As far as commutes go, Patience Powell has it easy.
Hers starts just past the kitchen counter and ends near the bottom of the stairs.
“The most terrible part of the commute is getting past my dog every day,” she said with a laugh.
Like an Old World shopkeeper, she lives above her business, Let It Rain Yarn. The 1,800-square-foot townhouse that she leases includes a ground-level commercial space for her yarn shop and an airy apartment above for her family. It is part of Village Center, a Mukilteo development completed in 2002 that mixes retail shops, offices and residential space.
For Powell, leasing a mixed-use space made it affordable to start a small business. She pays nothing to use the development’s clubhouse for Wednesday night knit and crochet get-togethers. Most of all, she likes the quality of life here, that neighbors know and look out for one another, and that a good Thai restaurant and a coffee shop are just a few strides down the street.
Her neighborhood doesn’t look like a typical development. The heart is a public plaza with outdoor dining, benches and a grassy park area. The village encourages walking by using narrower streets and larger walkways and paths.
There’s a name for what’s going on at Village Center: New Urbanism. Its proponents think it might be a smarter way to grow, and a solution to suburban sprawl.
New Urbanism is a movement that seeks to replace the typical suburban subdivision, with its cul-de-sacs of identical homes, with close-knit communities more like the ones earlier generations lived in, neighborhoods where people could live, work and shop all within a few blocks.
New Urbanism developments have some features in common: they are walkable and provide a range of housing options and jobs, according to the Congress for the New Urbanism, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco that works with architects, developers and planners.
With the Village Center development, Mukilteo is one of the first cities in Snohomish County to experiment with New Urbanism, albeit on a small scale. The Village Center covers just a fraction of the Harbour Pointe development it’s part of.
Other cities are trying mixed-use developments.
* In Everett, city officials and a California company that specializes in mixed-used developments are close to finalizing a deal. The company would transform 216 acres of former industrial land along the banks of the Snohomish River into an upscale development with retail space and hotel or residential units.
The first phase of the Port Gardner Wharf development on the Everett waterfront is expected to include 159 condos, shops, restaurants, offices and a grocery store.
* In Lynnwood, a Texas-based developer wants to build a $245 million project with retail stores, dense housing and hotels or office space on the site of the existing Lynnwood High School. The project hasn’t been approved.
* The Mill Creek Town Center is a mixed-use development in the city’s central core designed to serve as focal area for business and community events.
Not so long ago, live-work developments were virtually unheard of in the suburbs. City planning departments favored separating different types of development into separate zones: pods of housing, pods of strip malls and shopping centers, pods of office parks, and pods of civic institutions such as schools and libraries.
Before World War II, most people lived in city neighborhoods where most of life’s needs could be met within a few minutes walk. Life changed in the 1950s, partly because of federal low-interest home loans that made new housing affordable, and an interstate highway program that created and improved thousands of miles of roads. Not only could families afford a new home away from the city, they could easily drive to and from work.
Families had ample reason to leave city neighborhoods: the dirt, the crime, the crowding, the noise. Suburbia offered a new and better life. Builders responded to the demand and began to apply mass-production techniques to single family home construction. It didn’t take long for city business owners to follow their customers, and later, for corporations to follow the work force.
Heather McCartney, planning director for Mukilteo, first heard New Urbanism discussed in planning circles in the mid-1990s. The Redmond development Lions Gate was the first in the area to implement New Urbanism concepts.
“The project started to help all of us visualize,” McCartney said.
She said mixed-use developments can be an effective way to revitalize a downtown area by creating eyes and ears after dark in urban areas that otherwise are abandoned after businesses close for the evening.
That doesn’t mean mixed-use projects easily win approval. Most cities have zoning codes that prohibit them. In order to get Village Center built, the city and the developer created a special development agreement for the project. Few builders are accustomed to working on multiuse projects, and lenders may be hesitant to finance them, McCartney said.
Whether these developments will live up to expectations isn’t clear.
What shop owner Patience Powell doesn’t like is that all the commercial space isn’t filled with retail shops at Village Center. Her business is thriving now, but in the beginning, it was hard to attract customers to her shop, and she had to spend heavily on advertising. Some of the street-level shops around her serve as professional offices, rather than retail businesses.
“It would be nice to have more foot traffic,” she said. “It just hasn’t taken off the way they would have liked.”
McCartney said the Village Center development “is meeting our expectations.” Many city officials have asked to tour the development, she said. “This is something they want to see.”
“We know there will be more of it as it becomes more accepted,” she said.
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