FAYETTEVILLE -- A local group wants to help bridge the divide among residents on planning issues and guide city policy on streets, housing, parking and development patterns.
DeLani Bartlette, a resident who works at the University of Arkansas, has spearheaded an effort to start a local Strong Towns group.
Strong Towns is a national advocacy organization seeking to create safe, livable and inviting communities by replacing suburban, post-war development patterns with more traditional, walkable mixed-use areas, according to its website.
The city already has adopted many of those kinds of policies, but bringing those plans to fruition can take years, Bartlette said. Residents should become more engaged in city planning to help speed the process along, she said.
"The main gist should be to become a ground-up, grassroots type of organization," Bartlette said.
Rather than chapters, Strong Towns encourages residents to form "local conversation" groups. The organization lists more than 120 such groups throughout the country on its website. Bartlette said she was surprised to find out Fayetteville didn't already have its own group. The city is her hometown, and she said she wants to see it become a more walkable, bikeable and equitable place.
Strong Towns supports "local conversation" groups with listings on its website, contact information, online articles and academic courses. The organization produces videos, one of which is titled "Are Parking Lots Ruining Your City?" and is about Fayetteville doing away with parking minimums for businesses to make room for more buildings downtown.
Justin Tennant, a former City Council member and current member of the board for the Walton Arts Center, said sometimes urbanist ways of thought can overlook a city's unique conditions. For instance, the Walton Arts Center and other businesses in the entertainment district commissioned a parking study for downtown, set to be released next month. The city paid for a mobility study in 2017 that included a downtown parking analysis concluding there was ample parking supply. However, spaces were counted regardless of whether they were private or residential, and the study didn't adequately address the busiest times, Tennant said.
"It seems to me there's a tendency to believe all cities and downtowns are the same and a one-size-fits-all approach should work everywhere," he said. "I would rather look at each area on its own, then look at our region in Northwest Arkansas."
The city's planning policies need to evolve with its growth and include residential groups from all sides of issues, Tennant said.
Bartlette hosted the group's first meeting Wednesday at Crisis Brewing. Several urban planning enthusiasts and professionals were there, and she spent time networking and trying to get the word out. Bartlette advertised the meetup on the Facebook group she started, Fayetteville Strong.
A few people Bartlette talked to spoke of ideas such as incremental change to address specific issues, a tenet of Strong Towns. They also talked about the value of urban land, recommended books to one another and discussed different conferences coming up.
Keaton Smith, a member of the School Board and city planning advocate, said he hoped to use his connections within local, regional and national planning organizations to help grow the Strong Towns group. However, residents pushing for change in their own neighborhoods would make the most impact, he said.
"I think Strong Towns is about finding that next step of small, incremental change that is right for your community," Smith said. "Ideally, that is not top-down from experts and politicians. It's bottom-up from residents who know their neighborhood and know their neighbors and see an opportunity to make something better."
Residents often agree on the same goals for their community, Smith said. Those goals can include safe streets, a vibrant downtown and reducing traffic jams. It's just that people may have different ideas on how to accomplish those goals, he said.
Strong Towns has five priorities: ending highway expansion, keeping local government finances transparent, incrementally increasing housing density, creating safe streets and ending parking mandates, according to its website.
Every "local conversation" group has different priorities unique to its community, said John Pattison, community builder with Strong Towns. The organization is nonpartisan and welcomes residents of different political ideologies, he said.
Although Fayetteville has adopted many of the policies for which Strong Towns advocates, the work to make a city better never ends, Pattison said.
"Fayetteville could be a model. Many towns and cities don't want to go first," he said. "They want to be able to point to other leaders in places like Fayetteville for their constituents."
Shane Guenther, a senior civil engineering student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, started an urbanism club at the school last year with support from Strong Towns. He said the group has been focusing on education and advocacy for local planning policies.
The group hosts weekly meetings and invites speakers to talk about the concepts Strong Towns typically supports. Members routinely interact with city officials and show up to City Hall to express support for rezoning to higher residential density and walkable streets, he said.
Neighbors often show up to City Council meetings as a united front against a rezoning, Guenther said. Residents who want higher density rezonings typically don't express their support to elected officials, he said.
"We really want to be the voice of the people who then will be able to move in," Guenther said. "It's hard for someone to advocate for an apartment building that they don't live in yet."
Ann Arbor is in the middle of updating a vision plan for the city, and Guenther said his group plans to keep the momentum going for urbanist policies.
"All we want is just to be able to walk to a restaurant or a bar or a park, some kind of social space, and walk back without worrying about getting hit by a car," Guenther said. "When you frame it like that, people are a lot more receptive."
More News
NoneStrong Towns
The national Strong Towns organization has a four-step process for coming up with community solutions:
Humbly observe where people in the community struggle.
Ask the question: What is the next smallest thing we can do right now to address that struggle?
Do that thing.
Repeat.
For more information, go to:
https://bit.ly/StrongTownsapproach
Fayetteville Strong
To learn more about Fayetteville's Strong Towns group, search "Fayetteville Strong" on Facebook.
"Are Parking Lots Ruining Your City?"
To watch the video Strong Towns produced about Fayetteville's downtown parking, go to:
Know the News
Listen to the Know the News podcast with NWA Democrat-Gazette editor Dave Perozek and Fayetteville Strong founder DeLani Bartlette at:
Source: Strong Towns