A new lease on life

Like a family with three kids, city and county officials have their hands full with three types of communities, all clamoring for attention: downtown, the loud and brassy firstborn; the newborn outer suburbs, wailing in the crib; and the inner-ring suburbs, the quiet middle-child. Traditionally, the two demanding the most attention — downtowns and outer suburbs — have been local governments’ first priorities. Local officials focus on building roads and schools in the newer outlying suburbs; in the urban areas, they try to create a mix of development, including renovating office buildings and arts and convention centers.

Overlooked in the equation are the long-suffering inner-ring suburbs, literally trapped between the urban center and outer-ring burbs. Decaying from lack of attention, they have grown tired and worn. Partly as a result, some inner-ring suburb residents have moved to newer suburbs, often leaving their lower-income neighbors behind.

“[The inner-ring suburbs] all are suffering from common problems: the aging process and losing their tax base,” says William Hudnut, former mayor of Indianapolis, current senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute in Washington, D.C., and author of “Halfway to Everywhere: A Portrait of America’s First-Tier Suburbs.”

“First-tier is not a connotation of elite status,” says Hudnut, who also serves as a member of the Chevy Chase, Md., Town Council. First-tier suburbs “were the first ones founded after the central city — first in time, first in place.”

In addition to losing people and increasing poverty, the older suburbs are experiencing a deteriorating infrastructure, rapid ethnic change, a decreasing retail presence and poor school performance, Hudnut points out. To reverse those trends, some communities are focusing redevelopment efforts in inner-ring suburbs in an effort to reestablish their cultural, social and economic viability.

Blaming the throw-away society

Once seen as an answer to life in the city, inner suburbs have suffered from the American cultural attitude of “use it up and throw it away,” Hudnut says. “Move up and move out. You make it in the first suburb, and then you move on. These places become jumping-off communities for people.”

But across the country, Hudnut says, local officials in places like Emeryville, Calif., and Chelsea, Mass., are renewing their acquaintance with inner-ring suburbs, forging public-private partnerships to bring them back to life and allowing them to age gracefully.

Emeryville, which is adjacent to Oakland on the east side of San Francisco Bay, began losing businesses in the 1960s because of a high cost of living. It soon found itself littered with abandoned buildings and land, and pollution and brownfields, according to City Manager John Flores.

After Flores was hired in the 1980s, vacant warehouses were converted to artists’ lofts, and a 33-story condominium building was built along the waterfront. His job included adding trees and parks to the community, and attracting more service and technology companies to an area that once housed heavy industry. The city brought in big-box retail and started building new housing.

Developers and businesses were drawn to Emeryville for several reasons, including the city’s central location at the nexus of four Bay Area freeways and the availability of large parcels of land, which gave it an edge over neighboring cities, according to “Behind the Boomtown,” a report by the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy. City government’s orientation toward business, low tax rates and desire to provide a smooth development process made locating in Emeryville attractive, the report says.

Extensive capital improvements provided the necessary infrastructure for new, high-intensity land uses. The city’s willingness to allow large-scale developments that changed the shape and character of the landscape provided developers with opportunities rarely found in the densely built urban environment of the East Bay, according to the report.

The city also made extensive use of state-granted redevelopment powers to take land for private development and to fund large-scale redevelopment efforts, according to the report. With 95 percent of the city under the jurisdiction of the redevelopment agency, the scope of the powers extended to nearly every parcel of land.

Like Emeryville, other communities are attracting new retailers to places once home to crabgrass and boarded-up strip malls. New residents, tired of long commutes, are giving inner-ring suburbs a second look. For example, parts of Arlington County, Va., such as the Clarendon neighborhood, have become revitalized after a new grocery store, new shopping center and new housing were built. “In one generation, Arlington has gone from a declining inner-ring suburb to a vibrant urban community by successfully pairing transit with good urban design based on a mix of uses and ‘walkability,’” says Chris Zimmerman, Arlington County board member.

Location, location, location

Several communities have found that retailers provide the platform for developing inner-ring suburbs. To attract business growth, they are playing up the strengths of inner burbs, such as a close-in location and unique neighborhoods.

Silver Spring, Md., once was written off as a tired inner-suburb in Montgomery County, but, today, it has seen a rebirth through a $400 million redevelopment effort. The project follows one of Hudnut’s pieces of advice: build near transportation. Silver Spring is one of the busiest subway stops on the Washington, D.C., area’s Metro system.

Redevelopment first caught the attention of Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan 10 years ago in his first term. As part of an aggressive smart-growth program, Duncan made inner-suburbs a priority. “He had a vision from day one for what Silver Spring could be, and he’s gotten the right people to come to the table and share his vision, and it’s happening right now,” says Bonnie Ayers, Montgomery County spokesperson.

The county bought 22 acres in the Silver Spring area and hired The Peterson Co. in Fairfax, Va., to help make it more livable. The area was not attractive to residents because they had to travel out of it to find a large grocery store, hardware store, movie theater or book store — the kinds of amenities residents expect in a community.

County officials thought that new retail would revitalize the core and spread out from there. At first, attracting new tenants was not easy. The demographics were good, but retailers only would be convinced if other tenants were making the move with them. After considerable effort by the city and developer, stores began moving in, and, more importantly, they were successful. The county attracted a Whole Foods supermarket and cultural attractions such as the American Film Institute Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. Cable TV giant Discovery Communications also moved its headquarters there from Bethesda, Md. Now, the Silver Spring Whole Foods store is ranked number three in sales among the company’s 180 stores.

Like Silver Spring predicted, the success of the first few businesses bred further success. Today, the city’s retail space is 69 percent leased, and letters of intent to lease an additional 11 percent of the space have been signed. Borders will open a bookstore there this spring.

Strength in numbers

Some cities have banded together to renew their inner suburbs. For example, the Michigan Suburbs Alliance (MSA), which is composed of 24 cities with a combined population of 1 million people, formed in 2002. The Michigan cities banded together initially because “there was a growing sense among city officials that the issues confronting them were beyond their control,” says alliance Executive Director Jim Townsend. “As a group, they can possibly influence public policies that contribute to or subsidize sprawl.”

The MSA is implementing a Redevelopment-Ready Communities Project. The group is identifying what successful inner suburbs are doing to attract and keep businesses and residents, and then developing a set of redevelopment process standards for its members.

Once the standards are in place, the MSA will invite an independent third party to review its members’ redevelopment processes and certify that they meet the standards. Certification will demonstrate that the cities have favorable environments for development, and it will give cities a marketing tool that can be used to attract developers. “We [try to stop] the cycle of build-and-abandon, and encourage rebuilding these older communities,” Townsend says. “One way we do that is to get communities to work together on redevelopment strategies, to ‘brand’ themselves as ‘redevelopment-ready.’”

“We have to succeed in people demanding to live in older suburbs,” says Townsend, whose nonprofit corporation makes its home in Ferndale, an older inner-ring suburb. “The chief advantage of the inner suburbs is their central location within a region, between the central city and the newly developed exurbs. They feature lots of access to transportation links and a region’s major job centers and other destinations, so you can get lower commute times and generally have more options for things to do.”

The alliance also promotes inner suburbs as more “walkable” because many were developed initially as stops on trolley or train lines. Many also feature older “they don’t make them like they used to” housing stock and a decent amount of density to support stimulating nightlife.

Looking to the future, the main challenge facing inner suburbs, according to Townsend, is “to realize they must grow to survive. Costs in these communities are going up rapidly, so they have to figure out how to generate more tax revenue without taxing their populations into oblivion. That means building up, getting more dense — not things that most suburbanites have traditionally embraced.”

“In short, the Ozzy and Harriet model, nuclear family-centered, segregated land-uses version of suburbia does not work, especially in older suburbs,” Townsend says. “We need to engage in a dialogue that will help residents come up with a new vision of their communities that is sustainable.”

Mary Ann Barton is a freelance writer based in Arlington, Va.

12 tips to turn inner suburbs around

While there is no silver bullet to revitalizing inner suburbs, William Hudnut, former mayor of Indianapolis and senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute in Washington, D.C., offers 12 tips to help turn inner-suburbs into vibrant communities:

1. Develop around transit.
2. Plan for mixed-use space. Zone retail and residential together.
3. Create a sense of place.
4. Spare open and green space.
5. Think small. Convert an old gas station into a coffee shop.
6. Forge partnerships with the private sector, universities, organizations, schools and faith-based institutions.
7. Treat waterfront as an asset.
8. Have a plan and stick to it.
9. Make life festive. Add arts and culture so people enjoy life.
10. Build housing. Rehab multifamily and single-family homes.
11. Regenerate the tax base. Instead of leaving a building empty, convert it into a restaurant.
12. Preserve what is good.