Brookfield Shows Way to Walkable Living

In my little corner of the east side, you can walk to the grocery store, the drugstore, the hardware store, the movie theater, the bank, several restaurants, the bookstore and an array of other shops and services. And you're bound to run into neighbors along the way.

Glendale is moving in a similar direction. If other bedroom suburbs followed suit, they'd develop a stronger sense of place.

But now that the savvy, far-sighted Bloomberg is stepping down, will her successor, Jeff Speaker, keep Brookfield on the same thoughtful path?

"I want to keep going in the direction we're going," he told me, "but I want to slow down a bit, put the brakes on a little." Speaker said that while the Towne Centre plans are "beautiful" and will move ahead on schedule, he wants to take a closer look at some of the other mixed-use development.

Suburbs

In most postwar suburbs, you can get to such businesses only by car - and they're almost never in one place. Blame single-use zoning, which makes it illegal to put housing next to retail. Blame another aspect of blinkered zoning, too, for producing a suburban landscape increasingly dominated by big houses on big lots.

I know, I know. Lots of people want to live that way. But what about those who don't - for example, older people who'd like to stay in their suburban communities but would just as soon shed that high-maintenance lifestyle? Or young professionals who don't want it in the first place? And people in both categories who would rather walk than drive? Some of them are snapping up condos in downtown Milwaukee - a gain for our tax base, yes, but a loss for continuity and diversity in the 'burbs.

New choices in suburbs
The smarter suburbs are beginning to offer more choices. Brookfield is an example. Its newly minted Norhardt Crossing, an attractive subdivision of 72 condos and 145 apartments on Norhardt Drive, is within a stone's throw of the Ruby Isle shopping center, a senior citizen center, the public library, the post office and City Hall. While not perfect, the subdivision is miles ahead of its counterparts in the metro area from a planning standpoint.

Built by Milwaukee's Mandel Group in a modified row house style, with front porches and shallow setbacks, the housing (average price for the condos: $266,000) has a distinctly urban feel. Sidewalks, street lamps and a skinny (26-foot-wide) roadway make the neighborhood welcoming to pedestrians. Even the landscaping - street trees, beds of perennials - is more like that of a city than a suburb.

And, in contrast to those sterile subdivisions where endless driveways and big garages yawn into the street (as if to signal that cars live there and people are an afterthought), Norhardt Crossing hides the garages in a back courtyard, screened by evergreens. The building heights are sensitive to existing houses nearby.

There are, alas, a few shortcomings. A portion of wetland on the property was filled in, in order to make the development economically viable. While the destruction was confined to one-tenth of an acre, and two storm water detention ponds were added, losses of marshland add up.

The architectural work, by Bloodgood, Sharp and Buster of Des Moines, is also a mixed bag. While the buildings are well-proportioned and much more inviting than, say, the nearby row of faceless, flat-topped senior housing incorporated into the subdivision, their multiple gables and red-brick skin are nothing that we haven't seen a million times elsewhere; I wish there were more variety in building types.

Bob Monnat, the Mandel Group's personable chief operating officer, concedes the point. But he notes: "When you're introducing this kind of thing to an existing suburb, you have to walk before you can run."

Need for new architecture
From a marketing standpoint, he's probably right. How ironic, though, that the suburbs, birthplace of the ranch house - horizontal, geometric and revolutionary in its own way - should now be considered hostile territory for modern design. To create memorable neighborhoods, we need fresher architecture.

On the whole, though, these are small quibbles. Norhardt Crossing represents progress in both planning and housing choice. And to its credit, Brookfield has several other mixed-use developments in the works, blending retail (and sometimes offices) with housing. They include Towne Centre, a dense, Main Street-y complex planned for the intersection of Capitol Drive and Brookfield Road; the area around Brookfield Square mall; and the former Ruby Farms site between I-94 and Blue Mound Road.

Departing Mayor Kate Bloomberg says that while single-family homes will continue to define Brookfield, the diversifying housing base will help create a "life-cycle community" for people young, old and in-between. "We're not accepting density at random," she cautions. "It's got to have the right collection of pedestrian amenities in order to qualify."

Nothing wrong with reassessing things periodically. I just hope it won't be used as an excuse to reinstate the old, auto-centered approach to planning or, alternately, to choke off all growth - a futile strategy that just pushes development into the sprawl zone.

If suburbs like Brookfield are to mature gracefully, they'll need to nurture some of the same amenities that make for vibrant cities elsewhere: walkable neighborhoods, a variety of housing types and magnetic public places.

Call Whitney Gould at (414) 224-2358, write her at The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, P.O. Box 371, Milwaukee, WI 53201, or e-mail her at wgould@onwis.com.


Appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on April 15, 2002.