I attended part of the 'form based code' planning meeting last week, but I left early.  I found it too depressing, because it seems to me that nothing like that will happen in Lansing in the foreseeable future.  The presentation was a bit academic, which means I am not sure I really understood what they were talking about until the end when people began discussing it.  But it turns out that it means the people of a community actually come up with design specifications for very specific parts of their town and require developers to use them.

That is exactly as I have always envisioned a Lansing Town Center coming about.  The town owns a beautiful expanse of blank canvas, about 150 acres of land, on which we can paint anything we want.  That presents a unique opportunity to not only protect the town by providing a place where denser development can take place, but also to make it cohesive and beautiful.  By actually planning the town can increase the tax base, control where the bulk of development does or doesn't happen, protect farmlands, the lakefront and other areas of the town that we love the way they are, and -- cherry on top -- make the new parts attractive.

But every time the idea of a town center seems to gain some traction it goes up in a poof of smoke.  Three developers were willing to work together to follow a concept developed by Lansing residents when there was a Town Center Committee.  They were willing to pay for infrastructure, including roads, lighting, and sewer.  It would have been residential at first, because you need a certain threshold of population to support retail and professional business.  But a space was reserved for a small shopping and professional building center.

That's where this so-called form based planning code could have come in.  Instead of a hodgepodge of clashing designs and colors, we could have seen an attractive, cohesive shopping area.

But this seems to be a level of planning nobody in town has been willing to consider.  I have asked town officials about that approach before.  No one seemed very interested in that level of planning.

Which brings me back to that lost opportunity.  It is almost unheard of that an established town like Lansing can start from scratch and develop something that so purely reflects the desires of current citizens in an attractive and useful way.  That is planning at its purest and at its best.  Sure, I agree that if you own land you should be able to do whatever you want with it as long as it meets zoning requirements.  But here's the thing.  Nobody who might develop this land owns it now.  The town controls it 100%.  I do not think that towns should be in the development business, but they certainly should have say over what their future developments look like.  lansing could do that, but it won't.

In this case no developer would buy the land unless he or she was willing to abide by the predetermined design concept.  It would not be a restriction, because they'd buy into what amounts to design deed restrictions if they bought in at all.  It would be a winner for developers, because they would know they were building something that Lansingites really want.  And it would be a winner for Lansingites because we would be getting what we really want.  not to mention an expanded tax base to mitigate onerous property taxes that only go up and up and up.

Isn't that worth the effort of a little planning?  Isn't that what planning is really for?

Hasn't this town demonstrated time after time that it is merely a pipe dream?

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