Commentary: Building Communities

A couple days ago a Crossroads Conference was held in Des Moines to allow musicians, filmmakers, and other creative individuals in Iowa an opportunity to network and to attend developmental workshops. Since the 2007 state legislature passed tax breaks for filming in Iowa, I wonder how many of the presidential campaign ads now running on Iowa television stations were made in Iowa.

Yesterday DART and Drake University announced that the school would pay a flat fee to the transit service. In exchange, students and staff merely need to show their Drake identification to ride the buses. Earlier this year, DART started a similar program for employees of the public schools system. Such third-party fare payer arrangements concern me. However, if the single-payer agreements attract riders that could solve the ultimate problem with public transit systems. Namely, how do you pull in riders to establish more routes and greater frequency without first operating buses or light rail along those routes? The challenge for DART is to have a plan to use those single-payer agreements to build relationships with long-term, single-fare passengers.

After Thanksgiving, Jordan Creek Mall, on the western side of West Des Moines, claimed to have had 190,000 visitors in one day. In contrast, the attendance at Easter Lake in the southeastern part of Des Moines was put at 300,000 for an entire year, according to the May-August 2005 issue of Nature News from the Polk County Conservation Board. A quick search using the Internet shows the greater metropolitan area as having a population of between 456,000 and 522,400, but no definition of the metropolitan area was provided with those numbers. The area has been defined as three, five, or seven counties depending on the source of data. Even if the higher number is used, Jordan Creek Mall’s claim means that 2 out of every 5 residents visited that particular mall on Black Friday.

Jordan Creek Mall is technically Jordan Creek Town Center, just as another shopping complex in West Des Moines is called West Glen Town Center. This is the lexicon of modern community development. The idea is to build a town center in which people can walk and have a community life. Calling malls where spending money is the expectation town centers helps to confuse the discussion. Town centers need libraries and public meeting space in addition to shops. Most importantly, town centers should have a mix of apartments and single-family homes with yards nearby and there should be open air. Developers have found that people like to live in these planned communities. My biggest objection to these so-called walkable communities is that they often are designed where neighbors half-a-mile away must cross major roadways to reach them.

The lesson, I suppose, is that we should fill in Easter Lake and build a new mall-like Town Center there. Not only would the annual use dramatically increase, we might even get bus service to stop at the lilac arboretum in Ewing Park.

M.R. Field is editor of Leading Voices: Iowa.