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The Return of the Planner

Urban planning departments have been in decline for decades. Now they are reviving--with the nation's capital leading the way.

If you discuss the urban history of Washington D.C., with any student of the subject, two names from the past come up right away. One is Pierre L'Enfant, the Frenchman whom George Washington hired to lay a city plan over the newborn capital's swampy lowlands. The other is James McMillan, whose 1901 design for Washington's Mall gave the city its monumental grandeur. L'Enfant and McMillan were not only master designers of the nation's capital--they are icons of city planning in the United States.

So it is a bit peculiar that planning went out of style here for much of the 1980s and '90s. The District of Columbia's planning office shrank to fewer than a dozen staffers, a fraction of what is typical for a city of over half a million people. With so little manpower, the idea of planners as visionaries all but faded away. The people in the planning office became paper-pushers. They processed building permits and left the larger questions of urban design to any developer who was willing to build in the slumping city rather than in the burgeoning suburbs.

It was a sad time for anyone who believed in urban planning as a positive governmental force. But it's over now, and there's one primary reason: Andy Altman. Over the past five years as chief of the D.C. planning office, Altman has not only restored the agency's influence within city government but placed Washington itself back at the forefront of debate about the future of the planning profession. To be sure, Washington's current building boom is not entirely Altman's doing. But he has the nation's capital thinking big again, and developers have responded by hoisting more cranes into the sky than D.C. has seen in modern memory.

High-rise apartment towers are appearing all over the east end of downtown D.C. Along the once-blighted drag of U Street, where Altman and his wife fixed up a row house, stylish loft buildings are opening up. And not far from the U.S. Capitol, on the other side of a highway that few Washingtonians cross, a whole new neighborhood is under construction on the banks of the forgotten Anacostia River. Eventually, 100,000 people will work there by day, and 11,000 will live there at night.

GENERATIONAL CHANGE

The significance of planning's comeback extends far beyond one city, or one metro area. Altman has emerged on the scene in Washington just as a new generation of big-city planners is enjoying a surge of political support. Planning is gaining stature in New York and Chicago, which find themselves managing population growth after years of fighting decline. Planning directors in those cities are in the enviable if contentious position of guiding neighborhoods through their first wave of gentrification and growth in decades.

In Cleveland, Mayor Jane Campbell is a big believer in city planning- -her husband was Cleveland's planner for 20 years--and she has given 35-year-old Chris Ronayne the job of drawing up a blueprint for Cleveland's lakefront. In Denver, Mayor John Hickenlooper went to great lengths to recruit Peter Park, the New Urbanist planner who had rebuilt the planning department in Milwaukee. "We had population growth even when our economy was in recession," Hickenlooper says of the Mile-High City. "It's important for us to create an environment that can allow for economic growth, but at the same time protect our quality of life. Denver has a chance to be one of the first cities in the country that does it right."

Planning isn't on the rise everywhere in these tight budget times. Orange County, California, laid off dozens of planners in 2002 after mismanagement left their agency broke. Where cities aren't growing or are losing population, politicians tend to view planning departments as an unnecessary luxury--or even as a layer of red tape that turns developers away. When a budget crisis hit Cincinnati last year, Mayor Charlie Luken dismantled the city's planning agency altogether. "Police over planners" is the way he summed up his priorities. The planning chief ousted by Luken, Elizabeth Blume, accepts some responsibility for the collapse. "It's incumbent on planners to say how are we relevant," she says, "how are we helping the city make better decisions on physical development as well as capital investment. At some level, the department wasn't able to demonstrate its relevance--or at least that it was as relevant as picking up the trash."

Modern-day public planners are a vulnerable breed, one that bears no resemblance to the power brokers of the mid-20th century, the ones such as New York's Robert Moses, who cultivated their own impregnable sources of revenue as well as their own bases of political power. Today, planners can succeed only with the support of the mayors they work for. They don't have the luxury of indulging in academic discussions about the future of cities; what they need to focus on is maneuvering their way through the touchy local politics that surround nearly every development issue.

Those new rules are ones that Andy Altman understands. He enjoys firm backing from Mayor Anthony Williams, who wants to restore planning's stature in the image of L'Enfant and McMillan, but who places that goal second to getting shovels in the ground and tangible progress made in the short run. "I like planning to be involved in doing things, not just planning things," Altman says. "Planning needs to be aggressive. If your time horizon is too long, then you'll be out of the game."

PLANNING AS POLITICS

The 40-year-old Altman has sunken eyes, thinning dark hair and a kinetic impatience that comes through as he keys text messages into his wireless device while simultaneously holding a conversation. He has an unusual resume that has toned his political sophistication. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Altman moved to Los Angeles after graduate school to serve as redevelopment adviser to Tom Bradley, then the mayor there. Working for Bradley led Altman to see planning the way politicians do: as a valuable tool if it produces development and a waste of time if it doesn't. "If planners don't understand politics, and if they're not political," Altman warns, "then they're not going to be effective as planners."

An early test of that attitude came in 1990. Developers in L.A. were getting city aid to build office towers and hotels downtown, at a time when janitors were striking over their $4.25 hourly wage. Labor unrest threatened to grind the projects to a halt. Altman helped broker a compromise that guaranteed better pay for service workers at the new downtown businesses--the nation's first local "living wage" policy. Business leaders screamed about it, but the developments went on as planned.

Altman left the mayor's office to head planning in L.A.'s redevelopment agency, and later moved to Oakland, where he worked for Mayor Jerry Brown. When Altman arrived in Washington in 1999 to work for the newly elected Anthony Williams, he found a decimated planning office ravaged by budget cuts. Planning's decline in resources and professionalism had tracked the city's own slide toward bankruptcy. It also followed former mayor Marion Barry's conversion from a supporter of planning in the early '80s to an anything-goes crony of developers. City priorities such as building a "living downtown" succumbed to the developer's religion of putting land to its "highest and best use." In Washington that meant blocky office buildings, and for more than a decade, that's about all that got built in Washington.

Williams and Altman were determined to change this. With support from D.C.'s city council, planning's budget more than tripled to $7 million, enough for Altman to build up a current staff of 67 people. To Williams, rebuilding the planning office was a critical part of his wider agenda of restoring integrity in public management. The mayor saw land use planning not just as a blueprint for developers but also as an essential tool for guiding public spending on infrastructure and capital projects over time.

In addition, Williams wanted planning to help improve delivery of basic services at the neighborhood level. One of Altman's first endeavors was to chop the city into 39 neighborhood clusters and to send neighborhood planners out to ask residents in each cluster what they wanted to see from city government. The planners put the responses--everything from improving trash collection to stepping up crime fighting--into a database that all city agencies can access. Agencies are required to address these priorities in their budgets and, to foster accountability, their progress is tracked in the planning database.

Altman's critics call these "SNAPs"--or "strategic neighborhood action plans"--a feel-good political tool rather than serious planning. But Altman argues that SNAPs were needed to re-introduce Washingtonians to the very idea of planning after so many dormant years. "People said, 'Is this really planning? You're talking about crime and potholes.' My answer is that people didn't feel like planning had credibility to talk about the long-term shape of their neighborhoods if the city government can't deliver the basics."

DECISIVE MOMENT

In a conference room at his offices a few blocks north of the U.S. Capitol, Altman unrolls a wall-sized poster. It shows two-dozen projects that his planners, along with quite a few paid consultants, have been working on. There are giant plans to reshape miles of D.C.'s waterfront. And there are tiny plans to revive a commercial street or to increase density around a Metro station. Indeed, there is a hyperactivity of planning going on in Washington.

Altman arrived in Washington at the perfect time. A surge of demand for city living has stabilized D.C.'s long-declining population. Some of the city's neighborhoods, in fact, are now coping with tremendous growth. Meanwhile, the creation of the federal government's new anti- terrorist bureaucracy has bolstered D.C.'s office market even as other cities have slumped. For Altman, this is a city planner's ideal moment--a time when he can make demands of developers, rather than beg favors from them. The hot market also makes it likelier that any given plan will come to fruition. "Washington sits at one of those very rare historical moments where it's literally being transformed before our eyes," Altman says. "Washington will be a very different place when you look back five years, 10 years or 20 years from now."

In this environment, D.C. planners are asserting themselves as never before. Altman frequently boasts that the city's current planning spree is locally inspired, as opposed to the L'Enfant and McMillan plans, both imposed by the federal government.

He has also made aggressive demands of developers. Back in 2000, many cities were welcoming "tech hotels": downtown data centers, loaded with wires and circuitry but staffed by a minimal workforce, just to get some land on the tax rolls. Altman blocked several of these projects, fearing that plopping a high-rise box full of wires into a downtown setting would sap pedestrian life from the street. Eventually he brokered a deal: Developers could build the data centers, but they couldn't resemble suburban-style bunkers. They had to look like office buildings, with space for retail on the ground floor.

Washington's notoriously 9-to-5 downtown is showing signs of 24-hour life. 7,400 units of new downtown housing have been built or sit in the pipeline. One barren tract, worth millions to office developers, is instead slated for a grocery store to serve all the new residents. And on 10 acres where the city's old boarded-up convention center sits, the city is planning a mixed-use development (to be designed by star architect Norman Foster) that Altman envisions as a signature public space--D.C.'s version of New York's Bryant Park or London's Covent Garden. "This is a planner's dream. You wake up in the morning and the mayor says, "Here's 10 acres in the middle of the city, whattya want to do with it?'" Altman says. "This is the site that is going to bring the whole downtown together."

To keep this momentum rolling, D.C.'s planners work very closely with its economic developers. In fact, Altman technically works under economic development chief Eric Price--a sore spot for the planning watchdog group known as the Committee of 100 on the Federal City. Dorn McGrath, one of the group's leaders and a retired professor of geography at George Washington University, argues that this structure inevitably weakens planning's role and assures that Altman is judged primarily by the number of cranes in the sky. "This city can only talk about one subject at a time," McGrath says, citing a cluster of high- rise apartments going up near the nightlife of downtown but far from a city park. "Just going to bars and Starbucks isn't a complete life. They need to think of other aspects that make the city a living organism."

Altman's critics charge that he's taken a scattershot approach and has ignored, until now, the need to rewrite the city's outdated and muddled comprehensive plan. Altman admits that updating the comprehensive plan was low on his to-do list--these plans often end up as "mush," he says--but now he's taking that on, and he vows to produce something that developers, residents and city leaders may actually find useful. "When I came in four years ago, D.C. was at that moment of change when the economy was there, development was about to accelerate, and to have said that we're going to focus on the comprehensive plan would've been to miss planning's opportunity," Altman says. "We wanted to show that planning could be relevant."

RIVER DREAMS

Altman's white Ford Explorer follows a dusty dump truck through a gap in a chain-link fence and rolls past a backhoe that is turning over chocolate-colored soil. He points the driver toward an old brick warehouse. As the vehicle moves forward, the muddy Anacostia River comes into view. Altman points out the window to a barren concrete slab alongside the mucky water. It's no strain for him to imagine what this polluted scene could one day become; the picture is already in his head. "That's going to be a park, a really nice public space," Altman says. "There'll be housing all around it over here. The brick building is going to be retail."

City plans call this area, reaching from the Anacostia north to the gentrified neighborhood of Capitol Hill, the "Near Southeast." There's no telling what real estate agents will call it once they begin swarming around here in a few years. Some 4,200 new units of housing are planned, along with 13.6 million square feet of office space and plenty of retail. It is one of the nation's largest waterfront redevelopment projects, and it is well underway. A couple of new office buildings just opened near a Metro station on the main drag through here, and a new headquarters for the U.S. Department of Transportation is under construction. Once the jobs move in, the housing is set to follow. Altman's urban design framework for this area, crafted with the aid of several consulting firms, won the American Planning Association's national award this year.

What Altman finds most satisfying, however, is that the planning process--far from acting as the impediment that mayors of some cities still fear--has actually catalyzed much of the development activity. It's helped target public-sector investments, including a $300 million public housing redevelopment that is, contrary to most current federal policies, actually increasing housing density on the site. And it's given developers and neighbors a clear idea of the sort of mixed- income, mixed-use neighborhood the city wants this area to become. "Planning gives confidence to the private sector," Altman says. "It shows that the city has a business plan, that our investments aren't just ad hoc."

The Near Southeast plan is only one piece of a much larger planning project known as the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative. This ambitious effort takes in 2,800 acres along both sides of the Anacostia, aiming to shift Washington's locus eastward toward its long-neglected second river. Closely tied to the land use plans is a long-term environmental agenda to clean up the toxic river. There is also a social dimension: The Anacostia currently separates poor and mostly black neighborhoods from the rest of the city. Williams sees bridging this physical and psychological divide as an important goal for his administration.

Joseph Passonneau, an architect/engineer and local planning historian, calls the Anacostia initiative "the largest and most important planning effort in the city" since the Mall plan of 1901. All along this waterfront, however, the most visible ghosts of planning past are from the 1950s and '60s. Freeways on both sides of the river cut neighborhoods off from the waterfront. Even where urban renewal tried to make the waterfront attractive with a marina and restaurants, it is a lifeless, anti-urban failure. Altman's plans aim to undo this over time by increasing density, creating civic spaces near the water and connecting neighborhoods together using such tools as a waterfront trail.

Looking out at the river, Altman puts all the public workshops, the meetings with developers and the intense design work going on here in context. "It's safe to plan again," he says. "There was a reluctance to plan big after urban renewal and the backlash against it. People were tepid about planning. Now an era of bold planning is re- emerging."

It will be decades before anyone can reasonably judge whether Altman's name belongs in the planning pantheon behind those of L'Enfant and McMillan. Altman and Williams are keenly aware of the historical symmetry--that Washington's great planning waves have come about once a century. At the very least, both men have made an important contribution by re-establishing planning as vital work in the city that practically founded the profession. "The real legacy," Altman says, "is a strong planning office and a whole new generation of planners now vested in the city. That will live beyond any one director."

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