Column: New Canaan was early practitioner of smart growth

The town of New Canaan embraced and enacted smart growth principles before the concept became part of our lexicon.

New Canaan”™s compact business district is surrounded by dense, multifamily residential housing that transition to less dense, single-family housing toward the periphery of the town. At the core of the downtown is the New Canaan train station, which is the last stop on a spur of Metro-North Railroad that connects downtown to the Stamford Transportation Center. While many of our surrounding communities have sprawling development along their major roadways, New Canaan zoning has not allowed commercial development along these state routes and has focused all redevelopment within the downtown.

New Canaan is a community that is rich in architectural heritage that embraces sound planning. In 1950, when the town first enacted parking requirements, a portion of the downtown business district was exempted from having to provide parking and subsequently exempted from having to comply with a floor-area ratio (FAR) standard. By not requiring property owners in this zone to provide parking, we have eliminated unnecessary curb cuts and individual parking lots that detract from building design, allowing a near constant building façade along the streets.

Even the ideal development patterns present challenges. Exempting these areas from parking requires providing parking at strategic locations to meet the demand of the visitors to downtown, the employees servicing the businesses and the residents who also reside in this area.

The town has several municipal parking lots within and around the downtown and is presently studying tiered parking at two strategic locations to meet the demand for increased commuter parking and the additional parking needed for the new development we are seeing.

Another smart growth concept embraced in New Canaan is walkability. Beginning in 2008, the town began a program of expanding, rebuilding and enhancing the sidewalk network. This included brick sidewalks with granite curbing that range from 10 to 16 feet wide in the downtown core. These sidewalks not only accommodate recreational walkers and shoppers, they have also led to a vibrant outdoor dining scene that the town initiated in 2009.

Sidewalks are not confined to the downtown business core. As part of our Pavement Management and Improvement Program, the town annually includes sidewalk repair and construction in the annual budget process. Within the 2014 Plan of Conservation and Development (POCD), a formal sidewalk plan was included, allowing the town to identify the sidewalk goals for the next 10 years. In addition to sidewalks, the town has also begun completion of a five-mile pedestrian walk that will connect downtown New Canaan to a town park and the nature center.

In addition to the sidewalk plan, our POCD embraces and recommends increased housing density within the downtown. The town identified senior housing, workforce housing, housing for young professionals, as well as affordable housing options near the downtown. To achieve this increased density, the plan recommends increased building mass and density within mixed-use environments. In addition, the plan recommends looking at ways to reduce required parking through shared parking, fee-in-lieu and reductions for mixed-use developments. In response to these recommendations, the town has undertaken a series of neighborhood studies of the business district. The first study of Cross and Vitti streets was recently completed and the town is now undertaking a second study of Grove Street. As a result of the Cross and Vitti streets study, numerous zoning amendments are being considered and new design guidelines are being developed. More importantly this has spurred significant redevelopment interest in this area.

Steve Kleppin is the town planner for New Canaan. This is one in a series of reports on smart growth development in the region. The series will culminate in a March 24 panel discussion on smart growth trends hosted by Westfair Communications and Pace University Land Use Law Center at Pace Law School.