many American towns. S li l• Y 1: N1 It E 11 14911 Accommodating Au to in obiles HE practice of maximizing car movement at the ex- pense of all other concerns was applied with particu- lar zeal to suburban housing subdivisions. Suburban were given the characteristics of county highways, 1 children played in them. Suburban developments no- ;ly lack parks. The spacious private lots were sup - to make up for the lack of parks, but children have a cy to play in the street anyway—bicycles and roller don't work well on the lawn. Out in the subdivisions, trees along the sides of streets were often expressly ten, we see those asinine exercises in romantic land - g that attempt to recapitulate the forest primeval in of ornamental juniper. In a setting so inimical to g, sidewalks were often deemed a waste of money. to new urbanism the meaning of the street as the es - fabric of the public realm is restored. The space cre- understood to function as an outdoor room, and build- ades are understood to be street walls. -oughfares are distinguished by their character as well ieir capacity. The hierarchy of streets begins with the ard, featuring express lanes in the center, local lanes sides, and tree -planted medians between the express al lanes, with parallel parking along all curbs. Next in rarchy is the multilane avenue with a median. Then a main shopping street, with no median. This is fol - by two or more orders of ordinary streets (apt to be tial in character), and finally the lane or alley, which cts blocks and becomes the preferred location for and accessory apartments. llel parking is emphatically permitted along the curbs reets, except under the most extraordinary conditions. . parking is desirable for two. reasons: parked cars cre- iysical barrier and psychological buffer that protects fans on the sidewalk from moving vehicles; and a rich Df parallel parking can eliminate the need for parking hich are extremely destructive of the civic fabric. who thinks that parallel parking "ruins" a residential .iould take a look at some of the most desirable real t America: Georgetown, Beacon Hill, Nob Hill, Alex - Charleston, Savannah, Annapolis, Princeton, Green - Rage, Marblehead. All permit parallel parking. lential streets can and should be narrower than cur- cifications permit. In general, cars need not move at greater than 20 m.p.h. within a neighborhood. High - Is can be reserved for boulevards or parkways, which corridors. Within neighborhoods the explicit intent is and tame vehicular traffic. This is achieved by the omers with sharp turning radii, partly textured pave- ind T intersections. The result of these practices is a vilized street. 111' ATLANTIC MONT111.1 Even under ideal circumstances towns and cities will have some streets that are better than others. Over time streets tend to sort themselves out in a hierarchy of quality as well as size. The new urbanism recognizes this tendency, espe- cially in city commercial districts, and designates streets A or B. B streets may contain less -desirable structures—for in- stance, parking -garage entrances, pawnshops, a homeless shelter, a Burger King—without disrupting the A streets in proximity. This does not mean that B streets are allowed to be deliberately squalid. Even here the public realm deserves respect. Cars are still not given dominion. A decent standard of detailing applies to B streets with respect to sidewalks, lighting, and even trees. Property Values and Affordable Housing ONING required the artificial creation of "affordable housing," because the rules of zoning prohibited the very conditions that formerly made housing available to all income groups and integrated it into the civic fabric. Accessory apartments became illegal in most neighborhoods, particularly in new suburbs. Without provision for apart- ments, an unmarried sixth -grade schoolteacher could not afford to live near the children she taught. Nor could the housecleaner and the gardener—they had to commute for half an hour from some distant low-income ghetto. In many localities apartments over stores were also forbidden under the zoning laws. Few modern shopping centers are more than one story in height, and I know of no suburban malls that in- corporate housing. In eliminating arrangements like these we have eliminated the most common form of affordable hous- ing, found virtually all over the rest of the world. By zoning these things out, we've zoned out Main Street, USA. The best way to make housing affordable is to build or re- store compact, mixed-use, traditional American neighbor- hoods. The way to preserve property values is to recognize that a house is part of a community, not an isolated object, and to make sure that the community maintains high stan- dards of civic amenity in the form of walkable streets and easy access to shops, recreation, culture, and public beauty. Towns built before the Second World War contain more - desirable and less -desirable residential streets, but even the best can have income -integrated housing. A $350,000 house can exist next to a $180,000 house with a $600 -a -month garage apartment (which has the added benefit of helping the homeowner pay a substantial portion of his mortgage). Such a street might house two millionaires, eleven professionals, a dozen wage workers, sixteen children, three full-time moth- ers, a college student, two grandmothers on Social Security, and a bachelor fireman. That is a street that will maintain its value and bring people of different ages and occupations into informal contact. 61 Density, Not Congestion ONGESTION" was the scare word of the past, as "growth" is the scare word of our time. The fear of congestion sprang from the atrocious conditions in urban slums at the turn of the century. The Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1900 is said to have contained more in- habitants per square mile than are found in modern-day Cal- cutta. If crowding had been confined to the slums, it might not have made such an impact on the public imagination. But urban congestion was aggravated by the revolutionary Effects of the elevator, the office skyscraper, the sudden mass replication of large apartment buildings, and the widespread introduction of the automobile. These innovations drastical- ly altered the scale and tone of city life. Within a generation cities went from being dynamic to being --or at least seem- ing—frighteningly overcrowded. Those with the money to commute were easily persuaded to get out, and thus in the 1920s came the first mass evacuation to new suburbs, reach- able primarily by automobile. The movement was slowed by the Great Depression and then by the Second World War. The memory of all that lingers. Tremendous confusion about density and congestion persists in America today, even though most urban areas and even many small towns (like my own) now suffer from density deficits. Too few people live, and businesses operate, at the core to maintain the syn- ergies necessary for civic life. The new urbanism proposes a restoration of synergistic density, within reasonable limits. These limits are controlled by building size. The new urban- ism calls for higher density—more houses per acre, closer together—than zoning does. However, the new urbanism is modeled not on the urban slum but on the traditional Amer- ican town. This is not a pattern of life that should frighten reasonable people. Millions pay forty dollars a day to walk through a grossly oversimplified version of it at Disney World. It conforms exactly to their most cherished fantasies about the ideal living arrangement. Houses may be freestanding in the new urbanism, but their lots are smaller than those in sprawling subdivisions. Streets of connected row houses are also deemed desirable. Useless front lawns are often eliminated. The new urbanism compensates for this loss by providing squares, parks, greens, and other useful, high-quality civic amenities. The new urbanism also creates streets of beauty and character. This model does not suffer from congestion. Occupancy laws remain in force—sixteen families aren't jammed into one building, as in the tenements of yore. Back yards pro- vide plenty of privacy, and houses can be large and spacious on their lots. People and cars are able to circulate freely in the network of streets. The car is not needed for trips to the The crude street pattern of zoning, with its cul-de-sacs and collector streets, actually promotes congestion, because ab- solutely every trip out of the single -use residential pod must be made by car onto the collector street. The worst conges- tion in America today takes place not in the narrow streets of traditional neighborhoods such as Georgetown and Alexan- dria but on the six -lane collector streets of Tysons Corner, Virginia, and other places created by zoning. Because of the extremely poor connectivity inherent in them, such products of zoning have much of the infrastructure of a city and the culture of a backwater. Composing a Street Wall N order for a street to achieve the intimate and welcom- ing quality of an outdoor room, the buildings along it must compose a suitable street wall. Whereas they may vary in style and expression, some fundamental agreement, some unity, must pull buildings into alignment. Think of one of those fine side streets of row houses on the Upper East Side of New York. They may express in masonry every his- torical fantasy from neo -Egyptian to Ruskinian Gothic. But they are all close to the same height, and even if their win- dows don't line up precisely, they all run to four or five sto- ries. They all stand directly along the sidewalk. They share materials: stone and brick. They are not interrupted by va- cant spaces or parking lots. About half of them are homes; the rest may be diplomatic offices or art galleries. The vari- ous uses co -exist in harmony. The same may be said of streets on Chicago's North Side, in Savannah, on Beacon Hill, in Georgetown, in Pacific Heights, and in many other ultra -desirable neighborhoods across the country. Similarly, buildings must be sized in proportion to the width of the street. Low buildings do a poor job of defining streets, especially overly wide streets, as anyone who has been on a postwar commercial highway strip can tell. The road is too wide and the cars go too fast. The parking lots are fearsome wastelands. The buildings themselves are barely visible—that is why gigantic internally lit signs are necessary. The relation- ship between buildings and space fails utterly in this case. In many residential suburbs, too, the buildings do a poor job of defining space. The houses are low; the front lawns and streets are too wide. Sidewalks and orderly rows of trees are absent. The space between the houses is an incomprehensible abyss. The new urbanism advances specific solutions for these ills—both for existing towns and cities and to mitigate the cur- rent problems of the suburbs. Commerce is removed from the highway strip and reassembled in a town or neighborhood center. The buildings that house commerce are required to be at least two stories high and may be higher, and this has the store, the school, or other local places. This pattern encour- additional benefit of establishing apartments and offices above ages good connections between people and their commercial and cultural institutions. - the shops to bring vitality, along with extra rents, to the center. Buildings on designated shopping streets near the center 62 S 1; P'r G NI It li It 1 9 9 Ii are encouraged to house retail businesses on the ground floor. A build -to line determines how close buildings will stand to the street and promotes regular alignment. Zoning has a seem- ingly similar feature called the setback line, but it is intended to keep buildings far away from the street in order to create parking lots, particularly in front, where parking lots are con- sidered to be a WELCOME sign to motorists. When buildings stand in isolation like this, the unfortunate effect is their com- plete failure to define space: the abyss. In the new urbanism the build -to line is meant to ensure the opposite outcome: the positive definition of space by pulling buildings forward to the street. If parking lots are necessary, they should be be- hind the buildings, in the middle of the block, where they will not disrupt civic life. Additional rules gov- o ern building height, re- o cess lines according to a which upper stories may be set back, and transi- tion lines, which denote a distinction between ground floors for retail use and upper floors for offices and apartments. (Paris, under Baron Hauss- mann, was coded for an eleven -meter -high transi- tion line, which is one reason for the phenome- nal unity and character of Parisian boulevards.) In traditional American town planning the stan- dard increments for lots have been based on twen- ty-five feet of street front- age, which have allowed for twenty -five-foot row houses and storefronts, and fifty-, seventy-five-, and 100 -foot lots for free- standing houses. Unfortu- nately, the old standard is slightly out of whack with what is needed to park cars effi- ciently. Therefore, under the new urbanism lot size will be based on the rod (sixteen and a half feet), a classic unit of measurement. This allows for a minimum townhouse lot of sixteen and a half feet, which has room for parking one car in the rear (off an alley) plus a few feet for pedestrians to walk around the car. The 1.5 -rod townhouse lot permits two cars to park in the rear. The two -rod lot allows for a townhouse with parking for two cars plus a small side yard. Three rods allows for a standard detached house with on-site parking in different configurations. The four -rod lot provides room for a very large detached building (house, shops, offices, or apartments) with parking for as many as ten cars in the rear. The issue of a stan- dard increment based on the rod is far from settled. Some new -urbanist practitioners recommend an adjustable standard of twelve to eighteen feet, based on local conditions. The new urbanism recognizes zones of transition between the public realm of the street and the semi -private realm of the shop or the private realm of the house. (In the world of zoning this refinement is nonexistent.) Successful transitions are achieved by regulating such devices as the arcade, the store- front, the dooryard, the ensemble of porch and fence, even the front lawn. These devices of transition soften the visual and The sidewalk is an ensemble, including more than the pedestrian path itself. a planting strip with orderly rows of trees and a curb that can accommodate parked cars also contribute to the safety of pedestrians psychological hard edges of the everyday world, allowing us to move between these zones with appropriate degrees of ease or friction. (They are therefore at odds with the harsh geome- tries and polished surfaces of Modernism.) The arcade, for instance, affords shelter along the sidewalk on a street of shops. It is especially desirable in southern cli- mates where both harsh sunlight and frequent downpours oc- cur. The arcade must shelter the entire sidewalk, not just a por- tion of it, or else it tends to become an obstacle rather than an amenity. Porches on certain streets may be required to be set T118 ATLANTIC 61uNT111.1' 63 back no more than a "conver- sational distance" from the sidewalk, to aid communica- tion between the public and private realms. The low picket fence plays its part in the en- semble as a gentle physical barrier, reminding pedestrians that the zone between the side- walk and the porch is private while still permitting verbal and visual communication. In some conditions a front lawn is appropriate. Large, ornate civic buildings often merit a lawn, because they cannot be visually comprehended close up. Man- sions merit setbacks with lawns for similar reasons. Architectural Codes HE foregoing presents the "urban code" of the new urbanism, but ar- chitectural codes operate at a more detailed and refined lev- el. In theory a good urban code alone can create the con- ditions that make civic life possible, by holding to a stan- dard of excellence in a town's basic design framework. Ar- chitectural codes establish a standard of excellence for in- dividual buildings, particular- ly the surface details. Vari- ances to codes may be granted on the basis of architectural merit. The new urbanism does not favor any particular style. Nowadays houses are often designed from the inside out. A married couple wants a fanlight window over the bed, or a little octagonal window over the Jacuzzi, and a builder or archi- tect designs the room around that wish. This approach does not take into account how the house will end up looking on the outside. The outside ceases 0 as o _W Ei Vertical windows frame the human figure in an upright, neutral, and dignified way—reflecting back the human qualities that we project on houses to begin with Q Horizontal windows frame the human figure in a way that implicitly emphasizes the nonpublic and intimate In olderhouses invisible diagonals (broken line) regulate the proportions of doors and windows. Notice how many points line up along the regulating lines, producing visual agreement that pleases the human eye In the postwar suburban house the invisible diagonals do a poor job of regulating proportions to matter. This is socially unde- sirable. It degrades the com- munity. It encourages people to stay inside, lessening surveil- lance on the street, reducing opportunities for making con- nections, and in the long term causing considerable damage to the everyday environment. The new urbanism declares that the outside does matter, so a few simple rules re-establish the necessary design discipline for individual buildings. For example, a certain proportion of each exterior wall will be devoted to windows. Suddenly houses will no longer look like television sets, where only the front matters. Another rule may state that windows must be vertical or square, not hori- zontal—because horizontal windows tend to subvert the inherent dignity of the stand- ing human figure. This rule re- instates a basic principle of ar- chitecture that, unfortunately, has been abandoned or forgot- ten in America—and has re- sulted in millions of terrible - looking houses. Likewise, the front porch is an important and desirable ele- ment in some neighborhoods. A porch less than six feet deep is useless except for storage, because it provides too little room for furniture and the cir- culation of human bodies. Builders tack on inadequate porches as a sales gimmick to enhance "curb appeal," so that the real-estate agent can drive up with the customer and say, "Look, a front porch!" The porch becomes a cartoon fea- ture of the house, like the little fake cupola on the garage. This saves the builders money in time and materials. Perhaps they assume that the street will be too repulsive to sit next to. 64 sr: r'r r.1`t aels 1996 Why do builders even bother with pathetic -looking car- toon porches? Apparently Americans need at least the idea of a porch to be reassured, symbolically, that they're decent people living in a decent place. But the cartoon porch only compounds the degradation of the public realm. In America today flat roofs are the norm in commercial con- struction. This is a legacy of Modernism, and we're suffering because of it. The roofscapes of our communities are boring and dreary as well as vulnerable to leakage or collapse in the face of heavy rain or snow. An interesting roofscape can be a joy—and a life worth living is composed of many joys. Once Modernism had expanded beyond Europe to America, it de- veloped a hidden agenda: to give developers a moral and intel- lectual justification for putting up cheap buildings. One of the best ways to save money on a building is to put a flat roof on it. Aggravating matters was the tendency in postwar Ameri- ca to regard buildings as throwaway commodities, like cars. An architectural code establishes some fundamental unities of design within which many personal tastes may be expressed, as in these fayades Colonial, or whatever—though they certainly could if they were sufficiently detailed and rigorous. But style is emphati- cally not the point. The point is to achieve a standard of ex- cellence in design for the benefit of the community as a whole. Is anything wrong with standards of excellence? Should we continue the experiment of trying to live without them? Getting the Rules Changed EPLACING the crude idiocies of zoning with true civic art has proved to be a monumentally difficult task. It has been attempted in many places around the United States over the past fifteen years, mainly by develop- ers, professional town planners, and architects who are mem- bers of the new -urbanist movement. They have succeeded in a few places. The status quo has remarkable staying power, no matter how miserable it makes people, including the local That flat roofs began to leak after a few years didn't matter; by then the building was a candidate for demolition. That at- titude has now infected all architecture and development. Low standards that wouldn't have been acceptable in our grandparents' day, when this was a less affluent country, are today perfectly normal. The new urbanism seeks to redress this substandard normality. It recognizes that a distinctive roofline is architecturally appropriate and spiritually desir- able in the everyday environment. Pitched roofs and their ac- cessories, including towers, are favored explicitly by codes. Roofing materials can also be specified if a community wants a high standard of construction. Architectural codes should be viewed as a supplement to an urban code. Architectural codes are not intended to impose a particular style on a neighborhood—Victodan, neoclassical, officials who support it and who have to live in the same junk environment as everybody else. An enormous entrenched su- perstructure of bureaucratic agencies at state and federal lev- els also supports zoning and its accessories. Departments of transportation, the Federal Housing Administration, the vari- ous tax agencies, and so on all have a long-standing stake in policies that promote and heavily subsidize suburban sprawl. They're not going to renounce those policies without a strug- gle. Any change in a rule about land development makes or breaks people who seek to become millionaires. Ban sprawl, and some guy who bought twenty acres to build a strip mall is out of business, while somebody else with three weed - filled lots downtown suddenly has more -valuable property. I believe that we have entered a kind of slow-motion cultur- al meltdown, owing largely to our living habits, though many '1'IIE A'r I.A N T I C MUN'r II I.Y 65 IN 1: ordinary Americans wouldn't agree. They may or may not be doing all right in the changing economy, but they have person- al and psychological investments in going about business as usual. Many Americans have chosen to live in suburbia out of a historic antipathy for life in the city and particularly a fear of the underclass that has come to dwell there. They would soon- er move to the dark side of the moon than consider city life. about. Such codes show a desired outcome at the same time that they depict formal specifications. They're much more use- ful than the reams of balderdash found in zoning codes. An exemplary town -planning code devised by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and others can be found in the ninth edition of Architectural Graphic Standards. The code runs a brief fourteen pages. About 75 percent of the Americans still have considerable affection for small content is pictures—of street sections, blocks, building lots, towns, but small towns present a slightly different problem: in the past fifty years many towns have received a suburban - sprawl zoning overlay that has made them indistinguishable from the sprawl matrix that surrounds them. In my town strip malls and fast-food joints have invaded what used to be a much denser core, and nearly ruined it. Notwithstanding all these obstacles, zoning must go, and zoning will go. In its place we will re-establish a consensus for doing things better, along with formal town -planning codes to spell out the terms. I maintain that the change will occur whether we love suburbia or not. Fortunately, a democratic process for making this change exists. It has the advantage of being a highly localized process, geared to individual communities. It is called the charette. In its expanded modern meaning, a "charette" is a week-long professional design workshop held for the pur- pose of planning land development or redevelopment. It in- cludes public meetings that bring all the participants togeth- er in one room—developers, architects, citizens, government officials, traffic engineers, environmentalists, and so on. These meetings are meant to get all issues on the table and settle as many of them as possible. This avoids the otherwise usual, inevitably gruesome process of conflict resolution per- formed by lawyers—which is to say, a hugely expensive waste of society's resources benefiting only lawyers. The object of the charette is not, however, to produce ver- biage but to produce results on paper in the form of drawings and plans. This highlights an essential difference between zoning codes and traditional town planning based on civic art. Zoning codes are invariably twenty -seven -inch -high stacks of numbers and legalistic language that few people other than technical specialists understand. Because this is so, local zoning- and planning -board members frequently don't understand their own zoning laws. Zoning has great advan- tages for specialists, namely lawyers and traffic engineers, in that they profit financially by being the arbiters of the regula- tions, or benefit professionally by being able to impose their special technical needs (say, for cars) over the needs of citi- zens—without the public's being involved in their decisions. Traditional town planning produces pictorial codes that any normal citizen can comprehend. This is democratic and ethical as well as practical. It elevates the quality of the public discus- sion about development. People can see what they're talking building types, and street networks. Although it is generic, a code of similar brevity could easily be devised for localized conditions all over America. The most common consequence of the zoning status quo is that it ends up imposing fantastic unnecessary costs on top of bad development. It also wastes enormous amounts of time—and time is money. Projects are frequently sunk by delays in the process of obtaining permits. The worst conse- quence of the status quo is that it actually makes good de- velopment much harder to achieve than bad development. Because many citizens have been unhappy with the mod- el of development that zoning gives them, they have turned it into an adversarial process. They have added many layers of procedural rigmarole, so that only the most determined and wealthiest developers can withstand the ordeal. In the end, after all the zoning -board meetings and flashy presenta- tions and environmental objections and mitigation, and after both sides' lawyers have chewed each other up and spit each other out, what ends up getting built is a terrible piece of sprawl equipment—a strip mall, a housing subdivision. Everybody is left miserable and demoralized, and the next project that comes down the road gets beaten up even more, whether it's good or bad. No doubt many projects deserve to get beaten up and de- layed, even killed. But wouldn't society benefit if we could agree on a model of good development and simplify the means of going forward with it? This is the intent of the traditional town planning that is the foundation of the new urbanism. Human settlements are like living organisms. They must grow, and they will change. But we can decide on the nature of that growth—on the quality and the character of it—and where it ought to go. We don't have to scatter the building blocks of our civic life all over the countryside, destroying our towns and ruining farmland. We can put the shopping and the offices and the movie theaters and the library all within walk- ing distance of one another. And we can live within walking distance of all these things. We can build our schools close to where the children live, and the school buildings don't have to look like fertilizer plants. We can insist that commercial build- ings be more than one story high, and allow people to live in decent apartments over the stores. We can build Main Street and Elm Street and still park our cars. It is within our power to create places that are worthy of our affection. 4 Drawings and diagrams are taken from James Howard Kunstler's book Home From Nowhere. 66 S H I' T 6 %I It 1? It 19 9 6 Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center 7.0 INTRODUCTION ederal Way's City Center Plan presents concepts and strategies for creating a definable and vibrant "City Center" for Federal Way and an "urban center" for Southwest King County. The plan integrates the community's vision for a City Center with the Puget Sound Regional Council's (PSRC) adopted VISION 2020 plan, and King County's countywide strategy for developing a network of centers. In this Plan, the term "urban center" is used consistent with the VISION 2020/King County definition, or to refer to the general characteristics of a sub -regional center. The term "City Center" applies specifically to Federal Way's proposed center which includes a City Center core area. The City Center core area is intended to meet the requirements of an urban center. Purposes The principle purposes of the Federal Way City Center Plan are to: - ■ Create an identifiable downtown that is the social and economic focus of the City; ■ Strengthen the City as a whole by providing for long-term growth in employment and housing; ■ Promote housing opportunities close to employment-, ■ Support development of an extensive regional transportation system; ■ Reduce dependency on automobiles; ■ Consume less land with urban development; ■ Maximize the benefit of public investment in infrastructure and services; ■ Reduce costs of, and time required for permitting; ■ Provide a central gathering place for the community; and ■ Improve the quality of urban design for all developments. Background The VISION 2020 Plan (1995 update), Regional Goal 1 states: "Locate development in urban growth areas to conserve natural resources and enable efficient provision of services and facilities. Within urban growth areas, focus growth in compact communities and centers in a manner that uses ]and efficiently, provides parks and recreation areas, is pedestrian -oriented, and helps strengthen communities. Connect and serve urban communities with an efficient, transit oriented, multi- modal transportation system." Countywide Planning Policies (CWPP) support this goal by encouraging: ■ Establishment of an urban center that is a vibrant, unique, and attractive place to live and work; ■ Efficient public services including transit; and ■ Responding to local needs and markets for jobs and housing. The CWPP define urban centers as concentrated, mixed- use areas, a maximum size of I''/Z square miles (960 acres), and oriented around a high capacity transit station. At buildout, the policies envision that the center would contain a minimum of 15,000 jobs within '/2 mile of the transit center, or 50 employees per gross acre, and an average of 15 households per acre. The urban center policies also call for: ■ Adopting regulations which encourage transit use and discourage the use of single -occupant vehicles; ■ Emphasizing the pedestrian features and promoting superior urban design; ■ Providing sufficient public open spaces and recreational opportunities; and ■ Uses that provide daytime and nighttime activities. CWPP recognize that with this growth will come an increased need for infrastructure. The policies, therefore, indicate that priority will be given to ensure the development of additional transportation and other infrastructure improvements necessary to support new, concentrated growth in urban centers. During a series of community workshops, which are described in chapter one, participants helped to develop a "vision" for Federal Way's future. This vision includes the creation of a City Center. With the support of the residential and business community, Federal Way nominated itself to contain an urban center. Nominations were reviewed by the Growth Management Planning Council (GMPC), which confirmed the Federal Way City Center core area as an urban center in 1994. The urban center designation will help Federal Way gain access to County funds needed to provide infrastnicture as the City Center grows. The Role of the City Center in Federal Way's Future There are several reasons why a definable, vital City Center is an important part of Federal Way's future. These include: Community Support - The Federal Way community has made the City Center a significant part of its vision. Participants in community workshops helped to develop a "vision" for Federal Way's future. A keystone of that plan is an attractive, multi -faceted City Center providing the setting for civic features and commercial activities. Economic Development - Federal Way's economic development strategy relies on a strong urban center. As discussed in the Economic Development chapter, Federal Way has the opportunity to transform itself from an essentially residential and retail based economy to an emerging, sub -regional economic center with an expanded, more diversified employment base. Natural Evolution - The development of a more intensive, multi -use urban center is a natural step in Federal Way's evolution. Most new centers start out as bedroom communities. Retail businesses develop first; office and industrial activities next begin to locate at key transportation crossroads, adding jobs and strengthening the employment base. Federal Way has experienced all evolutionary phases, with the exception of one. The final step is achieving a sufficient critical mass in the City Center to produce lively street activity; support specialty business, cultural/ entertainment facilities and a high quality hotel; justify the investment for public parks, amenities, and improved transportation systems; and create the interactive "synergy" of a true urban center. Federal Way's economic development strategy will add this final essential step in this evolution. Growth Management - Developing a City Center is part of a regional strategy to address western Washington's growth management problems. Public policy makers have focused increased attention on issues affecting our quality of life, including urban sprawl and the accompanying reduction of open space, declining housing affordability, and increasing traffic congestion. As stated previously, concentrating future growth within the four county region into a number of centers (rather than a continued pattern of dispersion), linked by an efficient high capacity transit system, is one of the principle goals to manage this growth. Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center 7.1 VISION STATEMENT In the year 2010, the Federal Way City Center has evolved into the cultural, social, and economic center of the City and has fulfilled its role as one of Puget Sound's regional network of urban centers. This role is reinforced by pedestrian -oriented streetscapes; an efficient multi- modal transportation system; liveable and affordable housing; increased retail, service, and office development in a compact area; a network of public spaces and parks; superior urban design; and a safe, essential, and vibrant street life. The City Center is responsive to the needs of its residents. In addition to general services which draw people from outside the region, such as retail, office, and hotel uses, the City Center is the primary commercial area providing local goods and services to the surrounding neighborhoods, and to residents and employees within the center area. Private development and City initiated actions have resulted in a balanced transportation network which accommodates automobiles, public transportation, high occupancy vehicles, pedestrians, bicyclists, and integrated parking. Pedestrian and bicycle circulation is emphasized along with other travel modes. The downtown urban fabric includes smaller blocks, lending itself to efficient and pleasant travel. Concentrated development allows a significant number of jobs and residences to be located within close proximity to transit and a High Capacity Transit Station (HCT), thus, reducing dependency on the automobile and improving pedestrian mobility. Direct access to a regional transit system links the City Center to Seattle, Everett, Tacoma, Bellevue, Sea -Tac International Airport, and other regional and local destinations. The diversity of housing opportunities has also increased and now includes townhomes, condominiums, and medium-high rise apartment buildings which help to meet a significant portion of the community's housing needs. Residents walk or take transit to shop, work, and recreate. Community facilities and services, public spaces, parks, and trails compliment the variety of housing and provide places for residents to come together as a community. Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center A central gathering place for the community, the City Center is where the whole community can congregate and celebrate. Civic and cultural facilities, in addition to a park and open -space system, meet the needs of residents, employees, and visitors. These amenities connect to the Citywide and regional system of open spaces, parks, and trails. Public and private projects contain such design elements as fountains, sculptures, and unique landscaping. The quality of urban design for all developments, including streets, buildings, and landscaping, is high and contributes to an improved quality of life. Public buildings and spaces also set a high standard for design and compatibility with adjoining uses. Goals for the City Center Plan The goals and policies of the City Center Plan are derived from those of the Citywide Comprehensive Plan. The Comprehensive Plan addresses in greater detail the framework of regional plans and legislation which direct planning in Federal Way. It also discusses the basic policies addressing housing, parks, recreation, and commercial development. This plan builds on these policies, and provides specific recommendations and actions necessary to facilitate the development of the City Center. The following goals provide overall direction to policy makers and community members when making choices about growth and development within Federal Way's City Center. Additional goals and policies are located throughout this chapter, providing specific direction on other matters discussed. No set of goals or policies can address all potential issues that may arise in the course of implementing this Plan. Therefore, while these are fundamental to the Plan, they are not sacred and may need to be revised as situations warrant. Goals CCG1 Create an identifiable City Center that serves as the social and economic focus of the City. Define a City Center with distinct boundaries, unique building types, and special features. CCG2 Attract a regional market for high quality office and retail uses which increases employ- ment opportunities, adds to the City's tax base, and establishes Federal Way's City Center as an economic leader in the South King County region. CCG3 Connect the City Center to a convenient regional transit system. Provide service between centers and nearby areas by an efficient, transit -oriented, and multi -modal transportation system. CCG4 Create distinct districts within the City Center, defining the roles and characteristics of each such district. CCGS Encourage a mix of compatible uses to maintain a lively, attractive, and safe place to live, work, and visit. CCG6 Focus on improving the existing character and image of the City Center. CCG7 Encourage housing opportunities in mixed residential/commercial settings. Promote housing opportunities close to employment. CCG8 Develop land use patterns which will encourage less dependency on the single occupant automobile. CCG9 Create an environment oriented to pedestrians and bicyclists. CCG10 Create an environment that attracts high quality housing, commercial, and office uses. Develop requirements for buildings, streetscape, and site design. CCG11 Create policies and regulations to reduce the amount ofparking that is required. CCG12 Protect and enhance natural features of the area. 7.2 EXISTING CONDITIONS City Center Planning Area The City Center planning area is approximately 414 acres in size and is bounded by South 312th Street, South 324th Street, Interstate 5, and 11th Place and 13th VII -3 Avenue South, see Maps VII -1 and VII --2. The City Center Core and Frame areas are 209 and 205 acres, respectively. General Image The City Center is not currently an identifiable downtown or urban center. The existing commercial development within the study area is typical of suburban strip retail and mall development. The dominance of mass retailing has largely shaped the commercial core. The SeaTac Mall and spinoff retail centers are a regional destination and generate tremendous amounts of physical and economic activity. However, as is the case with most older suburban mall areas, the existing City Center area could be anyplace. It is similar to hundreds of other commercial centers across the country. The businesses do not connect to each other, nor to public and private spaces, residential neighborhoods, or civic uses, except by automobile. Developments essentially reflect one pattern: a single story of "light" construction, surrounded by an apron of asphalt. Buildings feature concrete, or concrete block walls, creating austere and "generic" images. Another prevalent image of the area is the vast amount of surface parking. The availability of parking is essential to the current type of retail found in Federal Way. City Center businesses serve regional as well as local markets, and are heavily oriented to access by automobile. Actual building footprints relative to total parcel areas are quite small; the majority of most parcels are used to provide surface parking. This parking is often underutilized, except during the peak holiday season. The current network of collectors and arterials, and the disjointed over -sized block grids within the existing commercial area, contributes to significant traffic congestion. The character of the street environment is also unfriendly to pedestrians. Signs proliferate the South 320th Street and State Route 99 (SR-99/Pacific Highway South) corridors. Some signs are as prominent as the buildings they purport to call attention to. The number and size of signs produce a negative effect on the visual image of the City. The City Center does not contain a significant residential population. A pocket of residential housing exists between South 312th and 316th Streets, and SR -99 and 23rd Avenue South. Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center Map VII -1 Figure VII -1 depicts an aerial view of the City Center area looking south from the northwest corner of the City Center boundaries. Current Physical Conditions Land Use Most of the study area is currently developed and consequently, most new development in this area will displace existing low intensity uses. Buildings are dispersed throughout the area and lack pedestrian con- nections to each other and public rights-of-way. Current land use patterns favor auto -oriented commercial activity. The primary use in the City Center area is retail, followed by office, manufacturing, then residential. Sea - Tac Mall is the `signature' development in the area. IE Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center Map VII -2 nounaaries of City Center Area `Ittw'Is`r. C ' + jao � 1 i o �Ii` t03'12THGSrS. 312 � �� Ji S ' �❑ CI'L � oQ _.J [ �� p❑GoG I' v G •0 �I2TH ST. ) i � �� 7-� Jf��G�ovoaao 0 =v i(; i,U1j �Y � I ��. � � , . fV'11 1 , ❑ ✓cps 17 0�'-�� o��n u �I 4 r �jL^�'I j a410 i j iL !� Ali II> G. /Ci � cooCl j� f CIS . 0 CL 6; �CL ' ! o i �I o j r o " �V'. a i to hsin'! ptio oc `' ! �� , ; ❑ q noo A5 ao o I a -" `� � .�•�'-- �� I � � � s. 3t6th sr. r --Ti I f �t S. 316th sT. 3 �? ;bs' a:x?41, _ ` L r j D S. LJ IST. S. 324TH T. � Jl i , I O i� 1 0 r fo u:v I • c 23th I� � 0 L r/ �D-O WER Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center Figure VII -1 Aerial View of City Center }, u�� .�.. / nov �. _ quoin,% .., � — _ '=�• ;,,_ -----_� �" f A►. ice- - � _%► ��i/vfw��ia:;uu�,�/ � .:/ � �— � I � arc• • a f �T_. •_ _`� _ _ z��-�� .r�� 1�E}'�� • i, ri;�� .:a/2�.,/!!. U/.%//d/I-V/li ... tri aannn..,.,, • f �1 i .c,wmrs ��. ' }'�'�}t :�'^ � r 7v ui '��( f•� � l err 7ur uuraarawur,• 'r///QI////!///////^�I?:�. 1 Table VII -1 Existing Land Use Development AREA Retail/Office (1,000 sq. ft) Manu. (1,000 sq. ft) Civic (1,000 sq. ft) Single Family (# Units) Multi -Family (# Units) CityCcntcr 3,152 0 14 0 352 VII -6 Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center Table VII --1 lists the amount of current land use development within the City Center planning area. Public and civic uses are scarce, with only four publicly owned non -park sites (the bus barn site north of 11th Place South and South 320th Street; Truman High School, northwest of South 317 Street and 28th Avenue South; King County Library, 848 South 320th Street; and Federal Way School District Administrative Offices, 31405 Pacific Highway South). Parks, Open Space, and Natural Systems There are no public spaces within the City Center. Private green spaces, plazas and meeting spaces are few. Steel Lake Park to the northeast and the proposed Celebration Park to the southwest are on the perimeter of the City Center. Even though these parks are within walking distance of the City Center, they also serve, or will serve, as regional facilities in addition to serving local needs. The only other open space areas where natural systems are evident include the wooded edge of Interstate 5 on the eastern edge of the City Center. Civic Buildings and Municipal Facilities The City Center contains one civic or municipal facility i.e., the Public Library. The next closest facility is the City of Federal Way Parks Department Steel Lake Annex and Maintenance Facility near South 312th Street and 28th Avenue South. Klahanee Senior/Community Center and City Hall are located a few miles southwest of the City Center at 33901 9th Avenue South and 33530 1st Way South, respectively. Circulation Roadways - A key element defining mobility within the City Center planning area is the enormous size of its blocks. Most U.S. downtowns have blocks ranging from 250 to 500 feet on a side; block lengths in Federal Way are several times that. Because of the "superblock" configuration, motorists drive between and within parking areas serving City Center developments to avoid congestion along City streets. Access to the area is provided by two principle arterial routes: South 320th Street (which runs east/west and connects to I-5), and SR -99 (which runs north/south). An inefficient hierarchy of streets feed these arterial roadways. The area lacks a system of minor arterial and smaller connector streets which could diffuse traffic efficiently away from these two principle arterials. The irregular spacing of traffic signals also adds to congestion. As such, the accessibility provided by the juncture of these routes, initially attractive to area residents, has been lost due to growth in traffic. Transit Service - A minimum of ten transit and dial -a - ride routes radiate from the City Center. However, service to the entire City Center is not the primary focus, especially during the peak periods of the day. A regional park and ride lot, located southwest of I-5 and South 320th Street, generates most of the area's transit ridership during peak periods of the day. Both METRO and Pierce Transit serve this site. Congestion on I-5, South 320th Street, and SR -99 demonstrates the need for an enhanced transit system. However, the existing low intensity and dispersed land use patterns will not support significant increases in transit service. The area also lacks transit facilities such as bus pullouts and waiting areas, and a pedestrian network to safe and direct access from transit stops. Pedestrian Environment and Bicycle Facilities - A 1992 inventory of existing sidewalks within the City (see page V-22 of the Community Profile, Feb, 1993) revealed a deficiency of pedestrian facilities Citywide. The central core was highlighted as one of the areas which lacks an adequate pedestrian network. For example, most of SR 99 and portions of South 312th and 324th Streets and 23rd Avenue South lack sidewalks. A majority of walking that does take place in the study area occurs within malls and along storefronts of shopping center strips. Sidewalks connecting storefronts to public walkways are lacking. The few sidewalks that do exist are narrow, devoid of trees, and interrupted by numerous curb cuts. Crossing wide, busy streets such as South 320th Street and SR -99 can also be intimidating to some people. There are few places to sit and enjoy pleasant weather, meet friends or have lunch outside. The current pedestrian environment is unfriendly and unappealing. The division which exists between pedestrians and auto areas is not conducive to establishing the active street life desired in a City Center. Bicyclists have even fewer facilities to choose from. City streets lack striping or signage for bike riders who must share the road with heavy volumes of traffic. Once bicyclists reach the area, they become frustrated by the lack of safe storage facilities for their vehicles. Residential The City Center contains approximately 352 units of housing, located primarily in the area east of SR -99, south of South 312th Street, north of South 316th Street, and west of 28th Avenue South. Other residential neighborhoods surround the City Center area. West and south of South 320th Street and South 11th Place are pockets of multi -family housing. There are also single family neighborhoods west of Highway 99 and north of the South 312th Street corridor. While these neighborhoods are not located immediately within the proposed City Center, they are located conveniently within walking, bicycling, or vehicular distance. They differ greatly in character and type. Infrastructure Most of the existing facilities and infrastructure were inherited from King County. Since the incorporation in 1990, the City has not yet been able to significantly improve infrastructure or increase the number of facilities in the City Center. However, as the City grows and implements the policies contained in its Capital Facility Plan, it will be able to direct investment to meet its growth objectives. 7.3 THE LAND USE AND TRANSPORTATION CONCEPT FOR THE CITY CENTER The Concept Plan The concept is to redevelop the City Center and create a compact urban community and vibrant center of activity. The crux of the strategy is to promote a compact urban center with connections between where we live, work, and recreate, and create an urban environment that is amenable to walking, bicycling, and transit. The concept, a result of the citizen participation process called CityShape, implements the community's goals outlined in Section 7.1. In summary, the concept is to: ■ Establish a City Center to support high capacity transit (HCT) by locating residents and workers within convenient walking distance of HCT. Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center ■ Make efficient use of existing capital improvements by concentrating higher intensity land uses in the City / Center. C ■ Encourage a mix of compatible uses where housing coexists adjacent to, above, or near commercial developments. ■ Create a dense residential community within walking and bicycling distance of the core. ■ Improve auto circulation in the City Center by completing the street grid, creating smaller blocks and directing through traffic around the core, thus minimizing the impact of future growth on Citywide traffic patterns and congestion. ■ Reduce the impact of parking by encouraging structured parking, reducing parking requirements, and implementing guidelines that enhance its appearance. ■ Create pedestrian and bicycle connections throughout the City Center and to surrounding neighborhoods. Provide a safe and inviting environment for pedestrians and bicyclists with direct connections between activities and transit facilities. Develop and/or reconstruct streets to include sidewalks, street trees, benches, garbage receptacles, screening of parking areas, etc. ■ Create a high amenity pedestrian boulevard through the core, linked to a transit center and providing an attractive civic focus to SeaTac Mall. ■ Provide a civic focus to create a sense of identity for all residents. Develop municipal and cultural facilities within the City Center core area. ■ Develop public spaces in the City Center, particularly the core area. Enhance the City Center with a network of public spaces and parks connected to the Citywide and regional system of open spaces, parks, and trails. Encourage gathering spaces in private development. Map VII -3 applies the principles described above. The Plan depicts the City Center core area between SR -99 and I-5 and South 316th/317th and South 320th and 324th Streets. The City Center core area contains a concentration of higher -density, mixed-use development. The City Center frame area surrounds the core along the Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center Map VII -3 ine �_Oncept r1an HIGH DENSITY ENHANCED PRIMARY ROAD RESIDENTIAL W/ACCESSORY NETWORK WITH RETAIL L OFFICE PEDESTRIAN LINKAGE PEDESTRIAN FACILITIES HIGH CAPACITY BETWEEN HCT STATION HIGH INTENSITY TRANSIT SYSTEM L SEATAC MALL SACT MIXED-USE 00 do '. ,.. ��... 4^ r.....—:. "....Iii..' �d,Q .. �.' L_ / — a 5 ,i n - - 1� _i_ ....... !.,' ... ... .' ' � LAKE: n c dSTIFhr �`• . f FRAM£ AREA - V �a�5cceazxtxA• �-...,L. y , CORE AREA VII -9 west and north edges and provides higher density, mixed use neighborhoods (primarily residential) to support the core. It also provides a transition to surrounding single family neighborhoods. High capacity transit runs through the middle of the City Center, and pedestrian pathways connect the HCT station with residential areas, future civic spaces, and the SeaTac Mall. 1, Proposed Land Use Designations This section expands on the land use concepts described previously. The City Center plan proposes two different land use designations, each with its own distinctive characteristics, to guide evolution of the City Center, see Map VII -4. The City Center core and frame area designations give form to the concepts summarized in section 7.3. These land use designations direct the location and extent of growth, will reshape the nature of development, and transform the area into a compact, vibrant City Center. City Center Core Area For the last 20 years or so, lower density shopping mall areas at the edge of the nation's Iarger cities have gradually been redeveloped and transformed into more dense urban centers, emulating the development patterns and sense of place of more traditional downtowns. This transformation, to an area with a unique character and improved image, is proposed for the core area. The intent of the core area land use designation is to create a higher -density mixed use "center" for Federal Way, and become an urban center as envisioned in VISION 2020 and the King Countywide Policies. The CityShape vision calls for concentrating growth requiring a higher demand for infrastructure in an area where sufficient infrastructure capacity exists, or where such capacity can be provided efficiently. The infrastructure within the City Center, specifically the core area, is designed to handle the highest levels of demand within Federal Way. By orienting new growth around this investment, the existing capacity can be utilized to its fullest extent. The core area designation also encourages the concentration of new development to help reduce development pressure in other areas of Federal Way. Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center The core area land use designation encourages a greater diversity of uses within mixed-use types of development.• Traditional City Centers are places where diverse office, retail, and government uses are concentrated, as well as cultural and civic facilities, community services, and housing. Many cities are advocating mixed-use development for a number of reasons. These include: ■ Providing new housing and cutting down on automobile dependency by bringing workplaces and residences into close proximity; ■ Providing retail and service needs in close proximity to residential and employment areas; and ■ Improving the feasibility of a development project. The proximity of urban services makes housing projects more desirable and a nearby source of consumers help make a commercial project more profitable. Concentrating growth in a specific area also supports future investment in transit, including a regional HCT system. Existing low density development does not generate sufficient levels of demand to justify HCT service. Promoting higher density uses within walking distance of transit facilities will improve the viability of this infrastructure. Additionally, concentrating the highest density of development in the core, where a significant number of jobs and residences will be within walking distance of a transit station, helps reduce dependency on the automobile and improve pedestrian mobility. The core area emphasizes pedestrian, bicycle, and transit mobility. The core area will be less auto -oriented than the frame area, but it will not be unfriendly to the use of automobiles. The City Center core area will also be the central gathering place for the community—a place where the whole community can congregate and celebrate. Accordingly, the core should include an outdoor square, park, or commons, with public amenities such as fountains, sculptures, and unique landscaping. Other civic amenities or buildings, including a City Hall and/or a performing arts center, could be grouped around this City Center square. Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center DOD ��31zTHaS1' �v� lfe � 3 o O A 0. 4 • QQOIO c th SL .0 I tC li Z Do 47 QFy il� QO�OOOQOQ �0 U Li 1pigure PU--4 uity uenter.Lana use tjesi;gnations } 0i!�F� 1= 0 a I ST. (� ! j FF t- r N J OO O� f ST S• 32<TH cr � r i OOp —1 o'er° o o r �� th L o r I ,sr r m CrY7�7 tiJ, o / r p �1 n t r–J-1 n �_- Goals & Policies Which Promote the Concentration of New Development in the City Center Core Area Goal CCG13 Focus new growth with higher demands for infrastructure and transportation in the City Center, specifically the core area. Allow for higher intensity uses for efficient use of land. Policies CCP1 Support the concentration of uses within the core area to create a financial, retail, and business hub of Federal Way. CCPZ Develop an attractive City Center which will attract quality development. CCP3 Revise land use regulations, as necessary, to allow the higher intensity development expected over the next 15 to 30 years. VII -11 CCP4 Create a City Center that is the primary commercial area providing local goods and services to the surrounding neighborhoods, and to residents and employees within the center. CCPS Provide streamlined permit review in the City Center to accelerate changes to the core area. CCP6 Work with urban service providers to ensure sufficient capacity is available for development. CCP7 Allow for a variety of uses and mixed use development within buildings, or complexes. Ensure that mixed-use development complements and enhances the character of the surrounding residential and commercial areas. CCP8 Establish guidelines that list compatible uses. CCP9 Provide incentives to encourage residential development in City Center, core/frame areas. City Center Frame Area Residents choose to live in higher density housing for a variety of reasons. First, higher density is frequently less expensive than single family housing. Second, the convenience and proximity to work, needed services, and cultural activities is very desirable for many people. Finally, many people find that they do not need a large, single family detached house. Given their lifestyle, they appreciate the low maintenance and security of higher density living. There is a mutually supportive relationship between higher density residential uses and commercial activities Establishing a City Center frame area provides a zone for dense mixed-use development that surrounds and supports the core. It also provides a transition between high -activity areas in the core area and less dense neighborhoods outside of the frame. The presence of housing also activates downtown streets, day and night. The frame area allows uses that are similar to those in the core area, but are of lower density and intensity. While the emphasis of the core area is to develop commercial and office uses with accessory residential, the emphasis of the frame area is residential development with accessory retail and office use. Together, the core and frame areas are -complementary. Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Canter Figure VII -2 Encouraging multi -unit housing mixed with business and commercial use will help Federal Way meet regional land use goals. This is accomplished by encouraging the development of housing close to employment and transportation centers. To help transform the character of this land use designation, density bonuses should be allowed in exchange for amenities which contribute to a more pedestrian oriented environment. Goals & Policies Encouraging The Location of Higher Density Residential Uses Around Core Area Goal CCG14 Increase housing opportunities and diversity ofhousing types within the City Center, specifically the Frame area. Policies CCP10 Revise land use regulations to allow the frame area to accommodate higher density residential uses accompanied by residentially oriented retail and service uses. VII -12 Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center CCPI I Provide amenities such as community services, parks, and public spaces to meet residential needs. CCP12 Develop guidelines that ensure effective transitions between different land uses and higher and lower densities. Figure VII -3 Circulation Federal Way's City Center plan is designed in accordance with VISION 2020 and CWPP related to mobility. Although regional travel trends continue to show more cars on the road, more trips per person, and increases in the number of people driving alone, the emphasis of this Plan is to promote a variety of travel options. The City will focus both on transportation improvements as well as influencing individual travel choices by increasing the attractiveness of alternatives to the automobile. Encouraging growth in a compact, well defined City Center will help promote bicycling, walking, and transit use. The City Center will be connected to other regional urban centers and areas of the City by a multi -modal transportation system, including a fast and convenient regional transit system. In order to function efficiently, mobility in the City Center must be enhanced by adding transportation improvements. The City should focus transportation investments in the City Center to support transit and pedestrian -oriented land use patterns. These improvements should include: a smaller street grid, bicycle routes, public sidewalks and pedestrian pathways, and clear and identifiable transit routes. These transportation improvements will also help meet City Center mobility needs in the event a High Capacity Transit (HCT) system is not developed. Goal to Improve Overall Circulation Goal CCG15 Provide a balanced transportation network which accommodates public transportation, high occupancy vehicles, pedestrians, bicyclists, automobiles, and integrated parking. Automobile Circulation The current network of collector roads and arterials, the disjointed grid, and large block sizes contribute to significant traffic congestion within the City Center. The solution is not to construct wider roads. Streets become less efficient as the numbers of lanes increases. Building new streets with fewer lanes versus widening existing streets is more cost effective, yields greater capacity, and will have less impact on the City Center. Automobiles are likely to continue as a dominant mode of transportation. A comprehensive network of collector arterials and other streets must be developed to distribute this traffic and create more driving choices. To the extent feasible, the City should connect streets to form a tighter grid within the City Center, especially in the core, by negotiating new public rights-of-way and building new streets. This "interconnectivity" serves to shorten and disperse trips, and consequently reduce travel on existing congested arterials. Map VII -5 indicates the proposed street network changes. Additionally, alternatives to auto travel such as van and car pools, transit, pedestrian corridors, and bicycle paths should also be emphasized. VII -13 Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center Map VII -S Enhanced Street Network VII -14 00 Oma P p ooaffeV ° 00 �� 000 �� Q[� it Cb tau da Lj ° Cs (Eo ° d e0�o ! (R� P o p THOS S.3I2TNS ��['a O°0000 o°oo�Jp.a O,o° C o0°d �dppp oocv O:: a TN ST. 7 :• a (2,P0 : AU 'A a 0:00 6f]D �-• ° °' O 0 Q ��Q d 8 U �'' > ° —W 00■ < D �oo �B,•.o o ::. •:. O :•...:.: a n64 ::. ° ..... ..............: ti• oO p a' -La G ....::r::: LS' ... ............ .. -- p 0 115 p srn 6 () 0 00 4 0 QC -n Cu a o D��"QW °((��,, oga000gp+oo g ° gq 9pC}�D� �• d .. _ k-.--.-KqMw-.MZTH sr. Ae od�}`CM b a o ❑ a o o a a o o a pS. 32VM ST. CRO op � 40 .. a 1 �. .;`� -• , CZC2 r--1 :1249h S1. " .. .. �•� MTh.....• •.• ---' S i... o p I� 0 QQ OozxcneerA000me�naeo C) �0 0 C S r �- In MO 0 18 ram C30 n rin EXISTING ARTERIALS . • . • . • SECONDARY ROADS ■ �M PROPOSED STREETS POTENTIAL STREET PARKING VII -14 Federal Way comprehensive Plan - City Center Goals and Policies to Improve Automobile Circulation and Reduce Usage Goal CCG16 Improve the flow ofvehicular traffic through the City Center and minimize increases in congestion. 'Policies CCP14 Improve traffic flow around and through the City Center by extending the street network, creating smaller blocks and completing the ring road along the west edge of the City Center. CCP15 Reduce congestion by supporting the Commute Trip Reduction Act. Develop commuting alternatives to single occupancy vehicles, including transit, walking, and bicycling. CCP16 Establish lower LOS targets in the City Center than are typical in other areas of the City to prevent roads from being over -designed and incompatible with pedestrian circulation. CCP17 Discourage cul-de-sacs within the City Center. Pedestrian/Bicycle Connections Pedestrian and bicycle mobility is a vital part of the future City Center circulation system. Improvements for pedestrians and bicyclists should support increases in transit services and promote the development of the City Center. This Plan addresses the lack of pedestrian amenities and pathways by recommending changes to the development patterns and transforming the character of the streetscape. As the street system is redeveloped to better accommodate the needs of pedestrians and bicyclists, a network of facilities for people on foot and bikes will be established such as already exists for people in cars. Reducing the size of the street grid, as proposed to improve auto circulation, and creating pedestrian easements and paths through larger parcels is critical to establishing walking patterns which reduce dependency on the automobile. As individual sites are designed and developed to be more pedestrian friendly, and as the City provides improved pedestrian linkages, the pedestrian system will handle an increasing share of trips. As such, all streets should include some pedestrian amenities, such as public sidewalks, street trees, benches, adequate lighting, dedicated bicycle paths, trash receptacles, and improved signage. Streets and pedestrian/bicycle accessways must be developed to provide for easy, safe, and fast pedestrian bicycle access. In addition to adding public sidewalks and creating mid - block easements and pathways, Map VII -6 depicts three principle pedestrian connections to improve pedestrian circulation. The fust is developing connections between the High Capacity Transit station, adjoining bus transfer facilities and other uses. The pedestrian and bicycle system is essential to other travel modes, particularly transit. Virtually all transit trips begin and end as pedestrian trips on public rights-of-way. All buildings within proximity to these areas should be required to facilitate pedestrian and bicycle movement. The second is to establish pedestrian and bicycle connections to SeaTac Mall, the region's largest generator of vehicular and pedestrian traffic. Linkages between the proposed transit station and the SeaTac Mall are important. Unfortunately, South 320th Street is wide, congested, and presents a significant barrier to this connection. Providing an at -grade pedestrian and bicycle crossing could increase congestion and vehicular and pedestrianibicycle conflicts. To facilitate this connection, and encourage redevelopment of existing parking areas, this Plan proposes a pedestrian bridge spanning South 320th Street. This connection would be enhanced by the presence of an elevated rail structure and a two-story addition extending from SeaTac Mail toward South 320th Street. The pedestrian overpass would create a major connection between two areas in the City Center which have a high potential for new development and redevelopment. The third is to connect the City Center to nearby neighborhoods and parks. Residential neighborhoods of varying densities surround the City Center. Steel Lake and the proposed Celebration Park are located to the northeast and southwest of the City Center, respectively. Both pedestrian and bicycle trails should extend to these residential neighborhoods and parks. Roads extending to these areas should emphasize the pedestrian connection by including additional pedestrian amenities. Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center Map VII -6 Principle Pedestrian and Bicycle Uonnections r :: � � I � ,,. � tool ► :; -- -- �� C�. � � �\`` j/%liiillii/ii/i%iii/ %jiij/i/%i//%ii %i//%i%i//I�l./ i • //liii{i1/��%/i1i% ,.�'�k..•• /� % . ter. �• ...,.... i. = � . a. • •.. a ///////////////////. ' • a i IIIIIiII a Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center Policies to Improve Pedestrian Connections Goal CCG17 Promote and facilitate the effective use of non -motorized transportation. Create a safe, efficient and enjoyable pedestrian and bicycle system. ,,Policies CCP18 Emphasize pedestrian and bicycle circulation to the same extent as other travel modes in all aspects of developing the City Center transportation system. Include public sidewalks, street trees, and other pedestrian amenities for streets. CCP19 Revise local zoning codes, site planning requirements, and street design standards, as necessary, to establish a more pedestrian and bicycle friendly environment. CCP20 Encourage new development to include active ground floor uses such as shops, community services, office, and housing units. Connect adjacent buildings where possible to provide for streetscape continuity. CCP21 Develop clear and safe pedestrian paths through large parcels to enhance the pedestrian network. CCP22 Site and screen parking lots to minimize impact on the pedestrian environment. CCP23 Connect the main entry of buildings to public sidewalks by a clear, identifiable walkway. CCP24 Encourage transit use by improving pedestrian and bicycle linkages to the existing and future transit system, and by improving the security and utility of park-and-ride lots and bus stops. CCP25 Establish clear and well marked pedestrian crossings to reach transit facilities and other uses at a maximum spacing of 600 feet. Signals at intersections and other crossings may be timed to allow pedestrians to cross. CCP26 Connect Celebration Park and Steel Lake Park, via a pedestrian/bicycle pathway, bisecting the City Center: orient buildings, urban open spaces, plazas, etc., to the pathway where feasible. CCP27 Develop special development standards to improve the appearance of, and pedestrian/bicycle circulation along, South 320th Street and Pacific Highway South. Transit Efficient, convenient, and reliable transit is important to this Plan's emphasis to reduce auto dependency through the creation of viable travel options. Transit will play an important role in the development of the City Center and the region as a whole. A multi -modal system which includes transit will bring commuters and shoppers to and from other areas of Federal Way and adjacent communities. A high capacity transit system with a principle stop in the core area will distribute people regionally and connect to other bus based transit systems. Transit stops throughout the center will help shoppers, employees, and residents to circulate around the City Center without the need to get into their cars. Encouraging a mix of land uses and densities at major transit access points will help meet passenger needs and reduce vehicle trips. High Capacity Transit The Regional Transit Authority is working with Puget Sound citizens and City representatives to develop a HCT network linking Everett, Tacoma, Seattle, Bellevue, and communities between them. Four HCT stations are proposed in Federal Way, including one in the City Center core area. Map VII --7 depicts the proposed approximate HCT alignment and location of the City Center station. The system will generally run north/south along SR -99, jogging east to connect to the transit station before heading south again along SR -99. The actual site for the station has not been determined, but, a station located between South 316th and 320th Streets will be critical for development of the core. A number of vacant or underutilized parcels exist along this alignment that will allow for developing facilities and public spaces required VII -17 Federal Way Comprehencive Plan - City Centw Map VII -7 Potential Transit Alignments anu cops .... .........r ��•1•...• •5 .'.�.' SLY. . .. '1 ' � . =:�•. .-.... ........ •A11. 1 Y.4 1.� Y.�• - - D :.... ego �Q11 ....... �� ,,,,..... ... ..�T.. •...�. N ® POSSIBLE SITES FOR ® EXAMPLE OF TRANSIT TRANSIT ROUTES HCT L BUS STATIONS Ie� ImoI Ml NCT CORRIDOR — 1�� STOP SPACING FRAME CORE Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center for this type of development. This Plan does not depend on the development of a HCT system. The proposed system is one of several transportation options. While HCT will help regional and local transportation needs, other modes will continue to play a vital role. Many of the characteristics that are desired within the City Center, and support HCT, also support other modes such as van/car pooling, bussing, bicycling, and walking. To encourage transit use, the high capacity transit station should provide an inviting environment with comfortable pedestrian facilities, including shelter for waiting areas, convenient passenger drop-off zones, safe lighting, and street furniture. Conveniences like telephones, automatic teller machines, secure bicycle storage areas, and outdoor seating areas are also important elements of the station design. Provisions for vendors, small cafes, and carts will make outdoor spaces more lively. Stores adjoining the station can take advantage of the concentrations of people by specializing in goods and services needed by commuters such as dry cleaning, videos, news kiosks, and day care. Federal Way's City Center station will be oriented principally to pedestrians and those arriving by other forms of transit. Providing or pedestrianibicycle accessibility between surrounding properties, street network, general vicinity, park & ride lots, and the HCT is essential. Policies to Guide Transit Planning and Establish a High Capacity Transit Station Goal CCG18 Work with the transit providers to develop a detailed transit plan for the City Center. Identify facilities, services, and implementation measures needed to make transit a viable and attractive travel mode. Tailor the plan to meet local needs, through rapid transit, express buses, community service, and/or demand -responsive service. Policies CCP28 Focus transportation investments to support transit and pedestrian/bicycle-oriented land use patterns, specifically in the core area. CCP29 Participate actively in regional efforts to develop a high capacity transit system to serve the City Center. Identify and preserve necessary right-of-way for high capacity transit alignments and station locations at every opportunity. "Land bank" parcels which will be used for the HCT system in the future, including land for the ROW and the station. CCP30 Create a compact zone around the HCT station for the highest intensities of land use. CCP31 Establish the most intensive levels of transit service to the City Center area. CCP32 Integrate any elevated transit system with new road right-of-way. Design the elevated structure to be compatible with new development in the area. CCP33 Develop a bus transfer facility, on or off the street, which will connect the City Center with other communities in the City. The HCT and bus transfer stations will set a high standard for design and compatibility with adjoining uses. CCP34 Integrate the high capacity transit system with other transportation modes serving Federal Way and the region. CCP35 Integrate bicycle and pedestrian facilities with and connect to high capacity transit facilities during right-of-way acquisition, facility design, and optional phases. Civic Buildings and Open Spaces Public buildings including community centers, libraries, City Hall, performing arts theaters, conference centers, and schools provide places for the community to meet, exchange ideas, and socialize, The City should take advantage of every opportunity to locate a variety of civic buildings in and around the City Center. This will occur over time, but it is necessary to establish a clear direction through public policy. A network of outdoor spaces for recreation, strolling, gathering, and dining will make the City Center a lively and attractive place to live, shop, and conduct business. Each type of space should serve a range of users and activities. Outdoor spaces should range from a major urban park which is the focal point for downtown, to pocket urban plazas for lunch time gathering by residents, visitors, and workers. Some spaces will be publicly built and maintained, others will be constructed along with private development. Privately developed gathering space is a major component of all City Centers: small parks and plazas are opportunities to enhance the urbanscape and image of the City Center. Courtyards, mews, and forecourts are ways to efficiently integrate open space to enhance a project. Visitors, shoppers, and employees often perceive these private spaces as public. The City should commit to assist in or provide incentives for, the development of plazas and parks that are open to the public. Map VII -8 proposes a central outdoor gathering place within the core area, such as a park, plaza, or square, which will become the focus of community activities in the core. Uses around the edges of this plaza, such as transit facilities and cafes, should be sited to generate activity throughout the day. The edges of the plaza should be well defined and landscaped to soften the hard surfaces of adjacent buildings and streets. This space should be physically and visually linked to the central pedestrian spine and transit center. Policies to Promote the Development of Civic Buildings and Urban Spaces Goal CCG19 Develop civic and cultural facilities in addition to a public space and park system within the City Center to meet the needs of residents, employees, and visitors. These facilities and spaces should connect to the Citywide and regional system ofpublic spaces, parks, and trails. Policies CCP36 Promote a diversity of public and privately funded recreational and cultural facilities throughout the City Center. Promote partnerships between the City and other agencies, private organizations, and individuals to develop and meet the needs of City Center and the general community for these types of facilities. Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center CCP37 Emphasize locating civic and cultural facilities within the core. Planned public facilities could �. include a City Hall, library, or performing arts complex. CCP38 Acquire land necessary to provide a broad range of recreational opportunities throughout the City Center. "Land bank" parcels in the core area for future municipal facilities. CCP39 Public buildings shall set a high standard for design and compatibility with adjoining uses. In the core, parking for municipal uses should be structured. CCP40 Development of public spaces within the City Center will focus on linking these to existing recreational components of the Citywide parks system. Parking The continued use of expansive surface parking conflicts with the goal of redeveloping the City Center as a higher density mixed use area which supports the use of public transportation. In order to promote higher intensity land uses, which is pedestrian friendly and supportive of HCT, itis necessary to reduce the need for parking and encourage the provision of structured parking within these areas. Moreover, parking lots have high redevelopment potential. There are numerous examples of communities similar to Federal Way where former parking lots now contain multi -story developments. Parking will be needed for many years to come. However, as development pressures and land values increase, surface parking becomes expensive and property owners will be able to afford the conversion from surface parking to structured parking. In the interim, the City should encourage site layouts which facilitate future redevelopment of parking areas. Private and public partnerships should examine the feasibility of constructing a parking structure in the dowtown commercial core area. Figure VII -4 is a conceptual illustration of the redevelopment of surface parking around a mall. VII -2o Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center Map VII --8 Potential Open Space and Bicycle Routes •,:Fir • ---1 �,' � 1 4 t• ri 1 i i� 1 , 1 - r 1 � • 1� i� , • • � � — � as .� . . � ♦ .Y if • : � r � ' ! � , �.. :.•..la• •NEW 'ro �i��'�� iii --- -- �. r=r2l op, w/�1 1. •' . !1 � 1 �. • ,` � �� 1 /IIII,J .11.11 /I. ••`(•�/•rt .a 1. +�.J � al . � ire ►,.,,/4,►• � t1 •: � I VII -21 Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center Figure VII -4 Potential Redevelooment of Surface Parking Areac \\YY Y Over time, parking garages, lower parking requirements and shared parking can allow for more intensive development of land. Goals and Policies to Develop Alternatives to Existing Parking Development Goal CCG20 Reduce demand for parking in the City Center. Policies CCP41 Reduce requirements for the number of parking stalls required for City Center development in comparison to other areas of the City to encourage more intensive development and reflect the improvements in local and regional transit service. Increases above the required number of parking stalls may be allowed, on a case by case basis, when structured or underground parking is provided. CCP42 Encourage public and private parking structures (below or above ground) in the core area. Consider a public private partnership to develop structured parking in the dog; -town commercial core area VII -22 Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center CCP43 The City will encourage the provision of - structured parking through the use of bonuses and incentives. CCP44 Buffer parking areas to increase compatibility between surrounding uses. For larger lots, provide substantial landscaping, special lighting, and pedestrian walkways. CCP45 Site and orient buildings and parking to allow redevelopment of surface parking. CCP46 Allow on -street parking to create a buffer between pedestrians and traffic depending on street characteristics and role within the City Center. On -street parking should be viewed as a component of the parking supply for the area. CCP47 Encourage shared parking between uses to maximize the use of available parking within the City Center. Streetscape To improve livability within the City Center area, the City must complete the street network and change its street standards. The street grid must be well interconnected to make travel from one place to another as efficient as possible. The key to achieving this is to redefine streets as a network that will serve pedestrians, bicycles, and transit, in addition to automobiles. In areas where increased density is proposed, existing streets must be retrofitted with sidewalks, street trees, street furniture, and other amenities. Allowing on -street parking also creates a buffer between pedestrians and vehicles. It also allows shoppers and visitors to park easily for short amounts of time. On street parking should be permitted on City Center streets (where feasible) except during the morning and evening commuting hours when the extra lanes are needed to accommodate the extra high volumes of traffic. Figure ill -S highlights two street standards developed specifically for the City Center area. These streets will connect to other proposed and existing streets to complete a street grid. Street standards for other existing and proposed streets within the City Center can be found in the second section of the Transportation chapter. Policies to Improve the Street Network and Streetscape Character Goal CCG21 Create street designations which reinforce the unique characteristics of the City Center. Policies CCP48 Acquire right-of-way, to complete and enhance the street network. CCP49 Design streets as public spaces, with appropriate pedestrian amenities, trees, sidewalks, bicycle paths, transit services, street furniture, and trash receptacles. CCP50 Construct streetscape improvements as an integral component of any roadway improvement. CCP51 Encourage buildings to front public rights-of- way, providing clear paths from the sidewalk to all entries. CCP52 Only SR -99 and South 320th Street shall be wider than five lanes. 7.4 IMPLEMENTATION Developing a City Center will require collaboration between government entities, citizens, and developers. Phasing and development of certain elements, such as high capacity transit, are outside the City's control. Therefore, an implementation program must be flexible. It must also be tied to general goals, policies, and strategies rather than a detailed, step-by-step list of actions. The implementation section consists of: ■ A set of strategies to guide implementing actions; ■ An illustration of how these strategies can be realized over time; ■ A 15 year action plan. VII -23 Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Cent:r Figure VII -5 • a •v.s.s r • au a • vVaa•'./a a aab as a� as a as a� a�♦ CROSS SECTION K n I72 LANES, WITH PARKING 1z-16' lz lz lz rr 1z -1e' 51dcwa1k Parking 6 2 Lancs 0 12• Parking 6 Sldcwalk B1kc Blkc With On -Street Bike Lane z -I, iz-16' 6' 1, 1r 1 12' J, 6' 12•-16' PcW5ika Parking 2 Lenea 01z Parking P,&131ke Without On -Street Bike Lane z tz 18' iz iz iz lz 1Z., 12'-18'z Sidce zlk I Parking d 3 Lanes P 12 Parking 6 Sidewalk Bike s Bikc s.a.•......vmvea•w LA_4c, aaveoav With On -Street Bike Lane L4e.kv c�rzwca. ro Without On -Street Bike Lane Figure III -13 CROSS SECTION 3 LANES, WITH PARKING Figure III -12 VII -24 Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center Implementation Strategies Specific strategies must be pursued in order to coor= dinate various elements and actions that are dependent upon one another. For example, private development depends upon adequate infrastructure and amenities. Effective transit service depends upon supporting land use development to provide sufficient ridership. Residential communities require adequate transportation ,gnd services, a pedestrian friendly environment, open spaces, and jobs to foster a sense of community. In addition, much of the City Center's development is dependent upon market demands and development that is not projected until about 2005. A regional high capacity transit corridor may not be implemented before 2015. However, regulatory and infrastructure actions must be taken in the interim to prepare for these developments. The following strategies form the basis to achieve desired City Center development. ■ Establish regulations to shape and influence new development (0-1 years). Discourage low intensity auto oriented development in the core. Provide regulations and incentives to achieve a high intensity, mixed-use, pedestrian friendly development. Encourage mixed density residential development in the City Center frame area. Allow short term investment in the frame area that will support long term core development. ■ Develop specific plans to construct needed street and infrastructure improvements (1-5 years). ■ Develop plans to acquire street rights-of-way for completing the street grid and constructing transit facilities. ■ Construct arterial improvements with associated landscaping and pedestrian amenities (timing set by capital facilities program). ■ Prepare a pedestrian and bicycle plan and construct sidewalks, pedestrian paths, mid -block connectors, and bicycle connections to all areas of the City Center and particularly to a transit center (ongoing effort). ■ Develop and manage structured parking facilities as needed to support more intensive development and gradually convert the core into less auto dependent area. ■ Develop parking standards for the City Center Area. ■ Improve both local and regional transit service. Begin new transit service configuration by adding a center bus stop and route busses to it (begin immediately). Upgrade central bus stop to a transit center/station and enhance regional and local transit services to it (2-7 years). Develop a regional HCT station at transit center (15-20 years). ■ Construct civic features, public spaces, parks, and other urban elements to create a true urban center and promote civic identity (5-15 years). Develop major civic facilities in the City Center such as, a City Hall, performing arts center, and recreation center, to generate social and economic activity (5-15 years). Add amenities to residential areas to build new neighborhoods (begin immediately as an incremental program). Include landscaping and pedestrian improvements in all street construction (incremental program tied to actual improvements). Phasing Transforming the existing dowtown commercial core area into the proposed City Center is an ambitious task. It requires a significant transformation from a low density, automobile oriented, largely retail area to a higher intensity, more pedestrian oriented mixed use area. It requires a change in housing patterns, lifestyle preferences, and transportation modes. The City Center plan acknowledges that the core will take some time to develop. The City can facilitate these changes if a series of small steps are taken over time. This is especially true if the steps are consistent with the emerging economic, social, and demographic trends. As is the intent of this plan, the phasing scenario presented here accounts for the timing of market projections and future actions. As noted above, the implementation strategy is keyed to projected trends and regional planning goals. Its form and character, as envisioned in the Plan, are dramatically different from anything that now exists in the center. It will take some time for the development community to VII -25 redirect its energy and investments to produce buildings that respond to the direction of the Plan. The demand for more intense development opportunities in the City Center is not projected for nearly a decade. In the meantime, there may be some deferred maintenance, short-term, high -turnover tenancies, and even vacancies, as the development community begins to assemble property for future redevelopment. The City should not encourage continued low -scale investment in this area, since it will need to be amortized over a decade or two and will delay accomplishment of preferred development. As regulations are applied to modest renovations, it should be possible to secure some basic improvements. However, the City should not expect full implementation of the vision for the City Center until owners are ready to install long-term, major development projects. Figures VII -6 through VII -9 and Maps VII -9 through VII -11 illustrate key steps in the evolution of Federal Way's City Center from 1995 through 2025, in ten year increments. The illustrations are taken from a viewpoint just north of South 316th Street between 20th Avenue South and SR -99. The drawings do not necessarily indicate recommendations for specific sites. The locations of the elements and the time frames may well vary. For example, the high-capacity transit line may follow a slightly different alignment and the City Hall could be located on a different site. The drawings do illustrate how a viable City Center can evolve through several coordinated, incremental steps taken over time. The approximate dates are based on current market demand and funding projections. However, new trends, funding priorities, and development opportunities may emerge, changing the timing. An illustration of 1995 conditions is included for reference. 1995 - 2005 Actions ■ Institute zoning and design guidelines for the core area that encourages a high intensity pedestrian - oriented mixed-use City Center. ■ Institute zoning and design guidelines for the frame area that encourage higher density residential with accessory commercial uses to support the core. ■ Develop a pedestrian/bicycle plan that outlines a connected, safety -oriented system of routes and facilities. This Plan shall be used in programming capital projects, reviewing development proposals, and encouraging other agencies to'integrate bicycle Federal Way Comprehencive Plan - City Center improvements and linkages into Federal Way projects. The plan should emphasize linkages between transportation facilities, Celebration and Steel Lake parks, SeaTac Mall, and surrounding communities. ■ Work with the transit providers to develop a detailed transit plan for the City Center. Identify facilities, services, acquisition strategies, and implementation measures needed to make transit a viable and attractive travel mode. Tailor the plan to meet local needs, through rapid transit, express buses, community service, and/or demand -responsive service. ■ Develop a parks and public spaces plan for the City Center. Begin negotiations for acquisition of land for a City Center park, plaza, or square. ■ Improve the South 320th streetscape. ■ Widen 312th and improve the streetscape. ■ Improve SR -99 and establish mid -block crossings. ■ Complete the Ring Road (14th Avenue). ■ Complete the BPA bike trail. ■ Negotiate and acquire rights-of-way to augment the City Center street grid. During permit review, ensure that new development is compatible with street grid. ■ Reroute transit through the City Center and provide a centralized transfer point. ■ Prepare an economic development program to assist with financing and construction of projects which support City Center development. ■ Begin negotiations to form a public private partnership to provide structured parking near SeaTac Mall. Construct the parking structure. ■ Construct street grid enhancements. ■ Negotiate for the HCT corridor properties. ■ Construct the pedestrian overpass across 320th and build phase one of the City Center pedestrian mall. VII -26 Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center ■ Begin negotiations and acquire property for a -City Hall and a City Center park. ■ Hold competition to design City Hall. Construct City Hall. 2005 - 2015 Actions ■ Construct City Center park. ■ Continue building public-private parking garages. ■ Develop a transit center and consider replacing the park-and-ride lot. Focus transit activities in the City Center core. ■ Improve community -wide transit service and implement a "spokes -of -a -wheel' service delivery pattern with City Center as the hub. 3 l ■ Continue constructing streetscape and pedestrian improvements. ■ Enhance educational and recreational opportunities in City Center. ■ Construct a performing arts center. ■ Establish ribbons of green parks along the City Center pedestrian mall. 2015 - 2025 Actions ■ Construct the HCT line. ■ Construct roads under the transit facility. r VII -27 - • • • S. 320th Street Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center Figure VII -6 Illustration of City Center, 1995 Conditions ..... 20th Avenue S. Pacific Highway S....... i _ 1 _fir . '� � 1 � `+�, _ ' , ,�- _ � �► M , �,,► --r ., to e = Ike - .r ; A. - =--•--•.Executel ....... S.316thStreet VII -28 Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center Map VII -9 Phasing Concept, 1995-20us u LU-�.o p3t=°e13 Q a n oonooa a 090 d a 0nm°4 mem tap"4 �ED Q o p a o 90 o b �J (j m®m om �L70 Qo I� Q 1 �nJ I W 04 j 1 Q - b Iq 1i f 1 1 Q ❑ OOQO T O 1 ll 0 0 DO 0 U Dal 6 li n 00 11 3o O o 11 U 16 ,L ---- II a ----------------- ----- L2 ----- ------------- II AS 0 0 ED JL UT n 0 Q d O G° D Q o d, C7 o Q ° Y S -T. 44S n VII -29 Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center Figure VII -7 m... s...,�:.,...,f f :tv renter F,volution. 2005 S. 320th Street Improvements ..... Highway 99 Improvements •. T I i I I _ _ IS 20.0,77MON5�1 0.- u• ►,■L�.� .. • • Executel Expansion Rerouted Transit Service ...... Acquisition of Land for Cross Street: with New Transit Centers and Transit Center VII -30 Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center Map VII- X 0 Phasing Concept 200:5-20ib f U vrsao dED u I Quo ❑ a a Q 4 6 e o fl 6 o daO q V a �o v o d a o o a v oa Q v a avpGva 6 090 d- j� DQO p Pim ® Q s..+LA. ►... 0 9� O� co � � �0 [� ��Q 9LS � a� D b 4 � m® m o� tumo tion � a Ir p —91 d � � aD p C3 C3 A p c o r--- C�D GEo a 00 ❑tea �[1' �o DO � Q ❑ Q 00 ❑ � � Q VII -31 Federal Way Comprehensive Plan City Center Figure VII -8 illustration of City Center Evolution, 2015 • • .... Phase I Expansion of Sea -Tac Mall ; ..... Pedestrian Bridge over S. 320th • = MIN flit ItSEP �� z; M • i��_ - / - � �� 11• III �I. - �_� Is all PIra�.�..) ♦ sMall -Alignment of Pedestrian Spine • Phase I Residential New Bus Transit Center Development • • • • Phase I Commercial Development VII -32 Federal Way Comprehensive Plan - City Center Map VII -11 Phasing Concept 2015-zuz� VII -33 ARTICLE XIX. COMMUNITY DESIGN GUIDELINES Sec. 22-1630. Purpose. The purpose of this article is to: (1) Adopt design guidelines for commercial, office, and industrial development in accordance with land use and development policies established in the Federal Way Comprehensive Plan. (2) Require minimum standards for design review to maintain and protect property values and enhance the general appearance of the city. (3) Increase flexibility and encourage creativity in building and site design, while assuring quality development pursuant to the comprehensive plan and the purpose of this article. (4) Achieve predictability in design review, balanced with administrative flexibility to consider the individual merits of proposals. (5) Improve and expand pedestrian circulation, public open space, and pedestrian amenities in commercial, office and industrial zoned areas of the city. Sec. 22-1631. Administration. Applications under this article shall be processed as a component of FWCC Article V, Site Plan Review, and the Director of Community Development Services shall have the authority to approve, modify, or deny proposals under this article. Decisions under this article will consider proposals on the basis of individual merit, and will encourage creative design alternatives in order to achieve the stated purpose and objectives of this article. Decisions under this article are appealable using the appeal procedures of FWCC Article V. Sec. 22-1632. Applicability. This article shall apply to all commercial, office, and industrial development applications subject to FWCC Article V, Site Plan Review, which were submitted for site plan review after July 1, 1996. Subject apor-ations for remodeling or expansion of existing developments shall meet only those provisions of this article that are determined by the Director to be reasonably related and applicable to the area of expansion or remodeling. This article in no way should be construed 'to supersede or modify any other city codes, ordinances or policies that apply to the proposal. Sec. 22-1633. Definitions. (1) Arcade: A linear pedestrian walkway that abuts and runs along the facade of a building. It is covered, but not enclosed, and open at all times to public use. Typically, it has a line of columns along its open side. There may be habitable space above the arcade. (2) Awning: A rooflike cover that is temporary or portable in nature and that projects from the wall of a building for the purpose of shielding a doorway or window from the elements. (3) Canopy: A permanent, cantilevered extension of a building that typically projects over a pedestrian walkway abutting and running along the facade of a building, with no habitable space above the canopy. A canopy roof is comprised of rigid materials. (4) Parking structure: A building or structure consisting of more than one level, above and/or below ground, and used for temporary storage of motor vehicles. (5) Plaza: A pedestrian space that is available for public use and is situated near a main entrance to a building or is clearly visible and accessible from the adjacent right-of-way. Typical features include special paving, landscaping, lighting, seating areas, water features, and art. (6) Public on-site open space: A space that is accessible to the public at all times, predominantly open above, and designed specifically for use by the general public as opposed to serving merely as a setting for the building. (7) Right-of-way: Land owned, dedicated or conveyed to the public, used primarily for the movement of vehicles, wheelchair and pedestrian traffic, and land privately owned, used primarily for the movement of vehicles, wheelchair and pedestrian traffic; so long as such privately owned land has been constructed in compliance with all applicable laws and standards for a public right-of-way. (8) Streetscape: A term in urban design that defines and describes the character and quality of a street by the amount and type of features and furnishings abutting it. Such features and furnishings may include trees and other landscaping, benches, lighting, trash receptacles, bollards, curbing, walls, differentpaving types, signage, kiosks, trellises,art objects, bus stops, and typical utility equipment and appurtenances. (9) Surface parking lot: An off-street, ground level open area, usually improved, for the temporary storage of motor vehicles. (10) Transparent glass: Windows that are transparent enough to permit the view of activities within a building from nearby streets, sidewalks and public spaces. Tinting or some coloration is permitted, provided a reasonable level of visibility is achieved. Reflective or very dark tinted glass does not accomplish this objective. Sec. 22-1634. Site design: all zoning districts. (a) General criteria: (1) Natural amenities such as views, significant or unique trees, creeks, riparian corridors, and similar features unique to the site should be incorporated into the design. (2) Pedestrian areas and amenities should be incorporated in the overall site design. Pedestrian areas include but are not limited to outdoor plazas, arcades, courtyards, seating areas, and amphitheaters. Pedestrian amenities include but are not limited to outdoor benches, tables and other furniture, balconies, gazebos, transparent glass at the ground floor, and landscaping. 2 (3) Pedestrian areas should be easily seen, accessible, and located to take advantage of surrounding features such as building entrances, open spaces, significant landscaping, unique topography or architecture, and solar exposure. (4) Project designers shall strive for overall design continuity by using similar elements throughout the project such as architectural style and features, materials, colors, and textures. (b) Surface parking lots: (1) Site and landscape design for parking lots are subject to the requirements of FWCC Article XVII. (2) Vehicle turning movements shall be minimized. Parking aisles without loop access are discouraged. Parking and vehicle circulation areas shall be clearly delineated using directional signage. (3) Driveways shall be located to be visible from the right-of-way but not impede pedestrian circulation on-site or to adjoining properties. Driveways should be shared with adjacent properties to minimize the number of driveways and curb cuts. (4) Multi -tenant developments with large surface parking lots adjacent to a right- of-way are encouraged to incorporate retail pads against the right-of-way to help break up the large areas of pavement. (5) See Sec. 22-1638 for supplemental guidelines. (c) Parking structures (includes parking floors located within commercial buildings): (1) The bulk (or mass) of a parking structure as seen from the right-of-way should be minimized by placing its short dimension along the street edge. The parking structure should include active uses such as retail, offices or other commercial uses at the ground level and/or along the street frontage. (2) Parking structures which are part of new development shall be architecturally consistent with exterior architectural elements of the primary structure, including roof lines, facade design, and finish materials. (3) Parking structures should incorporate methods of articulation and accessory elements, pursuant to Sec. 22-1635(c)(2), on facades located above ground level. (4) Buildings built over parking should not appear to "float" over the parking area, but should be linked with ground level uses or screening. Parking at grade under a building is discouraged unless the parking area is completely enclosed within the building or wholly screened with walls and/or landscaped berms. (5) Top deck lighting on multi-level parking structures shall be architecturally integrated with the building, and screened to control impacts to off-site uses. Exposed fluorescent light fixtures are not permitted. 3 (6) Parking structures and vehicle entrances should be designed to minimize views into the garage interior from surrounding streets. Methods to help minimize such views may include, but are not limited to landscaping, planters, and decorative grilles and screens. (7) Security grilles for parking structures shall be architecturally consistent with and integrated with the overall design. Chain link fencing is not permitted for garage security fencing. (8) See Sec. 22-1638(c)(4) for supplemental guidelines. (d) Pedestrian circulation and public spaces: (1) Primary entrances to buildings should be clearly visible or recognizable from the right-of-way. Pedestrian pathways from rights-of-way and bus stops to primary entrances, from parking lots to primary entrances, and pedestrian areas, shall be accessible and should be clearly delineated. (2) Pedestrian pathways and pedestrian areas should be delineated by separate paved routes using a variation in paved texture and color, and protected from abutting vehicle circulation areas with landscaping. Approved methods of delineation include: stone, brick or granite pavers; exposed aggregate; or stamped and colored concrete. Paint striping on asphalt as a method of delineation is not encouraged. Pedestrian pathways from R.O.W. r'COe5Uldn connecuons (3) Pedestrian connections should be' provided between properties to establish pedestrian links to adjacent buildings, parking, pedestrian areas and public rights- of-way. (4) Bicycle racks should be provided for all commercial developments. (5) Outdoor furniture, fixtures, and streetscape elements, such as lighting, free standing signs, trellises, arbors, raised planters, benches and other forms of seating, trash receptacles, bus stops, phone booths, fencing, etc., should be incorporated into the site design. (6) See Sec. 22-1638 for supplemental guidelines. 4 (e) Landscaping: Refer to FWCC Article XVII for specific landscaping requirements and for definitions of landscaping types referenced throughout this article. (0 Commercial service facilities: Refer to FWCC Sec. 22-949 and Sec. 22-1564 for requirements related to garbage and recycling receptacles, placement and screening. (1) Commercial services relating to loading, storage, trash and recycling should be located in such a manner as to optimize public circulation and minimize visibility into such facilities. Service yards shall comply with the following: a. Service yards and loading areas shall be designed and located for easy access by service vehicles and tenants and shall not displace required landscaping, impede other site uses, or create a nuisance for adjacent property owners. b. Trash and recycling receptacles shall include covers to prevent odor and wind blown litter. C. Service yard walls, enclosures, and similar accessory site elements shall be consistent with the primary building(s) relative to architecture, materials and colors. d. Chain link fencing shall not be used where visible from public streets, on-site major drive aisles, adjacent residential uses, or pedestrian areas. Barbed or razor wire shall not be used. 4 iaan -U —, ayc at caa ��OMII_�® (2) Site utilities shall comply with the following: KISSIMMEE Loading areas a. Building utility equipment such as electrical panels and junction boxes should be located in an interior utility room. 5 b. Site utilities including transformers, fire standpipes and engineered retention ponds (except biofiltration swales) should not be the dominant element of the front landscape area. When these must be located in a front yard, they shall be either undergrounded or screened by walls and/or Type I landscaping, and shall not obstruct views of tenant common spaces, public open spaces, monument signs, and/or driveways. (g) Miscellaneous site elements: (1) Lighting shall comply with the following: a. Lighting levels shall not spill onto adjacent properties pursuant to FWCC Sec. 22-954(c). b. Lighting shall be provided in all loading, storage, and circulation areas, but shall incorporate cut-off shields to prevent off-site glare. C. Light standards shall not reduce the amount of landscaping required for the project by FWCC Article XVII, Landscaping. (2) Drive-through facilities such as banks, cleaners, fast food, drug stores and service stations, etc., shall comply with the following: a. Drive-through windows and stacking lanes are not encouraged along facades of buildings that face a right-of-way. If they are permitted in such a location, then they shall be visually screened from such street by Type III landscaping and/or architectural element, or combination thereof, provided such elements reflect the primary building and provide appropriate screening. b. The stacking lane shall be physically -separated from the parking lot, sidewalk, and pedestrian areas by Type III landscaping and/or architectural element, or combination thereof, provided such elements reflect the primary building and provide appropriate separation. Painted lanes are not sufficient. C. Drive-through speakers shall not be audible off site. d. A bypass/escape lane is recommended for all drive-through facilities. e. See. Sec. 22-1638(d) for supplemental guidelines. Sec. 22-1635. Building design: all zoning districts. (a) General criteria: (1) Emphasize, ratherthan obscure, natural topography. Buildings should be designed to "step up" or "step down" hillsides to accommodate significant changes in elevation, unless this provision is precluded by other site elements such as stormwater design, optimal traffic circulation; or the proposed function or use of the site. 6 (b) (2) Building siting or massing shall preserve public viewpoints as designated by the Comprehensive Plan or other adopted plans or policies. (3) Materials and design features of fences and walls should reflect that of the primary building(s). Building facade modulation and screening options, defined: All building facades that are both longer than 60 feet and are visible from either a right-of- way or residential use or zone shall incorporate facade treatment according to this section. Subject facades shall incorporate at least two of the four options described herein; except, however, facades that are solidly screened by Type I landscaping, pursuant to Article XVII, Landscaping, may use facade modulation as the sole option under this section. Options used under this section shall be incorporated along the entire length of the facade, in any approved combination. Options used must meet the dimensional standards as specified herein; except, however, if more than two are used, dimensional requirements for each option will be determined on a case by case basis; provided that the gross area of a pedestrian plaza may not be less than the specified minimum of 200 square feet. See Sec. 22-1638(c) for guidelines pertaining to City Center Core and City Center Frame. (1) Facade Minimum depth: 2 feet; Minimum width: 6 feet; Maximum Modulation: width: 60 feet. Alternative methods to shape a building such as angled or curved facade elements, off -set planes, wing walls and terracing, will be considered, provided that the intent of this section is met. (2) Landscape 8 foot wide Type II landscape screening along the base of screening: the facade, except Type IV may be used in place of Type II for facades that are comprised of 50% or more window area, and around building entrance(s). For building facades that are located adjacent to a property line, some or all of the underlying buffer width required by Article XVII, Landscaping, may be considered in meeting the landscape width requirement of this section. Ll 6'MIN-60',tikx- Incorporating modulations Incorporating landscaped buffers (3) Canopy As a modulation option, canopies or arcades may be used or arcade: only along facades that are visible from a right-of-way. Minimum length: 50 percent of the length of the facade using this option. (4) Pedestrian Size of Plaza: Plaza square footage is equal to one percent Plaza: of the gross floor area of the building, but it must be a minimum of 200 square feet. The plaza should be clearly visible and accessible from the adjacent right-of-way. . SfifLC AI'OV1z.. .ate Incorporating canopy/arcade (c) Building articulation and scale: (1) Building facades visible from rights-of-way and other public areas should incorporate methods of articulation and accessory elements in the overall architectural design, as described in paragraph (2) below. 8 (2) Methods to articulate blank walls: Following is a non-exclusive list of methods to articulate blank walls, pursuant to FWCC Article XVII Sec. 22-1564(u) and Sec. 22-1635(c)(1), above.: a. Showcase, display, recessed windows; b. Vertical trellis(s) in front of the wall with climbing vines or similar planting; C. Set the wall back and provide a landscaped or raised planter bed in front of the wall, with plant material that will obscure or screen the wall's surface; d. Artwork such as mosaics, murals, decorative masonry or metal patterns or grillwork, sculptures, relief, etc., over a substantial portion of the blank wall surface. (The Federal Way Arts Commission may be used as an advisory body at the discretion of the planning staff); Showcase windows Vertical trellis Landscaping Artwork -Mural e. Architectural features such as setbacks, indentations, overhangs, projections, articulated cornices, bays, reveals, canopies, and awnings; f. Material variations such as colors, brick or metal banding, or textural changes; and g. Landscaped public plaza(s) with space for vendor carts, concerts and other pedestrian activities. (3) See Sec. 22-1638(c) for supplemental guidelines. Architectural features Architectural features III Material variations Landscaped public plazas Sec. 22-1636. Building and pedestrian orientation: all zoning districts. (a) Building and pedestrian orientation: (1) Buildings should generally be oriented to rights-of-way, as more particularly described in Sec. 22-1638. Features such as entries, lobbies, and display windows, should be oriented to the right-of-way; otherwise, screening or art features such as trellises, artwork, murals, landscaping, or combinations thereof, should be incorporated into the street -oriented facade. (2) Plazas, public open spaces and entries should be located at street corners to optimize pedestrian access and use. (3) All buildings adjacent to the street should provide visual access from the street into human services and activities within the building, if applicable. (4) Multiple buildings on the same site should incorporate public spaces (formal or informal). These should be integrated by elements such as plazas, walkways, and landscaping along pedestrian pathways, to provide a clear view to destinations, and to create a unified, c a m p u s- l i k e development. Shared public spaces/plazas Sec. 22-1637. Mixed Use residential buildings in commercial zoning districts. (a) Ground level facades of mixed-use buildings that front a public right-of-way shall meet the following guidelines: , (1) Retail, commercial, or office activities shall occupy at least 20% of the gross ground floor area of the building (unless exempt from this requirement by FWCC district zoning regulations). (2) If parking occupies the ground level, see Sec. 22- 1634(c). 10 (3) Landscaped gardens, courtyards, or enclosed terraces for private use by residents should be designed with minimum exposure to the right-of-way. Sec. 22-1638. District Guidelines. In addition to the foregoing development guidelines, the following supplemental guidelines apply to individual zoning districts: (a) Professional Office (PO), Neighborhood Business (BN), and Community Business (BC): (1) Surface parking may be located behind the building, to the side(s) of the building, or adjacent to the right-of-way; provided, however, that parking located adjacent to the right-of-way maximizes pedestrian access and circulation pursuant to Sec. 22-1634(d). (2) Entrance facades shall front on, face, or be clearly recognizable from the right-of-way; and should incorporate windows and other methods of articulation. (3) Ground -level mirrored or reflective glass is not encouraged adjacent to a public right-of-way or pedestrian area. (b) Office Park (OP), Corporate Park (CP), and Business Park (BP): (1) Surface parking may be located behind the building, to the side(s) of the building, or adjacent to the right-of-way; provided, however, that parking located adjacent to the right-of-way maximizes pedestrian access and circulation pursuant to Section 1634(d). (2) Buildings with ground floor retail sales or services should orient major entrances, display windows and other pedestrian features to the right-of-way to the extent possible. (3) Ground -level mirrored or reflective glass is not encouraged adjacent to a public right-of-way or pedestrian area. (c) City Center Core (CC -C) and City Center Frame (CC -F): (1) The City Center Core and Frame will contain transitional forms of development with surface parking areas. However, as new development or re -development occurs, the visual dominance of surface parking areas shall be reduced. Therefore, surface parking areas shall be located as follows: a. The parking is located behind the building, with the building located between the right-of-way and the parking areas, or it is located in structured parking; or b. All or some of the parking is located to the side(s) of the building; or C. Some short-term parking may be located between the building(s) and the right-of-way, but this shall not consist of more than one double -loaded drive aisle, and pedestrian circulation shall be provided pursuant to Sec. 22-1634(d). Large retail complexes may not be able to locate parking according to the above guidelines. Therefore, retail complexes of 60,000 square feet of gross floor 11 area or larger may locate surface parking between the building(s) and the right-of- way. However, this form of development shall provide for small building(s) along the right-of-way to breakup and reduce the visual impact of the parking, and pedestrian circulation must be provided pursuant to Sec. 22-1634(d). For purposes of this guideline, retail complex means the entire lot or parcel, or series of lots or parcels, on which a development, activity or use is located or will locate. (2) Entrance facades shall front on, face, or be clearly recognizable from the right- of-way; and should incorporate windows and other methods of articulation. (3) Building facades that are visible from a right-of-way and subject to modulation per Sec. 22-1635(b), shall incorporate facade treatment as follows: a. The facade incorporates modulation and/or a landscape buffer, pursuant to Sec. 22-1635(b); and b. The facade incorporates an arcade, canopy or plaza; and/or one or more articulation element listed in Sec. 22-1635(c)(2); provided that the resulting building characteristics achieve visual interest and appeal at a pedestrian scale and proximity, contribute to a sense df public space, and reinforce the pedestrian experience. (4) Drive-through facilities and stacking lanes shall not be located along a facade of a building that faces a right-of-way. (5) Above grade parking structures with a ground level facade visible from a right-of-way shall incorporate any combination of the following elements at the ground level: a. Retail, commercial, or office uses that occupy at least 50% of the building's lineal frontage along the right-of-way; or b. A 15 -foot wide strip of Type III landscaping along the base of the facade; or C. A decorative grille or screen that conceals interior parking areas from the right-of-way. (6) Facades of parking structures shall be articulated above the ground level pursuant to Sec. 22-1635(c)(1). (7) When curtain wall glass and steel systems are used to enclose a building, the glazing panels shall be transparent on 50% of the ground floor facade fronting a right-of-way or pedestrian area. Sec. 22-1639. Design criteria for public on-site open space. The following guidelines apply to public on-site open space that is developed pursuant to the height bonus program established in FWCC Article Xl. Division 8. (1) Open space developed under this section should be located so that it: a. Abuts a public right-of-way, or alternatively, is visible and accessible from a public right-of-way; 12 b. Is bordered on at least one side by, or is readily accessible from, structure(s) with entries to retail or office uses; housing, civic/public uses, or another public open space; and C. Is situated for maximum exposure to sunlight. (2) Open space site design and configuration must meet a majority the following guidelines: a. The gross area of the open space does not incorporate any other site elements such as setbacks, landscaping, buffers, paving, or storm drainage facilities, that would otherwise be incorporated into site design without exercising the open space option; b. The gross area of the open space encompasses at least 2.5% of the lot area, up to a total aggregate square footage of 25,000 square feet. C. The open space area must be clearly visible and accessible from the adjacent right -of way; d. The primary area is at least 25 feet in width; e. A minimum of 15% of the total area of the open space is landscaped using Type IV landscaping or other landscaping alternative; and f. The open space may not be used for parking or loading of commercial vehicles. Commercial vehicle loading areas abutting the open space must be screened by a solid, site obscuring wall. 13