The natural way neighborhoods have traditionally developed was as follows: People decide to live in an area and then a smattering of businesses that cater to those people open up shop nearby. Or perhaps the opposite happens: Some place is well-suited for business (maybe a canal is built, or gold is discovered, or, as in Kirkwood’s case, a railroad station is built), so then the businesses set up shop and then residents follow, either to work in those businesses themselves or to work in the restaurants and shops that cater to those who do.
The key thing is that these things go hand in hand. Residents attract businesses and businesses attract residents. Downtown Kirkwood is an excellent example. People want to live in apartments downtown because they’re close to a bunch of cool stuff, and businesses want to be in Downtown Kirkwood because it’s fairly densely populated so they have access to a lot more customers than they would if they were located in, say, a subdivision in the middle of Wildwood.
But Kirkwood has a couple of interesting patches where that process started, but then the link was broken: Businesses remain in otherwise residential neighborhoods as weird vestiges of what was supposed to be a growing hub activity. Here’s an excerpt of the EnVision Kirkwood 2035 Comprehensive Plan, originally published in 2017, which refers to these areas as “neighborhood villages”:
The Neighborhood Village module recognizes the development of commercial land uses built around local intersections and is a reminder of the more common neighborhood-scale shopping areas historically found in Kirkwood. In the early 1900’s, numerous intersections were zoned “Community Store” which consisted of a number of commercial and light industrial uses. Today this initial zoning continues in the form of the B-1 Neighborhood Business District which is not limited to, but can be found at the following intersections: Geyer Road and Essex Avenue, Woodbine Avenue and Andrews Avenue, [Essex and Harrison,] and Old Big Bend Road and Ballas Road.
EnVision Kirkwood 2035 Comprehensive Plan, Part 2, pg. 123
For visual reference, here’s where those “urban villages (B-1 zoned lots) are in Kirkwood:
I find these little pockets of urbanism fascinating, but I also wanted to know how we could make them substantial assets to community rather than vestiges of what used to be. Here’s what I found out.
B-1: Neighborhood Business District
Let’s start out by taking a look at what B-1 Neighborhood Business Districts currently allow and what they don’t.
Uses: The B-1 district has relatively few permitted by-right uses, essentially limited to offices, restaurants, and retail shops. Notably, the only residential use allowed —second story condos/apartments— requires special approval by the council.
Height: The Neighborhood Business allows a maximum of two stories (or 25 feet). For a place to be the “center” of activity, it generally has to be allowed to be more intensively (read: densely) developed than the surrounding land. It’s that density that allows for the agglomeration effects and economies of scale that attract businesses and residents alike. Forcing B-1 to have the same density of the two-story single family homes that surround it largely prevents this density.
Setbacks: Beyond vertical density in the form of height, the other dimension of density is horizontal density: how intensely can you develop those two stories that are allowed, in other words, the front, rear, and side setback requirements of the lots. And here, the news is mixed. B-1, interestingly enough, allows buildings in the district to have no side-yard setbacks, meaning buildings can be built directly next to one another with shared walls as they are in parts of Downtown Kirkwood.
But this permissive rule comes with a pretty major caveat: on lots that abut a residential district, minimum side yard setbacks have to equal the setback requirements of the abutting residential district. And because these districts tend to be small, in reality, the vast majority of lots end up needing a setback of some sort. For example, in the B-1 district at Woodbine and Essex, basically every lot abuts a residential district of one form or another:
The front setback requirements in B-1 are even more restrictive. The default is that all B-1 buildings must be setback at least 35 feet from the street, but where more than 40% of the lots on a given block are developed, the required setback is the average of the buildings on either side of the new development. The upshot of this is that B-1 businesses all end up fronted by parking-lots. Instead of catering to people living in the surrounding neighborhoods who might be inclined to walk to, say, a neighborhood coffee shop, you get essentially strip-mall businesses oriented towards cars.
We Know How to Do This Better
That same Envision 2035 master plan that we mentioned at the top has several recommendations for how we can make these “urban villages” better, which I think are a pretty great start. Let’s go through them one by one and I’ll offer some commentary.
Address existing intersections to make more pedestrian-friendly. As an example, the intersection of West Woodbine Avenue, Hickory Hollow Lane, George Avenue and Craig Drive could be considered for conversion to a roundabout to improve safety and pedestrian access
When I posted my story about St. Peter’s proposal to close Jefferson (which was also, ostensibly, about Clay), the thing that most people disagreed with in the comments was my proposal to put a roundabout at the intersection of Clay and Woodbine to help facilitate traffic in and out of Concordia. I’ve come to my senses on that (stop signs are superior for walkability), but part of my (admittedly limited) thinking was that it would serve as a nice bookend to a roundabout at the other end of Woodbine (the one referenced above).
And here I think it really does make sense. First, roundabouts tend to work best at locations that are at the edge of the urban/suburban margin (pretty much the definition B-1 zones). Second, roundabouts tend to clarify otherwise confusing intersections. Five way stop-signed intersections, especially ones with multiple slip-lanes are confusing for drivers and dangerous for pedestrians, but roundabouts tend to clarify what everyone is supposed to do. And for whatever reason (probably due to that historic pattern of what areas tended to naturally attract people and jobs), lots of the intersections surrounding our urban village are either these kind of strange five-street convergences and/or include slip lanes that degrade the pedestrian experience.
Some of these intersections might be suited for a roundabout, others could be fixed by just removing the slip lane. At the other end of the Woodbine Neighborhood Business district, the city is pursuing a partial slip-lane reduction, removing the option for drivers turning right from Geyer on to Woodbine:
Pursuing these enhancements on a wider scale would allow us to reinvent the space that is gained from eliminating the slip-lane space as small pocket parks and urban village squares, all it would take is a tree, a bike rack, maybe a bench. If we removed the slip-lane at Essex & Geyer we’d already a third of the way there:
Consider converting unwarranted car lanes into pedestrian and bicycle facilities. As an example, West Woodbine Avenue could be converted from 4 lanes to 3 lanes with a center turn lane and/or landscaped median.
In 2018, Kirkwood essentially brought this idea to fruition when it piloted a “complete street” on West Woodbine. That pilot included a road diet (reducing the number of drive lanes from four down to two 11-foot wide lanes), a buffered bike lane in either direction, a mid-block crosswalk and curb “bulb-outs” to narrow the roadway at pedestrian crossings.
These changes were a great start but there are still some further improvements to be made. The lanes could be reduced further from their current 11-foot width down to the industry standard of 10. bike lanes could be moved to the curb and protected, either a parking lane or a physical barrier, the mid-block crosswalk could be raised, and street trees could be added.
Still though, kudos to everyone involved for quickly acting on this recommendation. The only other B-1 zones fronted by a four lane road in desperate need of a diet are those along Big Bend, which unfortunately is unfortunately about to be re-paved with no reduction to its four-lane set-up despite repeated pleas from myself, the residents of Meacham, the folks behind Connect Our Community, and more.
The other change that could significantly reorient B-1 districts towards pedestrians (while adding to the allowed density) would be to eliminate the front yard setback requirements, thus bringing them into alignment with the rules governing the B-2 zoning of Downtown Kirkwood. This would mean that developers would no longer be required to front the building with a big parking lot. Instead you’d get more stuff like this quaint little building on Sappington in Glendale:
Promote the creation of mix-use development, 2-3 stories, with ground floor
retail and residential/office above.
I mentioned the need for additional density (especially residential density) already, and the least controversial way to achieve this would probably be to implement a mixed-use height bonus as we have in Downtown Kirkwood. That would mean that buildings with no residential component would remain limited to the two-stories currently allowed. If, however, a development called for ground-floor commercial with apartments or condos above, three stories would be permitted. This is an incredibly easy, low-impact way to add some additional homes to supply-constrained Kirkwood, while ensuring that the B-1 districts have the density needed for its businesses to thrive. I also think that politically it would be relatively uncontroversial: You could pitch allowing one extra story of housing in these districts as a way of ameliorating small home tear-downs in the surrounding neighborhood, plus pre-emptive zoning code changes tend to be much less controversial than discretionary votes on individual non-conforming projects (i.e. The James).
Develop specific architectural and urban design standards so that any new
development is coordinated and complementary in appearance.
I think aesthetic preferences are sorta dumb for several reasons (preferences change, everything looking the same is boring, they could add unnecessary costs thus raising prices, etc.), but in so much as they serve as a little sugar to make the medicine go down, they’re pretty harmless on the grand scale of things. Politics of the possible: if people say they want buildings to be brick, make ’em brick, baby!
We Should Have More Urban Villages
Speaking of deferring a bit to sentimentalities, the only other recommendation I would make is that there should be more of these urban villages (and more B-1 zoning, if it’s improved as outlined above). These quaint little islands of walkability with a neighborhood grocer or coffee shop represent what I think many consider to be the peak of urban design and planning. I know that we need to build a lot more housing at scale, but I also know that saying we should build ten more of the James is probably not a workable solution at this stage of public opinion. Building housing capacity and reducing reliance on cars via the urban village model of the B-1 zone feels like it could be a lot more palatable. And there are plenty of opportunities for where and how we could do this.
On lots that already exist as B-1 type neighborhood businesses but are zoned as something else, we should offer the owners the opportunity to rezone their lot to B-1 districts, which would allow them more flexibility in gaining approvals for additions and new construction on the lot. These are beloved neighborhood institutions. Pepe’s Apt. 2 is arguably Kirkwood’s best restaurant but sits on a lot currently zoned for R-3 single-family residential despite having been a restaurant, deli or event venue of some sort for my entire life. Michael Scott’s American Family Insurance office at 343 W. Woodbine has a ton of underutilized land directly accessible by Heege, but is basically frozen in place as is, because the lot is zoned as R-4 single-family.
And perhaps most damning of all is the case of Smitty’s Garage, which also sits on a R-4 lot. According to Liz Gibbons, Smitty’s was sort of caught in a limbo due to its non-conforming use: “The owner is going to be using it as a garage. They will have glass garage doors and showcase unique cars inside. Because the property is zoned residential they had to keep 50% of the building to be grandfathered as a garage. The owner has kept 50.2% of the building. A nice investment is being made to our community.”
That’s great and all but relying on a benevolent owner to take over the property and make it into some sort of non-profit car gallery does not seem to be a very scalable solution, nor one that is likely to raise much tax revenue for our community. If the property was rezoned B-1, a benevolent owner could have still keep it as a garage, they just would have had much less of a headache (50.2%, I mean come ON!) in doing so.
Then there are also large stretches of land zoned for I-1 Light Industrial that would probably serve Kirkwood in a much higher capacity if they were re-zoned B-1 Neighborhood business. I’ve made my thoughts on what should be done about the I-1 lots that surround the Grant’s Trail extension well known, but even if my idea for a B-GT zone doesn’t come to fruition, B-1 would be a move in the right direction (and in fact we’re inching closer to eliminating this distinction, with the city currently pursuing a zoning text amendment that would allow professional & commercial services like hair salons, gyms, and offices on I-1 lots.
B-3 Highway Business districts, which are often quite a distance from a highway, are a similar story. I don’t think “highway businesses” are really something to aspire to, and I think the look and feel of many of the businesses in those districts, like the four lots just south of Nipher pictured here, hew much more closely to the ideals of Neighborhood Business districts anyway.
All of this is to say that reforming the rules that govern our little urban villages and then expanding them feels like an easy win on a lot of different fronts: more housing, fewer tear-downs, safer streets, a broader tax base, and a path towards restoring the charm of Kirkwood that so many people say is disappearing. I hope some of our candidates for the five City Council spots opening up next spring will pursue it.