City Plan: There is more at stake than you might think

 

By Robert Kloska

Recently, the Lilly Endowment of Indianapolis has been giving out grant money to institutions of higher education who attempt to stem the tide of “brain drain” in Indiana. It seems that many of the best and brightest Indiana college students leave the state after graduation for better opportunities elsewhere. This is a wonderful initiative by Lilly and my own institution, Holy Cross College, has benefited from it greatly. This past year we founded a new Career Development Center, which, according to our press release, is intended to facilitate the “…development of programs to entice students to remain within the State following graduation.” As a born and raised Hoosier and a graduate of Notre Dame, I have witnessed this exodus of the young first hand. The Lilly Endowment’s focus on job placement and career development is a positive step, but I believe much more basic and effective action can be taken to keep young people in our area. Even more important than finding jobs for them, we need to create a city that is attractive to them. Young people are very resourceful. If we would make South Bend an exciting city where they would really want to live, they would use all their resourcefulness to find jobs here. Fourteen years ago, I remember how many of my Notre Dame classmates simply moved to Chicago before they found employment. Lifestyle drove their decision about where to live.  Once committed to the city of Chicago, they all found or created jobs for themselves.

Although strides have been made in recent years, South Bend and Mishawaka are severely lacking in the things that college educated young people tend to want. At least until they get married, most desire an interesting city with a lively street life and pedestrian culture, a city that has at least some urban flavor, a city rife with convenient, informal social opportunities. I have yet to meet a young person who would prefer the single use, drive up, cookie cutter apartment complexes that dominate Michiana to row house apartments oriented to a city’s traditional street grid, or quaint apartments over shops in a lively district, or loft apartments in historic factories or warehouses, if these latter options were located in safe, interesting, pedestrian friendly neighborhoods.

Let’s face it, no city today will ever begin to attract young people because of the high quality of its strip malls, or expansive parking lots, or minimalist architecture or pedestrian-hostile roadways. Such features represent the same type of humdrum, soulless suburban sprawl that can be found virtually anywhere in the continental United States. There is nothing distinctive, nothing unique about it. The stores look the same. The asphalt looks the same. The traffic congestion looks the same. Doesn’t it speak volumes that some local businesses now proudly advertise on the radio that they are not located on Grape Road?

 

A couple weeks ago I attended a lecture at South Bend’s Century Center that seemed to address this very issue. John Norquist, the former mayor of Milwaukee, is the president of the Congress for New Urbanism (http://www.cnu.org/), an organization devoted to the revitalization of urban areas. His track record from his fifteen year tenure in Milwaukee is impressive, his vision for the future of South Bend encouraging. Within the past ten years, the concept of New Urbanism has been spreading across the country with great success. According to http://www.newurbanism.org/, “New Urbanism promotes the creation and restoration of diverse, walkable, compact, vibrant, mixed-use communities composed of the same components as conventional development, but assembled in a more integrated fashion, in the form of complete communities. These (communities) contain housing, work places, shops, entertainment, schools, parks, and civic facilities essential to the daily lives of the residents, all within easy walking distance of each other.” Norquist claims that when city cores return to some basic, time-tested principles of urban planning, they can compete successfully against the suburbs. His evidence is abundant. Recently, even large chain stores, such as Target and Kohl’s have begun to design two and three story stores to fit into traditional urban areas. New Urbanist developments in small towns and large are succeeding. Their positive impact is being felt economically and sociologically.  In almost all cases, highly educated young people flock to these areas.

 

My intention is not to sound a clarion call to abolish all suburbs and all strip malls – they have their place and are being built for a reason – it is simply a call to provide a reasonable alternative to them in South Bend. With gas prices rising, wouldn’t it be nice to have the option to live in a neighborhood where we didn’t have to be a slave to our car everyday – a place compact enough to allow us to walk to some places occasionally? Don’t believe for a moment that we do not have the population base to support such development. New Urbanism is working wonders in towns our size and much smaller.

 

With City Plan, we in South Bend have been given a tremendous opportunity by our mayor and our city planners to voice our opinions about the future of South Bend. If we can persuade them to boldly commit to the principles of New Urbanism, we could very well become the most progressive, exciting city in the state. We would attract young people who would find or create jobs here because they’d be excited to live in such a dynamic city. Businesses that otherwise wouldn’t even think of relocating to our area could be lured here because of the diversity of lifestyle options available. By all accounts, committing to such a visionary plan would take quite a bit of courage. Zoning ordinances and building codes would have to be rewritten. Traffic patterns would have to be altered. The status quo would have to be challenged. But many other cities are already doing this. If we do not begin, our own community will be left behind. Why can’t South Bend be one of the leaders? How can we afford not to do this?

 

I participate in the city planning process partly because I hope that my own children will consider living in South Bend when they grow up. Without a vibrant city, why would they want to stay? If they fled from a place with no serious urban alternative to Grape Road, who could blame them for leaving?

 

Robert Kloska, a husband and father of four young children, is Director of Campus Ministry at Holy Cross College and member of its philosophy and religious studies department. He highly recommends “taking the tour” of New Urbanism at http://www.cnu.org/. He also recommends becoming involved in City Plan at http://www.southbendcityplan.org/.