| nickw252 |
Nov 19, 2012 3:33 AM |
Quote:
Phoenix officials hope to attract residents to some of the city’s vacant lots with urban farms, public art and innovative seating areas.
They’re launching an initiative aimed at working with various community groups and property owners to find temporary uses for these lots. They’re identifying potential lots, contacting the property owners and connecting them with groups and individuals with creative ideas.
Longer term, they hope to attract more infill building, and they hope this temporary fix will spur development.
It’s no small task. Vacant lots make up 43 percent of the land in Phoenix, according to a 2000 study by the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy.
Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton will announce the initiative at 10:30 a.m. Monday at a news conference at the site of the first project on the northeastern corner of Central Avenue and Indian School Road. The location is home to a 15-acre privately owned lot that has been vacant since 1990. One of its new uses will be a community garden.
The city also is working with the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension and local artists on the space.
“This really is a living and learning laboratory. We want it to be dynamic. We want it to be energetic and to percolate from here,” said Colin Tetreault, senior policy adviser to Stanton on sustainability. “If there’s a concept that works, they can go out and be successful at other places. We really expect to learn a whole lot from this test.”
City officials said Stanton has made filling the city’s vacant lots a priority since he began campaigning. Residents would constantly ask the mayor about vacant lots in their neighborhoods.
Paul Blue,Stanton’s chief of staff, said Phoenix residents want to drive less and want amenities closer to their homes. City officials hope developers respond by building projects in more dense locations as opposed to the outskirts.
“This use of vacant land is not brand new rocket science we’re dreaming up,” he said. “We think we’re doing some smart stuff, but on the East Coast, this philosophy is old and has been for half of a century.”
The initial transformation
The city focused its efforts for the first project on land that once housed the former Phoenix Indian School, which served Native American high-school and grade-school students.
The city partnered with Keep Phoenix Beautiful, a non-profit that focuses on environmental issues, and the Barron Collier Co., owners of the central Phoenix property.
City officials hope this project will serve as the prototype for how groups can temporarily use other vacant properties.
The city reached out to the International Rescue Committee, an international non-profit that serves refugees, because of its history with community gardening in Phoenix. About 80 refugees affiliated with the group will learn how to garden in Phoenix’s desert climate.
“They are high-impact. They don’t just do gardening. It’s kind of a micro-enterprise concept,” Tetreault said. “They educate and provide business and development opportunities. They really were a natural fit.”
John Vosper, the rescue committee’s community and economic development program manager, said the project is not only about filling vacant lots but about diversity and sustainable urban practices. The gardens also could help the refugees launch careers as urban farmers, non-profit leaders said.
“Being in such a central part of the city will raise the profile of refugees in the community,” he said.
Impact of vacant lots
City officials say Phoenix has dealt with an overabundance of vacant lots for decades, a problem rooted in outdated urban planning practices.
“There are a lot of classic reasons — the standard development process, historical leap-frog development, land speculation from the housing crisis,” Tetreault said. “Just our style of development at large. It’s kind of gotten us here where we are now.”
Blue said space did not limit where developers could build in Phoenix like it did in some older, East Coast cities.
“For the past 50, 60, 70 years, we’ve been building at the desert’s edge. If there was a site that was hard to build on, they bypassed it and moved to the next easiest thing to build on,” he said.
The city said the emptiness has given potential developers a negative perception of activity in Phoenix.
“Everybody has their favorite corner (to point out) in Phoenix. It’s kind of endemic that there seems to be a lot of this,” Blue said. “If it’s not adding value, it may be detracting value from the community.”
The lack of development hurts Phoenix financially because the city misses out on potential tax revenue, Blue said. Vacant lots can lead to zoning-enforcement issues that can be costly for the city — such as overgrown weeds and brush — if they’re not maintained.
Long-term goals
The city’s long-term goal is to get the land developed.
“Ultimately, these properties have an end date where they get built with something eventually and add value to the community,” Blue said.
The city does not offer any financial incentive to landowners to use vacant properties. City officials hope potential developers notice the activity and are motivated to build a project.
“There is a lot we’re asking of the partner, to be fair,” said Ruben Alonzo, Stanton’s deputy chief of staff. “For whatever reason, they own the lot and it’s vacant at this moment. But they stepped up when asked. In order to move forward, it required public and private partnerships on these properties.”
Phoenix owns a small percentage of the city’s vacant lots, but officials aren’t exactly sure of how many. Most of them are downtown, Blue said, and the city has plans to develop them.
“For example on the Phoenix Biomedical Campus, we have very specific plans for how to develop that real estate over time with medical uses,” he said. “We want to make sure we’re walking the walk and not just asking other people to do stuff (with their land).”
The public art and landscaping in a previously vacant lot on the northeastern corner of Second and Roosevelt streets is an example of what the city hopes to mimic in other lots.
Barron Collier President Blake Gable said he has looked at potential mixed-use projects to bring to his lot on Indian School Road for the past two decades.
Until then, he’s excited about making his land available to the city for temporary projects.
“There are a lot of options out there,” he said. “The trick is just making sure you find the right one that makes the most sense to the community and the most sense economically.”
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