A PLACE in the sun
Visionary live/work developer Chris Velasco is the president and executive director of Minneapolis-based PLACE, a non-profit organisation hired to create award-winning sustainable communities from inception to occupancy across the US
‘We only work by invitation,’ says Chris Velasco. ‘We don’t go out looking for opportunities. It’s important that we have the full focus of the community’s leaders on a project for it to succeed, and I don’t think we’d have as much standing or credibility if we approached a community saying “we’d like to do this”.’
PLACE is approached and hired by county and city governments, non-profit organisations, foundations and, occasionally, individuals to plan, design, fund and build sustainable, mixed use communities. For the Working Artists Ventura (WAV) project, the City of Ventura came to them with what seemed an impossible task.
‘They told us “prices in our downtown area going up by 25 per cent per year and the artists, who are our number one economic engine, are being priced out of town”,’ he says. ‘We’d like you to create affordable live/work space for them that will be insulated from any effects of the market, as well as a mixed-use community with arts-friendly creative businesses where the artists can work and which will attact foot traffic so the project becomes a destination. Oh, and we’d like it all to be green.”’
However tall an order that may originally have seemed, the project broke ground at the start of this year, following the award of $22m worth of low income tax credits. Sourcing - and combining – funding streams is one of the areas where PLACE excels.
OVERLAPPING AGENDAS
‘One of the ways that we try to make the impossible project possible is to look at the overlapping agendas inherent in a mixed use, mixed income project,’ he says. ‘There might be affordable housing money that can help make your project happen, or arts money, community development money, historic preservation money or environmental design money - all of these different pots that would be insufficient in themselves but not if you combine them. You can stitch them together into a proper financing instrument for a major project like this.’
It seems like an obvious solution but it remains very much the exception, he believes. ‘I think we’re probably the only organisation of our kind in America that combines the arts, social justice and environmental design in one non-profit package.’
MARKET RESEARCH
Rigorous market research is also a pre-requisite for PLACE projects. ‘We surveyed about 18,000 artists for WAV and discovered that the vast majority of them were low income households, so we decided that one of the primary sources of funding we could use was affordable housing money, so the community will include supported housing for low-income families.’
WAV will be completed next summer and will even have its own hybrid car sharing scheme. ‘It’s a very complicated project to construct and it will take a good 18 months to get it ready for occupancy,’ he says, ‘but it will have an internal, inexpensive and efficient transport infrastructure - all those things end up enhancing the whole live/work cycle as opposed to just creating spaces to live and work in.’
So what was his route to becoming a live/work pioneer? ‘I had dropped out of a graduate medical programme to be a musician, but I was making nothing,’ he says. ‘A friend of mine was creating a live/work project for artists and wanted it to be a cooperative, and he asked me to be involved because he thought I was an expert on cooperatives. I told him I was in a food co-operative but that was all – I didn’t know anything about housing. He said ‘well, you’re the only person I know who knows anything about co-operatives. You’re hired.’
FROGTOWN
Chris helped put together the co-operative - the Frogtown development in St Paul, Minnesota (link to feature here) - before moving into it as a musician and becoming president for two terms. ‘I learned about every aspect of creating a successful residential co-operative – how to fund, design and operate it and all the legal requirements,’ he says. ‘It gave me a real depth of knowledge, and from that point on I continued to work creating live/work spaces.’
The opportunity to head up PLACE allowed him to build on what he had learned in developing artists’ communities and go further, to create communities that were both environmentally and economically sustainable, as areas colonised by artists often become victims of their own success. Districts across the US, Europe and beyond have fallen victim to the ‘SoHo effect’ where the very people that projects were designed to help are priced out of their own communities.
MIXED INCOME
‘That was one of the challenges that the City of Ventura had specifically hired PLACE to sort out,’ he says. ‘It isn’t just with artists, although that’s very noticeable. There is an economic osmosis where, if a community has a good revitalisation plan then it attracts higher income households who raise the property values and the people responsible for the revitalisation to begin with are priced out of their community. That’s one of the reasons why we’re dedicated to mixed income communities.
‘Because we’re non-profit, we can actually use the market to have a stabilising effect, rather than the usual destabilising one,’ he continues. ‘As a non-profit steward of a community we can use a kind of economic judo to take positive revenue streams from the market components of a project and use them to nourish the components that need to be affordable. It’s a revenue balancing effect – we harness what’s best about the market and use that to support what doesn’t happen naturally, but serves an important public good.’
This savvy use of the market leads PLACE to focus on rental or retail projects, depending on local circumstances. ‘There are different funding sources out there that have a waxing and waning quality to them,’ he says. ‘We try to figure out what the opportunities are for funding and match those with the community’s goals. In this case the goals were high ceilings and natural light – the kind of things that make for an expensive project, but they wanted it to be affordable. The best resources out there to match that led us to create a good deal of rental.’
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
PLACE could never be accused of applying a ‘cookie cutter’ model to its projects, but what is applied each time is the process of community engagement. ‘We distil the goals of the community and match their needs with existing opportunities for funding,’ he explains. ‘That’s a process we can repeat over and over.’
A key lesson learned in all of this is the importance of thinking ahead and really knowing your market. ‘Development tends to be driven by fad rather than foundation,’ he says. ‘People hear the latest thing is green housing and then you get a glut of that. As agents of a municipality we have to be a lot more careful because we’re reflecting the goals and values of the city or county. We have to find a niche that is not seen as competing with what the private market place does best, but supports it and helps fill in the gaps of what they do. That way we’re welcomed by the private development community, rather than setting ourselves against it.’
The PLACE formula is clearly a winning one, but how far has live/work now permeated mainstream consciousness in the US? ‘It’s a recognisable part of the market place and we’re going to see it continue to expand,’ he says. ‘But you shouldn’t just create live/work space because you think everyone who lives in will take advantage of it, but rather because everyone who lives in it could take advantage of it. It will influence the design of those communities much more than it actually manifests itself there.’
SUB-PRIME FALLOUT
So where does the fall out from the sub-prime crisis and potentially severe economic downtown in the US leave live/work? Will people be less likely to take a risk on something seen as relatively new and untried, or will it become more attractive simply because it makes economic sense?
‘I think the sub-prime crisis will see people looking for economies of scale, and live/work does that very well,’ he says. ‘WAV is more than live/work, it’s an entire lifestyle that we’re trying to promote about how you commute, shop, play and relate with other people in the community as well as how you work.’
OPPORTUNISTIC BUYING
The economic downturn will also lead to a good deal of opportunistic buying up of properties, he believes, which will to some extent tread on the toes of live/work developers looking for cheap deals. ‘Even though there is a sub-prime crisis there is a profusion of private capital and people are going to grab these opportunities - I don’t think we’re going to be able to look to those distressed properties for live/work opportunities. But I think affordable live/work will enjoy a larger percentage of the development activity out there, because it’s boosted by a weak economy - affordable live/work spaces can become almost a buffer in the economy because they create construction jobs and cut the cost of living. There’s something to be gained from both weaknesses and surges in the economy if you’re paying attention.’
So what are the keys to making your project a success? ‘What developers often do is look at a development in a very sterile, removed way’ he says. ‘They don’t want to get their hands dirty talking to the community. You won’t get any uptake like that. You absolutely have to root it in the community, because the more they take ownership of a new development – particularly one seen as cutting edge – the more people will be excited about moving in to it and being part of an experiment about new ways to live and work.’
And, as would be expected of someone at the vanguard, he is truly evangelical about the potential of live/work to improve the way we live. ‘We want to make sure each project is a success because that’s a positive thing for the 21st century in terms of how we live, work, interrelate and commute - all these things that shifted in response to the automobile in the last century,’ he says.
‘If we’re going to shift back to something that makes more sense on a human scale then we have to make sure that doesn’t get blown out of the water by bad ideas and bad press. We need to see what it looks like when it’s done properly, with forethought and planning and the best execution. No one asks whether or not it was well planned and well executed when something fails – they just say “live/work doesn’t work, and here’s an example.”
ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROVERSY
But surely the environmental benefits of live/work can help silence the naysayers?
‘That’s a conversation that’s only just beginning,’ he says. ‘People cite studies that debunk the environmental benefits of live/work, such as you make more car trips if you work at home rather than drive your car to a workplace and leave it there all day. There hasn’t been a proper discussion about these studies, and it also needs to include building fewer buildings and needing fewer resources. I’m convinced of the environmental value of live/work but that’s not a broadly held concept yet.’
He cites Ventura’s parking code, which would have required PLACE to create more space for cars than for people. ‘We told them that people in this community would be able to have fewer automobiles than their statistics indicated because of the car sharing programme, access to mass transit, a walkable downtown and no commute. All of the things they’d normally have to plan for in terms of traffic and highways and commuting, they don’t have to. It’s been pretty new information to them.’
PUBLIC DISCOURSE
So having been at the cutting edge for so long, what’s his vision for the future of PLACE? ‘I’d like a network of live/work projects around the world, and to create some models that have enough influence to actually change the way we look at planning and building communities – to ask questions that have needed to be asked for a long time and foster a public discourse about those things.
‘In the US, development is one of the most disempowering things,’ he continues. ‘It requires the kind of capital that 95 per cent of the population have no access to, and that capital can change the political discourse in a community. The wielders of it ask for exceptions to the rules, so suddenly there’s this massive homogenous development there with traffic and pollution and all the rest of it. People have no say over something that probably affects their daily life more than anything the president would do. I would like to be part of a movement that changes those things.’