Dense, livable housing studied

Lancaster New Era

Jun 12, 2009 09:58 EST

Lancaster

By JACK BRUBAKER, Staff Writer

Woods Avenue is a tree-lined block of turn-of-the-20th-century homes just outside the city limits in Lancaster Township.

Castleton is a mixed-use, turn-of-the-21st-century housing development just outside Marietta in East Donegal Township.

Despite their development a century apart, Woods Avenue and Castleton have an almost identical housing density: each contains about seven residential lots per acre.

The Lancaster County Planning Commission would like to see more of that kind of development — moderately dense and attractively designed — in the future.

Therefore, pictures of Woods Avenue and Castleton grace the cover of the planning commission's new publication, "The Neighborhoods of Lancaster County: A Local Guide to Visualizing Residential Densities."

This photographic "scrapbook" provides a visual guide to county neighborhoods that are relatively dense but liveable.

It suggests there can be more of them if Lancastrians re-adopt residential living as it existed before suburban development created house-per-acre sprawl, and if municipalities alter current restrictions on density.

"Woods Avenue meets a lot of our objectives, but you couldn't reproduce it," says Danny Whittle, the county's principal planner. "Even if you could reproduce the architectural elements, you couldn't build it because of the zoning."

Lancaster Township requires a minimum lot area of 15,000 feet. The largest lot on Woods Avenue is slightly less than that, and the average lot is only 6,500 square feet.

It's easier to visualize a variety of densities by examining  photographs than the dry details of zoning ordinances, Whittle observes.

Planners realized that after the Coalition for Smart Growth held a "density summit" here two years ago.  They had examples of what they think should be built here, but no visual guide.

So Whittle, with the aid of Ryan Grube, a Penn State intern who photographed 35 neighborhoods throughout the county, put together this booklet.

It can be downloaded from the planning commission's Web site and soon will be distributed to municipal planners and other interested citizens in paper copies and on DVDs.

The featured neighborhoods are in boroughs, villages and the city, as well as modern developments throughout the county. The photos were chosen to show that attractive residential areas can be created without overrunning farmland and natural areas.

The object is to curb suburban sprawl.

"From the beginning of our development, from Maytown in 1760, we met the standards we call for now in livability," Whittle says. "But from 1960 to 1999, we built virtually nothing that was achieving smart-growth objectives."

That is changing, Whittle explains, with the development of  Castleton, Brighton, Fieldcrest and other new residential and mixed-use communities throughout the county.

"Some people say we are experimenting with the way people live by building these types of communities," observes James Cowhey, executive director of the planning commission. "That's not so. The last 50 years have been the experiment."

That "experiment" has failed, planners say, and development rules going forward must change if we are to preserve farmland and open space.

So it might be said that the primary goal of this visual guide to residential densities is to encourage everything old to become  new again.


Staff writer Jack Brubaker can be reached at jbrubaker@LNPnews.com or 291-8781.