“Art imitates nature in this: not to dare is to dwindle”

  John Updike

Langley faces an identity crisis in 2009.   Several merchants have shuttered their businesses on 1^st & 2^nd streets over the past several months and more are rumored to close this year.  The local school district plans to shut down facilities due to declining enrollment. When some were busy in searching why do dogs pant , pleas are issued for a benefactor to save the “Dog”, a communal howl of hope, as concerned citizens seek to avoid the unthinkable–the end of the line for Langley’s venerable Dog House Tavern.   To numerous town residents, the rapidly emptying commercial spaces are simply a reflection of the nation’s depressed economy.  They view closed shops as the inevitable consequences of bad business decisions or just a necessary stop on the economic circle of life.  To many others, however, the dark storefronts and thinning classrooms are symptoms of a local, and deeper problem.  The vibrant retail and restaurant sectors are an essential part of Langley’s “brand” and their decline hits a bass note.  Perhaps the faux western facades of a terminally cute town and the civic virtues of its inhabitants are not enough to sustain the promise of the good life for all. That Langley, a wee village, should be responsible for providing the good life is a daunting, perhaps unfair, expectation.  However, it implicitly exists and the prospect that it may not be able to meet that expectation brings the town to the present crisis.   As Langley looks at its reflection in the mirror during this downturn it can be fairly secure in its core value structure.  Community spirit, volunteerism and consciousness abound.  The plurality found among its mere 1,000 souls is astonishing.  In fact, one is hard-pressed to think of another community of its size engaged in as many cultural, artistic and environmental endeavors all the while maintaining a nearly continuous on-line forum debate over its guiding values.  This embedded civic virtue seems to be its most enduring asset.  However, a healthy town is a complex organism and it must nourish all of its cells in order to survive.  The merchant class needs the opportunity to thrive, not just survive. It has to offer its youth the prospect of a future and a reason to return to the community after leaving for school or other experiences.  It has to be a place where working folks can make a living as well as celebrate living.  Year round. Therefore, unless Langley wants to become an elite enclave that only caters to those with independent means it will have to wean itself of an economy dependent upon tourism and seek to build a new economic model based on high-wage earning and low-impact businesses.   Imagine with me a scenario where the empty spaces downtown are filled in the future with clean energy consultants, non-profit think tanks and a small caucus of Boeing engineers who commute to Everett twice a week for meetings by way of a foot ferry linking Langley’s marina to Port Gardner Wharf.  What if utility and power companies  booked conferences in Langley because of its reputation as a sustainable village prototype?  People might come to see how biking paths and electric powered carts connect a new conference center on Coles Road to the downtown as well as to browse the bookstores and admire the views.  Could Langley be the first town of its size to boast a LEEDS certified building?  Or to offer an attainable housing program?  Might internet based businesses with small “footprints” elect to move their operations to Langley because of its reputation as an ideas incubator?  Is it possible that one day, restauranteurs will look forward to the off-season because it means that business will go back to “normal” (that is, steady but relaxed) once again?  Will a significantly higher percentage of local kids return to Langley someday, after receiving their degree, to work for a local firm or try their hand at a start-up enterprise in the space above Langley’s iconic tavern? On that note, could we envision Skagit Valley College opening a South Whidbey branch campus? How about Langley hosting a part of the Seattle Film Festival and one day serving as a destination for more script writers, directors and producers?   If the more dynamic Langley described above is appealing, read on.  If not, toss or delete now. The paths to a more vibrant Langley are multiple and diverse, but share a common start:  a commitment to resolving the identity crisis by first reshaping the town’s commercial underpinnings.  For too long the economic foundation of Langley has been a monochromatic reliance upon discretionary income spending.  This means living or dying by the purchases of tourists, or “visitors” (for those more inclined to add a human touch), and the well-off locals.  The problem with this economic dependency is obvious on 1^st Street today—in a recessionary cycle the unnecessary expenditures are the first to go.   So dying becomes a reality.  To shore up this aging structure, the first order of business is to attract a permanent class of high wage earning knowledge workers, such as those described by Richard Florida in his now seminal work “The Rise of the Creative Class”.  An emerging knowledge enterprise sector will take Langley’s economic footers deeper and allow a more durable and stronger edifice. The vision presented here builds on this basic premise and suggests that Langley “re-brand” itself as a regional leader of “sustainable” community.   The call to leadership essentially asks Langley to articulate its core values to a larger audience. These values are for the most part self-evident in the absence of big-box retailers and strip-malls and the presence of arbors, view corridors and inviting spaces.  Langley pretty much “gets it” already in that it has stubbornly resisted many of the catalysts that gave rise to the oil-dependent, suburban sprawl, over-consumptive, easy money practices that led to the “bubble” in the first place.  So it requires only a small step to get to the podium.  Why leadership?  Because to whom much is given much will be required. Nature, a history of hard working people and a long-standing arts culture endowed Langley with a sense of place.  Add to this mix the transplanted residents who chose to move here in the pursuit of the idyllic and you have an uncommon alchemy of talent, ideas and energy gathered in one small village. For these reasons Langley is uniquely poised to become a prototype sustainable community, one perhaps based on the new energy economy as described by Thomas Friedman in his book “Hot, Flat and Crowded.   It will be very important to arrive at some kind of shared definition of what “sustainability” means in order to tie Langley’s identity to it.  In conversations today the word tends to be used synonymously with “green” and to incorporate ideas of conservation, re-use, net-zero resource use, etc.   Those concepts need to remain in play.  However, for the full flowering of a small community the discussion must include economic growth and development. It certainly must be acknowledged that to many Langleyites the essential idea of “sustainability” excludes an economic component.  Large and authoritative voices in the sustainability movement share this view. One of the leading theorists of modern “systems” thinking, of which the notion of sustainability is a derivative, is Berkeley’s Fritjof Capra.  In his teachings regarding building and nurturing sustainable communities, Capra calls for the creation of social, cultural and physical environments in which we can satisfy our needs and our aspirations without diminishing the chances of future generations.  Despite this fairly broad definition, however, Capra is known to recoil at suggestions that economic development fits within his tao of systems thinking.  One is aware of similar sentiments among Langley’s own denizens, who perceive economic growth as the catalyst for the very evils the sustainability movement seeks to eradicate.   This fear deserves further examination, because omitting the financial element in the sustainability definition sidesteps the daily concerns of a large swath of the citizenry. Many folks worry more about jobs, income, the availability of basic goods and services—yes, even in Langley—than the need to buy “local” or grow vegetables in the back yard. In effect, equating sustainability with green practices exclusively ends up suffocating the class of persons that bring goods and services to town, fill the classrooms and broaden the local demographics.  Perhaps a more balanced definition of sustainability is the one recently suggested by professor Bruce Hutton of the University of Denver:   The goal of sustainability is to achieve economic prosperity, social equality and environmental integrity through actions that respect and enhance all three.   I sense that Langley can embrace this working definition. While all three elements are equally important, the vision outlined here focuses on the economic component as the one that deserves immediate attention, requiring the most effort.   It can be argued that business failures alone aren’t necessarily a negative measure of the town’s reliance on discretionary dollars.  Statistics show that up to 70% of new, single establishment enterprises fail over a 10 year period.  However, it is not enough to simply cite statistics that a certain percentage of small businesses fail and expect that the invisible hand of the free market will yield a better business plan.  Perhaps that holds true in larger markets. In the very small markets, though, a limited supply of oxygen permits only a certain number of retail candles to burn.  In Langley, the retailers, inn keepers and food service providers historically “breathe” during the summer months and hold their collective breath for the balance of the year, a typical resort cycle.  To break this cycle, Langley must brand itself differently.  Rather than fueling the image of a summer getaway with a cool arts scene and quaint cottages the town’s leaders and marketers could paint a new portrait of the town as the place where ideas happen.  Or perhaps the place where smart firms can offer their employees sophistication and sustainability embedded in the charm of village life.  A friend of mine recently described his work colleagues as business hippies, a reference, I believe, to their unique blend of startup company energy and laid-back, Birkenstock style.  They want to sip lattes in the morning, sea kayak on their lunch hour and commute home by way of a neighborhood electrical vehicle.  And they have young families.  That means school plays and PTA meetings too.  It seems these folks would fit right in with a 1^st Street office overlooking Saratoga Passage.   It is important to stress that the effort to re-invent Langley’s identity is not inorganic or artificial.   The vision presented here does not call for new programs, gimmicks or desperate pleas.  On the contrary, the “imagining Langley” exercise merely expands on what already exists.  Several small firms fit the bill at the moment—e.g., Lindsay Communications, Russell Sparkman’s FusionSpark Media, Inc., The Giraffe Heroes Project, Ross Chapin’s architectural studio and others come to mind.  These are low-impact, internet based businesses with national and international reaches.  The owners and workers are committed to Langley on a year-round basis.  Add to this a cohort of sustainable-minded village entrepreneurs—Gene and Tamar Felton, Maureen Cooke, Des Rock, Marty Fernandez, Paul Schell and Marty Behr, to name just a few, and it is obvious that Langley’s very capable human resources have already established the brand.  The “marketing” is simply getting the message out to a wider audience with the goal of increasing the stable of enterprises of similar size and with congruent values.   Other communities have established values-based identities at various scales.  Think, for example, of downtown Portland, Oregon, or Boulder, Colorado, as far as large, urban prototypes.  Arcosanti in the high Arizona desert, hits on the really tiny end of the spectrum.  Across the Atlantic, Poundbury, in England’s Dorset county might serve as an example.  Again, it is not the streetscapes and physical attributes alone that define the ethos of those places, but rather an overall, intangible civic virtue.  Similarly, the collection of coffee shops, gardens or a walk down Cascade on a clear, summer day tell only a small part of Langley’s story.  They make for good postcards, but focusing upon such aesthetic delights may lull the community into not planning for a future, or worse, turn Langley’s sense of place into a caricature.  Is it possible that Langley has obsessed over its own reflection to the point where, like Narcissus, it is doomed to stare at its own, unchanging image forever?   The public debate generated by the Two Totems project on 1^st Street two years ago revealed the community’s fascination with its good looks.  The outpouring of sentiment regarding scale, form and style was expressed in a generally healthy way.  The same could be said about the on-line conversations related to why do dogs pant ? The main thread of that posting was something like  “won’t anyone step forward and make a go of the place without changing the use or any of the exterior elements we have come to know and love?” The priority of aesthetics implicit in this query is telling.  Equally so the absence of interest in what would make it a profitable venture.   Although not stated expressly, the subtext seemed to be “we don’t want to get into the details of whether it works as a viable business, we just want the comfort of knowing it won’t change.”  This over-emphasis on appearance actually threatens Langley’s future by encouraging the townfolk to dwell on form rather than substance.  To wit, the town ponders whether the new fire house across from the fairgrounds is in keeping with its historical character while Linds pharmacy quietly closes up.   The time has come for Langley to see its destiny beyond quaintness. The moment seems propitious to pursue a truly sustainable future with a more balanced demographic.  Gen X needs to know that Langley supports high-tech, low-impact businesses and will make an effort to promote their kind.  Gen Y needs to know that Langley would love to see a couple of start-ups in town.  For-profits and non-profits across the water needs to know that cool ideas are welcome in Langley and that here they will encounter others who share their passion.  By claiming this identity Langley can emerge as a model, dynamic village, the true sum of all its parts.  Not to fear–time and the art of living can still be practiced here.  The grace found in the unexpected encounter with an arbor and a sea breeze will not fade away.  The arts will abound.  These charms will continue because they are important to the community.  But so is a more stable and prosperous future.  The bronze lad next to the Pizzeria may capture this best.  He gazes out to the Sound as if acknowledging that one day he must go, but given his youth, he surely contemplates whether he will return.

The broken sidewalks and sagging fences of the neighborhood of my youth eventually lead to large, grassy parks.  These common areas used to have barbeque grills, swing sets, sand areas and lots of open space for group games like volleyball.  We often gathered there after school on nice days for pick-up baseball games.  Clearly, the open spaces were designed for activities.  Today, the park closest to my childhood home is eerily quiet.  Gone are the barbeque pits, the swing sets and other symbols of collective outdoor living.  The world has changed.  Now folks tend to barbeque in their own back yard and interact on-line and with hand-held devices.  Plus, the rise of district-wide recreation centers and athletic fields pulled a lot of the child traffic away from neighborhood parks.

So now the park, surrounded by back yard fences, represents an underutilized green space owned and maintained by a local parks and recreation district. Although “greenbelt” space is readily considered a typical and sought-after suburban amenity, the atrophy of the surrounding homes and yards suggest that the program should be re-evaluated. From the standpoint of resource usage, does it make sense to irrigate and maintain large tracts of unused grass abutting back yards? From a more policy oriented viewpoint, should we continue to elevate the role of the car as the sine qua non of the suburban lifestyle?  Is it always the case that ‘burb’ dwellers must jump in their cars in order to get the most basic household needs?

Perhaps not.  A re-visioning of the neighborhood park, along with the sidewalks and paths that lead to it, could offer the best chance for avoiding the suburban decay that some see as inevitable.  By encouraging new uses for these common spaces, such as common gardens free from pests with the help of experts from pest control augusta ga, co-op office space, a transit connection hub and even a small market center, many of our nation’s suburbs could experience a rejuvenation by making them more attractive to a wider group of potential residents.

We invite you to return to this blog for future additions to this series discussing the hidden potential for our suburban communities.

The fallout from the mortgage crisis two years ago supposedly attracted many buyers to the real estate sideline, waiting to jump in at the long-awaited end of a 20-year “seller’s market.” And in a few markets, namely the single-family, owner-occupied, market, lower asking prices have been met with eager bids. However, in the commercial and real estate investment world, fewer transactions are occurring these days than perhaps anticipated when the crisis spread. Much of this has to do with banks struggling to let go of underperforming assets and REO properties. Yet the paralysis affects the buyer side of the equation too and is not just limited to markets involving troubled assets. While inefficient markets might shoulder some of the blame, the stall pattern appears rooted in a more fundamental human reflex: fear.

How else do we account for the irrational market behavior at a time that is supposed to represent an historic opportunity? Unlike the savings and loan crisis of the 1980’s there is no RTC present to acquire and dispose of assets in a dedicated environment. While the previous and current administrations invoked a series of federal measures designed to prevent the widespread failure of banks and stimulate the economy it left the disposition of troubled assets to the free market. It is now clear to me that the law of supply and demand, the free market’s judicious overlord, is subordinate to the law of basic instinct. Widespread fear of the deal on both sides of the table leaves many transactions in a state of perpetual possibility, but not realized.

I suspect that the market fear we speak of originates in very different visions of the future held by buyers and sellers. To speak on behalf of one narrow class of buyers, in this case developers of for-sale product, the crystal ball reveals a future customer that is much different than the one from yesterday. In their minds, tomorrow’s end-users will bear the mark of today’s economic difficulties. Therefore, the thinking goes, their future buyers will be less liquid, pickier and fewer in number. This view of the future, and the fear of overpaying, drives the bid price south. Sellers, on the other hand (including many lending institutions), still aglow from the days of wine and roses, appear ready to wait out the current dystopia. Today’s crisis is merely a spot on a larger market cycle. Since the future is sure to be brighter they fear leaving money on the table. Patience is their partner. Such a sanguine view of the future holds the ask price at status quo.

Regardless of which version of the future will bear out, time is the critical coefficient here. Developers seeking new inventory can no longer think in mere two to three year increments. The new reality calls for a longer hold period with built-in flexibility to adjust for future unknowns. Their bid price will factor in a “feasible today” analysis over a longer span of time. Across the table, sellers can stall on the ask price, believing that a two to three year wait will allow the frenzy for distressed assets to clear the table and a return to demand-driven price scenarios.

It would not surprise me that free market fear and the resulting gap in expectations between seller and buyer will continue with respect to investment acquisitions for quite some time, perhaps through the two to three year period described above. In the interim, the buyers looking for a “pipeline” will chase markets where seller motivations close the ask/bid gap. The hidden troves of debt-encumbered assets and bank-owned portfolios will be picked-over and business models will be adjusted in the search for properties that can work within the new risk environment. As a result, many commendable projects will remain in manila folders to collect dust–waiting in fear for a future that may never come.

The literary genre of urbanism and new urbanism studies tends to arrive at certain undisputed conclusions, one of which is that the suburbs (or exurbs depending on the criteria) are moribund.  The two-story home on a large, grassy lot at the bottom of the cul-de-sac is an endangered, if not extinct, residential species.  At least from the planning perspective.

While there is fresh evidence to the contrary outside my window in Lakewood, Colorado, where I spend quite a bit of time, the long-term viability of the suburban option has been called into question.   The cost of land and public infrastructure as well as the economics and lifestyle impacts of managing large distances between home and civic interaction may lead to the demise of suburbia as the preferred residential option.  In its place, planners, architects and developers envision a mass migration toward a higher-density or mixed-use residential solution in urban cores.  While this may be the hope, if not the trend, the rush to more “sustainable” alternatives begs the question of what happens to the existing suburban building stock?

Senior family attorneys serving in Spokane has stated that according to data collected from the 2000 census, approximately 60% of all housing units were single-family, detached product.Based on the same census this would translate into roughly 70 million homes.  Although not all single-family, detached homes are synonymous with “suburbia” per se, large percentages are found in the “burbs.”  In his March 2008 article in The Atlantic entitled “The Next Slum?”, Christopher B. Leinberger argues that the sprawling American suburb of today represents the likely ghetto of tomorrow. Some of the crime fears articulated by Leinberger seem far-fetched outside neighborhoods racked by foreclosures and unoccupied residences.  More likely is the description of suburban blight he mentions, where the lack of quality construction, years of wear and tear, and shifting demographics have left certain suburban neighborhoods in a state of near-obsolescence.

Take the landscape of my youth, for example.   The 2,400 square foot, two-story home where I spent my adolescent years sits on a large lot along the asphalt conduit connecting two cul-de-sacs in unincorporated Jefferson County, Colorado.  The combination brick and aluminum siding maintains its appearance remarkably well considering its 40 years.  Sadly though, the sidewalks connecting the back of the home heave and buckle, leaving fractured ridges of exposed concrete to compete with weeds and gnarled roots from backyard Cottonwood trees for control of the walkways.  The backyard fences erected in the 1970’s to screen the barbeque from the dog-walkers and passersby sit in hopelessly dilapidated condition with wood pickets de-pigmented from almost four decades of endless sun.  Maybe Leinberger is right.

We invite you to return to this blog for future additions to this series discussing the hidden potential for our suburban communities.

If you happen to be in the San Francisco bay area and are looking for something to do I recommend stopping by Johansson Projects gallery in Oakland http://johanssonprojects.com/ to have a look at the Article X show hosted there. (Disclaimer: one of the two artists featured, Kristina Lewis, is my sister-in-law so please look past the possible bias!). You will find her work to be deconstructionist in nature, that is, she takes apart common things, the everyday world of utilitarian objects, in such a way so as to give them new life and give us a new interpretation of them. You will find, for example, a commercial-grade electrical switch box, with the wires pulled out through the switch and frozen in the air as if permanently starched. It will make you think.

We here at Novawest also want to make you think. In opposite tension to Ms. Lewis’ fascinating work, which turns everyday items into art, we desire to bring art to the everyday. The built environment is our 3-D canvas. Through design collaboration, community involvement, public/private cooperation and the “paintbrushes” of dozens of talented individuals who work on our projects, real estate development becomes a multi-dimensional experience. Our buyers, tenants and neighbors are our jury. If we create a small, cottage home that enables a senior couple to live elegantly within walking distance of the store and pharmacy we have succeeded. If we can turn a patch of unkempt urban dirt or asphalt into a mixed-use building that provides needed office space and more active street life we succeed. If we can re-configure an approved, but un-built project into a plan that aligns better with the expectations of the local community we are successful.

As with Ms. Lewis’ art, we hope that our projects will make you pause and consider the way we should approach the development of spaces in our urban, exurban and village environments. The economic meltdown hit all of us in the industry hard. For many it was devastating. Yet, we are reminded of the old oriental saying, “a crisis is an opportunity riding the dangerous wind.” Here, the opportunity is to inhale deeply and examine the foundations that led to the collapse. Easy money, ponzi-like speculative fervor and a failure to connect the means to the ends contributed to the downfall. Aware of this excess, as we exhale slowly, we should approach our development responsibility with a post-modern attitude, with skepticism or ambivalence about the notion of endless prosperity and rising property values. In almost pedestrian fashion developers will have to dwell longer on the fragile barrier between what is desirable and what is necessary. In the future that I see, what will make money has to first make sense. By pulling the wires out of the socket, Ms. Lewis might say, we will see the importance of the fundamentals in a whole new way.

We invite you to return to our SuperNova resource center often as we intend for this site to develop into a newsroom for thoughtful development and a virtual laboratory for new concepts that can make a difference in our communities.