BusinessReport.com

There’s no question downtown Baton Rouge is more vibrant now than it has been in decades. The city-parish says there’s been more than $1.5 billion in new investment just in the past decade.

But the progress has been driven by public investment; most important, the consolidation of state government offices downtown. Baton Rouge is a fairly typical American city in that, up until very recently, there has been a dearth of private investment in the city’s core.

“We were too convinced, the real estate community especially was too convinced, that the wants and desires of the population lay outside of cities,” says Alex Krieger of Chan Krieger Sieniewicz, an architecture, urban design and planning firm based in Cambridge, Mass. Developing outside of downtown was also quicker, easier and less expensive.

Krieger, the former chairman of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, leads the consulting team for Plan Baton Rouge Phase 2, downtown’s newest planning effort. Team members say significant capital investments have already been made downtown. The key goal for them is finding ways to get the private sector to fill in the gaps.

“We want to create a compelling vision for you and help you sell it,” said Alan Mountjoy, the project’s manager who is also from Chan Krieger, during the team’s public interview for the job.

The original Plan Baton Rouge is now in its 10th year, and the city-parish says more than 80% of its proposed projects are now completed—the Shaw Center for the Arts being perhaps the most visible. The second phase is supposed to find ways to maximize the investments that will fill in the gaps between existing projects.

At least 16 consultant teams responded to the request for qualifications, and four finalists were selected for a series of two-hour public interviews on June 23-24. The eight members of the selection committee were Troy Bunch, city-parish planning director; Jim Frey, special project director with the Department of Public Works; John Spain, executive vice president of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation; Elizabeth “Boo” Thomas, CEO of the Center for Planning Excellence; Cordell Haymon, CPEX board president; Susan Turner, a Baton Rouge landscape architect; Davis Rhorer, executive director of the Downtown Development District; and Paul Arrigo, president of the Baton Rouge Area Convention and Visitors Bureau.

CPEX Vice President Rachel DiResto says the quality of the individual firms and the cohesion between them as demonstrated in their presentation helped push the Chan Kreiger team to the top. At the end of the process, the recommendation to Mayor Kip Holden was unanimous, DiResto says.

As of July 8, the team’s contract had not been finalized. The budget is about $400,000. The city-parish put up $150,000, while Baton Rouge Area Foundation is contributing a $150,000 grant from Fannie Mae. The rest of the money will come from the Downtown Business Association, BRAF, the Convention and Visitors Bureau, and the Downtown Development District.

Rex Cabaniss of WHLC Architecture in Baton Rouge assembled the team and will serve as local facilitator, gathering input from various local stakeholders and getting it to the appropriate people. He selected local people he had worked with in the past, including LSU’s James Richardson and Allen Eskew from New Orleans, and chose the national firms based mainly on their reputations for quality work.

Residential development is already happening in the downtown business district on a small scale, but Cabaniss would like to see hundreds of units a year, not a dozen at a time.

“We all feel that this would naturally happen, probably over many decades,” he says. “How can we accelerate that to happen in one decade?”

Part of the solution is coming up with incentives that make building downtown more affordable for developers. John Alschuler of HR&A Advisors divides cities into three categories. “Flatliners” are cities where virtually nothing new is happening. New York, for example, was pretty much dead in the late 1970s. In “pump-priming” cities, with the right land, the right incentives, and a brave developer, you can get a significant new investment. He puts Baton Rouge in this category.

The goal, Alschuler says, is to turn Baton Rouge into a “market city” within 10 years, a place where the market has its own momentum and doesn’t rely on prodding from the government or planning groups. He says New York took 15 years to get to that point, while Washington, D.C. took eight. Housing subsidies can work, and are working today in places like Columbus, Ohio, but it has to be a replicable system, not a one-off deal, so any smart project with enough money and muscle behind it can get off the ground.

Beyond incentives for housing and the Arts and Entertainment District, the regulatory and permitting process needs to be streamlined to make development within the city’s core more competitive with outlying areas, Krieger says. But in other places, he has found that there also has to be a change in mindset, because the real estate market often doesn’t understand the pent-up demand from people who don’t aspire to live in suburbia.

“They’re programmed to think that the population at large is best served by greenfield development,” Krieger says.

Much modern development seems based on the assumption that people grow up, finish school, get married, buy a house in the ’burbs, have kids, raise them to adulthood and die. But this model misses two growing demographics, Kreiger argues.

First, there’s the young who are staying younger longer. They’re in their 20s and 30s and still prefer an active city life to the quiet cul-de-sac. But you also have empty-nesters living longer than ever before. Many want a cottage house or condo on a golf course, but others want to be near good restaurants or museums. Some look to cultivate new careers. The city life might be the best life for many of these active seniors.

“Cities were made to live in,” he says.

PET PROJECTS

Here is Chan Krieger Sieniewicz’s full urban design project list:

Anacostia Riverfront, Washington, D.C.

Buffalo Niagara Medical Center Campus Plan, Buffalo, N.Y.

Capital Center District, Providence, R.I.

Capital District and Downtown, Augusta, Maine

Capitol Gateway East, Des Moines, Iowa

Central Artery Master Plan, Boston

Centrum Plaza Landscape Architecture and Downtown Master Plan, Worcester, Mass.

Charles River Dam Esplanade, Boston/Cambridge, Mass.

City Hall Plaza/ Government Center Master Plan, Boston

Congress Street Pedestrian Bridge, Boston

Convention Center Master Plan, Cleveland

Dallas Trinity River Master Plan, Dallas

Downtown East Urban Design Guidelines and Fifth Street Corridor Development Plan, Minneapolis

East Downtown and Medical Center, Louisville, Ky.

Federal Security Urban Design Guidelines, Washington D.C.

Fort Washington Way Urban Design and Bridge Design, Cincinnati

Lexington Center District Plan, Lexington, Ky.

Louisville Development Plan, Louisville, Ky.

Main Street South Guidelines, Southbury, Conn.

Massport Strategic Plan, South Boston, Mass.

Mass Turnpike Air Rights Study, Boston

Navy Yard Development Plan, Charlestown, Mass.

New Fenway Ballpark and Mixed-Use Development Plan, Boston

North Tama District Urban Design, Tokyo

Old Port Master Plan, Montreal

Pittsburgh Riverfronts Master Plan, Pittsburgh

South Capitol Street Urban Design Study, Washington, D.C.

Strategic Plan for the Washington Road CBD, Pittsburgh

Town Center Renovation, Brookline, Mass.

University Circle Urban Design Plan, Cleveland

U.S. Post Office Re-use Master Plan, Boston

SOURCE: Chankrieger.com

TEAM CHAN KRIEGER

Chan Krieger Sieniewicz, Cambridge, Mass.

Urban design and planning

Alex Krieger, project executive

Alan Mountjoy, project manager

HR&A, New York

Economic strategic planning

John Alschuler

James A. Richardson, Baton Rouge

Regional economic planning adviser

Glatting Jackson Kercher Anglin, Denver

Traffic planning

Troy Russ

Reed Hildebrand, Watertown, Mass.

Landscape architecture

Doug Reed

WHLC Architecture, Baton Rouge

Local planning coordinator

Rex Cabaniss

Eskew + Dumez + Ripple, New Orleans

Regional urban planning adviser

Allen Eskew