NOTEBOOK:In Des Moines, developers should take heed of the pedestrian experience
KENT DARR Jun 22, 2016 | 8:53 pm
<1 min read time
0 wordsBusiness Record Insider, Real Estate and Development, The Insider NotebookA colleague from my days at The Columbus Dispatch was in town last week to attend the annual conference of the Alliance of Area Business Publishers. These days, Mary Yost is editor of Columbus CEO magazine. After dodging on-street and off-street construction blockades in downtown Des Moines, she just wanted to take a long, unimpeded walk, and she said as much. “Where can I just take a walk?” she asked.
Standing on the north side of Locust Street at Fifth Avenue, it looked as though she had a clear shot all the way to the state Capitol. “That’s a hike, but it’s a nice hike,” she was told. “I’ll take it,” she said.
Going for a stroll can be a challenge these days. That’s a blessing in disguise. It’s tough travels for motorists and pedestrians, thanks to the glut of development projects. I like it.
Still, we need to be thinking about the pedestrian experience. Just ask Dennis Reynolds, the urban planner and landscape designer who is a member of the Des Moines Urban Design Review Board. The board itself is an interesting mix of personalities and professions, with developers, architects, a lawyer and, for the next three years, an economic development specialist. All of them seem to be committed to the value of a good walk. Reynolds might be the bluntest of them all, so he is going to get special attention here. Straight talk is hard for a reporter to ignore, but easy to appreciate.
When the board met a couple of weeks ago, Reynolds said he could not support plans for a 32-story mixed-use tower at Fifth and Court avenues if a solid wall along Fifth remained part of the plans. Developer Justin Mandelbaum suggested that he could make that wall go away easy enough.
This week, the developers of an office building planned for Southeast Sixth and Elm streets in the city’s Market District got some inkling of Reynolds’ thoughts on the pedestrian experience when they appeared before the board..
The development occupies about 1 acre along Elm between Southeast Fifth and Southeast Sixth. A three-story parking garage occupies about half of the property. Brothers-in-law Adam Petersen, president of PDM Precast Inc., and Matt Kottmeyer, a partner with GPS Impact Inc., are developing the property along with equity partners. They are being called pioneers for proposing an office building in an area that is just emerging as prime development territory. Read more about the project.
Petersen told the board that he understood the need to provide some parking in the Market District.
Parking is one thing, the pedestrian experience is another. Reynolds isn’t all that fond of parking ramps and surface lots that eat up a lot of urban landscape. If they eat it up, they should also provide a visual feast at ground level. Leave room for some retail spaces or restaurants or some sort of eye candy.
Reynolds said that because the developers were urban pioneers, he would cut them some slack so far as the parking garage was concerned. Other developers, who are less pioneering, shouldn’t count on him being so lenient, he said.
After the meeting, Reynolds said that for now, few people are going to be walking to the Market District and north to the East Village from the south. To do so, they would have to walk by scrap yards and a city service lot that don’t provide much in the way of interesting visual distractions. But that will change as the Market District continues along its development trajectory.
Reynolds noted that pedestrians shouldn’t have to walk more than 100 feet or so without something interesting to see, such as restaurants or green spaces or retail shops. I live about an hour’s drive from Des Moines, so I tend to take parking in whatever form I find it. Besides, I tend to take on the retail experience with my eyes closed. But Reynolds is the expert.
He is complimentary of the Southeast Sixth and Elm project, but those who follow, beware.
“The next time we see something come in and it has a half a block of parking, we’re going to have a problem with it,” Reynolds said.
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