Following an apples-to-oranges discussion that was, for the most part, wildly off-subject, the City Council voted 6-1 Tuesday night to direct the Planning & Zoning Commission “to revise the CBD 1 & the CBD 2 zoning codes.”
In introducing the measure, council member Dex Ellison said it was part of the council’s “downtown revitalization” initiatives.
However, council member Robert Rizo, who was the lone vote against approving the item, talked solely about “downtown development” projects, which is simply extraneous to the notion of “downtown revitalization.” Development involves the inanimate; i.e. increasing the number of buildings or, worse, the number of parking spaces in a specific destination. Revitalization involves the animate; i.e., increasing the number of people going to a specific destination.
“This (revising the zoning) is not what’s going to start the development downtown,” Rizo said. “What’s going to start the development downtown is what this council is doing.”
Which may be true, but that was not the point of Tuesday night’s discussion. It does, however, raise another point which is simply: What should the City Council concentrate on — development or revitalization? I would argue for the latter, even though that presents a two major challenges the council, for some reason, refuses to address, possibly because it is not even aware of their existence. The first is the fact that Kyle is not a walkable city and the second is the nature of Kyle’s workforce.
That first challenge is obvious to anyone who lives here. For example, in order for just about any resident of Kyle to go grocery shopping, get a haircut, eat out a restaurant, go the bank — whatever — he or she must use some form of a motorized vehicle. Kyle’s Comprehensive Plan even recognizes this obstacle in its section on Downtown Revitalization. Page 241 of the Comp Plan lists a series of goals for this effort, one of which is “Encourage trail system connections to the downtown and other commercial centers.” In other words, make Kyle more walkable, a most-worthwhile goal. But then I have been arguing for a separate section in the Comprehensive Plan devoted exclusively to hike/bike trails ever since I moved here in 2014.
The problem with the workforce is that the overwhelming percentage of it is not employed in Kyle. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the mean travel time to work for a Kyle resident is 36 minutes. Its data also shows 93 percent of Kyle’s workforce drives to work, 6 percent above the national average. While 3 percent of Americans walk or bicycle to their place of employment, that number in Kyle is 0 percent. What this means for downtown revitalization is that when workers have to drive long distances to and from work five days a week, the last thing they are going to want to do after they get home is to get back in their cars and drive to downtown Kyle, unless it’s for a specific event such as Pie in the Sky or a concert in the park. And successful downtown revitalization requires steady streams of people on a daily basis, not event-predicated streams four or five times a year.
But there’s a partial solution to this as well, as Community Development Director Howard Koontz told the council Tuesday.
“Our downtown is a neighborhood and that’s absolutely unique,” Koontz said. “There’s a lot of small towns in Texas — and I certainly don’t know all of them — but I’ve been trying to find an analogous city somewhere that has a downtown as residential as ours is. Most towns — especially the ones in the Hill Country — have a commercial square and residential once you get blocks away. But we have residential uses right on our main thoroughfares.”
Rizo argued that the City needed to develop more parking opportunities in order to spur revitalization. That, in fact, is the worst thing the City can do. Simply look at any city that has experienced a successful downtown revitalization effort. All of them have followed one simple rule: The only way to get a lot of people into a downtown area is to have a lot of people living in that downtown area.
That means the first step in achieving a downtown revitalization in Kyle is to capitalize on that important fact Koontz pointed out: “Our downtown is a neighborhood.” Create a sense of community in that neighborhood. Develop a survey that asks downtown residents what amenities they would like within walking distances of their homes and then take the time and make the effort to go door-to-door to every residence in downtown to get that survey completed.
The second step would be to encourage even more residents to live in or within easy walking distance of downtown. And this is where revising the CBD zoning codes comes into play. For example, remove the multifamily restrictions in both CBD1 and CBD2 zoning. Not that you would want the type of apartment complexes you see on Cromwell Drive located downtown, but some two-story, all-brick exterior, loft-style apartments could fit very comfortably downtown and attract just the type of empty-nesters that spur neighborhood revitalization efforts.
For the first 30 years I lived in Dallas, downtown became a ghost town after 6 p.m. City leaders made all kinds of efforts at downtown revitalization, none of which worked. Then, in the 1990s, developers began turning vacated downtown warehouses into residential lofts. After they became 100 percent occupied, others began building townhouse projects downtown and other residential projects quickly followed. Suddenly downtown Dallas became an attractive place to live in the city. A development of single-family homes called Bryan Place on the eastern edge of downtown built in the 1960s saw property values skyrocket in the 1990s. Today, downtown Dallas is a buzz of activity between 6 p.m. and midnight. Downtown Austin is still active after dark even though its principle attractions from years gone by — the music outlets — have diminished to the point of almost disappearing completely. However, if you look at the Austin skyline, most of those skyscrapers are residential buildings and it’s those residents that breathe life into the downtown area.
It’s not rocket science: To revitalize downtown, you have to get people to live downtown. As Koontz pointed out, Kyle is unique in that it already has a lot of downtown residences. So concentrate any revitalization effort in (1) determining what will get them to walk outside of their homes and (2) attracting more people to live downtown who don’t want to rely on the automobile to get them to where they want to go.
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