Clean Energy Springfield

Will sent me a copy of the Sierra Club's candidate survey yesterday, and asked if I wanted to make any comments. I zeroed in on the sprawl question and decided to write something about it:

6) What actions would you take to encourage development within Springfield’s city center, and discourage sprawl? but then couldn't find any quick way.

Last night's mayoral debate solved that!

Both candidates were asked about the possibility of "large-scale" residential growth downtown and its role in having a vibrant central city.

Davlin said he didn't "see downtown as having what's in downtown Chicago" and didn't know if he'd support "large-scale development." He said he likes the mix there now and hailed the growth of second-floor condos in downtown buildings.

Strom said downtown housing is as important, if not more so, than continued growth of the bar and entertainment industry. He favors "a philosophy ... that we need to increase residential properties downtown to drive the economy for other things."

There is so much attention in the urban world on the great American cities--Chicago, New York, Baltimore (my bad!), Philadelphia, and so on--that it's easy to forget that we used to have real urban small cities. In grad school, we worked for awhile with Jackson, Michigan, a city of 30,000 that used to have a solid union middle class, with a wonderful downtown. Now, it's struggling to keep its jobs, and it's downtown has been hollowed out to just a thin strip surrounded by parking. Sound familiar?

You can see the bones of Jackson and Springfield's urbanism, and they're good. It's a low-lying density that allows for walkability, work, retail. It's called neotraditional design or New Urbanism now, and it's trendy. But what they're creating aren't the dense urban cores of Chicago and New York. They're recreating the downtowns of Springfield and Jackson.

We don't need to recreate. We just need to fill back in.