Spokane Horizons
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With all the talk these days about economic development and amending the
Comprehensive Plan, a Comp Plan refresher course might be helpful to folks.
Here’s a look at the Spokane Horizons public process that created the Comp Plan
and the Comp Plan itself, which was adopted almost two years ago.
In 1995, City residents responded to the survey, “50,000 People Are Coming to
Dinner – and They’re Spending the Night.” These responses included over 15,000
individual comments about quality of life interests as the City looked forward
to the next 20 years’ growth.
This start on the new plan was at a time when the community was learning a lot
about itself. The Pace Study directed our attention to a troubling city income
profile: a high poverty level and disproportionate jobs in the service sector.
Neal Peirce showed us how our pattern of growth was undermining our sense of
place and feeling of community. Our City Budget Director informed us of the
increasing gap in total assessed valuation between the City and the
unincorporated county, one that had grown four-fold to nearly a billion dollars
over the prior 10 years. Alan Durning pointed out that those in poverty must
choose between adequate housing or vehicle ownership to access employment and
child care. And David Rusk confirmed what we had been witnessing in our older
neighborhoods for several decades – people with higher incomes were leaving the
City and these core neighborhoods were increasingly the place of poverty.
That first Horizons survey revealed that many City residents already had a good
sense of these conditions. Their four most frequently stated concerns about
growth and development were:
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The health of downtown (decline in disposable income; fringe competition)
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The maintenance of parks and preservation of open space (declining tax base;
conversion of rural lands)
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Traffic congestion (increased traffic through the City to reach the expanding
suburbs)
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Public safety (unsafe streets; declining socio-economic conditions.
Each of these four concerns was linked to our patterns of post-war urban growth
and the economic segregation that had accompanied it. From the beginning, the
Horizons community planning process assumed the holistic model of community
health, indicating that the community understood how the economic and social
realms are inherently linked to the physical environment. That’s why the Comp
Plan now includes Economic Development, Social Health, Neighborhoods, Leadership
and other topics derived directly from this broader understanding of community
well being.
As the public input process continued through visions and values, issues,
solutions, goals and policies, the larger directions that surfaced were these
ambitions for change:
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Promote “neighborhood” as the basic unit of community.
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Link the parts of the community
through routes, paths, and systems to improve accessibility to everything.
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Increase the range of lifestyle choices.
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Provide a mix of housing densities and
types in proximity to services and transportation systems.
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Provide more travel choices within the
city.
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Increase access to goods and services
needed daily.
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Provide neighborhood spaces for social
activity.
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Design the city for people, not cars.
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Create mixes of housing, retail
businesses, public services and places of work.
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Maintain downtown as the “heart” of
the city and region.
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Create new opportunities for
businesses in neighborhoods.
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Preserve the natural environment,
increase environmental quality.
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Improve delivery of urban services.
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Continue to empower citizens to be in
control of City’s future.
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Make a future that is ecologically,
economically, and socially sustainable.
Strategies
Efforts to tie these aspirations to growth patterns resulted in two preliminary
growth strategies:
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Current Patterns, from our current
experience and as baseline for comparison, and
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Focused Growth, as a reflection of the
public process.
These evolved into three growth alternatives: Current Patterns, Centers &
Corridors, and Central City. Each was evaluated for its fiscal, environmental,
and social service performance, its affordability, and its market feasibility.
Of the three, the community’s strong preference was for the strategy that
focuses growth in 22 designated Centers and Corridors within the city.
As the Comp Plan evolved to its final form, the following criteria were used to
guide the Plan’s strategy and ensure that the Plan would make Spokane a place of
higher value.
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Meets the goals of GMA,
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Responds to the inputs of the public
process,
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Relies on incremental change
reflective of marketplace realities,
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Retains most of the urban landscape in
its current form,
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And, most importantly, it addresses
the core socio-economic conditions that were recognized in the beginning:
increasing poverty and declining community value.
As a result, Spokane’s Comp Plan, which was adopted by the City Council on May
21, 2001, offers the opportunity for higher disposable incomes by creating new
venues for jobs within neighborhoods and employment centers – not just any jobs,
but living wage jobs born by new industries attracted by a more urban and
diverse place. It creates more value in personal and public property alike by
promoting infill and mixed use and rejecting segregated land uses and leapfrog
growth. It raises the value of the uniqueness of individual citizens by
addressing the wide array of social needs and lifestyle preferences represented
in a diverse community, offering new choices in housing, transportation,
employment, living environments, cultural experience, and social engagement.
The Plan gives increased value to the natural environment, not just for its
ecological importance but also for its appeal to new industries that seek
amenities for their managers and workforce. It promotes the value of
neighborhoods by committing tools that enable neighbors to identify and pursue
shared needs. It values youth as citizens by recognizing their legitimate place
as equals in building the community and by giving them a reason to remain a part
of it as adults. It gives higher value to new employment by directing job growth
to areas in the City where the need is greatest.
And, the Plan adds value to our older, low-density neighborhoods by preserving
their character while increasing residents’ access to goods, services, and
transit in designated centers.
Turning the Ship
Changing the City’s direction after more than five decades on the same path is
like changing the course of an aircraft carrier. Because of inertia, it just
can’t happen quickly or without great intent. Spokane has great inertia from the
course of its past 50 years. But with the public continuing to assert their
desires, this Plan will slowly but deliberately nudge Spokane to its new
direction.
The text of this article is based on remarks by former GMA Program Manager Chris
Hugo, on Feb. 26, 2001.
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