The Minneapolis suburb of Chaska is trying to do what few cities around the country have done: Improve on traditional development by transplanting a slice of the city to the outer edge of suburbia.
In its plan to turn farm fields into the 1,000-home Clover Ridge neighborhood, the city has embraced “new urbanism,” concepts that encourage dense and diverse housing within easy walking distance of parks, transit and stores.
Residents of the new neighborhood are divided into two camps: Those who love the ideals of new urbanism but worry after years of delays that the neighborhood won’t fulfill them, and those who think the kind of urban density envisioned doesn’t belong in Clover Ridge.
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The main dispute is over the neighborhood’s most radical venture, still unbuilt: A Minneapolis affordable housing provider, Central Community Housing Trust, recently proposed a 115-unit apartment complex called Clover Field Marketplace, with 10,000 square feet of retail space on the first floor.
Something like the complex was always planned for the center of Clover Ridge. As in other new urbanist projects, the idea is to create a bustling “town center” at the heart of the neighborhood.
The site is next to a recently built four-story condo building, near a park-and-ride bus stop and across the street from a brand-new Clover Ridge Elementary School.
Peter Musty of the Charette Center in Minneapolis, who helped design parts of Clover Ridge, said the Marketplace would be the one “block of real urbanism” in the neighborhood that makes it all work.
As a “technique for getting people out and walking,” the shops will give residents a gathering spot and a destination.
Some residents can’t wait.
Four years ago, Megan Schaack moved with her family to Clover Fields, a sub-neighborhood of Clover Ridge where houses sit close together on narrow lots — a typical new urbanist design.
“We like the look of it and the way it’s conducive to meeting the neighbors,” she said.
A developer’s financial difficulties have slowed building in Clover Fields, and Schaack and others are frustrated by how long it has taken to bring retail space to the area.
Other residents, who live in more typical suburban houses on wider lots nearby, tend to be more suspicious of the Marketplace project.
The new urbanism idea “intimates to us that there’s something wrong with suburbia,” resident Bill Thompson told the city Planning Commission reviewing the Marketplace project. “We like the quietness. We like the lack of traffic.”
Opponents of the project say they didn’t know such density was part of the Clover Ridge master plan, and they worry about the fact that half of the complex’s 115 units will be subsidized, affordable to low- and middle-income renters.
Fifteen of the affordable units will be covered by a federal program under which low-income renters pay 30 percent of their income.
Planner and new urbanism expert Bob Gibbs acknowledges that about half of the population doesn’t really like new urbanism.
“We’re just trying to give an alternative to the 25 percent that want it,” Gibbs said.
Chaska’s director of planning, Kevin Ringwald, said the city wanted the neighborhood to provide lots of choices in housing and prices.
Few cities have tried to construct neighborhoods like Clover Ridge. New urbanism is more commonly introduced into already busy commercial areas.
St. Louis Park, another Minneapolis suburb, built the large housing-and-retail complex Excelsior & Grand.
Other suburbs, including Maple Grove, in its Arbor Lakes area, and Eden Prairie, near Eden Prairie Center mall, have brought housing into their central business districts.
But most suburbs have been reluctant to bring commerce into the middle of suburban residential developments.
Maple Grove City Administrator Al Madsen noted some reasons: “traffic, lights, noise.”
“We’ve talked about it in the past,” he said. “Developers always seem to be reluctant.”
Chaska often requires developers to follow city plans. The city has a history of experiments in planning.
The Jonathan neighborhood, a large planned community, was started in the 1960s by wealthy developer Henry T. McKnight. In a few years, construction will start on Chaska’s next planned, new urbanist development: Heights of Chaska is a 3,500-home plan for 700 acres of farmland west of the city’s downtown.
Clover Ridge is a test of how to accommodate thousands of new residents, drawn to Chaska by the new U.S. Highway 212, to be completed in 2008.
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One open question is whether the retail space at the center of Clover Ridge will work. Residents have asked for a coffee shop — a place for the neighborhood’s many stay-at-home moms to gather — and for dry cleaners, restaurants, an ice cream shop and a convenience store for eggs, milk and other necessities.
But some experts in new urbanism worry that Clover Ridge’s design will make it hard to meet residents’ expectations.
Instead of placing retail stores on a busy street at the edge of the development, Clover Ridge, like other new urbanist neighborhoods, places retail at the center.
That doesn’t work, retail experts say, because stores need lots of customers.
“The residential model of new urbanism works, but the retail model is a lot shakier,” said Brent Ryan, an urban planning professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Gibbs agrees, and typically designs his neighborhoods with retail at the edge, along busy roads.
“Almost none of the commercial has worked in new urbanism,” he said. “They’re trying to force the retail to do something that it can’t do.”
Only a limited amount of retail space will be built in the Marketplace. About 10,000 square feet of retail space could accommodate four or five businesses.
Also, the project has been delayed until enough new residents moved into the neighborhood to support it. About three-quarters of the neighborhood’s 1,000 homes now have been built.