A Placemaker’s Approach to Development: An Interview with Paddy Steinschneider
A Placemaker’s Approach to Development: An Interview with Paddy Steinschneider
This is part of nine-part series where three students ask three questions to architects, planners, and figures at the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU 32).
This past May, student fellows at Southern Urbanism attended the thirty-second national gathering of the Congress of New Urbanism (CNU) in downtown Cincinnati. While there, the fellows caught up with urbanists from all over the United States and beyond to chat about their work. Each interviewee was asked three questions about what they do and the goals that their work advances. The conversations have been edited for length and clarity.
Paddy Steinschneider is a longtime placemaker from Dobbs Ferry, NY. He is the owner of Gotham Design, Planning, and Community Development, and describes himself as a designer, builder, and advocate. Drawing from his personal experiences, Paddy explains difficulties with the approval and entitlement process, the challenges this process poses to the principles of New Urbanism, and opportunities for reform.
MS: Could you take a second to just introduce yourself and tell us about your professional experiences?
PS: My name is Paddy Steinschneider. I'm located in Dobbs Ferry, New York. I have a small firm that does kind of full spectrum. We are Gotham Design, Planning, and Development. It's a little different because we often get involved in building the things that we're designing. That was always my intent. Even before I got into architecture school, I would be doing the construction side of it. It's given me the opportunity to transform some places because so often when you've got a separation between the developer and the designer, there's a little bit of tension. I don't get that there's any tension that's within myself. And I'm really good at being creative. I'm really bad at being responsible economically. So I tend to build things that are much nicer than they really justify for economics, but I've found that could be magical and transform places.
MS: So through that experience, I imagine you've had to work with communities and municipalities a lot to get things approved. Can you tell us about that experience?
PS Sure. It's kind of what it's become all about. When I first started doing this, I opened my firm in ‘78, and my proposals for projects would mention that we'll handle the approvals process. The approvals process back in ‘78 was often you'd go in and meet with the building inspector. The building inspector would have fairly clear instructions from the mayor and trustees about what they wanted to see happen in the community. If you were bringing something in that you knew was consistent and code-compliant, it really was a very simple process. They would have a public meeting. The mayor and the trustees would have already decided before that meeting happened what they were doing, you'd know it. So it was a very simple process, not a very fair process, and not a process that engaged the people who live in the community. And some of this might be partially my fault.
I didn't think that was a good way of doing things, so a lot of us, starting in the ‘80s, started talking about having a different process of creating charrettes. Bringing people in, getting the whole community to participate. What that did is it helped people understand the importance of using their voice. So now I'd say forty percent of what we do in time is the approval process. It'll actually take us longer. I've had projects that took me eight years to get entitled, when we did the construction in two. One of my favorite moments is after eight years, one of the guys who was on the board approving came up to me, shook my hand, and he said, “Are you glad to be done with this?” And I said, “All you've enabled me to do is get started. I haven't gotten done with anything. I need to build it.” So it's really changed, and the community, it has a tremendous effect now, in positives and in some negatives.
MS: Could you elaborate more on the negatives? I know a lot of these projects help with affordability, sustainability, density, and walkability in communities, and I think a lot of times the approval process can delay that or get in the way of that.
PS: It totally interferes with many of the goals that we have. If we are committed to affordable housing, just housing, just communities, and fair communities, there's an economics issue. And anything that is put in the way of the developer that requires more time, time is money in this. It interferes with how much you can justify doing with the project. If I have to go through a multi-year process, where my bottom line recognizes the costs of the approval process, I can't sell things for as inexpensive. I often can't provide some of the amenities that would have made really good sense. It's just there's no extra space for that.
So I think that's made things more difficult, and of course, the real problem is municipal leaders. The mayors and the trustees often have a misunderstanding of the significance and the following that people coming to the mic have. So somebody will walk up to the mic and say, “I represent my community, I represent my neighborhood, I represent my neighbors.” And we'll talk about how they oppose something. This is going to be terrible. It's going to ruin life as we know it in the Western Hemisphere. So they will talk and the mayor and trustees are often fearful that they're carrying votes, they're carrying weight, and that if they don't listen to these people, they're going to have a challenge.
And it was funny because I gave a talk several years ago on this where I talked about how ten percent of the community was so opposed to what I was doing with incremental development within the downtown: revitalizing the downtown, increasing the tax base, providing them better restaurants, better shops, better stores and a lot of smaller apartments in the downtown. They were totally walkable, two blocks from the train station. It's kind of like it checked all the right boxes, but still there was this group of people who organized [against the project]. They were so organized they created a Facebook page called SOS Dobbs Ferry, and they put a thing out that said if you are concerned and interested in the future of Dobbs Ferry and its character, join this thing. So I tried to sign up, and I was told no, I'm sorry. We're not going to let you be a member because it was directly against what [I was] trying to do.
So ten percent of the community is aggressively opposed, balanced by ten percent of the community who really understood how important what I was doing was and how beneficial it was for everything. So it's these ten and these ten, and you got the 80 percent in between who just want to make sure that they can get to the train on time. So they're not really participating. And at the end, there was a Q&A, and the guy said, “How many people do you think really, I mean, honestly, how many people really meet and talk about you in a negative way? How many people really are committed to be against you?”
Trying to be a little dramatic, I said, “at least a hundred.” You know that to me sounded like a lot of people that hate, you know, one hundred people, a hundred of my neighbors hate me.
And he said, “What's the population of Dobbs Ferry?”
I said, “11,000.”
He said, “That's not even one percent.”
And I said, “OK, granted I have less than one percent is against me. But you know that statistic on the other end is the same too? I got one percent supporting me, so 98 percent of the people just want to get to the train on time.”
MS: So across the country, there have been efforts of reform. What suggestions would you have to get that 98 percent of people involved in the process?
PS: This is something we're constantly trying to do. You and I meet here at the Congress for the New Urbanism. Obviously, a tremendous amount of this effort has been exactly that. How do we integrate with the process? Integrate the processes that actually get people to participate in a way that's meaningful because they can understand what's actually going on?
So what we try to do, and often when I say we do a lot of our own development, to make that happen we bring in developer people with us. They're the money side of it, and I do things that make them incredibly nervous. I’ll say, “Well look, I'm gonna organize the thing. We're gonna meet at the diner at 10 o’clock on Saturday morning. Anybody who wants to come can come. You know, I'm gonna be there. You can come in. You can talk. You can tell me what your issues are.” The opportunity there is to get them to have the facts. If they come in front of you with facts, and they say, I have a problem with this project because I think it's going to do this, now we've got something that can be calibrated, that can have quantities assigned to it. Maybe we need to make an adjustment. Maybe we have to change this to be that, and we can solve those problems.
So, we were doing this project that was an eighteen-acre office complex that had been owned by Akzo Noble. It took us a year, which for that size was kind of streamlined, but we had the support of the mayor and the trustees, so we were going through all this stuff.
And a woman stood up, and she was almost in tears, explaining that if this is built, it will result in the death of her children. And you have to be a little careful about how you respond to something like that because you don't want to make that sound like “Well, I don't know, they're your kids, not mine.” That doesn't really work. So I said, “What is it specifically that you're afraid is gonna happen?”
She said, “Well, the traffic. My kids right now get to school because they're close enough they can walk, but it's about a quarter-mile walk, and they're walking on the street cause there are no sidewalks. And now you're going to significantly increase the traffic on that street, and my kids are gonna get hit by cars.”
I said, “Well, wouldn't it be better if there were sidewalks?”
She said, “Well, we've been trying to get sidewalks for fifteen years in the village. The village doesn’t have enough money.” I said, “Well, what if we built sidewalks?”
This is going to be a mixed-use place where people live. They're gonna want to walk into town. Their kids are going to walk to school. And so we'll put sidewalks into our program. And we built sidewalks that went from our location for half a mile on two main roads. It was not inexpensive, but it was a really effective way to address a real problem that the municipality couldn't fix.
When a developer comes to town, the important thing is to get them to understand what your real needs are if you’re a municipality. They are interested in getting approval, and if they feel you know this is not a pay off, this is a justification for us cooperating with you because you're providing us with things that are needed. So it's a fair exchange, and if it gets you the approvals, that sounds terrific.
Michael Schwartz is a Public Policy student at Duke University. He is on the executive team of the Duke Initiative for Urban Studies and an Affordable Housing Intern for the Duke Office of Durham and Community Affairs.
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