The public finally weighed in on potential zoning changes along Providence’s waterfront at a four-day meeting that marked the midpoint of a multi-year effort to reconfigure the city’s Comprehensive Plan. Planners are confident they are collecting useful feedback, but at least a few businesses say the public input is coming too late.
Last week’s neighborhood meeting, called a charrette, probably will prove to have been the most controversial during the comprehensive planning process because it put on display a polarizing issue: the city’s proposal to bring new, non-industrial uses to Providence’s major industrial corridor, a 244-acre stretch along Allens Avenue. While many industrial businesses oppose those changes, other organizations said the corridor is one of the only remaining areas where new economic development can be spurred.
The process that led to the latest charrette was started about two years ago, when city planners began preparing for the five-year update of the Comprehensive Plan.
“In May 2006, we started to think about what our process would be for this update,” said Director of Future Planning Bonnie Nickerson, who initiated and is running the 12 charrettes. “How could we engage residents and businesses in this process? And we were really trying to think of a bigger process that we could engage the city in, instead of just sitting at our desks and doing the update.”
The answer the city came up with was to hold charrettes – interactive neighborhood meetings that span a few days. Director of Planning & Development Thomas Deller last week framed the charrettes as the first step toward understanding what the city – one of the most densely populated in the country – can do with a limited area in which economic development is possible.
About 50 percent of Providence’s land is under tax-exempt ownership, he said. Another 35 percent is residential.
“So we are talking about 15 percent of the city’s land area that we can develop to grow the city’s economy, where we can create jobs,” he said. The last time the city’s waterfront underwent a significant planning process was during 1989, he said.
So when the series of charrettes kicked off during July 2006, the first step was to ask residents to establish what neighborhoods in the city would support growth, Nickerson said. And residents overwhelmingly picked the Allens Avenue and Woonasquatucket River corridors. “When you take out residential areas and you know you’re not going to build on park land, it really does leave a very limited amount of space where you could possibly grow,” Nickerson said.
After that first charrette, planners rewrote much of the Comprehensive Plan and, because of the state’s five-year deadline, submitted it as an interim document. The changes in that plan included mixed-use zoning along the industrial waterfront.
For businesses like Allens Avenue’s Promet Marine Services, that change was immediately seen as an attack on their livelihood. In September 2007, they became one of the founding members of a group of water-dependent businesses that formed the Providence Working Waterfront Alliance to combat what they called a “gentrification” effort. New uses would drive old uses out of the area, the group said.
Promet President David Cohen, a vocal PWWA member, said at last week’s charrettes that it was clear that the city had already made up its mind to rezone.
“From the mayor’s and the planners’ perspective, it’s a foregone conclusion. They’ve already told us that,” he said, adding that the charrettes were just a “charade” and public input is coming too late in the process. “It’s going to be mixed use, plain and simple.” But a mixed-use waterfront is just one possibility, according to a report released last week by Ninigret Partners, an independent firm hired by the city to study the waterfront.
The firm detailed four possible uses: an increase in current uses; adding commercial uses with increased public infrastructure; adding residential uses, with a potential for new construction up to 10-stories; and attracting enhanced marine uses, such as short sea shipping.
In an effort to push industrial uses, the PWWA released its own report last week. (READ MORE)
That report found that, during 2007, seven waterfront businesses accounted for more than $140 million in purchases from Rhode Island businesses, paid property taxes of $716,371 to the city and paid other local and state taxes totaling about $4.2 million.
Those businesses also accounted for $294 million in annual sales. And they employ 372 workers with an average annual salary of about $55,000.
Mayor David N. Cicilline has been a supporter of mixed-use – specifically, he’s in favor of residential – along the corridor. Residential uses can fit alongside the current industrial uses, he said. “I think what we’re seeing in the 21st century is a very different attraction to a really dense, mixed-use urban environment,” he said on June 9.
The current planning process isn’t the first effort to bring retail and residential space to the industrial corridor. Developer Patrick Conley has renovated a former factory into offices and a gallery and, on an adjacent parcel, he long has planned a hotel and condominium development. Also, during 1999, then-Mayor Vincent A. “Buddy” Cianci proposed a “Three Cities” plan to redevelop much of the waterfront for residential and public uses.
Ninigret Partners President Kevin Hively emphasized last week that the zoning changes would set up the waterfront for future development – maybe 20 to 30 years in the future – instead of spurring instant change.
Erik Bright, a co-director of the Partnership for Creative Public Spaces, said the city should be planning for businesses that are going to grow. His group last year was awarded a zoning variance to bring nonwater-dependent businesses to Allens Avenue. In Conley’s Providence Piers building, PCPS took out a 10-year lease for 40,000 square feet of office space. The 43 businesses that now fill that space have 107 employees and are growing by an annual average of 20 percent, he said.
New businesses that come could be expected to grow at the same rate, he said, because there is plenty of room for them to expand. “Now you’ve got more than 50 percent of that waterfront that’s either vacant or underused,” he said.
Many of the charrette attendees last week, like Judy Jamieson, a rower and member of the Narragansett Boat Club, which has a dock farther north on Narragansett Bay, had strong opinions about the corridor’s zoning.
“We know what goes on along the waterfront, we row past it all the time,” she said. “I’m opposed to making it mixed-use. There are lots other possibilities to maintain this as an industrial facility and expand it.”
Although, the charrettes will not lead to consensus among the public, Nickerson said, the city is still open to any of the four options that Ninigret presented.
Planners will introduce new zoning ordinances next spring based on the interim Comprehensive Plan and public input, she said. The city’s zoning board will then have to change its ordinances within 18 months, she said.
But the biggest zoning changes – like the possible addition of mixed-use on Allens Avenue – could come sooner, Nickerson said.
“What we’ve said is that any big zoning changes that come out of this process, we would start that process rolling,” she said. Nickerson added that it is likely that “a series of zoning changes” will be proposed. •
