Land Use Planning

Great American Neighborhoods

Guide to Livable Design - the Great American Neighborhood (PDF 5.91MB)

The Maine State Planning Office's Great American Neighborhood initiative is intended to encourage the creation and restoration of traditional neighborhoods (typical of New England villages and trolley suburbs). The initiative includes the development and release of both a Design Guide for homebuyers, homebuilders, and developers and a Municipal Handbook for Maine communities that wish to ensure that local ordinances encourage, and don't discourage, this type of traditional neighborhood development (many of today's local ordinances outlaw, through lot size, setback and road frontage requirements, the types of neighborhoods typical in a New England village.) Another important part of our initiative is an Education Campaign designed to reach the homebuying market in Maine-- nearly 40% of which (our homebuyers survey indicates) are likely to buy their next home, if one were available, in a Great American Neighborhood.

WHAT IS A "GREAT AMERICAN NEIGHBORHOOD?"

The best neighborhoods/villages/developments/town centers seem to have 6 features:

Walkability
A civic core
Neighborhood boundaries that join together 2 or more neighborhoods and are meeting places
Protection from excessive traffic and traffic noise
Human scale
A public-private continuum
Our description of what we call a "Great American Neighborhood" are largely drawn from these major sources:
- Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language
- Anton Nelessen's Visions for a New American Dream
- Peter Calthorpe's The Next American Metropolis
- Research I've done on "livable streets" with local comprehensive planning committees and with students from Bowdoin College in Camden, Kennebunk, Richmond, and Wiscasset.

WALKABILITY

People walk 250 - 300 feet per minute. This defines the size of the neighborhood -- in round numbers, 150 to 250 acres. But walkability only means something if there are things to walk to. What is in these 150 to 250 acres? In what might be called the Great American Small Town Neighborhood (or Village, etc.) a mix of uses as follows:

CIVIC CORE

The civic core can be a square, green, or crossroad, with civic buildings (church, school, library, etc.) and/or local retailers surrounding, along, or nearby. The core needs a central location and easy access, some mix of uses, and a size proportional to the size of the neighborhood.

NEIGHBORHOOD BOUNDARIES

Boundaries provide the neighborhood with an identity -- when you've entered it, you know you're entering the neighborhood. The boundary is a place of interaction, not a throwaway place; an important place in its own right. A place where two or more neighborhoods come together, where a corner store or small group of shops might be located. The degree of penetration is important: a boundary should not be a hard, impenetrable edge (e.g., a freeway); but shouldn't be too porous, either, or the neighborhood loses the protection it needs. Boundaries should allow for a couple of ways into the neighborhood.

PROTECTION FROM EXCESSIVE TRAFFIC

This, of course, gets at both traffic safety and traffic noise.

Traffic safety: Roads become a barrier when people have to routinely adapt their movement to give way to vehicles. A rough guideline as to the borderline between acceptable and unacceptable conditions is an average delay of two seconds in crossing the street. This equates to about 200-250 cars per hour. If this is peak hour, then the daily flow would be about 2,000 cars. Neighborhood cohesion really begins to break down at 5,000 cars/day. This comes from Appleyard and Lintell's study in San Francisco in 1972, cited by Alexander (p. 83); the findings were retested and confirmed recently (see "Livable Streets Retested," Bosselman et. al., APA Journal, Spring 1999).

Traffic noise. High speed traffic (>45 mph) in high volumes generate industrial strength noise -- 70 - 80 dB. Faced with such noise the only way to deal with it is distance. Neighborhood traffic noise needs to get down to 55 dB at the outside wall of the home; at 65 dB, the noise becomes extremely bothersome (people say they can't watch TV, talk inside, etc. at this level).

So, the neighborhood or develpment has to be designed such that commuter or through traffic runs tangent to, not through, the neighborhood; or there are adequate buffers, as in a well designed boulevard that puts distance and landscaping between the traffic and the homes; and/or with built-in traffic calming, so that the average speed is below 30-35 mph.

HUMAN SCALE

Renaissance proportions cited by Duany; by Paula Craighead in The Hidden Design; and others help define the human scale in a Great American Neighborhood. We've documented and refined these proportions in our measurements of neighborhoods in Camden, Kennebunk, etc.

Beyond pure dimensions, Nelessen uses what he calls the Grandpa-Jennifer test: can Grandpa and Jennifer live in the same neighborhood? Can they walk to the neighborhood store or the neighborhood core safely and comfortably? Will Grandpa find a safe, convenient place to sit down and talk to friends, while Jennifer finds something to keep her occupied?

THE PUBLIC - PRIVATE CONTINUUM

This is coming to be recognized as one of the most important elements. It's related to walkability, freedom from high traffic volumes, human scale, etc., but is something that is needed on every single residential lot. Everybody needs both the public realm and privacy in their day-to-day lives. Both a worthy public realm and true privacy have been pretty much lost in the town centers and small city neighborhoods (due to traffic, negligence in design, etc.). Our hypothesis is that when a household can't have this needed balance in town, it flees outward and settles for privacy in its personal surroundings and for the public realm when its members go to work, school, etc.

In its simplest form as it affects one's house and house lot, the continuum is as follows:

Public -- the public 50 or 60 foot right-of-way properly consisting of the cartway, curbs, esplanades with trees, and sidewalks

Semi-public -- one's front yard

Semi-private -- one's porch or stoop

Private -- one's back yard

The same continuum can be followed inside the home:

Public -- the hallway and front room, where you welcome/allow relative strangers or casual acquaintances

Semi-public -- dining room or living room, back yard deck, where you welcome/allow closer friends

Semi-private -- kitchen, family room, where you welcome/allow best friends, relatives

Private -- den, bedrooms, where you and family are meant to be alone

Neighborhoods that are composed of homes, house lots and public streets respecting this continuum will almost always be highly sought after.

WHERE TO FIND GOOD EXAMPLES IN MAINE

There are many developments/neighborhoods/villages/town centers that have some of these elements in place. It is hard to find one that has all of them.

One of the best places to look in Maine might be the neighborhoods that developed as trolley suburbs -- Meetinghouse Hill and Loveitt's Field in South Portland, Cape Cottage in Cape Elizabeth, Deering in Portland, Wildwood in Cumberland, etc.

Other examples are older residential neighborhoods surrounding village centers -- Pearl St. neighborhood in Camden, for example, Yarmouth village, Farmington village, or in Brunswick around Bowdoin College, to name a few examples.

Land Use Planning Program