The semi-impossible revitalization task facing P&Z

The Planning & Zoning Commission held the first of what promises to be dozens of meetings Wednesday night to figure out what the City Council had in mind when it gave the Commission a downtown revitalization task. As I wrote earlier, the Council voted 6-1 to instruct the Commission to review what land uses are currently allowed in two zoning districts — CBD 1 and CBD 2 — to determine which uses to keep and which to ditch.

CBD, when employed by city planners, refers to Central Business District, which, in itself, presents P&Z with its first dilemma. As you can see by this map, Kyle’s CBDs, basically runs along and on either side of Center Street from the railroad track on the east to just west of Wallace Street on the west and then along Scott Street to include the library. But that is not Kyle’s Central Business District. Kyle’s current CBD is at the intersection of I-35 and Kyle Parkway and is slowly shifting north along FM 1626. Within a few years, the principle intersection of Kyle’s CBD will be at the Parkway and Kohlers Crossing.

That doesn’t mean there should not be a revitalization in this Center Street area. In fact, quite the opposite. As the only candidate to become a completely sustainable neighborhood in the entire city, this area should be the focus of any municipal revitalization effort. But the neighborhood needs another designation other than CBD, because it is not now and never will be again the city’s Central Business District.

That’s one issue. But P&Z is facing other obstacles as well. It can go through the long list that currently exists that delineates all the types of businesses are currently allowed in this area and then decide which types to excise and which to add. But that could be complete waste of time and energy when, for all practical purposes, there’s nowhere within this district to put any of these businesses. There are no vacant lots in the district.

That means if the City is serious about revitalizing this area it must (1) develop a program that incentivizes developers to redevelop the existing properties within the district and (2) extend the boundaries of the district to places where vacant land exists; i.e., along Old Highway 81 north of Center Street and along RM 150 on the east side of I-35, perhaps all the way to Lehman Drive.

I would encourage P&Z to complete the task the Council assigned it — come up with a completely revised list of allowable uses within the district (with the addition, as I mentioned in my earlier article, of R-3-1 multifamily residential) — along with recommendations that the City (1) create a zoning designation for the district to replace CBD, (2) extend the boundaries of the district to incorporate vacant properties, (3) create a program designed to incentivize revitalization redevelopment, and (4) develop a visual images for what the City wants this area to look like post-revitalization.

The City must also decide the audience for these revitalization efforts — exactly who do they want to attract to this revitalized area. Three possible audiences exist, but only one is truly realistic for Kyle. It’s also the easiest to attract. The first audience is the out-of-town audience. Kyle City Manager Scott Sellers said when he assumed his current position, his No. 1 goal was to make Kyle a destination city. With the events surrounding Pie in the Sky, he has been successful beyond just about all expectations in this effort. But Pie in the Sky does not attract a steady stream of out-of-town visitors. The Texas Pie Company does and the City should be happy with that. Now it needs to develop other places along Center Street for people to go when they come to Kyle for pie. I know Kyle has visions of developing a main street analogous to the one in, say, Fredericksburg, but that main street sprung naturally from the German heritage that pre-existed that development. To borrow from the medical vernacular, Kyle doesn’t have those kinds of pre-existing conditions.

The second audience is those who already live in Kyle and, for reasons outlined earlier, the only local residents this area, when revitalized, is going to attract are those who live within comfortable walking distance of it. 

Which naturally brings me to the third audience — those who already live in the district, the low-hanging fruit. Fortunately for Kyle, because the district is already largely residential to begin with, that built-in audience is already considerable and can be easily enlarged by allowing, as I said above, R-3-1 uses. If P&Z and, ultimately, the City Council decide to concentrate on this audience, they are well on their way to a successful revitalization effort.

The nature and challenges of downtown revitalization

 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.