Win-wins for developers and communities?

May 5, 2011 12:24 PM

Can anyone point me to stories or case studies about conflicts between communities and land developers that were resolved to everyone's satisfaction?

I'm puzzling through some issues with commercial land developers (yes big box stores and strip malls and all that) and local communities who think such development will ruin their towns etc. and looking for examples where communities have been locked in fights with developers and the situation has resolved itself. I'm just wondering about pathways through deadlocked situations, and curious about cases where the community and the developers came to an agreement after a period of conflict.

I have numerous examples of communities winning their fights against developers and lots of cases of developers ramming through developments against the wishes of communities, but I'm interested in stories and cases of reconciliation, collaboration and, if you like "win-win" results. Looking especially for stories of massive commercial developments - those ones are the thorniest.

posted by salishsea to Society & Culture (4 answers total)

An example of a successful residential development amidst the cries of tenant actinides can be found around the Trinity project at Market and 8th in SF.
posted by samthemander at 12:29 PM on May 5, 2011

The Orange County Great Park is largely seen as having been resolved as a win-win, after years and years of often fractious debate. It hasn't progressed as fast as everyone has liked, but the housing downturn has played a big role in that.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 12:49 PM on May 5, 2011

The nixing of the proposed New Haven Galleria Mall and that plan's replacement with the present-day Ikea Store on Long Wharf seems to have gone very well (though I was a child when the struggles against the mall were happening, so I don't know for sure what the feeling was at the time).

Some of the major complaints of the anti-mall people at the time: (1) the mall would harm local small businesses by drawing suburban customers away from downtown, (2) the mall would increase traffic to a crippling degree, and plans for new roads weren't adequate and that (3) the mall's plans called for demolishing the architecturally significant Pirelli Tire Building. The Ikea plan had much less of an impact on local business because they catered to more of a niche market than a mall, it (somehow) didn't increase traffic all that much, and it incorporated the Pirelli building. These days everyone seems pretty okay with it being there. The Wikipedia article looks like it has some good links at the bottom if you want to delve into the details of this whole thing in a little more detail.
posted by bubukaba at 12:55 PM on May 5, 2011

Response by poster: You guys are gold. Thank you. I'm especially interested in the role that citizens played in creating options, while recognizing that the three key players in these situations are citizens, developers and local governments. Often it is the citizens who get the shortest shrift in terms of the story. They always come across as the ones opposed to things, and no one ever seems to write about the ways in which they participate in the middle ground. Often the story goes like this:

1. Developer buys land and proposes mega development.
2. Citizens up in arms.
3. Local government gets involved, debate moves to the political process.
4. Subsequent legislative, policy and zoning processes proceed.
5. Government exacts demands from developer, developer concedes, citizens vote to approve.

I'm especially interested in what happens when the situation is really poisoned at step 2, such as there seems to be no way forward.

Keep the links coming. And thank you!
posted by salishsea at 1:04 PM on May 5, 2011