Could Pocatello become a walkable city? Mixed-use buildings may be the answer

The view of Station Square’s dining area from the second-floor mezzanine. | Logan Ramsey, EastIdahoNews.com POCATELLO – It was a Tuesday afternoon, and when Denis Clijsters looked down out of his office window, he could see the inside of a gourmet burger restaurant. This wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, as his office overlooks the ground floor of the building they share. Further down the lobby, a couple were eating in the dining area, which sits between a restaurant serving Hawaiian food – and a beauty salon. Three more people were on the second floor mezzanine, two eating together on a couch and another sitting on a bench overlooking the lobby. Other offices like Clijsters are scattered around this floor. And then on the floor above them, which isn’t accessible to the foot traffic on the first two, many of the people who live in the building were in their apartments. The tenants apparently feel so comfortable with their neighbors that most of them leave their shoes out in the hallway. This building is called Station Square, and Clijsters is the owner of it. With it housing not just businesses and offices, but residential space as well, Station Square can easily be identified as a mixed-use building. The view of Nook from the staircase of Station Square. | Logan Ramsey, EastIdahoNews.com The view of Station Square’s lobby from the dining area. | Logan Ramsey, EastIdahoNews.com Shoes sitting out in the hallway of Station Square’s apartments. | Logan Ramsey, EastIdahoNews.com These buildings don’t all have to look like Station Square. To be considered mixed-use, a development must designate space for multiple functions, including offices, residential apartments or commercial space, into either the same building or within the same development. While Station Square combines all three of these functions, a mixed-use building doesn’t have to. “They don’t always have to be as big, or expansive as this,” Clijsters said. “It could be one building with a larger first floor area that’s commercial space, and then apartments on top of that.” A bedroom in a Station Square apartment. | Logan Ramsey, EastIdahoNews.com The kitchen in an unfinished Station Square apartment. | Logan Ramsey, EastIdahoNews.com Because Clijsters lives only a couple blocks away from the building, he often walks to work. The way he sees it, someone being able to walk to their workplace, the grocery store or another specific storefront makes the area they’re living in not just more convenient, but safer and more economically active. “It makes the neighborhood safer, because you’ll see more people walking. And once you’re walking, there’s more likely the chance that (you’ll say), ‘oh, I’ll do this too.’ Like, ‘let me swing into this store.’ ‘Look what’s going on there.’ ‘Oh, there’s an event here at the park.’ Well, if you drive, you’re more likely going from A to B, (and) that’s it,” Clijsters said. Another benefit of mixed-use developments that Clijsters pointed to was how it allows a city to more efficiently use its resources. Not just in its land use, but also in its infrastructure costs, as it’s cheaper to maintain what’s already built, rather than have brand new infrastructure developed, and then maintain that as well as what was there before. “In our minds, (it’s) commercial there, residential there, let’s kind of separate them. And I think that’s a very inefficient use of our infrastructure, and that’s a very high push on the tax burden by thinking that way. It’s a waste of money,” Clijsters said. Mixed-use buildings aren’t overly common in Pocatello. But they’re more common in the part of town that was historically the Gate City’s downtown. This is because, according to Long-Range Senior Planner Jim Anglesey, Pocatello was developed in a “traditional” way, like most cities built before World War II. “The traditional development pattern is that there’s always a higher density in the central district, and then it kind of just dissipates from there,” Anglesey explained. As time has gone on, the priorities of development shifted, favoring expansion into undeveloped land. But as Anglesey pointed out, Pocatello is constrained to the confines of the Portneuf Valley, which limits how much land developers can spread out to. “We don’t have unlimited land to expand into, and so we have to get ahead of and come to the realization that we’re gonna have to focus on infill development and start building up instead of out,” Anglesey said. In order to emphasize the traditional development pattern, with an urban core, and mixed use areas serving as a transition to residential areas, the city introduced a number of changes to its zoning ordinance. One of the most significant of these changes was changing height limits on buildings built in commercial and industrial zones. For Commercial General (CG) zoning areas, buildings were capped at 60 feet, and in Central Commercial (CC) and industrial zoning, they were capped at 80 feet. For example, Yellowstone Avenue is zoned CG and the core of Historic Downtown is zoned CC. “And we opened it up to be higher, because a lot of our existing buildings were higher,” Anglesey said. But they didn’t increase the height limits for every zoning designation. Both residential and Residential Commercial Professional (RCP), which allows for mixed-use buildings, maintained its previous height limits. The way Anglesey explained it, these zoning changes encourage more density and infill development in the city’s urban areas, and keep it out of residential neighborhoods. “The question isn’t, ‘are we going to prevent this?’ It’s, ‘how should we develop in a way that puts these higher densities in places that we want them,’ versus anywhere,” Anglesey said. And the changes to zoning won’t stop there. “In the next couple years, we’re going to rewrite the whole thing, because we’ve kind of Frankensteined it to death,” Anglesey said. The Pocatello Comprehensive Plan 2040 includes maps of what Pocatello’s zoning could look like in the future. Click here to read and download the comprehensive plan, and click here to view Pocatello’s current zoning areas. A future land use map of Pocatello. | Courtesy of Pocatello Examples of what the zoning areas are intended to look like. | Courtesy of Pocatello Making these zoning changes may encourage developers to think more seriously about mixed-use developments. And while Josh Ellis, president of Cornerstone Realty and Development and a former Chubbuck City Councilmember, spoke with EastIdahoNews.com, and talked about increasing demand for mixed-use buildings, he also noted the difficulties involved in securing funding from major banks for those projects. “We will always joke that the bank wants to lend to you when you don’t need the bank. … When you need the bank to lend, they’re like, ‘we don’t know if we like the risk. It might be a little too much risk,’” Ellis said. Ellis said that while many developers are looking to take on projects that increase density rather than expand outwards, banks will often not take the project on because they don’t see the Pocatello-Chubbuck area as being large enough to support it. “You are seeing people trying to build up higher density because the cost of expanding out is just more expensive. Sometimes the needs of the market don’t always match what the banks like or want,” Ellis said. “It doesn’t mean the banks are totally against it. They’re just going to look at every project, and with higher interest rates right now, it makes fewer projects viable.” However, some banks may be interested in supporting mixed-use developments in this area. Corey Mangum, the branch manager of WaFd Bank and a member of the Pocatello City Council, said that his institution has supported these projects in other parts of the country. While Mangum can’t yet speak openly about specifics, he said that WaFd Bank is, “working on a couple of (mixed-use) projects with some organizations here, and we’re looking at branching that out even further in communication with different developers to see if we can help impact our community.” A map showing where Harvest Springs is in relation to the rest of Chubbuck. | Logan Ramsey, EastIdahoNews.com But not every developer is convinced that there’s demand in the Pocatello-Chubbuck area. While Ryan Satterfield, president of Satterfield Realty, pointed to his Harvest Springs project as a mixed-use development, he said that the company hasn’t developed a mixed-use building. “It is something that’s just a little bit outside of the box,” Satterfield said. Satterfield acknowledged that many places in the country have seen demand increase for mixed-use buildings, but also feels that Pocatello follows its own trends. “There are changes and shifts in the way that people are choosing to live, and the culture that is coming into having more of an urban setting for living — I’m just not sure how much Pocatello’s market will accept something like that,” Satterfield said. But Satterfield also acknowledged that Pocatello changing its zoning ordinance would help to encourage infill developments as time goes on. It was a Friday afternoon, and most of the tables in the Station Square dining area were filled up. The outside of Station Square. | Logan Ramsey, EastIdahoNews.com The view of the dining area and Taste of Hawaii from inside Blades Salon & Spa. | Logan Ramsey, EastIdahoNews.com From inside the beauty salon, its customers could see the dining area, where young people were talking and chatting near people who were still eating. A customer who goes to the beauty salon, or visits a real estate office, has the option to get food once they’re done with their appointment. People who work in the office space above also always have the option to visit one of the restaurants in Station Square, or any one of the many restaurants within walking distance of the building when they want to take lunch. Clijsters pointed out that city employees only have one restaurant within walking distance of city hall, located across the parking lot. “The moment you’re in a car, half the time you may as well just go home. Or maybe you go to a drive through, and that’s it. But (in Historic Downtown), as soon as you’re walking, you walk to nearby restaurants, but on the way, maybe my wife wanted a book, so I’m buying a book, or I need a present for someone. You quickly combine your trip with a few other things. Which, if you drive a car, you may not do all that,” Clijsters said. As a city council member, and as a branch manager of a financial institution, Mangum finds himself communicating with developers in both those capacities. “The bank does its due diligence to make sure that the developer is operating within the scope of the zoning ordinance. That way it’s not a recourse back onto the bank,” Mangum said. “(And then) wearing the City Council hat, we have done some work on rezoning here within the city of Pocatello, and it’s very strategic, very well planned, very well executed, in my opinion, to help with the growth of the city of Pocatello.” When looking at the future land zoning map of Pocatello, it becomes apparent that areas that allow for mixed-use developments are within a reasonable walking distance of most neighborhoods in the city. Anglesey said this was intentional, and those areas are meant to function as a medium density transition between Pocatello’s urban core and its residential neighborhoods. Anglesey sees this as important to not just the development of the city, but also for protecting the land around it. “Where are (people moving here) all going to go? Are we willing to sacrifice farmland, or should we be utilizing the land that we have in our towns?” Anglesey asked. As time goes on, Clijsters hopes to see more buildings like Station Square come to the city. “I think it’s the perfect thing. I think we’ve got to mix more commercial and residential together. There’s nothing wrong with doing that,” Clijsters said.The post Could Pocatello become a walkable city? Mixed-use buildings may be the answer appeared first on East Idaho News.
Source: eastidahonews.com