Implementing Smart Growth through the Downtown Specific Plan
Two hundred and twenty five years after Father Serra founded our beautiful city, Downtown Ventura is about to enter its next era. After 17 public workshops, 22 public hearings, hundreds of citizen comments, and three draft documents, Ventura will have a new plan for Downtown! Although the name is far from original – Downtown Ventura Specific Plan – (actually, about as bureaucratic as we could think of) the contents are groundbreaking, innovative, and bold. On what basis can such a claim be asserted? Well, it is based on the fact that the Downtown Ventura Specific Plan is all about implementing the general plan and the smart growth principles on which it stands.
In August 2005, with extensive community input and participation, the City of Ventura adopted a new General Plan. Adopting the General Plan was a major milestone and represented a commitment to a new way – a better way – of planning and developing our city: we call it smart growth. Smart growth has a national definition based on certain principles. We took those nationally recognized principles and adopted and tailored them to our Ventura context and produced a plan worthy of the name Smart Growth.
You may ask what is "smart" about our smart growth plan for Downtown. Although the answer is complex, involving well over 200 pages of text, graphics, definitions, codes and regulations, in many ways it is simple. The plan is smart because it does the following:
- Stop sprawl and preserve our hillsides, agriculture and open space by directing growth into areas that are already developed such as downtown;
- Emphasizes high quality urban design and architecture;
- Preserves our historic buildings and character;
- Encourages new investment in older areas of town;
- Provides for a variety of transportation choices;
- Creates more affordable housing and a variety of housing choices;
- Creates walkable neighborhoods; and
- Makes development predictable and the rules transparent.
Adopting the plan is not the end. So, what is to be done? In a word---plenty! For instance, we need to continue the community-wide dialogue, education and information about the new development rules based on what planners call “form-based codes.” Form-based codes are a method of regulating development to achieve a specific community vision based on time-tested forms of urbanism. Ultimately, a form-based code is a tool. Form-based codes create a predictable public realm by controlling physical form primarily, with a lesser focus on land use. Form-based codes address the relationship between building facades and the public realm, the form and mass of buildings in relation to one another, and the scale and types of streets and blocks. This is in contrast to conventional zoning's focus on the segregation of land-use types, permissible property uses, and the control of development intensity through simple numerical parameters.
Our Downtown Ventura Specific Plan will be one of only a few places in America capable of making a claim to smart growth and having the documentation to support it. We are sure others will follow our example because the old model simply will not work for tomorrow’s society. The old model is based on consuming ever expanding green fields and cheap and super cheap gas. Moreover, the old model does not recognize demographic changes, changes in the American family, and the desire for great places.
225 years ago Ventura was at the vanguard of city planning in California through its commitment to missions. 225 years later, Ventura remains at the vanguard of city planning, this time through its commitment to smart growth.
Masthead Art: katherinemcguire.com
