John Sarvay has published Part II of his series about Richmond’s downtown master plan: “What’s a Downtown Plan?” The plan, as it turns out, is not a tool for control freaks and social engineers. It is a guide. As Sarvay quotes from the plan itself:
Its purpose is to serve as a guide to assist in public and private decision-making relative to a wide variety of issues affecting the future of Downtown Richmond. It is intended to be used by the City as a guide for making public capital investment decisions and establishing land use policies and regulations. Of equal importance is the role of the Plan as a tool providing guidance to Downtown stakeholders and potential investors in making decisions affecting Downtown’s future.
That seems entirely appropriate. The plan provides a roadmap for local government to use in planning its public capital investments. It also provides the private sector guidance in what kind of re-zoning requests the locality is likely to approve and where it will be most willing to make public capital investment. Actual execution of the plan is another issue entirely. Circumstances change. Unexpected opportunities arise. Politics intervenes. Nothing is carved in stone — but the plan, which represents a consensus of opinion, carries a certain moral force. It is not deviated from lightly.
Which brings us to an issue of much contention in the comments sections of this blog: Ed Risse’s concept of the “Balanced Community” and how it might be achieved. EMR is in the process of developing his thoughts fully, which he will publish in book form in the near future. Until then, we have to rely upon the fragmentary hints he provides on this blog. The controversy to this point revolves around the suspicion that “planning” for a Balanced Community will be some kind of top-down process imposed by social engineers upon an unwilling public.
Here’s how I see it: “Planning” for a Balanced Community — a community with a balance of jobs, housing, retail and amenities and a transportation system to fit — needs be no more top-down than the process of creating Richmond’s downtown plan. The idea is to provide a roadmap (1) for future public capital improvements, and (2) for future rezoning decisions. Where the process would differ is in recognizing that the organic components of Balanced Communities often overlap political jurisdictions, thus planning is not something that can be undertaken by a single locality. Some Balanced Communities might overlap two or even three jurisdictions, thus requiring genuine coordination and cooperation between local governments, or more logically (and politically difficult) a rewriting of local government boundaries to reflect the economic-social realities on the ground.