Over on Mark Maynard's page, a discussion of the proposed pedestrian malling of College Place seems to have veered into a critique of on-campus businesses, with the complaint that they don't pay property taxes. The larger issue that I see with housing bookstores and restaurants on-campus - and this holds true across most super-block campuses I've spent time on - is that providing these services on-site helps to emphasize the town/gown dividing line.

Any service that EMU provides on-campus is a service that students aren't heading to West Cross for. Likewise, and in the most extreme example of this phenomenon I know, any service that UMich provides on North Campus is a service that students aren't going to be supporting on Fuller Road or Plymouth Road. A private example of this is the Ren Center - people drive in and park within the RenCen, go about their business, patronize the restaurants within the RenCen for lunch, and then get back in their cars and drive home; they don't contribute anything to the area around the Ren Cen.

By contrast, consider how little parking Comerica Park provides on-site, forcing people to spend at least some time outside the stadium en route between their cars and their Tigers game. The routine sell-out crowds of this season have, in one year, provided enough foot traffic that the Ilitchs, long accused of land speculation, have decided it's time to cash in:

Atanas Ilitch, president of Olympia Development, said Tuesday that the company is in "significant talks with five or six" national retailers and expects at least two retailers and an upscale grocery store to build stores on Ilitch-owned parking lots around the ballpark and the Fox Theatre complex. . . "We are going to try to live up to the grandness that this street (Woodward Avenue), this downtown deserves," Ilitch said.

It has become fairly common (but ignored) wisdom among planners that sports stadiums and other such mega-magnet developments are poor catalysts for economic development, but Comerica Park is, in my opinion, joining Baltimore's Oriole Park as the counter-example. By not providing parking on-site, they create foot traffic that, say, Cobo Hall's attached parking structure doesn't. If you provide people with direct access between their cars and the game (or their class) by providing plentiful on-site parking, you eliminate any spillover economic activity to adjacent land uses. Once people are in their cars, you've lost them - they can as easily shop 20 miles away, on their trip home, as they can Right Here.

Jumping back to UMich, compare the built form of North Campus to that of the Diag. On North Campus, the academic buildings are placed at the center, ringed by parking and student housing, with off-campus pushed beyond that. There's relatively little off-campus foot traffic generated by campus uses. On Central Campus, by comparison, Angell Hall, NatSci, the Chemistry Building, East and West Halls, and the Schools of Social Work, Business, and Education are all basically right on the sidewalk, facing private uses. Most housing and parking are a block or so away, forcing people to walk through the State Street or South U business districts. Compare the thriving campus-oriented business communities around Central Campus to the near-complete absence of such development around North Campus, and tell me that the spatial arrangement of campus buildings has nothing to do with it.

Popping the stack one further, back to Ypsilanti, the West Cross area admittedly doesn't provide the nicest scenery for, say, visiting prospective students and their parents. (Though, speaking as a neighbor, I'll note that Jimmy Johns' renovations and several other businesses in that area have done a lot to make their buildings look nicer, just in the last few months, and there are several businesses very worth patronizing there.) Arguing from a viewpoint fairly well influenced by Jane Jacobs' spatial determinism, as well as by various other, less accessible, urban theorists, I'd say that the physical condition of West Cross is in significant part driven by the EMU campus' provision of so much housing and parking on campus, and by the locating of restaurants, coffee shops, and bookstores on campus. The locating of private student-oriented housing to the north of campus, such as Peninsular Place, will similarly have little effect on West Cross (though very well might provide excellent opportunities for pedestrian-oriented retail and service business development on the north edge of campus).

I've heard some residents in my neighborhood praise the location of Pen Place up on Huron River Drive as a way to move students out of this neighborhood - but separating the neighborhood from its campus-oriented residents certainly won't help the businesses on West Cross! Returning to Jacobs, edges in urban areas tend to become dead spaces, for lack of through (pedestrian) traffic. If this neighborhood loses its campus-oriented residents, setting up Perrin and West Cross as a hard edge between unrelated districts, those edges will suffer. With nobody crossing or passing along those streets, businesses will suffer.

At this point, I expect you want me to offer up some solutions. I admit, I want me to offer up some solutions, as well. I wish I had the answers. (Dude, aren't you a planner? Well, yes. But I advise maintaining a safe distance from planners who claim to know The Answers. Planners who have all the answers are the folks who brought you urban renewal and the interstate highway system, and, therefore, who are responsible for Cabrini Green and hour-long commutes from one former cornfield to another. I'd prefer not to be one of the planners who has the answers - I stay over here, with the planners who want to identify issues, facilitate community discussion, build consensus, generate collaborative approaches to problems, provide technical support, and offer up the occasional suggestion.) That caveat aside, maybe I'll offer up some suggestions.

Since I see one of the driving issues as the superblocking of campuses, and the spatial homogenization of users, maybe we can find ways to break that up - make things messy, and generate flow across current boundaries. If we want EMU to function as part of the Ypsilanti community, rather than merely being located here, we should look to make it physically part of Ypsilanti's urban fabric. Blur the physical boundaries a little bit. Maybe we encourage EMU to buy Ave Maria's old classroom buildings - but as part of a trade in which they sell off some piece of campus for private development. Perhaps some areas currently used as (dare I say it?) parking along Washtenaw or Lowell. As I look at a map of campus, I have to ask - do E. Circle Drive and W. Circle Drive really not connect? Why not provide a through connection, albeit one that's engineered to keep vehicular traffic to 15mph or so. (Think woonerfs, or the way that vehicles act on the portion of Ann Arbor's E. University that's not really a street.)

Some boundary blurring can be done programmatically, as well. Hey, remember that time when a Mayoral debate was held on campus and brought 300 Ypsilanti residents across the line? I'm told there will be an upcoming opportunity for residents and business owners to see the inside of the B-school, as well. The EMU faculty and (to a lesser extent) grad students I know who live in Ypsi are some of the most engaged and energetic community members around; how about a "live where you work: campus edition" initiative?

Look back up to the first sentence of this post - is "on campus restaurants don't pay property tax" still the most important (or interesting) facet of town/gown planning you can think of?