This weekend, the Statesman (link coming later if I can locate the story online, which so far is not happening) ran a story summarizing the current state of the TOD (transit-oriented development) ordinance(s) centering around the stations for the commuter rail line being built by Capital Metro in their ASG (All Systems Go) plan.
Summary:
- Neighborhoods are against it in every case.
- Up north, where there’s a ton of space around the station, neighborhoods mainly just want the area covered by the ordinance to shrink.
- Down southeast, they want affordable housing targets which are going to be too onerous to be practical, AND they want reductions in height and density.
- Nearly all mandates or requirements in the ordinance, other than affordable housing set-asides, have been watered down to suggestions and incentives.
- Maximum height and density levels originally proposed around stations will likely be drastically reduced in the final ordinance.
Remember what I told you last month – unlike the light rail plan in 2000, this commuter rail line operates down right-of-way which runs through neighborhoods that don’t want any more density (and there’s not enough political will to do it against their wishes). And, of course, they don’t have (much) density now either. Compare to the Lamar/Guadalupe corridor, where neighborhoods that do irresponsibly fight density end up losing anyways — because there IS political will to stand fast and tell them that single-family-only low-density sprawl doesn’t belong in the central city. And, of course, substantially more density currently exists there than anywhere along the commuter rail corridor. Hyde Park and North University and West Campus already have the kind of density that TOD would bring to these commuter rail line neighborhoods.
So this rail line relies much more heavily on future development around stations to produce its intended passenger load than did the more traditional light rail line proposed in 2000 (that line had enough current residents within walking distance of stations to make the Feds very enthusiastic about its prospects – TOD would have just been an added bonus there).
Thus, the additional ridership generated by TOD is a critical piece of the ‘business case’ for this commuter rail line. Unfortunately, thanks to the Council basically rolling over and dying for these neighborhoods, there won’t be much TOD at all when the thing’s finally done. Capital Metro can only hope that the Feds ignore the technical wording of the ordinance which eventually passes and instead responds to the meaningless empty words promoting it. Unfortunately, the Feds have shown little willingness to get this deep on other projects around the country (meaning that they give money to projects that don’t merit it, and don’t give money to projects that do).