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Standish Adopts New Code Aimed at Restoring Village

June 27, 2011 - Standish - The town of Standish has become the first town in Maine to adopt form-based code, part of an effort to replicate the downtowns of yesteryear where people lived and worked in the same place.

Vastly different from traditional zoning, which dictates what kind of land and building uses are allowable and relegates those uses to certain areas of town, form-based code allows all uses - commercial, retail, residential. In Standish, the new code, passed recently by the Town Council, will be applied to the downtown village district, which runs mainly along Route 25 from Oak Hill Road to Colonial Marketplace.

According to Alan Manoian, Bridgton's economic development director who was instrumental in helping Standish develop their plan, is excited for Standish. Manoian, who is in the process of helping Bridgton incorporate form-based code, says the town is setting the trend for other Maine towns seeking to restore the traditional New England village feel, which gradually was lost when zoning took over in the 1960s and 1970s.

"We've had zoning in America since 1926," Manoian said. "Most of Maine had adopted it by the 1970s. Zoning is based on the whole rationale of segregation, separation, isolation of uses. While it was established for the benefit of public health, public safety and general welfare, what it really resulted in is what you see now all around us: sprawl.

"We shop in one zone. We live in this zone. We work in a business park. We go to school in another zone," he continued. "When you have certain zones for everything, you sprawl everything out. You decentralize."

And for 2011, when gas prices are about $4 a gallon, what that results in is a lot of driving.

"You need a car to get everywhere now," Manoian said. "So, traditional zoning is very costly. It's inefficient, and it pulls apart the social cohesion of a town."

Standish is just one of many towns where transportation is required, said Carol Billington, who worked for months with Manoian and others to develop the code.

She said the new code allows higher density in the village - 50,000 square feet per dwelling unit versus the 3 acres the town has required in the past. Other parts of town remain unaffected.

"That's a lot of the reason we have so much sprawl now," Billington said.

She said downtown Standish has large tracts of vacant land that, if landowners choose, can now be developed according to the form-based code. While land and building uses are up to the imagination of the developer, the buildings have to look somewhat similar. They cannot exceed two-and-a-half stories in height, mainly because the town's fire engines can't reach higher. General building principles include featuring buildings that are close to the road and have a lot of glass in the form of windows and doors on the street-side.

Along the all-important travelway, roads will be less of a mass of pavement but feature wide sidewalks, on-street parking, plantings, crosswalks and trees. According to Billington and Manoian, the changes are an effort to create an "outdoor room" of sorts that attracts shoppers mainly because it is visually appealing and pedestrian friendly.

The new code, however, is different from the "design standards" that Windham is contemplating. Design standards dictate to developers what building materials, designs and colors should be used. Instead, Standish is basically prescribing a building's shape, and requiring that the building doesn't appear flat from the street, but is broken up by windows, doors, stoops, similar to an old New England downtown.

Since one of form-based code's goals is to reduce the requirement of a car in people's lives, motorists will likely see a drastically different Route 25 in downtown Standish in coming years. Since the town owns the roadway, which goes back to the range road era when then-Pearsonstown was incorporated in the 1700s, the town will employ a "If you build it, they will come" sort of philosophy.

Using grant money, Billington said the town is "taking the responsibility" of developing on-street parking and new sidewalks on much of Route 25. The more on-street parking, she said, the less parking individual property owners are required to have on-site, which allows for smaller parcels and more structures.

Think the opposite of North Windham. Half of North Windham is paved parking areas; a business is required to offer a certain square-footage of parking to be granted an operating license. With more on-street parking and possibly a municipal lot in Standish, individual business owners can save some of the upfront expense.

"Parking is the main reason you see the spreading-out of a commercial area," Billington said. "If we can have half of that parking on the street, that's fewer cars taking up space in a business' parking lot."

Growing smart

Standish's adoption of form-based code adoption last week was the result of a few years of hard work on the part of local and regional leaders and buoyed when Standish was chosen as GrowSmart Maine's Model Town in 2007.

Since that time, the nonprofit GrowSmart, which is concerned about the increasing growth pressures many towns are facing, paid for specialists to help Standish with developing the new code. One of the Standish residents involved with tailoring the code to meet Standish's needs, Carolyn Biegel, a former town councilor and now a School Administrative District 6 school board member, said without GrowSmart's help and financial aid, Standish would never have developed Maine's first form-based code.

"We got a lot of eyes to help us, the folks at GrowSmart really helped us out," said Biegel. "This really is exciting. It's such a win for everyone. If you don't want to develop your property, you don't have to. But if you do, you certainly have more options available to you."

Form-based code is still fairly new but area town planners are familiar with it. Windham's planner, Brooks More, said, "More people are talking about it and you hear about it being done for sure."

More summarizes the form-based approach, which was spearheaded in 1993 by a group of architects known as the Congress for New Urbanism, saying, "Fundamentally, it's promoted by architects who are interested in designing the built environment. They're more focused on the way a building looks and how it interacts with the street and where it's located on the building site and less concerned with compatible uses."

Windham's assistant town planner, Ben Smith, said national trends reflect how Standish is applying form-based code in its village zone only while existing zoning elsewhere in town remains in place.

"Nationally, it's pretty rare for towns to go completely form-based code. Where it's catching on, however, is for a downtown area," Smith said.

Other benefits

There are many financial benefits to form-based code, said Manoian. Since sprawl lessens when a village allows more residential and commercial options within the same area of town, residents will spend less on gas and commuting expenses since they may be able to live and work in the same place.

The municipality also benefits from the code's focus on a compact, mixed-use and walkable layout, Manoian said, since roads theoretically need less repair and people live in a more centralized location, public safety and public works needs are reduced.

"Taxpayers love this," Manoian said. "Right now, they are being bled dry paying to maintain sprawling roads, which need more maintenance, more salt. You have to hire more police officers. You have to have more regional fire stations. It's really an unending cycle."

And developers, who will actually drive the incorporation of the new code since nothing can happen without developers wanting to build or renovate structures along Route 25, will benefit as well, Manoian said, because the code is less restrictive, and, most importantly, simply written. Rather than 300 pages of zoning regulations, form-based code may have 20 to 30 pages, he said, "and most of it is visual graphics showing the applicant what the town is looking for."

"Conventional zoning reads like a legal narrative," Manoian added. "It's like having root canal. And it keeps getting thicker and thicker because municipalities have to keep adding to it," he said. "And this is why you have people, land-use attorneys primarily, making their living representing applicants because the average person couldn't possibly understand it. That's not the case with form-based code. Smaller guys can get in the game and they're mitigating their risk of investment because they know what the code is asking of them. They know it ahead of time, which actually encourages more development."

With the economy at a standstill in small Maine towns like Standish, it may take a while for the new code to take effect. The next step, Billington said, will be for the town to use federal stimulus grant money to create sidewalks connecting Standish Corner (routes 35 and 25) and George E. Jack Elementary School on Route 35. The goal is to create sidewalks connecting Standish Corner with the Avesta Housing senior development off Oak Hill Road and then planting trees and eventually providing for on-street parking, bike paths, esplanades landscaping and lighting.

Despite the "very dead economy," as Billington described the current financial state to towns west of Portland, "all are anxious for there to be jobs in Standish. This is a step in that direction."

John Balentine, Keep Maine Current, June 2011


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