Why is RIGHT NOW the RIGHT TIME to buy   Panama City, Florida?
       
 

NEWS YOU CAN USE

Panama City Beach’s 'New Urbanism'

Beach officials given vision of the future                 Ed Offley News Herald Writer 

PANAMA CITY BEACH
    When Dan Burden thinks of Panama City Beach, he doesn’t see a condo canyon in the making, or an existing patchwork of high-rise resorts scattered along an obsolete road network, even the limited space for pedestrians.
    Instead, Burden sees a dynamic city rising along the Gulf of Mexico, thronged by full-time residents and tourists, who are drawn to a vibrant community. He sees a place where restaurants, retail shops and residential units carefully intermingle in smaller urban districts linked by broad walkways, sidewalks and plazas that offer meeting grounds and opportunities for human interaction.
    And very few cars.
    “It’s all about building place,” said Burden, an expert on transforming urban sprawl into a dynamic arrangement of streetscapes, buildings and open space. A senior staff member of Glatting, Jackson, Kercher and Anglin, an Orlando-based consulting firm that specializes in urban planning, Burden has spent the last 15 years helping several thousand American cities and towns.
    At the request of city officials, Burden and colleague Billy Hattaway earlier this month toured the city’s Front Beach Road Community Redevelopment Area, or CRA, and offered a detailed assessment at a City Council workshop.
Pedestrian-friendly
    A key element of successful urban redesign is to re-engineer the streetscape to make it not only attractive, but “pedestrian-friendly,” Burden said. “The quality of the experience outside is critically important.”
    The Front Beach Road CRA has drawn up a $400-million capital improvement campaign to transform the beachfront roadway and various connector streets into an urban streetscape by adding sidewalks and bicycle lanes to attract non-motorists and by placing utility wires underground and landscaping to improve the visual appearance.
    Burden summarized the essential elements to a successful redesign effort. They include:
    Redesigning streets with narrower vehicle lanes;
    Building wider sidewalks to give pedestrians a sense of open space;
    Encouraging mixed-use buildings that combine retail and office activity on the ground floor with residential uses on upper levels;
    Incorporating innovative landuse regulations that encourage developers to design and locate new construction projects that encourage pedestrian traffic and outdoor activities. Elements include creating an attractive pedestrian space on the street frontage, ensuring “transparency” between the building interior and outside with large windows and openings and encouraging height and setback aspects of the design that minimize the visual mass of the structure;
    Managing — and reducing — vehicle traffic by changing major streetlight intersections into circular roundabouts, surrounding and visually concealing parking garages with retail and entertainment sites and providing alternative mass transportation to get people out of their cars;
    Encouraging specific design features of individual districts within the city, then connecting them with streetscapes and mass transportation.
    Burden said he was “incredibly impressed” with the CRA’s plan for rebuilding Front Beach Road itself, which includes dedicated lanes for a proposed mass transit trolley system.
    “This highway (corridor) won’t allow for widening, so the plan is focused on making it into a great street,” he said.
    Burden said creating such an environment quickly attracts development as investors spot a “potential place” in which they know large numbers of people will want to gather. That fits into a major sociological trend sweeping across America, he said.
    “The agricultural era is over, and the industrial era is coming to an end,” Burden noted. “In the future, success will depend on attracting creative people to your city, because cities are an invention to maximize exchange and to minimize travel.”
    Beach officials said they were struck by the many examples Burden had shown at the workshop, where blighted and sprawling areas of various cities quickly transformed once an effective streetscape went in.
    “I have always been impressed by the way they have gone into places and fixed things,” Mayor Gayle Oberst said of Burden’s firm. “It was a pretty good shock when you see a picture of what things looked like before they were renovated.”
    Oberst said that as the CRA work proceeds, the City Council will hold additional workshops, not only to update the construction work, but also to encourage residents and business owners to participate in creating a joint vision of the city’s future.
    “It is a great thing for us to do, but it is still going to be difficult for people who have property already built there,” the mayor noted. “One of the things that we will have to have is ‘buy in’ from the people along Front Beach Road.”
Response
    In response to the workshop, city officials already signaled their interest in incorporating several of Burden’s recommendations. Oberst said the Planning Board, which has been reviewing the existing land development code this year, has halted that process and soon will start studying whether a “form-based” code might provide a better guide for future growth.
    Traditional zoning ordinances control land uses by defining where industrial, commercial or residential activities may take place within the municipal boundaries, Burden said. Form-based codes, on the other hand, regulate the relationship between building facades and public spaces, the form and mass of buildings in relation to one another and the scale and types of streets and blocks.
    Meanwhile, the CRA designers are mulling over the possibility of creating traffic roundabouts at several of the city’s major intersections, said CRA director Ben Faust.
    Faust said the intersection of Front Beach Road and State 79 would be one obvious candidate for such a traffic-calming device. The Pier Park development already features one of the devices.
    Burden himself praised city officials in a somewhat ironic fashion.
    “Panama City Beach is in a good position because you did not spend a lot of money to destroy yourselves,” he told the workshop. “You haven’t made any capital errors yet, and I want to congratulate you on getting this far.” 		 

 

       


Copyright © 2007 Bay County Association of Realtors®          Web Design Copyright 2007 © www.TheGouldingAgency.com