News Roundup

By Irene Liguori

Fighting to make left turns onto Transit Road. Racing the kids to the Pepsi Center. Using a gallon of gas to get a gallon of milk. And fuming about all that driving.

There must be a way to serve the needs of people, not cars, in the suburbs.

Actually, there is.

Welcome to the “walkable community”— a design movement transforming American suburban neighborhoods just as the cul-de-sac and strip mall once did. It could be the new green wave of the future for Western New York, changing forever the built environment as we know it in an era of obscene gas prices.

Lancaster gave a thumbs up to a walkable community project earlier this month. Amherst’s Town Board slammed the brakes on another. What’s totally mainstream in Atlanta — where National Public Radio last month featured a successful walkable community called Atlantic Station — is still mostly strange and scary here.

“We are behind the times here in Western New York,” acknowledged Bill Tuyn, president-elect of the Buffalo Niagara Builders Association and a passionate proponent of the walkable community concept.

“Yes, people here are thinking about walkable communities, but it’s hard, because until someone does it here successfully — well, no one wants to be the pioneer,” Tuyn said. “You know what happened to the pioneers. They got slaughtered.”

Right now, the suburban dweller has little choice but to get in a car to seek out necessities: food, job, clothing and, yes, more gasoline.

By contrast, the “walkable community” uses a dense, villagelike mix of homes and businesses to create historic-looking neighborhoods where people can walk to get the things they need, wasting less fuel and time spent sitting in a car.

Amherst, Clarence and Grand Island have already altered zoning codes to accommodate walkable communities — also known as “smart growth” or “new urbanism.”

Even so, it has been a hard sell for local developers. Some projects have fallen flat from public opposition. For others, the approval process has dragged on interminably.

In Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., a developer resorted to buying plane tickets to Maryland for the lord mayor and two key officials. He wanted them to see firsthand the kind of community he wanted to build. Today, John Hawley’s 50-acre project called The Village is one-fifth complete.

Buffalo developer Dominick Piestrak also visited Maryland’s award-winning Kentlands and wants badly to build something like it in Western New York. But so far, he has had to shelve two plans in Clarence and Cheektowaga.

A year after Benderson Development Co. first introduced the idea for a 34-acre smart-growth project called Town Centre, a gun-shy Amherst Town Board applied the brakes early this month, stalling a zoning vote until next week.

Tuyn, who works for Greenman- Pedersen Inc., has conceptual drawings in his office for about a half-dozen new urbanism communities in Lancaster, Clarence, Amherst, Wheatfield and Grand Island. His company has long been doing these kinds of projects in other states.

Here, Tuyn anxiously follows the sagas of town boards where such projects have been floated so far.

“Six people [in the audience] can kill a project, even if the vast majority of the public supports it,” Tuyn laments. “We need to have people in the room at these meetings representing smart-growth principles.”

Victor A. Martucci, vice president for land and diversification with Marrano/Marc Equity Corp., agrees.

“In some of these communities, elected officials find themselves reacting to a vocal minority, instead of looking at what’s best for the community as a whole,” he said.

“At some point, the cost of driving is going to force people to change their lifestyles, and this type of development is perfect for addressing that problem. It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when,” Martucci added.

After eight years of effort and compromise, Martucci has won approval from the Lancaster Town Board for a key zoning change allowing his company’s “walkable community” project — a 271-acre spread called Pleasant Meadows — to go forward as planned.

A central 40-acre greenspace incorporating wetlands will be ringed with homes in all price ranges and types, enabling residents to live in Pleasant Meadows from the time they buy a starter home to the time they want to downsize to a patio home. Retail shops and offices are interwoven in the mix, reducing the need to drive and reducing strain on busy Walden Avenue.

Suburban residents get nervous when developers put forward large new residential developments that mix homes and businesses. Many local zoning ordinances have no provision to accept smart-growth development. Amherst does, but some residents there remain fearful.

“How out touch are these people [in Amherst] who say they don’t want residential in [Town Centre]?” said Piestrak, who has no involvement with Town Centre, a Benderson project.

“Here you’re saying to people: ‘Look, we’re going to eliminate the need for you to drive, and everybody will be better for it.’ When gas prices hit $5 a gallon, people are going to say: ‘Geez, I sure wish I could walk to my favorite restaurant.’ They will realize the value of a walkable community,” Piestrak said.

Lancaster Councilwoman Donna G. Stempniak, who has been involved with the town’s Planning Board for 30 years, says she can understand why people get spooked.

“A lot of people think ‘smart growth’ means ‘no growth,’ ” said Stempniak, who got excited about walkable communities when a relative took her to visit Easton Town Center in Columbus, Ohio.

“That’s not true. It’s a mind-set we’ve got to change, and that’s above and beyond what the zoning codes can do. We need to rethink our energy use. We can’t just buy energy-efficient cars — we need to plan communities so that the everyday services we need are closer to us,” Stempniak said.

Changing that mind-set may take some doing. A teen who spoke against the Pleasant Meadows development at a recent town meeting said she thought it ridiculous to think that anyone would walk from home along a sidewalk to a cluster of neighborhood businesses.

“How many people with cars would really walk to the retail stores?” she asked.

No one in the audience of perhaps 50 people raised their hands.

David Mansell, who lives in a traditional Lancaster subdivision bordering the future Pleasant Meadows development, doesn’t like the idea of a patch of neighborhood businesses tucked 150 feet from his backyard property line.

“People aren’t accepting this because they don’t know better,” said local attorney George Grasser, founder of Partners for a Livable New York. “People walk more at Niagara- on-the-Lake than they would walk elsewhere because of the vibrancy of the downtown area.”

Two years ago, Grasser put his money where his mouth is — launching a small, 23-home walkable community called the Gardens at Oxbow, located on the outskirts of the Village of Lewiston.

Only four homes have been built so far. All the facades are copied from historic homes of varying styles, and garages are discretely tucked to the rear. Quaint, spindled front porches overlook a central green commons and a pond.

One of Grasser’s partners, William Game, bought one of the four homes. Two others have sold, and one picture-postcard yellow house has sat empty for months for reasons Game says he can’t fathom.

A full-color newspaper ad drew lots of interest but no takers. “They come, they ooh and aah, we spend hours with them,” Game said, “and then we don’t hear anything again.”

iliguori@buffnews.com