Implementing planning

Can a city planner make Springfield love planning?

DYSPEPSIANA | James Krohe Jr.

Usually no one pays attention to what the losers in a mayoral contest had to say. The recent city hall election was a happy exception. The un-preferred Paul Palazollo said repeatedly during the campaign that the city of Springfield needs a “planner/implementer” to, well, plan and implement. After the election, the local worthies on the Sustainable Design Assessment Team (SDAT) action committee seconded that motion. So did the State Journal-Register, whose editors urged the new mayor to take up the idea, saying, “Many of the problems Springfield has with things like drainage, traffic, sidewalks, urban sprawl, parking and development could have been averted had the city paid better attention to planning.”

I might have put it this way: Many of the problems Springfield has with things like drainage, traffic, sidewalks, urban sprawl, parking and development could have been averted had the city paid better attention to the planners it already has. Springfield has had a city planner and it hasn’t had one at different times in the 40 years I’ve been writing about this stuff. In that time, half a shelf has been filled with good plans for rail relocation, neighborhood revitalization, downtown redevelopment, historic preservation. Yet as a result virtually nothing – not downtown redevelopment, not retail expansion, not new housing or rehabilitation of old neighborhoods – has been done well (and much has been done quite poorly) because the plans were ignored or implemented halfheartedly.

Longtime readers of this paper will recall that Illinois Times has been beating that drum until our arms are too tired to type. As I noted in this space in 2014 (“Advice and dissent”), what’s needed is not more good advice but more aldermen and developers willing to listen to the good advice they’re already getting from the Springfield-Sangamon County Regional Planning Commission and ad hoc groups like the Sustainable Design Assessment Team. Instead, decisions about land use and zoning in the capital city are largely decided politically by aldermen who are in thrall to the retailing projects that put sales tax into the city coffers and the developers who put cash into their campaign kitties.

Mr. Palazollo’s primary opponent, incumbent mayor Mike Houston, offered the Hy-Vee on South MacArthur and the west side of Veterans Parkway or North Dirksen Parkway as evidence that Springfield is “still a great place to make an investment.” One yearns for a mayor who would ask herself, even privately, whether Springfield is also still a great place to live as a result of that kind of investment. I suspect that Mr. Palazollo misunderstands how planning works but I am certain that Mr. Houston misunderstands what planning is for. His mayor’s office included an Office of Planning and Economic Development, which is a little like an Office of Health and Junk Food.

For more than a century now, good urban planning was intended to ameliorate the effect that unplanned business development has on a city. Not to thwart development; the most vigorous planning regime would not mean no new shops, merely change where those shops are located, how they sit on the street, how they relate to their neighbor buildings and what they add to the visual environment that is our only universally shared experience of Springfield.

In fact, business can be a crucial constituent for good urban planning. Look at Chicago at the turn of the last century. The business community did not merely accept the Chicago Plan of 1909, they wrote that plan, and rallied citizens to back the new taxes needed to make it work. Why? Because they realized that good planning was good business. That was the spirit that animated Springfield’s civic-minded businesspeople to push for adoption of a similar plan in 1923.

Some have pointed to Indianapolis as a model for the revolution that a city planner might work in today’s Springfield. But the Indianapolis miracle did not happen because that city had a planner of the sort that Springfield lacks, or even because it has a plan (“Plan 2020”). It happened because Indianapolis is home to the state capital, because it is home to major hospitals and headquarters of a bunch of Fortune 500 firms, because its entire metropolitan area is under one government and because Indianapolis (whose metro area is more than eight times the size of Springfield) is a small big city and Springfield is a big small town.

A capable city planner focused solely on the city might indeed make a positive difference, but not even a Daniel Burnham brought back to life (and bringing him back to life would be easier than persuading him to move to Springfield) would be able to work the miracles that backers of the ideas hope for.

Contact James Krohe Jr. at KroJnr@gmail.com.

Editor’s note

It looks like Gov. Bruce Rauner and the legislature may not get to see summer this year. They’ll likely be at the Statehouse playing politics, which may be good for Springfi eld restaurants if bad for the poor, state workers, Amtrak riders, nursing home residents and on and on. The rest of us can make the best of summer by planning ahead, with IT’s special 72-page summerlong Summerguide. Now’s the time to look at all the offerings from July to September and mark your calendar to take in as much as you can. Because you know what politicians never learn – a summer is a terrible thing to waste. –Fletcher Farrar, editor and publisher