Joel Garreau’s 1991 book Edge Cities described a phenomenon with which the planning community has become too familiar. He noted that across the country suburban shopping/residential/office complexes are burgeoning outside of traditional city boundaries. This new growth strengthens our nation’s commitment to suburbia by confirming that not only will residential development take place, but that jobs and commerce will occur in suburban areas.

As many observers have noted, these new phenomena carry with them a whole set of problems that frustrate the planning profession because they are so hard to resolve. These problems include wasteful use of land at relatively low densities and automobile dependence leading either to suburban traffic jams and/or the demand for more new highways. In addition, the placing of Edge City developments at the fringes has intruded upon and exacerbated pressure to develop farmlands or other environmentally desirable areas.

Another all too frequent side effect of Edge City development is a dearth of affordable housing. In too many locales, the zoning ordinances that govern, or perhaps the correct phrase is “facilitate,” Edge Cities are geared to nonresidential ratables that enhance the community’s tax base including expensive single-family homes. The latter uses are perceived, accurately or inaccurately, to conform most closely to the existing social fabric of a fringe suburb and impose the least constraint on schools or other facilities.

These patterns recur nationally and have been the subject of frequent comment. One proposed solution has been neotraditional neighborhoods in which more compact housing development would be integrated with pedestrian-oriented commercial centers. Such denser patterns of development could make affordable housing feasible and reduce the land consumption and environmental impacts commonly associated with edge city or sprawl development. However, the main templates for neotraditional neighborhoods have so far been greenfields, in which a single developer with a large amount of open land may work with a design professional or set of design professionals to implement a rigorously detailed code which orders the entire land mass within neotraditional lines.

However, this solution is not readily available in the densely built-up northeastern and midwestern states where large tracts of economically desirable and appropriately zoned land do not usually exist. Instead, the land-use professional is faced with a welter of disparate existing uses and fractionated vacant parcels with diverse ownership. The oft-conflicting zoning codes of several adjacent jurisdictions are also involved, so it is generally not feasible for a single developer and design professional, acting in accordance with a preestablished set of regulations, to implement a traditional neighborhood vision. Nonetheless, the task of finding alternate development patterns is more critical in densely populated areas that have already borne the brunt of environmental degradation and lack affordable housing associated with edge city development.

This paper proposes an alternative approach applicable to existing suburbs and their less built-up environs. In a situation where there are existing uses and vacant land is fractured in ownership, the traditional redevelopment laws first conceived in the 1940s and ’50s may be readapted and reused to reorganize development along more satisfactory lines. In addition, any growth management scheme for such areas must include the kind of management capability provided by redevelopment laws rather than by pure regulations. Finally, this article provides a sample of the type of regulation needed to be successful—a more open ended regulatory framework to accommodate the diverse ownership and uses that presently exist in typical suburban edge cities.

Although the approach suggested is rooted in a New Jersey experience, it may well be more broadly applicable. A basic redevelopment law framework exists in most states. In fact, in the case of Levin v. Township Committee of Bridgewater Township, 271 A.2d 1 (N.J. 1971), appeal dismissed, 404 U.S. 803 (1972), 23 ZD 372, New Jersey’s highest court noted that at least 10 states at that time, including New York, Virginia, and Maryland, had redevelopment laws potentially applicable to suburban areas.

THE NEW JERSEY SETTING
New Jersey, like many other states, has been struggling with its suburban growth patterns. For a small state, it has incredible diversity among its cities, suburbs, and rural areas. This very diversity fosters intense localism—home rule sentiment—which has prevented effective regional cooperation that might have helped address infrastructure, open space, and development patterns more coherently.

The problem led planners in New Jersey to focus on the concept of centers that would absorb growth while reducing the pressures for development of rural areas in the state. The 1992 State Development and Redevelopment Plan, prepared under the State Planning Act (N.J. STAT. ANN. § 52:18A-196), was titled “Communities of Place,” reflecting the plan’s goal of substituting compact, mixed use centers for the present spread-out, single-function land-use patterns.

However, under the state’s statutory framework, control over land use remains at the local level. As it explicitly acknowledges, the state plan is not a regulatory document. For this reason, the concept of centers is one that must be sold to New Jersey’s 566 local governments, each of which has land-use powers. There is no mechanism, a la Oregon or Florida, for imposing such concepts from above.

For that reason, the Middlesex-Somerset-Mercer Regional Council (MSM), the state’s largest private planning group, has played a lead role in attempting to sell the centers concept. As part of that effort, MSM, along with the Regional Plan Association (RPA) based in New York, contracted with the Design Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts to analyze the centers concept and promote it. The author of this article was retained as part of that study to suggest the legal structures that could enable centers to happen in our state. The 1994 MSM-RPA Report, Redesigning the Suburbs: Turning Sprawl into Centers, contained a chapter on the legal framework for centers. This article is based on that chapter. In the course of preparing the report, MSM also conducted a planning institute in June 1994 to ascertain whether support for the centers concept existed in the development and financial communities and among municipal governments in the state. This planning institute articulated a number of principles critical to obtaining consensus for centers in New Jersey.

First, there must be public-private partnerships in the centers process, most notably in the form of provision of key infrastructure. Second, the municipal sector needs incentives. Center plans that simply add growth to existing zoning will not get political support. As a very progressive mayor bluntly said, if he advocated the addition of 1,000 housing units to an existing office center, he would get killed in the next election. Third, the governmental commitment to the center project must be long term, not subject to drastic political shifts.

There was also a general agreement at the planning institute and at a follow-up session with one of the biggest office developers in New Jersey and the executive director of the National Association of Industrial and Office Properties that we needed to reinvent zoning in New Jersey. We need a regulatory flexibility to interest the private sector in committing to centers for the long haul. Traditional and even some nontraditional zoning strictures, following the usual New Jersey model, will fail to produce viable centers.

Achieving the three goals—partnership, municipal incentives, and flexibility—will require discarding much conventional zoning wisdom. The usual detailed prescriptions of specific uses, with specific setbacks and yards, mandatory minimum lot sizes for particular uses, and prescribed floor area ratios for particular uses, cannot possibly serve the needs of a center that is supposed to grow, breathe, and develop in response to changing market needs over 20 or more years. Nor can a single design theme work, given the variety of the potential settings for centers in New Jersey and the need, in many cases, to retrofit existing development patterns to create centers. Further, while the concept of centers in New Jersey draws on the new urbanism and traditional neighborhood development ideas for its emphasis on compactness and a mixture of uses, it requires a much different implementation strategy because we do not have the freedom in New Jersey to create new communities on large tracts of vacant land, as in Seaside, Florida. Rather, the goal must be to impose a new order on diverse existing uses and fragmented patterns of land ownership to meet the triple goals of partnership, local support, and flexibility.

The balance of this paper addresses these challenges. These proposals can serve as the framework for full scale regulatory codes. Hopefully, this framework will be strong enough to support the development of centers as real communities of place in New Jersey in accordance with the underlying vision of New Jersey’s first State Development and Redevelopment Plan.

THE REDEVELOPMENT LAW:
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS
Unlike most land-use proposals, implementation of a center scheme is more like running a project than regulating land use. The nature of the center effort itself, as confirmed by discussions at the MSM planning institute, strongly suggests that some form of active, unified management of the center’s development is critical to its success. Moreover, this management must involve the cooperation or partnership between the public and private sectors, because the provision of basic infrastructure is normally a public responsibility, while actual development of buildings is done by the private sector. Further, the management of the center project requires a kind of flexibility that only a private entity normally has, while it is a public responsibility to provide the oversight necessary to ensure that the center develops in accordance with its guiding vision.

Thus, it is clearly desirable to have some form of general control mechanism that goes beyond zoning to implement a center. Moreover, a modified redevelopment type of approach makes sense because the future for New Jersey and other heavily developed suburbanized states will be to retrofit existing or incipient centers such as New Jersey’s Route 1 corridor area. Thus, zoning plus redevelopment may be needed to implement centers.

Fortunately, New Jersey’s redevelopment laws now have a greater emphasis on carrying out state and regional planning goals, which now include centers as defined in the state plan. In 1991 and 1992, the New Jersey legislature revamped the state’s redevelopment laws in response to the 1987 report of a special commission, the County and Municipal Government Study Commission. This body recognized the need to link local redevelopment efforts to comprehensive state and regional planning processes:

Based on this observation, the commission recommended that:

While this recommendation was not adopted exactly as proposed, the statute approved by the legislature five years later did include, among its preconditions for carrying out a redevelopment project, a new mandate that the municipality specify any significant relationship of a redevelopment plan to:

Thus, the 1992 Local Redevelopment and Housing Law, N.J. STAT. ANN. § 40A:12A-1 et seq., for the first time explicitly recognized a link between local redevelopment plans and the state goals and objectives embodied in the state plan, which emphasizes “communities of place” as its centerpiece.

In this new regional planning context, some of the criteria for determining the boundaries of a redevelopment area (formerly a blighted area) and planning for its redevelopment take on a new meaning outside urban areas or downtown sites which, in New Jersey and elsewhere, have traditionally been the focus for redevelopment efforts.

Specifically, N.J. STAT. ANN. § 40A:12A-5d targets for development those areas with buildings or improvements that are plagued by “faulty arrangement or design, deleterious land use or obsolete layout, or any combination of these or other factors detrimental to the safety, health, morals or welfare of the community.” Thus, a strip mall with vacant lots could well qualify as obsolete or faulty when a center as envisioned in the state plan is to be located.

Another criterion provides for redevelopment where there is a “growing or lack of proper utilization of areas caused by the condition of the title, diverse ownership of the real estate or other conditions resulting in a stagnant or not fully productive condition of land potentially useful and valuable for and contributing to and serving the public health, safety and welfare.” N.J. STAT. ANN. § 40A:12-5e. These are extremely broad expressions of legislative support for redevelopment. These criteria are clearly applicable to suburban candidates for centers, whether developed, partially built, or even mostly vacant.

Land that is publicly owned or which has been privately owned and vacant for 10 years and is unlikely to be developed through the instrumentality of private capital can also be placed in a redevelopment area. N.J. STAT. ANN. § 40A:12A-(5)c. This language provides another opportunity to designate a type of suburban place that could be transformed into a center through the redevelopment powers.

The relevance of these provisions to suburban centers is affirmed by existing New Jersey case law. They were applied by the New Jersey Supreme Court to authorize the exercise of municipal redevelopment powers for the Bridgewater Commons, which is now one of the archetypal examples of a center in the making and was described in depth in a chapter of Joel Garreau’s book Edge Cities. In Levin v. Township Committee of Bridgewater Township, 271 A.2d 1 (N.J. 1971), appeal dismissed, 404 U.S. 803 (1972), 23 ZD 372, New Jersey’s highest court determined that the use of redevelopment powers by Bridgewater Township to develop this nascent center was justified by the diversity of land ownership, the presence of some dilapidated dwellings, and underutilized vacant land, among other conditions.

Such provisions have national relevance for suburban design as well as applicability in New Jersey. The court in Levin noted that at least 10 other states have redevelopment laws phrased as broadly as New Jersey’s law. Further, the fact that public purposes are furthered by an areawide design for redevelopment was recognized 40 years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case involving the Southwest urban renewal area in the District of Columbia, Berman v. Parker, 348 U.S. 26 (1954). The U.S. Supreme Court more recently cited Berman when it reaffirmed the broad rights of states and local governments to change patterns of land holding in order to serve the public interest, Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff, 467 U.S. 229 (1984), 36 ZD 194. Thus, the redevelopment approach to suburban densification can potentially be used across the country.

The potential use of redevelopment concepts in suburbia is significant and exciting. It provides a method to accomplish the kind of public/private cooperation that is essential to the development of centers but which really cannot be achieved solely through an essentially regulatory mechanism such as zoning. Designation of an area as a redevelopment area triggers a whole host of potential contact/partnership points between the municipality and private capital as well as a great deal of additional regulatory flexibility. Here are some of the more significant tools that become available in a redevelopment area:

Thus, a municipality using its redevelopment powers can cooperate with private enterprise through a generous selection of otherwise unavailable techniques. For example, intense forms of interaction such as direct financial aid and leasing of property to the redeveloper are permitted. See, e.g., N.J. STAT. ANN. § 40A:12A-8g. Further, a redevelopment approach can go forward with public acquisition if the parcels are not in common ownership. Moreover, only part of a center need be implemented through redevelopment. Where some appropriate uses are already in place, only the vacant and poorly utilized portions of a center need be subject to redevelopment.

One example of a model is appropriate. Assume a partly vacant suburban site largely in single ownership. If one entity holds a significant amount of land, it can be designated as the redeveloper. The municipality may then agree with the redeveloper that it will float tax-exempt bonds to support the construction of infrastructure provided that the developer agrees to implement certain land uses in a given time frame, to repay some or all of the amount of the bonds out of revenues for the development, and to grant a mortgage on its property to guarantee the bond repayment. Such an approach, without condemnation or direct local financial contribution, would give a suburban center a discrete, ongoing financial structure that would provide strong organizational impetus for the whole center project.

In addition to all these techniques, municipalities may offer long-term tax abatements for 30 years with the amount of tax abatement decreasing over time. See N.J. STAT. ANN. § 40A:20-12. The tax abatement would be administered through a financial agreement in the form of a contract. See N.J. STAT. ANN. § 40A:20a-9 and 10. Many suburban municipalities will, of course, not be interested in tax abatements. However, they are an additional flexible tool that could help make a center happen. Further, they could be accompanied by additional revenue sources such as land leases, where municipally owned land is part of a center, to give the municipality a greater income stream than would be possible through full taxation.

In sum, the redevelopment agency powers contained in the new statutes provide municipalities with a formidable array of tools for regional suburban centers. These powers provide a series of financial incentives and controls that can support an infrastructure and development partnership. As a result, the redevelopment approach, compared with zoning, offers municipalities a far greater opportunity to create centers. In fact, in contrast with zoning, the redevelopment approach brings parties together through mutual agreements and mutual assistance rather than with having the governmental and private sectors glare at each other over the great divide of regulation.

Where the redevelopment approach can be implemented, it should be considered as a first step before assessing the types of zoning that should be imposed upon development. If, as is agreed generally, development of centers is a long-term process requiring good faith participation by all parties, then the redevelopment approach provides the framework for this process—a framework that promotes mutual agreement on shared solutions for the design, development, and implementation of centers in existing edge cities.

ZONING FOR REDEVELOPMENT
Retrofitting areas in the Northeast or Midwest will be different than designing neotraditional neighborhoods on greenfields in Florida. Such retrofitting exacerbates the tension between the general and prohibitory nature of zoning regulation and the flexible, site specific treatment that will make a retrofitted center work. Even though edge cities contain much vacant land, it is scattered and is not likely to be acquired totally by government or a single entrepreneur.

There is also a tension between regulation responsive to present day expectations and the need to accommodate alterations in market conditions or design preferences that may occur during the extended period in which the center will develop. For that reason, a center redevelopment plan and ordinance must maximize flexibility and treat the center boundaries as an envelope in which uses may be flexibly deployed so long as external impacts are controlled and the design of individual projects is managed through an ongoing process.

A few specifics also deserve comment. There may be political need in suburban retrofitting to ensure that the center does not become simply an addition to existing growth, but that it alleviates growth pressures elsewhere in the community. This result may happen naturally. The greater ease of development accorded to sites in centers may attract capital towards the center and away from other, more restrictively regulated portions of a community.

However, ordinance incentives are suggested for center developers to obtain and set aside open space outside the center so that the center development really does eliminate development on land outside of it.

The design standards in redevelopment center zoning can make or break the retrofitting of suburban areas into centers. Design is generally a challenge because good design is not easy to define—one person’s landmark is another’s eyesore. A zoning regulation that rigidly sets design standards (for example, landscaping) can stifle creativity and impose economic burdens that benefit neither the center developers nor the municipality. For these reasons, design approaches in the redevelopment center zoning should be managed carefully and applied in a manner that allows the flexibility necessary to achieve an aesthetic and successful center. See An Ordinance to Develop Suburban Centers, pages 7-9, § M.

There must also be flexibility in providing utilities and their easements. Although these requirements are only sketched in at this point, they are critical. Without guaranteed utility access, the center zoning will fail. See § I.

Perhaps as critical to the success of the center as any portion of the proposed ordinance is alternate dispute resolution. Without a prompt nonjudicial mechanism for resolving disputes, developers, municipalities, and citizens will be embroiled in lengthy arguments that can thwart center development. See § O. Management and implementation of centers requires predictability. Litigation could completely obliterate any hope of achieving certainty in the development process, since zoning cases can take years to resolve through the courts. See, for example, Lake Shore Estates v. Township of Denville, 605 A.2d. 1073 (N.J. 1992), in which New Jersey Supreme Court Justice Daniel O’Hern, in dissent, criticized the development process for taking 19 years to deal with one relatively straightforward project.

Finally, an ordinance should address external impacts by laying out performance goals that are clear enough to be administered by a reviewing authority in a predictable manner. See § P. These performance goals are backed up by numerical floor area ratio and height standards. These ordinance provisions, similar to density requirements, are subject to local debate and amendment based on the character of the municipality considering a center, and the design goals and development objectives of a particular center.

The author has assisted in preparing a design ordinance formulated by the Thompson Design Group of Boston, Massachusetts, for the redevelopment of waterfront areas of the City of Long Branch, New Jersey. This ordinance, adopted in 1997, reflects many of the concepts above. See box, pages 7-9.

OVERCOMING OBSTACLES
Once the ordinance is in place, public and private obstacles must be addressed. In the private sector, some bankers and developers may at first be resistant to the idea of centers. Bankers have not yet seen or financed retrofitted centers. They must be persuaded to finance them through public commitments to infrastructure and possibly limitations on other development that would tend to compete with the marketability of centers.

Similarly, a diversity of developers is an issue that a center plan must address. Different kinds of developers who will own parts of the proposed center specialize in different products. One developer alone will not do office, residential, and retail; different developers will carry out each of these specialties. Therefore, the center plan must be capable of being implemented by multiple developers. (The five-acre minimum development size proposed in the ordinance is intended to achieve this objective.)

The public sector must be more flexible in a number of ways. There has got to be a change in regulatory philosophy at all levels of government from the present bent towards very detailed zoning ordinances towards the goals of setting forth general standards and letting the private sector work within those general standards. For example, the State of New Jersey’s Coastal Program has agreed to use the City of Long Branch design standards that emphasize performance features in place of more rigid state standards. Finally, guarantees of utility access and state permits are essential to supplement the redevelopment and zoning tools described in this paper.

Although these obstacles are all real, none should be allowed to stand in the way of realizing the public and private benefits from retrofitting the suburbs into centers.

CONCLUSION
Suburban centers can be much more attractive with the application of tools such as the New Jersey Local Rede-velopment and Housing Law described above, and a flexible approach towards regulation, combined with -sufficient open space incentives and controls against external impacts. If these issues are resolved, centers can and should be built in New Jersey and our community life will benefit.

With these tools, other states can concentrate on the task of retrofitting edge cities into something more useful and available to a wider range of economic groups. Creating jobs that match affordable housing in these centers can reduce commutes. And, when commuting is necessary, these centers may well serve as nodes for new mass transit options such as buses. These factors may all add up to more employment opportunities for families with less income.

Moreover, the centers should attract urban growth that would otherwise spill even further out into the countryside, consuming valuable farmland and other scarce natural resources. Retrofitting suburban growth into centers with these tools is an extremely valuable concept that can, in fact, use untamed edge cities as an opportunity to create defined suburban centers. Because America continues to become a nation of suburbanites, these tools should be adopted sooner rather than later.

An Ordinance to Develop Suburban Centers

Based on the Long Branch experience and occurrences since 1994 (when this approach was initially conceived), the following provisions are recommended as a framework to guide the development of centers. These standards are intended to provide generic guidance for suburban centers. The numerical standards in particular may be reviewed and altered to fit the character of different communities in which centers are proposed. (Some ordinance provisions contain instructive language, rather than strictly regulatory language, in order to assist communities in tailoring the provisions to their needs. In addition, some explanations are offered parenthetically.)

[Center Redevelopment Ordinance No. __ ; Township of _______ ]

A. Uses. The Redevelopment Centers shall be divided into the following three types of use areas:

B. Each area shall constitute no less than 25% of the total area of a zone and shall be located as set forth in the zoning map. One type of area shall be designated as the center core.

C. Residential Areas. Permitted uses shall be single-family detached dwellings and attached dwellings/townhouses and multiple dwellings.

D. Residential/Commercial Areas.

E. Non-Residential Areas.

F. Expansion of Areas.

G. Open Space.

H. Affordable Housing. A sufficient number of units shall be set aside for affordable housing in the Center to meet the municipal new construction obligation as set forth in the regulations of the New Jersey Council on Affordable Housing, unless other centers have been zoned for this purpose.

I. Infrastructure. Through a redevelopment plan, or by agreement, all rights to develop obtained pursuant to this Ordinance shall include with them the right to sufficient sewerage capacity and water service to meet the needs of the proposed development. All infrastructure shall be in accordance with the circulation and utility plan shown in the master plan/redevelopment plan.

J. Incentives.

K. Minimum Development Size. Except for infill development on isolated smaller lots, minimum development size shall be five acres, provided that the location of any infrastructure proposed in connection with such development shall be consistent with the overall Center plan.

L. Off-street parking. Off-street parking for residential uses shall be provided as required by the Uniform Site Standards Act, specifically N.J. STAT. ANN. § 40:55D-40.4, through the adoption of the off-street parking standards set forth in the New Jersey Model Subdivision and Site Plan Ordinance, page 312. For non-residential uses, the number of off-street parking spaces shall meet the standards of the most recent handbook or information from the Institute of Transportation Engineers (or other nationally recognized written source such as the Urban Land Institute’s shared parking guidelines) provided that the number of spaces can be shown to meet the needed spaces for the proposed mixture of land uses.

M. Design.

N. Vesting. The Center shall be developed pursuant to general development plans approved in accordance with the Municipal Land Use Law. Vesting of rights to develop shall be for a period of twenty years, pursuant to N.J. STAT. ANN. § 40:55D-45.1b. except where a redevelopment plan is involved along with tax exemptions, in which case the vesting period shall be for thirty years or for any other duration as specified in N.J. STAT. ANN. § 40A:20-9 or 40A:20-12a.

O. Alternate Dispute Resolution.

P. External Impacts/Height/Floor Area Ratio.

Q. Miscellaneous.

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Author and Copyright Information

Copyright 2002 by author

Peter A. Buchsbaum