Planning magazine — July 1986

Office in the Dell

A new kind of "downtown" is emerging in the suburbs, and local officials are just now beginning to deal with some of the
headaches it causes.

By William Fulton

Thirty miles northeast of midtown Manhattan, Stamford, Connecticut (pop. 102,000), has become one of the leading corporate headquarters cities in the world. In Houston, the Galleria-Post Oak area would be the ninth-largest downtown in America — if it were a downtown, instead of a quasi suburb 10 miles away. In California, the Orange County city of Costa Mesa, 35 miles from Los Angeles City Hall, is building a $65 million performing arts center to complement a forest of office buildings and one of the largest shopping malls in the country. And outside Dallas, a former ranch called Las Colinas, strategically located close to the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, is rapidly becoming the most prestigious corporate address in the region.

All across the country, a new kind of "downtown" is emerging. Like the traditional urban downtown, it is a center for employment, commerce, and culture. But it's usually located far from the center of the old city, in an area that until recently was thought of as a bucolic suburb. Some of these centers are emerging almost overnight in older, traditionally low-rise suburban shopping areas. Others are being planned from scratch on raw land, much as the new towns of the 1960s were. And planners and researchers are puzzled about what they represent and how to deal with them.

In fact, experts in the field haven't even been able to agree on what to call them. Terms like "suburban activity centers," "urban villages," "outer cities," and "mega-centers" have been kicked around, but nothing has caught on.

Where the jobs are

Whatever they should be called, suburban downtowns are everywhere, from New Jersey and Michigan to Texas and California. "The suburban downtown phenomenon is very widespread," says Peter Muller, a University of Miami geographer, who has been researching them. "And it's not restricted to the Sun Belt."

In simplest terms, suburban downtowns are employment centers, representing a shift of jobs away from central cities. Office employers — the lifeblood of the postwar downtown — have been heading for the suburbs in increasing numbers. As one builder in Las Colinas was quoted as saying, "Corporations are attracted to the same amenities as residential buyers" — fresh air, grass, and proximity to a growing percentage of the labor force.

In fact, the unprecedented pace of office construction in the last five years has dramatically altered the shape of suburban America. While the suburban population is growing slowly, employment is mushrooming. According to The Office Network of Houston, which tracks construction and leasing of office space nationally, 57 percent of all U.S. office space was located in traditional downtown areas in 1981, while 43 percent was elsewhere. In the last five years, so much construction has gone on in the suburbs that the figures have flipped — 57 percent is now located outside of urban downtowns and only 43 percent is in the old central business districts.

The nature of suburban employment also is changing rapidly. When the rush to the suburbs began just a few years ago, it was made up mostly of "back office" workers like clerical employees in banks' credit card operations. But real estate location experts say that middle management is heading for the suburbs now, too. For example, Merrill Lynch's large new operation in Princeton, New Jersey, includes 50 money-market managers. Only a few years ago, such a move from Wall Street would have been unthinkable. Following the middle managers to the suburbs are large accounting and law firms and other service-oriented businesses traditionally found only in big-city downtowns.

"All the stuff that doesn't have to be downtown is moving to the suburbs," says David Dowall, professor of urban and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley.

New look

Because of this massive employment shift, a whole new kind of city is being created in the suburbs. But as real estate consultant Christopher Leinberger, managing partner of California-based Roberts Charles Lesser, Inc., puts it: "Nobody has an image of what that city should be." Developers want to build at urban densities. Planners demand suburban-style height and parking requirements. And residents often rebel at the resulting traffic congestion.

The result, says Leinberger, is something that is "neither fish nor fowl." The new downtowns aren't really suburban. They employ up to 100,000 people, often in tall office buildings. And even when they're located close to commuter rail stations, they're frequently characterized by massive traffic jams.

But new downtowns aren't really urban, either. Most are designed for the automobile, with little concern for pedestrians or transit riders and with few of the urban characteristics that can make a downtown job enjoyable. And some of the businesses are reporting difficulty finding employees for lower paying jobs. Having moved to the suburbs partly to draw upon the attractive suburban work force, they're inaccessible to the urban working class — a group that, ironically, could become more important as the number of suburban women looking to reenter the work force dwindles. "It's increasingly difficult to find housewives in the suburbs sitting at home not working," says Dowall.

In short, as Houston developer Giorgio Borlenghi put it at a conference on the subject not long ago: "Satellite areas perform a city's urban functions, but they don't become downtowns."

Denial

Why not? Why have whole new cities sprung up in front of us over the last 10 years without much attention from planners or designers? They've been ignored partly out of snobbishness — as if the suburbs weren't worthy of serious attention, even while they were capturing two-thirds of all office construction, as they have been doing over the past few years.

"We've been ignoring a major part of our urban landscape," says J. Thomas Black, staff vice-president of the Urban Land Institute, which is just beginning to research the subject. "There is a tremendous bias among urban designers, who don't like to admit that the suburban centers exist. There's a real shortage of concepts as to what the alternatives are."

"Suburban planners are used to dealing with smaller scale development problems, what to do with a commercial strip, for instance," notes APA deputy director Frank So, who helped organize the "Suburbs Becoming Cities" workshop being presented this month in Philadelphia. "I don't know how many of those planners realize that they are on a new plateau, where they're going to be faced with 20-to-30-story office buildings."

Many researchers and consultants who have been looking at the suburbs agree that suburban planners — used to dealing with subdivision regulations and shopping malls — may not be up to the office invasion.

Talking about the mishmash of development around Princeton, Ingrid Reed, the university administrator who chairs the Mercer County Planning Board in New Jersey, complains: "I have not seen any planners who can tell me how to do it better."

One of the reasons few suburban downtowns have done better is that, as suburban buildings have gotten bigger, the underlying assumptions about suburban development — auto orientation, campus settings, low scale — haven't changed.

"When you take certain things for granted, such as the use of the automobile, that implies a certain pattern," says ULI's Black. "You get a driveway and a parking lot and a building, and they don't relate to each other in some sensible way." Moreover, say some experts, suburban areas are willing to accept greater density — temporarily ignoring side effects like traffic jams — but they often won't accept taller buildings.

"A building is just like a balloon," says John Kriken, a partner with the architecture firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in San Francisco. "It blows up to fill out the envelope allowed by law." In many suburban communities, Kriken adds, allowable floor area ratio is high — four, five, even eight to one — but height is limited to between three and six stories. That means buildings will be low and bulky, leaving designers little room to create "people spaces."

In Leinberger's view, the low-rise approach is not in the suburbs' best interest. Campus settings, he says, are no more useful than surface parking lots in creating a downtown atmosphere. "Even with a lot of grass, it's the same basic thing — there's no way you can actually walk from building to building." And in Westport, Connecticut, once the archetypal affluent suburb, local residents are, in fact, not worried about "Manhattanization" so much as encroaching "Stamfordization" — the onslaught of large, corporate-type office campuses.

Worries

Among suburban dwellers, there is fear that the suburban downtown is bringing the city and its problems — particularly traffic congestion — to the tranquil areas they moved to in order to escape the city in the first place. And so they are organizing themselves to resist the commercial growth of the suburbs.

"This is the hottest political issue in the country," says Leinberger. "The suburbs are trying to hang on to the image of what they were 20 or 30 years ago."

"I think we're revving up for the next growth control era," adds David Dowall. "Only this time they'll be commercial and industrial growth controls."

In Northern California, where the residential growth control movement reached its zenith in the late 1970s, there is now a renewed effort to restrict commercial growth through ballot initiatives. Even in North Carolina, traditionally a state with few restraints on economic growth, growth-control advocates have been elected to local office in several cities in the fast-growing Research Triangle area.

Tax base blues

Interestingly, the commercial development that many suburbanites believe will choke them has been partly self-induced. In the 1970s, commercial growth often was favored over residential growth by communities eager to boost sales tax revenues, reported Cynthia Kroll, a regional economist with the Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, in a recent study on the issue. Since 1980, however, commercial development growth management measures have surged.

A good example is Walnut Creek, an affluent suburban community in Contra Costa County, 20 miles east of San Francisco. Office space in Walnut Creek grew from 400,000 square feet in 1970 to 2.3 million in 1980. In 1975, the city's downtown plan set a height limit of 10 stories near the BART transit station and six stories elsewhere in the downtown. But it proposed living with the current street system, while clustering commercial growth around the BART station, near a charming old part of the downtown.

Since 1980, however, office space in Walnut Creek has doubled to five million square feet, and six to eight mid-rise office buildings have grown up around the BART station. However, BART has not picked up many of the new commuters, and significant development has occurred outside the downtown. The number of workers driving into Walnut Creek from nearby communities has doubled. At the same time, the neighboring city of Concord has been encouraging the construction of large commercial developments, such as Bank of America's four-building, million-square-foot complex, a redevelopment project that opened this spring, and that has created more through traffic in Walnut Creek. As the in-commuting increased, traffic at major intersections in Walnut Creek deteriorated to what traffic engineers call the "E" level of service — just short of gridlock. The response from the residents was to look aggressively for ways to slow or freeze development.

"This used to be a community that had a sense of place," says Cynthia Kroll. "Now all of a sudden it's urban, and it never expected that to happen."

In response, city residents last year passed two growth control initiatives reminiscent of the Bay Area's residential growth-control measures of the 1970s. One initiative, passed in March 1985, froze height limits on all parcels of land within the city and reduced the overall height limit to six stories. In November, voters approved a second measure banning all commercial construction until traffic flow at major intersections improved to the "D" level of service. At the same time, two growth control advocates were elected to the city council.

For the moment, commercial construction is stopped, but in the long run it is unclear whether the measure will lead to less construction or more highways. "Well never be able to achieve these service levels," says Gary Binger, Walnut Creek's director of community development. "It's forcing us into the mode of building more highways."

Going with the flow

Not every suburb is fighting commercial development. Some older, close-in suburbs have accepted the fact that they will inevitably become more urban and have planned accordingly. Thanks largely to the Washington, D.C., Metro rail system, Bethesda, Maryland, has been transformed from a quiet suburb to a booming "outer city" with 10-story hotels and 20-story office buildings — but is using strict design and development controls in hopes of creating a lively, urban atmosphere. (See "Bethesda Stages a Beauty Contest for Developers," January 1985.)

Bellevue, Washington, outside Seattle, has taken a similar approach. Faced with a large amount of suburban-type commercial development scattered all over the city, Bellevue decided to concentrate construction in its central area, converting it into a true "urban downtown." Strict design controls require pedestrian orientation for all buildings, and parking requirements have been reduced to urban levels (2.5 to three spaces per 1,000 square feet). The downtown is being tied by pedestrian walkways to a transit (bus) hub, and independent parking garages and lots are prohibited in the downtown.

"We've decided we are going to be an urban place, at least downtown," says Mark Hinshaw, Bellevue's staff urban designer.

Other new suburban centers, such as Las Colinas, have taken advantage of the vast land ownership and high ambitions of private developers to create an idyllic environment that seeks to be both urban and suburban.

Geographer Peter Muller calls Las Colinas, a 12,000-acre former ranch just five miles from the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, "the first city of the twenty-first century." It is the brainchild of Dallas developer Ben Carpenter, whose family assembled the ranch and has lived there for decades. Las Colinas is a new town in conception, with residential, cultural, and employment areas all contained within the development. But it has been constructed with attention to amenities; every time Carpenter found a drainage problem, for example, he solved it by creating a small lake or creek, rather than building a concrete culvert. And the core of its commercial area — called the urban center — could become a prototype for suburban downtowns.

The urban center focuses on a lake, created at a cost of $ 1 million. A huge parking garage is hidden from a pedestrian "canal walk" by a row of old world fake fronts and is topped by a two-acre landscaped plaza. Water taxis carry passengers from place to place within the urban center. Carpenter has built a ramp to accommodate a future people-mover and has joined a group of developers offering a right-of-way for Dallas's future light rail system. Blessed with the 1980s version of a "great location" (proximity to a nationally significant airport), Carpenter is clearly selling a suburban downtown by giving it a sense of place.

Neither fish nor fowl

But most of the new suburban downtowns are neither Bethesda nor Las Colinas. Most are stuck somewhere in between, usually in a traffic jam — the case of Tyson's Corner, Virginia, or the corporate campuses of Westchester and Connecticut. Traffic is perhaps the most visible side effect of intense suburban development — and, suburban planners say, traffic is what riles up suburban residents more than anything else.

"The thing that drives all the negatives — it's all transportation," says Binger, who notes that most of the Walnut Creek disputes have been prompted by traffic concerns.

In some suburbs, important strides have been made through transportation systems management (TSM) techniques. In Pleasanton, California, 20 miles south of Walnut Creek, the massive Hacienda Business Park (which will contain more than 10 million square feet of space when completed) has reduced commuting trips by more than 40 percent in a single year through TSM measures such as free shuttle buses to the nearest BART station. And at Warner Center in Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley, about 20 percent of employees either take the bus or carpool — an amazing statistic, considering that the center is 25 miles from downtown Los Angeles and surrounded by low-density residential neighborhoods.

New roads?

Increasingly, construction of new highways is being considered as a serious option, despite the cost. Local developers are being asked to pick up more of the cost in roads, and local governments are putting up more money as well. Santa Clara County, California, home of Silicon Valley and San Jose, recently passed a half-cent sales tax — in effect for 10 years only — to construct new highways.

"The only answer is new expressways," says Peter Muller, reflecting on his visits to a dozen or more suburban downtowns. That's anathema to everything in planning, I know. But, with the suburban majority in the House of Representatives, I can see it as a big issue in the 1990s."

Narrowly focused transportation measures may keep traffic barely under control around the suburban downtowns. But in the long run, they are not likely to succeed in improving the environment of suburban downtowns. Without broader measures to improve function and design, suburban centers might find themselves in the same kind of vicious traffic circle that characterized cities in the 1950s and 1960s.

Many of the planners researching and working in the suburbs today agree that the potential for lively and interesting suburban downtowns exists, if only the suburbs had the cohesiveness and political will to be creative.

The answer might be deceptively simple if the underlying assumptions of suburban development are challenged. "Bring the buildings closer together," says Hinshaw, the urban designer from Bellevue. "Unless you have a concentration of some level of intensity, you're not going to have anything going."

In fact, many of the suburban downtowns, such as Houston's Galleria-Post Oak area, are so densely built up that the critical mass for better planning and design already exists. "In Post Oak, you actually feel as though you could walk and not be ridiculed," says Dowall.

The trick in design terms is to accommodate cars, transit riders, and pedestrians all in the same space. And an increasing number of planners and designers are talking about turning parking, that old nemesis of good urban design, into a positive aspect. Parking garages, they say, can help to create good urban spaces. "It's crazy from an economic point of view to build a parking garage unless the land values are high," says Dowall, "but it may be very important for urban design."

What's needed

The question remains, however, whether the political will exists in the suburbs to take such bold steps. One planner, when told of innovative design efforts in a project in Washington's northern Virginia suburbs, responded by saying: "The concepts that bind Fairfax County together are the roadway networks. I wonder if the people spaces will work."

And Ingrid Reed, the planning commissioner from Princeton, admits that while aesthetic disasters in the suburbs bother her, they probably don't bother many of her constituents. "It's the traffic issue that bugs people. I'm not sure that there is any consensus on making suburbs better."

William Fulton is a contributing editor to Planning.