Rising tides on the mind as Norfolk plans for the future
NORFOLK — When folks in the 1940s and 1950s imagined the city of the future, they talked about flying cars and moving sidewalks.
These days, city planning is a little more, well, down to earth. But trying to predict the future — or at least shape it — is critical in trying to drive economic and physical development in the city.
That’s especially true in a city like Norfolk, where the idea of sinking into the sea like the Lost City of Atlantis is hits a little too close to home.
In Norfolk’s recently unveiled new Downtown 2030 plan, the threat of rising tides looms large.
The plan talks about the need for a flood wall stretching from Fort Norfolk and the Hague, around where Downtown meets the Elizabeth River, all the way to Harbor
Park. It envisions raising streets in low-lying areas, such as around the Chrysler Museum, and ceding land now occupied by public housing with chronic flooding problems back to the creek it was built over.
Previous iterations of the plan focused on things such as building up a then-largely-abandoned Granby Street in the 1990s, spending the following decade establishing large institutions and businesses like MacArthur Mall, before turning their attention in the 2010’s to plugging holes in the Downtown landscape with in-fill residential development.
Now, Downtown is largely built out. As such, the focus of the new plan is on outlying regions not traditionally thought of as ‘downtown’: the St. Paul’s area, Fort Norfolk, the waterfront around Harbor Park.
“Are they part of the downtown today? Some people would say yes, some people would say no. But it’s clear to planners and citizens this is the effort to knitting it together as a new downtown,” said the city’s planning director, George Homewood.
Reality vs. aspiration
The Downtown plan’s focus on projects already in the works — things like the St. Paul’s redevelopment, hospital and medical school expansions in Fort Norfolk, and the planned resort-casino complex next to Harbor Park — leaves it closer to a blueprint than a vision statement.
“On the one hand, we try to be aspirational, on the other hand, we try to leaven it with reality and how much it’s going to cost,” Homewood said.
Still, some aspirations continue to shine through. One is to make Norfolk more pedestrian friendly and less automobile-centric, something Homewood said city planners have been leaning into for years with middling success.
“With scooters and wider sidewalks, bike share, we have made strides. Have we gotten as far as we’ve probably aspired to get? Probably not,” Homewood said.
And whenever you’re trying to predict the future, there is always some guesswork.
Case in point: a handful of ideas thrown out about ways to make use of the ailing MacArthur Center.
The 1.1 million-square-foot shopping mall was built more than 20 years ago, and it’s recent steep decline has been well documented, with store closings and the loss of anchor tenants.
The Downtown plan itself notes “In the course of the first two decades of the 21st century, retail changed so dramatically that MacArthur Center needs to be reconceived.”
The plan lays out three potential ideas.
The first would turn the higher floors into office space and leave the lower floor for retail.
The second seeks to “de-mall” the central section of MacArthur Center, leaving the parking structures and some anchors and reopening Market Street as a pedestrian promenade flanked by mixed-use buildings.
The third advocates razing the whole thing and starting from scratch, redeveloping a new district smack in the middle of downtown.
As of now, there are no concrete plans with any of those options. MacArthur Center’s future is uncertain since its private owners, Starwood Property Trust, defaulted on a $750 million loan that uses the Norfolk mall and others as collateral.
Norfolk is exploring the idea of relocating some city offices into the now-empty Macy’s section of the mall, which the city owns.
The core reason behind this kind of planning, Homewood said, is to try to give potential businesses, developers and residents an idea of the future of the area, and hopefully draw them in.
“The idea is we show on the plan the art of the possible, and that begins to drive the ideas made by the private sector as well as the public sector,” Homewood said.
Many cities in the region have tried to take longer views when it comes to planning, especially given the imminent threat of sea level rise. Neighboring Virginia Beach spent six years and nearly $4 million to develop its comprehensive plan to battle it.
In Norfolk, a plan called Vision 2100 gives the broad strokes of development priorities aimed at making sure Norfolk survives the rising tides into the next century. The 2016 plan specifically calls out several sections of the city, including Downtown, as critical economic drivers that need to be shored up to withstand climate change.
Then there are more confined plans looking at a decade or two out that try to get their hands around what the areas could look like.
One such 10-year-plan, stylized as “plaNorfolk 2030,” tries to give an overall vision for the city and touches on a lot of different aspects important for the future development of the city, from healthy neighborhoods to housing access.
Norfolk has also done deepdive plans on specific areas such as Wards Corner and Military Circle, once-vibrant centers in need of overhaul.
In Military Circle, the city is leading the charge, taking control of big swaths of the area and prepping it for redevelopment.
Wards Corner was the city’s shopping Mecca 70 years ago, but after a long decline, may best known in the current day as the confluence of major roadways, highway on-ramps and train tracks.
The city has laid out an ambitious plan to remake the area into a more contemporary, walkable urban neighborhood.
And both of those areas are on higher ground, meaning they’ll better survive the rising tides.
Part of the planned overhaul in those neighborhoods is the potential for rapid transit — often thought of as an extension of the Tide light rail system, but potentially something like new dedicated bus routes. A whole other study is under way to examine transit options along that corridor, from the Naval Station to the Virginia Beach city line.
“While they’re not 100-year looks, neither are they 10-year looks. It’s more of a 20-year look tied into a transit connection,” Homewood said.
The Downtown plan is different. It’s at least the fifth iteration of the plan, updated once a decade or so, and is a much more immediate-term look at what’s brewing in the area. What’s billed as coming soon in that plan is a much safer bet than the concepts the city has sketched for Wards Corner or Military Circle.
“(The Downtown plans) are much, much more tied into what has happened and what we have a pretty strong sense that is going to happen,” Homewood said. “They’re not necessarily deeply visionary as much as they are that they are demonstrative of where we need to go … and making sure round pegs are going into round holes.”