New chief planner aims to see Calgary grow ‘up’, not ‘out’
Rollin Stanley an outspoken advocate of ‘smart growth’
When you find a planning bureaucrat extolling the virtues of parking shortages, normally it’s in an unguarded remark after the third pint with peers, or perhaps an off-script moment in a conference speech.
Not when it’s Rollin Stanley. That utterance is on his official government blog. Actually, it’s the motto:
“No place is worth visiting that doesn’t have a parking problem.”
Stanley, a man with an equally vocal disdain for oneway streets, drive-thrus and strip malls — and, to some extent, suburbs and opponents — starts today as Calgary’s top planning official.
He’s been recruited from the Washington, D.C., area to do here what he did there with brashness, flair and the occasional kilt at dressy functions: invigorate a rather slow and cautious planning system, and do so to assertively add density and urban liveliness wherever the strategy fits.
Stanley is coming from somewhere that, like Calgary, has roughly one million people, and is dominated with suburban neighbourhoods linked by roomy roadways and commuter rail lines. Al- though he had thorny relations with community activists, Montgomery County, Md., suited his style: one that had stopped expanding outward, and grew predominantly with infill redevelopments like White Flint, a conversion of a massive swath of strip malls into a pedestrian and transit focused array of condo and office buildings including what’s now the county’s tallest tower. Think the change underway at Brentwood mall along the northwest LRT, but on steroids.
Calgary wants to go in that direction, but is still building anew on almost all its fringes, something unfamiliar to the smart growth enthusiast who has dissed U.S. burgs such as Phoenix and Houston.
“His slogan is ‘I don’t do suburbs,’ right? Well, welcome to suburbia. Let’s see what’s up,” said Ald. Gian-Carlo Carra.
To Stanley, inadequate parking means high demand to be in a space — a testament to its desirability. Traffic congestion is similarly a plus, he’s said repeatedly, because it encourages people to choose transit, walking or cycling.
Stanley has often joked publicly about his “I don’t do suburbs” bumper sticker after years as a senior planner in Toronto, then planning director in St. Louis before his 2008 move to the same job in Maryland.
“I do suburbs now, and recently I’ve been regretting it,” he added on an “Agents of Change” panel in Washington in March, a month before he’d announce his move back to his native country.
Even politicians are often wary about that sort of crack, let alone civil servants. The Ontario-born Stanley’s outspokenness has caught the attention of the development industry here, curious about the successor to David Watson, the general manager of planning who retired last month.
“We have this sprawling landscape, and it’s what people want. So how do you not provide what people want?” asked Shane Wenzel, president of Shane Homes, which is building in new communities in all four Calgary quadrants.
“You’ve got to hold out some hope that Rollin’s at least open to conversation and what’s been written about in the past is maybe taken out of context. Maybe he’s never really experienced a place like Calgary to this point.”
There may be little choice in the matter, with years’ worth of land already planned for new suburbs and more in the hopper — though their density creeps ever upwards with fewer single-family homes.
Stanley got along just fine with the development industry in Montgomery, who shared his desire to maximize their land’s value by building up and building attractive.
“I was really sad and I think most of the business community was really saddened when he left because he’s a strong advocate for smart growth and developing our spaces in an urban way,” said Evan Goldman of Federal Realty, one of the companies behind White Flint.
With a hands-on approach with businesses and his planning staff, Stanley slashed the time plans by two-thirds, Goldman said — something his Calgary counterparts would love.
It’s preservationist community groups he’s run afoul of in Montgomery. While Calgary was already recruiting him, a magazine story this spring about White Flint quoted him as deriding his persistent critics as “rich white women” who “stalked” him.
Those women were lawyers and former councillors and other veteran figures, who didn’t take kindly to his nasty dismissal of their anti-urbanization comments and worries about gridlock. As they led calls for his resignation, he apologized for his “thoughtlessness” and pledged to take lessons in conflict resolution.
He rarely seemed to listen to longtime residents concerned about the pace of change he espoused, said Peggy Dennis of Montgomery Civic Federa- tion, an umbrella group of community groups, which also demanded he resign.
“His biggest problem was too much belief in himself and what he wanted to have happen,” she said.
“The message we got is that he doesn’t like suburbs. He doesn’t like the way we’ve already come to be and what we are. Well, why can’t he accept what we’ve come to be, and work with us?”
While the developer sector in Calgary is well-organized, there’s not as professionalized and unified community movement against smart growth principles here, although Watson had warned as he left about community resistance to the coming changes.
In fact, Stanley has showered praise on Calgarians’ support in helping shape the Plan It and Imagine Calgary long-range blueprints.
“That is not something that happens in a lot of places because it cannot happen in a lot of places, so instantly that tells you something,” he said in a brief interview after being announced as planning GM on April 23, the provincial election day.
“We need someone who’s strong-minded, has leadership capabilities and is persuasive in arguments, and I think we’ve found such a person in Rollin,” city manager Owen Tobert said.
Stanley also ran afoul of government auditors early in his four-year tenure in Maryland. He surrendered his credit card after an audit found he had improperly used it and had poorly detailed expenses for meals. Auditors noted his “unwillingness to cooperate” with the probe, the Washington Post reported in 2009. It didn’t, however, cloud his career there.
“No one cared,” said Roger Berliner, president of the allDemocrat county council.
“I think he’s a human of great integrity.”
He welcomed Stanley’s leadership and drive, but said council had to rein him in when community groups chafed at plans to bring intense redevelopment right to the edge of their residential enclaves.
“We tried to share with him he can achieve his vision if he picks his fights,” he said.
Stanley’s approach somewhat resembles that of Mayor Naheed Nenshi, and beyond his unconventionally frank yet also high-reaching rhetoric. Nenshi, too, deplores suburban sprawl and the financial challenges it brings for government, and praises more walkable districts and transit.
While Nenshi avidly uses social-media site Twitter, Stanley blogs prolifically with long rhapsodies on everything from master plans and neighbourhood walkabouts to census data and criticism.
As he launched an overhaul of the D.C.-area county’s zoning rules, Stanley also aimed to ease the process for homeowners to create regulated secondary suites, running into the same roadblock of community resistance Nenshi ran into in Calgary.