Returning to Legacy Crossing

It's been a year since I was exploring development in Legacy Crossing. A year of a very down economy and a year post-Copenhagen of seeing international paralysis on carbon emissions.

I've renewed my interest in the southern parcel in Legacy Crossing and in developing it as model for the district.

Model of what? I'm looking for a succinct tag line. Perhaps "Net zero." I think that for heating and domestic hot water that might be achievable in row houses. For water on the landscape, maybe. Food production, no. Might it get the residents out of their cars, or into pluggable cars? Perhaps solar supplemented charging could be a feature.

Spokane to Moscow Rail - possible terminus

From: Peterson, Nils
Sent: Friday, October 09, 2009 11:55 AM
To: Scarfo, Bob
Subject: Rail connection between Spokane and Moscow

Bob,
I've been following some of your work to get the communities to imagine
a
rail link to Spokane.

I have begun exploring doing a development in Moscow's Legacy Crossing
in a
parcel that might be the terminus or just beyond the terminus of the
line
you are proposing. I have been posting various thoughts, including some
site analysis here
http://greenmoscow.blogspot.com/2009/09/developing-in-legacy-crossing.ht
ml

This is a note to explore if there is a conversation that you and your
students might want to have regarding your project and the site I'm
exploring

---
Scarfo replies
Nils, you're working on some very exciting stuff. I have forwarded your
email to the students working on the Moscow, ID rail station design.
Part of what they are doing is trying to determine a good location for a
potential station.
I told them to contact you and see about meeting and talking with you.

There has been so much interest in the idea of reintroducing passenger
rail that I have been poking around trying to find some funding for a
one-day working session with a broad a group of people as possible. I'd
like to see us walk away for such a meeting with a strong strategy of
how to incrementally move for where we are today to a point in time when
passenger rail is an integral part of the Palouse, eastern WA and
western ID regions.

When I get this meeting established I will definitely let you know so
you can participate.

Thanks so much for reaching out to me.
Bob

Legacy Crossing Land Cost Analysis

I did some photography looking at the site, and started thinking about the visual impact and potential of building massing, but concluded that I need to work more on the business model first.

One issue to understand is the contribution of the land cost to the project costs. The variables I have thought about considering are:

• Net usable site (after dedicating land for the Almon St extension ROW
• Net buildable site (after further deducting space inevitably lost to external circulation)
• Gross Built space, after allowing for required parking. Parking could be under the building (at the cost of ground floor space and higher construction costs), but I don't know how to assess this yet.
  
• Number of floors. The Overlay zone says minimum height 2 stories, and seems to say maximum height of 5 stories (but might be leaving open greater height with setbacks on upper stories)

Below is the spreadsheet I made with these variables. The Overlay Zone sets out the parking requirements, but its hard to estimate the parking without more detail of the program, so I took a guess.

What I see is that it takes quite intense development to get the land cost down below $10/sqft.

There are a couple commercial properties for sale in Moscow CBD right now with asking prices of about $100/sqft (land + structure). Construction costs run well over $90/sqft so there is something I'm missing or this land is greatly overpriced.

Site size (sqft)	184020
Net after ROW (sqft)	134014
Assumed Useable Footprint	90%
Net Footprint (sqft)	120613
Lost to public circulation	13401
Gross Built Footprint (not lost to parking)	60%
Numb Floors	4
Gross Built Space (SqFt)	361839
Land Cost	$3,000,000
Land Cost/sqft built	$10.36

Developing in Legacy Crossing

Last spring I posted some thoughts on alternative ways to develop in Moscow's Legacy Crossing area. I continue to mull those ideas over and have taken a few minutes to explore with my banker and Moscow Community Development the south-western parcel. The image (click to enlarge) has two colors of site boundaries, red the recorded property lines and yellow the ideas of Moscow Community Development for street alignments.

The parcel has a long creek frontage (actual creek ROW is owned by University of Idaho. Its access is on the skinny end (NW) along College street. The proposed street would provide access along most of the long north-eastern side. The FEMA flood plain map 1600900002 shows this parcel is above the 100 year flood, were areas just to the North and NW are in the flood plain.

Moscow is in the process of updating its Comprehensive Plan and Chapter 5, Public Utilities, has two maps of interest. The first shows storm water constraints along 6th st, but not in the area of the parcel.

The second shows sanitary sewer constraints


The question arising in the sewer map is what route might the City choose for improving the sanitary sewer capacity? I need to learn the current alignment of the sewers in this area, but given that the site has historically (100 years) been railroad and grain elevators its unlikely that the current alignment lies in this area. However, a future alignment down the proposed street is a possibility.

Moscow Valley Transit provides fixed route service passing the site on 8th and south of the site in Sweet Ave.

"The city earned an Idaho Rural Community Development Block Grant to extend fiber optic connectivity into Alturas Technology Park. The Moscow Fiber Project creates a citywide fiber optic network, using as a nucleus the existing Avista fiber network, which serves many public entities including the city, Moscow School District, Gritman Medical Center, Alturas Technology Park, University of Idaho, Latah County, State of Idaho and potentially many other entities both public and private." http://www.matr.net/article-26796.html This network must pass close to the site as Gritman is to the north and the new fiber was laid along the bike path beginning to the east of Main St on the south side of the creek. The Business Incubator south of the site on Sweet Ave also has high speed network access, probably provided from University of Idaho.

Legacy Crossing Thoughts

Previously I've posted on the Legacy Crossing model that was created by Nels Reece's students and an interesting green architectural firm, Mithun, and how their ideas might apply to Legacy Crossing.

The thing that I keep getting stuck on in Nels' students' work in the buildings as islands that they created. I look at downtown and see continuous urban form. Recently I visited Federal Hill and Otterbien districts in Baltimore and Mission Valley in San Diego and created this slide show with a different vision for the Legacy Crossing area. I'm not proposing either Federalist or Mission styles, but rather the continuous forms, and the interweaving of multiple scales, uses and textures.

With the favorable E-W orientation of the site there is green potential for daylighting, solar PV, or solar hot water. The large roof area suggests looking at Mithun ideas for rain water capture and reuse.

Bicycle City

Bicycle City describes itself as "a planned community where people live, work and play. Its eco-friendly, car-free design is healthy, sustainable and animal-friendly." So far, Bicycle City does not exist, its a vision shopping for a location. The site lists places in Idaho as potential existing cities to host this innovation, alas, the descriptions of Moscow seem to have been done by somebody at their dining room table in Manhattan -- there is no sense the person knew the local area or even worked very hard with the Moscow website.

Nonetheless, I filled out the form and suggested that Moscow was an interesting site to consider because of the Legacy Crossing redevelopment downtown and the already developing bicycle culture and path system.

Water and Legacy Crossing URA Project

Wed (4-9) saw a presentation by the Moscow Urban Renewal Agency of the Legacy Crossing Project at P&Z. Gary Reidner laid out the ways in which the Project was generally consistent with the 1999 Comprehensive Plan. You can see the URA materials here.

What troubled me about the document was there was no mention of water conservation as a infrastructure or utility issue that the URA would include in its goals. This post puts my concern in context.

Consequently, here are my notes on the motion passed unanimously relative to the URA request:

We find the URA proposal generally consistent with the Comprehensive Plan, contingent on the URA bringing back to P&Z for approval the following modifications to the URA plan:
1. addition of a new section that addresses the URA’s infrastructural strategies to conserve municipal potable water.
2. inclusion of Hogg Creek as a waterway to be preserved/ enhanced
3. inclusion of enhanced emphasis on multi-modal transportation infrastructure (rights of way, facilities, etc) as a goal of the URA

And we request that Staff draft the appropriate reasoned statement for our review.

My Rationale: A project of this scale cannot fit under the PBAC cap. Given that the URA mechanism funds infrastructure related activities that are for municipal benefit I would like to see in their proposal for infrastructure development by the project structural approaches to water conservation (this would give project activities a municipal benefit in addition to econonmic development).

I don’t want to suggest either a mechanism the URA would choose or an amount of conservation the URA would target, I’d rather they come back with a proposal and convince P&Z of the merits and feasibility of their idea.

I was instructed at the last P&Z meeting by my fellow Commissioners that water conservation could not be taken out on the back of a single developer. I understand that, but if we do not plan for, and make, infrastructural changes impacting water use, the difficulty of conserving is greater. The URA is a great opportunity to make a public-private partnership to steward our resources.

I think P&Z's planning responsibility is to look at these infrastructural issues and plan for long term strategies to impact the city’s efficiency (water, energy, garbage). I'm looking for suggestions.

Council can look at policy mechanisms like price or rationing irrigation to meet specific goals within the constraints that the infrastructure imposes.

Legacy Crossing and PBAC Cap

Back in March I posted about a small annexation going through P&Z and the water budget questions it raised. Joel Hamilton commented with a resource from the Army Corps looking at ways to divert surface water for municipal needs of Moscow and Pullman.

At the Feb 27 P&Z meeting, Nels Reece and students showed this Legacy Crossing Conceptual Model. (See the model at City Hall, very cool.) April 12 the Legacy Crossing URA redevelopment plan will be the subject of a public hearing at P&Z. (Public notice as PDF). Nels' students' project addressed only the southern portion of the URL, south of 6th, and going SW to Hwy 95. They were assigned to see how much housing density the could create as part of a mixed use development in the area. The handout they had is part of the Feb 27 P&Z Minutes. It describes fitting 650 dwellings (6.5million sqft) on the ~20 acre site.

I've been reading the PBAC 2006 annual report (PDF) (PBAC home) which has these two graphs on the historic water pumping by Moscow. (Graphs for other entities are in the report as well).


This is the pumping rate (blue) compared to the agreed PBAC rising cap. Only recently have we gotten our conservation efforts in line with our pledge.

In addition to the 1% rate of increase pledge, we have also pledged to stay below an absolute cap of 875 million gallons.


This graph shows our actual pumping (bars) compared to the 875 ceiling (line). This difference is the 30-50 million gallon "headroom" that Bill Belknap described in the March 26 P&Z minutes. The available headroom in Moscow's pledge for 2006 was 875-856 = 19 million gallons.

Here is the problem. The Council committed 2% of our total pumping allowance to Hawkins (and 111% of the available headroom). There was a furor (for multiple reasons). Nels Reece's students' ideas for just part of Legacy Crossing would commit 8% of our pumping allowance, see table below and 363% of the headroom.

Project	use	gal/yr	acre ft	% headroom	% of ceiling
Moscow Ceiling (125% baseline)	all uses	875,000,000	2685	-	-
Moscow 2006 pumping	all uses	856,000,000	2627	-	-
Moscow Headroom	all uses	19,000,000	58	-	-
Hawkins	Potable	14,663,295	45	77%	2%
Hawkins	Irrigation	6,517,020	20	34%	1%
Hawkins	all uses	21,180,315	65	111%	2%
Macrch 27 1 ac rezone	all uses (1 dwelling estimated)	106,000	0.3	1%	0%
Legacy Crossing	all uses (650 units estimated)	68,900,000	211	363%	8%

Legacy Crossing Conceptual Model

There is a beautiful model under the stairs on 1st floor of City Hall. It was done by students in Nels Reece's class.

These are the notes from the draft 2-27-08 P&Z meeting minutes on the model:

Nels Reece distributed flyers to the attendees and introduced Christa Shell, one of his students assisting in the project. He made the presentation of the model of the Urban Renewal District model. The railroad was a divider in the past but the land is now being considered in a different manner. Nels Reece’s U of I class evaluated the land to determine if a purpose could be developed. Landscape architecture and architecture students built the model at about 1/16 scale.

Christa stated that the students that built the model were fourth year students and the design intent was to maintain and bolster the unique character of Moscow and yet reflect the sustainable nature of the City and the University. They also wished to encourage the use of pedestrian and bike ways here in this presentation. Reece oriented those in attendance by pointing out the different landscaped models.

The extension of Main Street is strong, remembering that it is important to exploit those elements that are current.

The red ribbons represent the extension from the Hello Walk, which could be a 40 or 50 foot wide public right of way. The street could become a 60 feet wide public right of way, as well.

Its worth looking at the model and seeing which of its ideas resonate with your visions for how central Moscow might develop. Its also worth looking at the model for the kind of opportunity it represents for Moscow as compared to the lack of a similar opportunity in downtown Pullman. It is an example of the kind of significant difference between the two communities which are so similar in many other ways.

Latah County Comp Plan Revision

I attended (briefly) a meeting gathering input on aspects of Latah County that were valued by the community. This is part of a process to revise the county Comp Plan.

Two points struck me:
1. Several people spoke to the idea of valuing the unique character and qualities of the various communities in the county -- Moscow being just one of those communities. As part of that, they sought to preserve the community schools, business core, history and other attributes that make the towns unique. I think there is something in this idea that connects to my recent post on cultural sustainability.

2. There were also several mentions of the desire for urban densities (including housing (Legacy Crossing was mentioned by location)) without causing sprawl. Virtues that were listed in support of this (in addition to urban amenities) were preserving farming, open space, avoiding McMansions on hilltops, and concentrating commercial/industrial activities (another way to avoid sprawl). A virtue not mentioned might be that urban densities make the provision of utilities relatively cheaper and lower the multiple costs associated with transportation in low-density communities.

Creating Community Character

I'm reading the minutes of P&Z for Feb 27 where Bret Keast was holding forth on ideas in the new Comprehensive Plan. The term he was using is "community character" and it strikes me now that creating/maintaining community character is an element in boyd's "cultural sustainability" that I noted previously.

What Keast was driving at was to move away from the Euclidean approach to zoning and toward a more forms-based model where the desired character is specified and the specific use(s) are allowed to range more widely. We get a first chance to look at these ideas in the Legacy Crossing URA (final plan in huge PDF) and the overlay zone currently making its way through P&Z. What we saw at the previous P&Z meeting was ideas about setting the form for the development but being more open to the use(s). In fact, mixed use is the expectation for the area, with rentals, condos, and commercial (and structured parking) all expected on th site.