Met Council turns from light rail to reshaping suburbs

With the area's first light-rail line closing in on final approval, the Metropolitan Council will turn this week to what its chairman calls an even bigger deal in the long run: its wish to reshape the future development of the Twin Cities area.

Ted Mondale's second State of the Region address on Wednesday will mark the formal launch of the council's so-called "smart growth" initiative, an attempt to convince local officials to stop developing so that the only way to get anywhere is in a car.

"Smart growth" has wide support in theory, including from residential and commercial developers.

But there are critics, including those who worry that it will simply make land more expensive -- by putting pressure on cities and developers to build taller buildings closer to the core cities, rather than going farther and farther out -- and traffic worse. Already, those critics say, land prices are accelerating at a startling rate.

"Last year in a matter of months the price of an acre of land in this community went from $22,000 to $35,000," said Andover Mayor Jack McKelvey. "Once one developer pays that much, everyone else wants to get it, too."

The Twin Cities area has slipped in one year from third place to 10th in housing affordability -- worse even than Washington, D.C. -- among the 57 U.S. metro areas with populations of 1 million or more, according to calculations by the National Association of Home Builders.

The political dangers facing the council will be symbolized this week by a series of TV news reports that are expected to accuse the council and other government agencies of contributing to the high cost of housing by, among other things, restricting the land supply. The council has various means of confining development in the seven core counties under its jurisdiction, including the control of sewer capacity.

Met Council officials deny the accusation. Housing costs are rising, Mondale said, because of "the economy, the economy and thirdly, the economy."

And in fact, many metro areas that do not have regional planning agencies such as the Met Council restricting land supply are experiencing explosions in housing prices much greater than those in the Twin Cities area, home builders' figures show.

Home builders contend, however -- and plan soon to release detailed figures they say will prove -- that the council is vastly overestimating the inventory of land available for development. Those alarmingly low inventories, they say, are helping to force up prices. They want the council to release more land for quicker use, a request the council is studying.

Against this highly charged backdrop, Mondale this week will formally launch what he says will be the signature initiative for the Met Council appointed by Gov. Jesse Ventura: "Smart Growth Twin Cities."

The centerpiece of the speech is expected to be the announcement that six sites around the area have been chosen as "smart-growth" demonstration projects.

These are to be areas 20 to 100 acres that can do what "smart growth" aims to do: locate shopping, work, restaurants, entertainment, civic functions, cultural activities, parks and other public spaces, and a variety of housing types and costs, in a design that allows people to walk or bike within the development. These dense nodes would in turn be linked to other parts of the area via transit lines.

Dozens of suburban and urban communities would like to do that, and some in limited ways already have. But it tends to be an arduous process. It is one of the highest priorities of the council to provide enough of a push to get something built under these principles, to prove it can be done and that it can be attractive to buyers.

"We've had significant resources to use for planning, which is critical, but now we need to get things up out of the ground," said Caren Dewar, the council's new director of community development. "I don't want to create expectations that this kind of work happens in six months, but this is what I want to focus on."

Current members of the council, all appointed by "smart growth" advocate Ventura, cannot count on being around for long once he leaves office. So there's a sense of urgency about making things happen.

Getting citizen input

The Met Council plans to bring in Calthorpe Associates of Berkeley, Calif., to guide a process of bringing residents in to help decide what they want to see in the demonstration zones.

Calthorpe did similar work on a regional scale during the 1990s in Salt Lake City, in a project called Envision Utah, in which members of the public were invited to help decide how their community should evolve to handle rapid population growth.

Critics say that process is advertised as being bottom-up planning, but in fact is often highly manipulative, with people given unrealistically attractive examples of smart growth and unfairly ugly examples of other growth styles.

"They give you 'options,'" said Ronald Utt, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. "But what you see is, on the one hand, an artist's rendering of woods and lakes and a traditional downtown where people pull up in front of Uncle Bob's Pharmacy -- and then the same scene with no lakes, no trees, bisected by two eight-lane highways with 'big box' shopping on the horizon. And that's what people are 'voting' on!"

Mondale responded: "We understand that criticism. If we were to do that, it would be inval id. It's not what we're going to do."

Critics also say the fact is that places like Cub Foods and Home Depot -- prime examples of what's called 'big box' retail because of the shape of the stores -- while highly car-dependent, are what consumers want. Mondale said he agrees.

"Big box is not going to go away. I work three blocks from a Home Depot and the parking lot's as full as a casino," he said. "We have to make sure that what we do is realistic, that we're working with real plots of land and that the designers' designs are realistic and pass muster with builders and developers. You gotta make the deal work."

TV reports to air

Coincidentally, Mondale will be delivering his message the same week that KARE-TV, Channel 11, will air close to half an hour's worth of reporting taking the council and others to task for contributing to the high cost of housing.

The report will say, for instance, that the council doesn't have a good handle on how much land is truly available for development.

Mondale said he agreed that "it's incumbent upon us to get further clarity in the land supply data," a process that is in fact taking place, he said, irrespective of "gotcha, sweeps-week TV."

Shoreview's plans

It's hard to get a read these days on how popular a concept "smart growth" might be.

On the one hand, Vice President Al Gore decided to drop sprawl as a big issue after playing it up a lot last year, and voters in Arizona and Colorado last week rejected major growth-control measures on their ballots after favoring them in earlier polls.

On the other hand, many local communities -- especially as they anticipate aging populations -- are planning smart-growth zones in which senior and other housing is located close to shops, parks, city halls and transit hubs.

A case in point is Shoreview, which has been working recently with Calthorpe to design such an area near its City Hall.

"People are starting to realize that we can alleviate traffic congestion if we can live, work and shop in the same place," said Ady Wickstrom, a City Council member in Shoreview. "Then when density is higher, you can do things with transit. Right now we can't do much except a park-and-ride [lot], because we don't have the density to make it feasible. We're getting letters from residents because our park-and-rides are all filled up. People want that car for errands after work, but they can take the bus most of the way."

David Peterson can be contacted at david.a.peterson@startribune.com