The city of Urbandale is moving ahead with its plan to revitalize its downtown area into a multiuse district to create a sense of place for the community to come together for shopping, entertaining and to live.

City officials held a meeting with a downtown stakeholders group last month, with a plan for a community open house to gather public input in late April or early May before the proposed master plan goes to the City Council for consideration in June.

If approved, it would then be incorporated into projects prioritized in the city’s Community Improvement Plan, which is updated every January.

The Downtown Master Plan looks at traffic patterns, parking, stormwater management and the density and mix of how the space will be used.

“If those things aren’t figured out, why would a developer want to do something there?” said Aaron DeJong, the city’s director of economic development. “It just makes it so much harder to achieve without this effort and the understanding and clarity that is going to be needed to make those first developments happen.”

He said the work going into developing and activating the Downtown Master Plan, which began last summer, “is signaling to the community that this is a real opportunity to put Urbandale in a spot to be successful in our eastern neighborhoods for the next 100 years.”

DeJong said the key components for a successful downtown redevelopment district include having green space for people to enjoy, being pedestrian-friendly with easy access to parking, having successful businesses and having a place where people feel safe to visit.

“We need to make sure that all of these are in place because if we don’t have one, it will affect the others,” he said.

Currently, downtown Urbandale ― the area along Douglas Avenue from Merle Hay Road to 75th Street and a couple of blocks north and south of Douglas ― is primarily a pass-through area for commuters driving across the metro, DeJong said.

“You know, 80% to 90% of cars on Douglas don’t stop in downtown Urbandale,” he said. “It’s a place to go through and that is not the definition of a downtown area, and we need to flip that so it becomes a place to stay and not just go through.

“What do we have to do and what are things that need to be implemented to get that to tip the other way?” DeJong said. “That’s what this master planning effort is, is to figure out what that is and how we do that so we can signal to the development community, we can signal to the businesses that are looking at this area and signal to our vested partners that are down there that this is the way we are going.”

The city is working with consulting firm Bolton and Menk on the plan, and they are beginning to come up with key recommendations for the Downtown Master Plan.

The first issue that needs to be addressed is the realignment of traffic patterns on Douglas Avenue, which is currently four lanes. Consultants with Bolton & Menk are recommending that traffic be slowed down and opportunities be created for pedestrian access and visibility, DeJong said.

“They’ve gone through a traffic analysis and tried to figure out, does a three-lane roadway work, and they believe it does,” he said. “From a city staff level, we’ve looked at the same information and we wouldn’t be screwing things up by going to a three-lane road.”

Doing that would create opportunities for on-street parking, which DeJong said will help make the redeveloped downtown successful.

“We will need a lot more parking because people are going to be coming from across the metro to downtown, and we need to have that availability of parking to make that happen,” he said.

DeJong said parking can’t just be surface lots for individual properties.

“One of the recommendations is we need to figure out how this whole area is going to work together from a parking standpoint, which is a paradigm shift from how it was originally developed in the 1940s and 50s,” he said. “The parking demand in 1950 was just way different than it is now.”

Creating parking that makes the downtown more walkable for visitors is another goal of the redevelopment plan, DeJong said.

He said the city will also explore burying overhead utility lines to make the downtown district more attractive.

The current speed limit along Douglas is 30 miles per hour, but DeJong and Assistant City Manager Curtis Brown acknowledge people drive much faster through there. There may be conversations about the posted speed limit as the redevelopment plan moves forward, they said.

Brown said adding on-street parking, more landscaping along the street and more pedestrian access creates natural friction that forces people to slow down.

“It creates that psychological feeling that I should slow down,” he said. “So it’s that little bit of friction that gets people to moderate their speed through the corridor.”

The master plan will address density questions that haven’t been addressed previously in the city’s Comprehensive Plan, DeJong said.

“It didn’t talk about the levels of density that we were looking at,” he said. “We were talking about: two-story buildings, three-story buildings, four-story buildings? We never got to that level of what the desired redevelopment would be, but we’re doing that in this master plan.”

He said feedback from the Planning and Zoning Commission, the City Council and neighborhood representatives indicates that if a property is going to change, “we should go as big as we possibly can.”

The two areas being focused on for mixed-use development are near the intersection of 67th Street and Douglas Avenue where the former Plaza Florist building once stood, and the 7000 block of Douglas Avenue.

DeJong said it’s important to focus on a couple of key areas to create a vision and demonstrate to the community what opportunities exist.

“And then we can keep hitting more wins after that,” he said.

A stormwater strategy will also be critical to the success of a redevelopment plan, especially if increased density is part of that vision, DeJong said.

“We understand that if we want that kind of development, then the city needs to be a player in how we achieve the stormwater detention and water quality that we all expect to have,” he said.

Brown said there has been flooding in neighborhoods north of Douglas and the city is working to address that issue.

“What we’re going to need to do is figure out what we are going to do infrastructure-wise and policy-wise to improve the water we’re sending downstream in a storm?” he said. “These are the challenges of redevelopment. Certainly, we have the idea to add more green through the area but it’s going to take technologies like softening the current hardscape through landscaping. But also, is it a combination of some detention ponds, some underground storage, is it some infiltration into the right-of-way along the curb way? It’s a real challenge that redevelopment  poses.”

DeJong said creating a stormwater strategy must be done in partnership with developers so the effort is coordinated.

“If we want a dense environment and we want to do this, too, we have to get creative,” he said.

The proposed plan will also be shared with residential stakeholders in the neighborhood that surrounds the downtown area, Brown said.

“We’ve been very deliberate about making sure we’re open and transparent in that the process is open to the participation of the residents,” he said.

DeJong said a redeveloped downtown district will benefit not only Urbandale but the entire region.

While Urbandale has great neighborhoods, it is lacking that place where its culture can be elevated, similar to districts that have been developed or that are being developed in other metro communities, he said.

“The community wants to see that and they also want to see redevelopment of our existing neighborhoods that are beginning to show their age,” DeJong said. “We want to be part of the solution for being a great region for growth.”

The city is in the process of taking the high-level view of what it wants for a downtown that is outlined in its comprehensive plan, which is the city’s vision for growth and development, and refining that view to look at more details of that vision, which will result in policy changes and projects to “create that transformation we want to see,” Brown said.

He said redeveloping downtown will also help preserve a sense of pride in the community.

“The community of Urbandale desires a place to say this is where our community gathers,” he said. “Urbandale is famous for its Fourth of July parade, which is one of the events that has its base downtown. The idea that downtown is a place for Urbandale, but without some attention and investment we could lose the potential downtown Urbandale has to be a place of pride and gathering for the community.”

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