Perhaps you are familiar with Neighbors Allied for the Best Riverfront (NABR) from their citywide “CasiNO” campaign, whose signs are in the windows of many homes, especially those closest to the proposed casino sites. Perhaps you’ve gotten literature about the state stripping Philadelphia of zoning authority over casinos from a NABR member running a table at a farmer’s market, or been asked to sign a petition to repeal the gaming law, Act 71. But at the same time NABR has been working against mandated casinos, they have also been building ties to the community, and promoting an alternate view of what’s possible for the city, a future for Philadelphia that doesn’t include casinos adjacent to neighborhoods, or on our riverfront.
I met Monday, October 2nd, with Sarah Thorp and Shawn Rairigh, two NABR members with formal backgrounds in city planning, who have been active in NABR’s planning initiative, and asked them questions about planning for the river.
Most people know about Neighbors Allied for the Best Riverfront from the “CasiNO” campaign to keep casinos from being forced on residents without their consent. But fewer people are aware of NABR’s planning initiative. Can you describe it?
SARAH THORP: NABR’s been involved since the beginning. Our CasiNO mission was not necessarily anti-casino. What we’ve been fighting for is good community-based planning for the riverfront. The casino process allowed no planning input from the community.
SHAWN RAIRIGH: The reason we have the planning initiative, casinos helped spawn it, but really, there are thousands of units of residential development coming to the waterfront also. There needed to be a planning initiative.
THORP: We had development proposals in both Fishtown and Northern Liberties and there was no citywide plan for the riverfront, no contiguous plan, nothing that was supported by the city government. Nothing we could sink our teeth into and use as a planning document when we were considering developments in our zoning committee. So, in the absence of anything provided to us by the city, we needed to step up as a community members to try to get a master plan, or a riverfront plan, or something that could aid us in proper development of our riverfront.
Why is a plan so important?
RAIRIGH: A plan is important because it allows the community to work with professionals to create a vision for your neighborhood of what you want development to be. How big, how much development? And it also allows you to gear the public infrastructure to allow that development to occur. In the event that development occurs, and you get thousands of new units of housing, what does that make the street look like? How do those people get around, do they walk? Can they walk under I-95 easily? Shouldn’t we improve those conditions? So the plan addresses things like that. It says we’d like new development to look like this, but it also handles public infrastructure as well, and acts as a means to get money to improve that infrastructure too.
For these kinds of plans, is there normally a community input process in place for them, in other cities?
RAIRIGH: In the better cities, yes. In fact, the city government does the planning and welcomes community input.
THORP: The problem here is not that the Planning Commission isn’t willing to do plans, or doesn’t want to do plans, the problem is the administration of the city does not support the plans that are done by the Planning Commission. And until we get support from the Mayor’s office for the Planning Commission, there aren’t going to be any plans coming out of the Planning Commission that can be adequately implemented by the city.
From what I understand, the developers come to City Councilmembers to get things done, and that’s how things are decided. Would a plan help change that process?
RAIRIGH: Ideally. Well, that’s a kind of process that’s built into the city government structure the way it works now. Ideally, a plan would help guide that process so a community can come back and say, listen, we have this huge document, we went through a year and a half effort to create this thing, we took polls and surveys and held public meetings, and the vast majority of the community is saying X, and you’re saying Y. Then there’s real reason to oppose elected officials.
THORP: It’s a way for communities to be proactive rather than reactive on development. It’s a way for communities to say, “this is what we want”. And then have developers come in that are in keeping with what communities want, rather than having developers coming in and imposing what they want, and then having the communities react badly.
Sarah, I know you have a background in historic preservation, I would think from a historic point of view that planning would be very important.
THORP: Very, very important. You lose assets if you don’t have a plan. You lose historic assets and you lose resources if you don’t adequately protect those resources ahead of time.
A Wharton School study has established the economic links between public green spaces and property values as well as commercial investment, but maybe you could briefly describe some benefits? What are some of the alternatives to condo towers and casinos that NABR advocates?
RAIRIGH: Everyone in Philadelphia knows that it’s the small little squares and playgrounds that attract redevelopment first.
THORP: People want to live in a place where they can walk their dogs. You need to have a park or something close where you can get out for adequate recreation, and any time you have that, it’s going to make development more attractive to buyers. You also want adequate retail close enough so people can walk to a market, walk to the dry cleaners from where they live. We can’t say we want the whole riverfront to be green space, and we can’t say we want it all to be residential. We want a mix, a variety of uses for the riverfront. But most of all, we want it done in a way that’s planned, not haphazard.
And it’s not that we’ve identified specific alternative uses for the river, but rather that we want to go out into the community and find out what the neighborhoods want for their riverfront. Do they want a movie theater? One thing I’ve heard over and over is that people don’t have enough forms of recreation for kids, for teenagers, and a movie theater, or a bowling alley, might provide that. So, from NABR’s viewpoint, we don’t want to dictate what the riverfront should look like, we want to facilitate communities having a voice in what the riverfront is, and how it should be developed. If people say, we want jobs and that’s our number one thing, then we should look for uses on the riverfront that promote new jobs. If people say they want recreation, then we should look for things that promote recreation, such as parks, bike paths, and movie theaters.
It’s such a long riverfront; I’d think there’d be plenty of room for all of those things.
RAIRIGH: Certainly. There’s definitely a few things that have always been talked about even before NABR was born- the idea of east coast greenway coming down along Delaware Avenue, having a bike trail that links the whole entire riverfront. I think that’s something that nobody would disagree with, and we would certainly push for. There are things that are going on right now that are technically illegal, like fishing on the piers. You go out any Saturday or Sunday and you’ll see dozens of people fishing. I mean, it’s technically illegal, but we should assume that the community would really like to have a place to fish. Now there are government or market realities that we are just going to have to live with. For instance, even if the public says, all we want is one big open space, parkland and things like that, well, the problem is that’s private land, and it costs a heck of a lot of money, and then we’ve got to actually build a park afterwards, and there’s probably environmental contaminants in some of that land. So there’s going to be some market realities, there’s going to be some environmental realities in this.
THORP: And parks aren’t going to solve problems like jobs.
But if it’s mixed-use, which seems very reasonable, then it seems to me it’s better if it’s local retail, for instance, instead of casinos, which bring in their own bars and restaurants and boutiques, and are designed to trap people indoors.
RAIRIGH: I don’t think anyone would disagree with the statement that we want our riverfront to be an active place, whether it’s working, biking, walking around, shopping, whatever it is. The water is an attraction and it should be what brings people there. The idea of a casino, being exactly as you say, an interior space that really has no relation to anything around it, seems antithetical to the idea of an active riverfront.
You’re saying Philly residents have a stake in the riverfront and deserve to have their voices be heard. In New York, the state invokes the Public Trust Doctrine that mandates set asides and public access rules for waterfront, because there’s this feeling for the public nature of the water’s edge. How long does this kind of thinking about waterfront access go back and why isn’t it in Pennsylvania?
RAIRIGH: Well, you can go back to the 1968 California Coastal Act, which basically said there would be no more development on the coast of California. So 800 miles of coastland in California is development free and will be forever. I don’t think we’re going to have that on the Delaware!
THORP: No. But I think every great city in the world, whether it’s Paris, or London, or Rome, has an active waterfront of some sort. People are drawn to the water for lots of different reasons. In the past it’s been for transportation. Many times we used our rivers for industrial uses. Industry located there, often, unfortunately, spewing their waste into the river. Now these industries have declined, and they’ve left the riverfront, so we have the opportunity to redefine what we want our riverfront to be. In Philadelphia, another problem we’ve had is that I-95 was built right next to the riverfront and it cut off a lot of residents and small businesses and basically built a barrier between the riverfront and communities.
RAIRIGH: Almost every city with a waterfront has had that problem. I-95 definitely cuts off the waterfront, but remember what that was in the ’60s and ’70s. It was a dying, forlorn place, the port had been moved off, there was really nothing there, so why not build a road along there? New York did it too.
THORP: And it was extremely polluted before the Environmental Protection Act. Since then, since the industries have gone away, and we have much stricter environmental controls, the rivers are now cleaned up. And lo and behold, we go there. We think it’s beautiful, and want to be there again.
And it’s not impossible to change part of I-95, if we wanted to. They did it in Portland, when they decided to buld their waterfront park. There’s 22 blocks of park right on the water there.
RAIRIGH: The good thing about the Tom McCall Waterfront Park is it was a centerpiece of an effort to redevelop the whole area. This was the public infrastructure that was going to draw development there. It’s very akin to Philadelphia where we have huge swaths of waterfront that nothing’s going to build on as it is right now. But building up public infrastructure, like a park, or other kind of public use infrastructure, then you’re going to get development where you want development. So. It sort of becomes a very good question about what are our public bodies placing on the waterfront now? And what kind of development is that going to draw?
Very good question indeed. In Hoboken, they had the public will to build a corridor that no one could build on, but then the next street over, facing the water, the local businesses went crazy building up the area and it’s been very successful.
RAIRIGH: Look at the west side of Lower Manhattan. You walked around there 15 years ago, that’s where the prostitutes hung out. In Tribeca and the meat-packing district. It was a terrible place. They had a highway that they tore down, but they also built just a simple bike path, and reserved some of the piers as public parks. Things that are very doable here. And all of a sudden, that’s one of the booming areas in Manhattan now.
Why is the Schuylkill so well developed? What’s the difference between the Schuylkill and the Delaware?
RAIRIGH: Because we need water to drink.
THORP: There were so many good things about Philadelphia in the 19th century; it was a huge booming city. They designed the Waterworks on the Schuylkill River. Because of the industrial revolution, we also needed a place for industrial usage, but luckily they realized that spewing pollutants into a river that was a water source for the city wasn’t going to work. So the city acquired land all along the Schuylkill early in the city’s history, before it was developed, to protect the water for drinking. This was around the 1820s. Certainly by the time of the 1876 exposition, it was all park there.
RAIRIGH: We weren’t the only city building large parks in that era. And also, it was an idea to draw development west. Same thing with Central Park. When they first built Central Park in New York City there wasn’t a single building around it. It was the countryside almost. The idea was to get development out there, once again, using public infrastructrue to draw development.
Which seemed to work like a charm.
RAIRIGH: It did. New York did it, Boston did it, and Philadelphia did it. So, why can’t we do it on the Delaware? Obviously we’re not going to get anything the size of Fairmount Park out of the Delaware.
THORP: But uniquely, what the Delaware could have that the Schuylkill will never have is that with mixed-use, people can actually live right there.
RAIRIGH: I think Philadelphians need to look outside their own city and compare the Delaware to what other formerly working waterfronts have become. Like Hoboken, like the west side of Manhattan, like Seattle, San Francisco.
THORP: The south side of the Thames was very industrial. They’ve put the Tate Modern Museum there, in a former power plant. And all around there they still have the grit of the industrial side of London, but it’s developed, and beautiful, and active with cultural assets.
RAIRIGH: I wouldn’t look to Baltimore, though; it’s kind of a unique case. Its waterfront is right in the middle of its downtown.
It’s not like there are neighborhoods there in danger of being walled in from the river.
RAIRIGH: Right. But there are plenty of other examples.
THORP: Even smaller examples, like Havre de Grace. Smaller places can do it just as well as cities. The size or scale is not as big of a factor as the will of the people to make something happen.
When I was at the first Zoning Reform Forum, in May, people stood up and said that their neighborhoods have been asking for plans for the riverfront for years, why hasn’t there been one? And what about the New River City plan?
THORP: New River City was developed by the City Planning Commission and part of the New River City initiative was to do a master plan for the riverfront. I think the whole idea went for all the rivers around Philadelphia, not just the Delaware.
The Planning Commission commissioned a large-scale plan of the North Delaware. There isn’t a lot of detail on the plan south of Allegheny to Penn Treaty park, but north of Allegheny there’s been a lot more detail done, and there’s a bike trail, and there’s a couple of big developments happening in accordance with the plan that allows for public access to the riverfront and the trail to be connected, things like that.
That sounds good.
RAIRIGH: And that kind of plan has spurred neighborhoods like Bridesburg to do their own more in-depth plan for their neighborhood that also deals with the riverfront. Because they’re getting development up there and they want to make sure that their riverfront remains accessible, that development is of the scale that fits the neighborhood. It’s been a fairly successful project up there.
THORP It has been successful. And I feel like they had good community involvement. It’s interesting because they’re still industrial uses up north that you don’t want to scare away. And industries get scared that once you start wanting to get the bike trails that people will want to send away the industry. But the utility of doing a plan is to air out things like that. You point out the benefits to their employees. You say, if we build a better road, part of that plan is a river road that will keep truck traffic away from the river on a different road, so people just coming to and from work can use the river road, which is more recreational and aesthetically pleasing.
RAIRIGH: Then warehouses will be able to get their trucks out on the road with no problem. That’s the whole idea of planning. You’re able to fit together all the various needs together into one whole. So now when Joe who owns the warehouse expands his facilities, he doesn’t have to fight people at a community meeting.
THORP: Which costs a significant amount of money.
RAIRIGH: Right. When Eric the developer comes in and wants to build houses in Bridesburg, he knows he’s welcome to do it on certain parcels.
THORP: But stay away from the places that are right next to Pennypack Park.
RAIRIGH: Right. And when the community knows that nothing big is going to be built next to Pennypack Park, they’re much more willing to compromise.
Well, that makes perfect sense.
RAIRIGH: Well, it’s proper public leadership. Now, the central waterfront is a different issue.
THORP: The stakes are high there because real estate has skyrocketed in the past five years. People want to live on the water, so developers have seen it as the place to put very high-density condo developments with very small amounts of open space, and limited or no public access to the riverfront, and charge exhorbitant rates for the condos. And they sell. So a developer knows what he can get from a piece of property if he builds a 48-story tower on an 80% footprint of the lot. And advertises it as secluded, luxury, gated, on the river.
And you know, in some places density is good, but the people need to decide. Where do we want our neighborhoods to be densely populated? That also means you could have dense traffic, unless there are ways to mitigate that traffic via interstates or adequate public transportation, and the public will to use public transportation. Part of the problem of what’s happening now is that each parcel of land is being developed piecemeal.
What are “riparian rights”?
THORP: The Governor’s moratorium on riparian rights brings up a good issue about private versus public ownership of the riverfront. There are certain places that are very much public-owned like Penn Treaty Park and Pennypack Park, and the city owns the land and takes care of those places. Then there are other places where the land is privately owned. However the state has a thing called “riparian rights”, which is ownership of things like piers or the land that’s under the water, but could be built upon, land adjoining the riverfront that could provide access, things like that.
About six months ago, the Governor put a moratorium on granting these riparian rights to certain developers. The developers would say we want to develop this parcel and the state owns the riparian rights to the pier, and the state has been granting those rights, or selling them or long-term leasing them for, say, a dollar, to developers. Well the Governor put a halt to that, for whatever reason. So now the state is not selling them for a dollar, or long-term leasing them, but rather evaluating each parcel individually. So what’s going to happen to these riparian rights, are we just going to sell them? It’s kind of the state’s way of saying, well maybe we should try to get some money for this land that people now want. There’s a demand for it, so maybe we shouldn’t just give it away for a dollar.
So though most of the land along the Delaware is owned privately, the riparian rights are all publicly owned?
THORP: Theoretically, yes. There would have to be something in the deed that said, OK, you now have permission to build out over the river.
So it makes sense from the point of view of the public’s interest to lease them as opposed to selling them outright…
THORP: Well, actually, I’m glad you brought up riparian rights. It’s a big issue, and something we’ve been talking a lot about recently. I personally feel like if the riparian rights are already owned by the state, why are we giving them back to the developers? Why don’t we use that land as our publicly accessible part of the riverfront and allow them to develop up to that line, or in places where the bulkhead line goes farther back, then maybe we can negotiate for selling some of the riparian land, but not all of it. I mean, if it’s already publicly owned land, and we don’t have enough publicly owned riverfront land, why are we selling more publicly owned riverfront land back to private developers? That’s really not the best way to proceed, and we will probably be lobbying in Harrisburg about riparian rights in the future.
RAIRIGH: Then you have the sort of quasi-public land like Penn’s Landing. Penn’s Landing, which is a quasi-governmental authority, like the Port Authority, owns a number of piers on the central waterfront. I’m not sure exactly how it works, either they own them straight out, or it’s that they’re publicly owned and Penn’s Landing is allowed to negotiate development deals or whatever. But either way, the lands are still technically in public hands.
In other words, the lands are being held by Penn’s Landing in trust for the public…
RAIRIGH: I think that the city gained the rights to these piers and these lands sometime in the ’50s or ’60s to create what became Penn’s Landing, and eventually bought some piers to allow and facilitate development along the waterfront.
But there’s been no public process?
RAIRIGH: Well, Penn’s Landing is supposed to have done a plan, and if you look on their website, they have ideas for what they want for the piers. These are all developable piers. None of them are supposed to be public space, except for what people now know as Penn’s Landing at Market, Chestnut, and Walnut streets. That’s fine. A lot of these piers have the best views of the bridge, they’re the biggest, with the sturdiest foundations, and so forth. They’re very developable. The market’s right there for them. So maybe we could switch rights to develop for some of these other, less desirable piers that are farther away that might be cheaper, but that private developers are sitting on? Bargain with what we have. We say, you’re the developer, you go buy the cheaper pier that’s farther away, and we’ll work out a swap. That way we get to keep some piers in public hands for public use.
Ah, I see.
RAIRIGH: Yeah, there are all sorts of good ideas.
THORP: Another idea is land banking, which is when a developer in the city cannot provide the amount of green space the city requires. That means that they could buy into a bank of open space on the riverfront, or somewhere else where we have decided, hey, we need more open space, we need to do some acquisition. So any inner-city developer that can’t provide enough open space can buy into our bank, and we can acquire more land. And this could work for development along the riverfront as well. If you want to build a really dense development along the riverfront, that’s great, but then you have to provide a certain amount of acreage or buy into a fund for parks or whatever else has been decided for public use.
What can regular people do to participate in a planning process?
RAIRIGH: As annoying as it may seem, write elected officials, write letters to the editor.
THORP: Number one, we need to enable our Planning Commission to do plans. If the Planning Commission cannot do planning, then it might as well not exist. We’re wasting our money right now.
RAIRIGH: And to do that it’s going to come down to the next mayoral race. And all this is becoming an issue now. We need a mayor who promises to use the Planning Commission, who promises to listen to neighborhoods. We need a mayor who will follow through on these promises.
And just becoming aware of how the process of building things happens helps. How does development occur? What is zoning? For a lot of people, this is a boring subject.
THORP: But the point is that zoning is actually supposed to protect people. Zoning is designed to do some planning ahead of time so that we don’t have to be reactionary. We can actually say, this is the kind of zoning we want for these particular parcels, and we don’t need to have a meeting every time someone wants to build whatever and needs a variance, because we’ve already decided, for example, we want Girard Avenue to be our commercial corridor. So if you’re building something commercial, go for it. If you want to do something else, come talk to us.
Luckily, most of us realize that the zoning code needs to be reformed. And that’s something that everyone can agree on. And that’s certainly something people can get involved with in their own neighborhoods, going to zoning meetings. Also, on a citywide level, attending zoning reform meetings and talking about these issues, so they’re out in the open for the next mayoral election.
Find out more about NABR at www.NABRhood.org.
2006-10-01 17:00:00