It’s small-town charm nestled inside a larger city. It’s a short walk to a unique restaurant, a bike ride to a baseball game, and a car ride or bus ride to bigger stores and supermarkets.
Pickwick Place, the name for the development surrounding the intersection of East Cherry Street and South Pickwick Avenue, comes front and center for many Springfield residents when they hear the phrase “complete neighborhood,” according to city consultants.
The ideas playing out at the intersection of Cherry and Pickwick are the model for redevelopment plans found in Forward SGF, a 20-year comprehensive plan for the entire city of Springfield — set to be the guiding principles for growth from now until the end of 2040.
“I can’t think of how many times Cherry and Pickwick was thrown out as this thing people want to see somewhere else in town,” consultant Brandon Nolin told the Springfield City Council. “This place type is getting at that — small, one or two intersections, not a huge area, really focusing on mixed-use development.”
Nolin gave the second of two lengthy seminars on all points of the Forward SGF comprehensive plan at Lincoln Hall on the campus of Ozarks Technical Community College on June 2.
What is a ‘complete neighborhood?'
Nolin described a “complete neighborhood” development as having multifamily housing and/or apartments, commercial, retail and/or restaurant developments, office spaces and entertainment in one cluster. The idea is people who live in the neighborhood wouldn’t need to get in the car, or even use their transit passes to access their jobs, their favorite corner store or some weekend entertainment.
“How do we put things in proximity to where people are living?” Nolin said.
Cherry and Pickwick is home to stops like Skully’s, Team Taco, Tea Bar and Bites, Ott’s Pasta, Tie and Timber Beer Company, the Royal Music Hall, Cherry Picker Package and Fare and a whole lot more. Whether you want to eat, drink, shop for something unique or just hang out and watch the people, Cherry and Pickwick is a suitable place to go.
‘Sense of place’ is no accident
Springfield Director of Quality of Place Initiatives Tim Rosenbury unpacked the complete neighborhood concept to the Springfield City Council, which will consider formal adoption of the Forward SGF master plan in October.
“If we create a higher quality environment, then we will create a vital economy,” Rosenbury said. “We need to improve on what we have and we are the people responsible for it.”
Nolin is a project manager for Houseal Lavigne Associates, the Chicago-based firm that wrote Forward SGF. As part of the writing process, the consultants and city staff members met with the general public in person and through virtual meetings, and collected more than 10,000 pieces of data that represented varying degrees of planning input.
“There are a lot of people we heard during the community engagement piece saying ‘Where we are is not where we want to be. We want to raise the bar for ourselves and our future,’” Rosenbury said.
A complete neighborhood is meant to be a place where people can live and work without having a commute. It also has amenities that can encourage residents to stay close to home, often choosing to walk or ride a bicycle instead of hopping in the car to venture out on the town.
“When we talk about complete neighborhoods, we talk about characteristics such as a 15-minute walk, that everything you need is within a 15-minute walk, roughly three-quarters of a mile,” Rosenbury said.
The complete neighborhood has more options for housing than just single-family dwellings. Instead, it caters to what Rosenbury called the “missing middle,” people who earn enough to get out of low-income housing, but may not be in a financial place to commit to buying large houses.
“There’s all kinds of things in the middle. For the most part, those are missing from many neighborhoods in Springfield and we are the poorer for it,” Rosenbury said.
Mixed-use development in Rountree
In 2018, the Springfield city government’s Rountree Neighborhood Plan put the estimated population of the neighborhood at around 2,800 residents, and estimated that there were more than 1,400 housing units.
Mixed-use developments blur the lines between commercial and residential zones. Instead, the local government’s focus turns to the overall quality of construction and development, with less focus on land use.
“It’s much more than just a collection of streets and houses,” Rosenbury said. “It is more functional; it is more livable.”
In Rountree, there are apartment complexes next to restaurants and a microbrewery. Rosenbury hopes mixed-use developments in other parts of Springfield — he gave one example of future developments along the Grant Avenue Parkway development — could encourage townhomes, condos, or more spaces where commercial space and living space are in the same building.
“Our neighborhoods are made richer when they are made more diverse, and I mean that in just about every way, including housing types, neighborhood centers that are accessible by foot, by bicycle that create a sense of community,” Rosenbury said.
Growing pains
Mixed-use development, pockets of retail stores and restaurants and more affordable housing won’t happen with one City Council vote or one stroke of a pen in October. The recommendations for neighborhood development in Forward SGF will take years, or even decades to play out.
Over the past several years, the Cherry Street and Pickwick Avenue area in Springfield has become a popular center of activity for Rountree residents and visitors. With the increase in popularity, there has been more vehicle and foot traffic. More pedestrians brought up more safety concerns among the residents and business owners along East Cherry Street. “Traffic calming” features, bulb-outs and raised pedestrian crossings, have been built to slow traffic on East Cherry.
Nolin said that much of the success of place-based development and shaping districts will fall into public-private partnerships.
“There’s going to be a lot of things that the city either needs help with or shouldn’t be the primary driver on that are identified in this plan, so there’s going to be a big need for partnerships and coordination to really make change happen over the long term,” Nolin said.
It’s not as much about how one piece of property is zoned, even in comparison to the adjacent properties, but how well a property works with the rest of the properties in the district where it belongs. The concept of “placemaking” prioritizes design quality over land use.
“It’s meant to be a mix of a variety of housing types from single-family homes, row homes, multifamily and apartment buildings, and duplexes, everything in between,” Nolin said. “The mixed residential place-type leans more towards the multifamily and the more intense residential development, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have single-family homes in the neighborhood.”
Housing is a key sticking point of the Forward SGF comprehensive plan, not just on the neighborhood level, but across the city.
“The need for greater diversity in housing choice within the city was a frequently cited concern among workshop participants,” part of the Forward SGF “Issues and Opportunities” report reads. “The average mortgage payment and apartment rent in Springfield are 28 percent and 29 percent below the national average respectively. Despite lower housing costs, an estimated 24 percent of households in Springfield were considered cost-burdened (paying more than 30 percent of income for housing) in 2017.”
Flip-flopping Springfield’s codes for placemaking
At the briefing June 2, Springfield Director of Planning and Development Susan Istenes said shifting Springfield’s development community toward the “sense of place” concepts found in Forward SGF would be a major philosophical change.
“We’re going to have some challenges with design requirements, because we really don’t have those in the code right now,” Istenes said. “We need to have a foundation or a basis upon which to make our decisions as staff to make recommendations to (the City Council).
Istenes said it would take about two years, maybe more, to adopt the changes that will encourage development like Nolin described.
Fully updating Springfield’s codes for development would likely involve engagement with a consulting firm, conversations with the public and years of work.
“I think where the challenges are going to be is in design,” Istenes said. “This is flip-flopping. As we said, we haven’t had design requirements in our city code, we don’t hold people to certain design standards, and that’s going to be totally different now, once we adopt this.”
Nolin says the best way Springfield can manage its growth and future development is to direct development toward parts of Springfield that are already urbanized. That concept is built into the Forward SGF section on Rountree and into the Rountree Neighborhood Plan adopted in 2018.
Missouri is not one of them, but Nolin said there are other states in the Midwest where law requires cities to adopt policies on code adoption as part of their comprehensive plan updates. Nolin also said that Springfield shouldn’t relax its building codes to the point where a developer can build anything they want in any part of a neighborhood.
“In general, we’re talking about edges or key intersections, we’re not talking about putting up Mom and Pop’s Bait Shop next to your house; it’s more about picking areas where we want to see that kind of use mix encouraged within a neighborhood context,” Nolin said.
Forward SGF has been in development for three years. The full plan will be revealed to the public with a series of events in July and August, with the Springfield City Council scheduled to adopt the plan formally by ordinance Oct. 3. The plan will go to the Springfield Planning and Zoning Commission for consideration Sept. 15.
