Sustainable Land Development Today - July/August 2008 - (Page 22) VISIONARY FINALIST Waterfront Resurrection: From the Worst of the Worst to the Best of the Best The power of a public-private partnership transforms a blighted neighborhood into a 2008 Visionary Award finalist. By Rob Kundert This is the second of five articles that feature the 2008 SLDI Visionary Award finalists announced in May. the Ocean View corridor to see what could be done to reverse its decline. Though identifying a few choicer areas that held the potential for redevelopment, it ignored East Ocean View as being too far gone. The theory was to concentrate on those areas that could be more readily improved. ULI was asked to do another study in 1998 and came to a different conclusion. “They basically said, ‘The eastern part of Ocean View is so bad, you have to fix it, and you have to fix it soon,’” Bell said. A little more than a decade ago, its reputation was so bad that it was declared off-limits to nearby US Navy personnel. Today the 100-acre parcel on a stretch of Norfolk, Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay shoreline is raising the bar for the rest of city’s bay front. East Beach is a traditional neighborhood development designed by NewUrbanist master planner Duany Plater-Zyberk. Through a risk-sharing, pubic/private partnership with the City, the multi-phased development preserves and enhances natural features of the site and sets high standards for the quality of its homes. Its innovative design protects and enhances existing mature trees and maintains a community-wide connectivity with the Chesapeake through a network of pedestrian-friendly streets and public parks, paths and bay front greens. Early on, Norfolk Mayor Paul D. Fraim stated that the goal was to take the worst of the worst and make it the best of the best. “That’s almost a mantra to us,” Rock Bell, general manager of East Beach Company, LLC., developer of the project. “We think daily, ‘How can we make this a better place?’” East Beach broke ground in 2003. With 65 percent of the neighborhood’s single-family homes built, plans are in the works for retail shops and restaurants. Completion is expected in 2011. Homes are selling on average for 32 percent more than the typically-designed adjacent subdivision development, despite the fact that they enjoy the same beach, marinas, restaurants, and are the same general housing types and sizes. Blighted past Ocean view is a 4.5-mile stretch of Norfolk’s shoreline facing Chesapeake Bay as it opens to the Atlantic Ocean. East Beach, formerly known at East Ocean View, occupies the scenic beach on its eastern end. Once home to a popular amusement park, a lack of zoning regulation following World War II sped a downward trend as the area devolved into a haven for drug pushers and prostitutes. East Ocean View was the worst. Of its 1600 housing units, all but 22 were owned by absentee landlords, who offered by-the-week or by-theday rates to its transient population, according to Bell. “As a result, the housing stock slid into disrepair. A lot of it was very poorly built to begin with. The roads were narrow and haphazardly maintained as was the rest of the infrastructure,” he said. In 1987 the City of Norfolk commissioned the Urban Land Institute (ULI) to do a study of Develop a plan, work the plan The City enjoyed a long relationship with Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based Urban Design Associates (UDA) – world-class talent who the City called in to create a master plan for the new neighborhood. UDA in turn recom- 22 July/August 2008 Sustainable Land Development Today
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