Community Beautification in Action

You want to be lookin' good, don’t you?

Your community, that is.

Just one beautification project can create a short buzz for you. Television, for instance, loves visual tidbits, and it's a very powerful medium. A pleasing appearance adds to residential property values, helps attract business, and generally gives you a positive reputation.

Quick links to sub-topics: urban design principles
neighborhood character   streetscape   public art   dog parks
cleaning up your neighorhood park   abandoned buildings   alleys   signs
big box stores   office towers   CONTINUE READING SUMMARY

To look good, it's really helpful to understand some urban design principles. When people take what is called visual preference surveys, usually the results are pretty lop-sided. In this technique, participants are simply asked which photo of a similar type of street scene or building they prefer.

People actually prefer some degree of sympathy and compatibility in architecture. They like the fronts of buildings to line up, more or less. People prefer a vibrant scene with some personality over blandness. The trick is not overdoing the variation, unless you are in a true city where layers and layers of complexity are piled together.

So are these preferences hard and fast rules for every place and every time? No, but they are usually fairly enduring over the course of a couple of decades. So ignore them at your peril.

The right balance between monotony and repetition of similar design elements in a community is important. It's very pleasant to stroll down a block of three-story brick houses with similar setbacks from the street. The brick may be different colors, the landscaping quite contrasting, the side yards varied, and the window patterns unique, but if the height, material, and front yard setback are similar, the neighborhood will feel great.

However, if every house is the same brick with the same window pattern and the same side yard, we might think it's, well, boring. Many new developments think that somehow the same beige house with the same gray roof can be repeated over and over again and that the uniformity will make a nice development. Probably not. At least not until it has been there for 30 or 40 years and people have individualized their space.

Everything does not have to be perfect to have a pleasing neighborhood character. Just have a critical mass of pleasant elements, and unless your exceptions are horrendous, you'll still get positive reviews. Make your neighborhood just a little bit distinctive.

Design for Smaller Communities

Because we're using the term urban design, you may not have heard that community design for small cities and towns is critically important. In fact, in non-metropolitan parts of the country, it's what distinguishes one town from another. If you live in such an area, you've probably heard it said that one town is junky, another town is so well-kept, and so forth. These statements reflect not only property maintenance norms but also the original design smarts.

If your original design was tacky, that's where a beautification campaign to distract the eye becomes critical.

Streetscape

To improve community appearance, neighborhoods often try to improve what is known as streetscape, which pertains to the area between the driving lanes and the edge of the private property. Partly this is a popular technique because it is public space, and it's easy for the government to dictate what will happen there.

In truth, streetscape can be quite effective in uniting block faces (the half of a block facing a particular street) or a series of blocks that are discordant in some way. Because streetscape often includes plantings, the effect is to soften the view created by streets and hopefully sidewalks.

Care in the choice of materials and in the quality of the installation makes all the difference in this form of beautification. Try not to choose exactly the same thing as the next neighborhood, because streetscape lends neighborhood identity as well.

Focal Points

In addition to streetscape, sometimes you need a focal point. This might be public art, fountains, a clock tower, or even a particularly striking garden. Like all forms of community development, beautification benefits from thinking in terms of critical mass.

If you already have a lonely statue with nothing around it, maybe you should add planting beds of considerable size, an inviting bench or two, and maybe an interpretive sign explaining "the rest of the story" that can't be told on the bronze plaque.

Just so you know, public art is fraught with danger of people thinking it's stupid, so if you decide to go that route, form a selection committee including some astute judges of art but also a few solid citizens who will keep the artists from getting carried away. On the other hand, if you are an especially artistic community, a little controversy is a good thing.

Just to keep you from being all too serious about the aesthetics of your neighborhood, we thought we'd throw in a page about the off leash dog park phenomenon on this section of the website.

Do-It-Yourself Beautification

Don't overlook the opportunity to organize private citizens into their own little community beautification campaign. People might try to out-do one another in installing great-looking window boxes, for example. A common planting palette in a neighborhood is attractive, for instance, if the assortment of plants offered provides variety.

Those are pretty much the building blocks. Now let's check out how cleaning up some items can be important.

Clean-Ups as Beautification

Eyesores in your community are a little bit like the squeaky door at your house. If you let them go long enough, you no longer "see" them. It always amazes me as a consultant to go meet an earnest board of directors who have been ignoring an obvious liability for oh, say, 15 or 20 years. They look at each other sheepishly when I point it out. Don't be that community--just face the music and know you need to do something about it.

Denial doesn't help. Newcomers won't join in overlooking the obvious.

An easy first win, if you've never done anything like this, is cleaning up your neighborhood park.

Moving on to more time-consuming projects, let's talk first about abandoned buildings and lots. You as an organization or an individual activist need to become very skilled in finding out who owns real estate and then in contacting them. Chase them down with letters, phone calls, flowers, or whatever it takes. Ask them to please clean up their property. Be kind, be sympathetic about their financial or logistical difficulties, but do be insistent that together you figure out the solution. Abandoned buildings, by which I mean buildings that aren't in use, and don't appear to be actively maintained or for lease, giving a really negative impression. It says that the owner doesn't believe in your community enough to even try to renovate, rent, or sell. Think about that--someone has invested money to buy a property and then doesn't think it's worth his or her time, trouble, or small amount of money (in some cases) to make use of the property.

An abandoned lot is pretty bad too. It's a gathering place for people or kids who are up to no good. It seems to attract debris because people feel comfortable dumping there. I don't understand the world view that says it's OK to throw your soda can out the car window or your potato chip bag on the ground as soon as you're finished, but people do it. It's just that if there's a bad-looking available lot, they'll choose that place.

Code enforcement should always be your first line of defense. In most places, you can call in a complaint to your city or village government, providing they have a "code" (law) that can be enforced. The property owner will be the one held responsible for cleaning up the lot or building, even though he or she may not be the one doing the littering. But you can't be sentimental--you have to get that lot or building cleaned up.

Sometimes the first beautification project should be cleaning up your neighborhood park, or public stream right-of-way. Litter collects in these places also, especially when no trash receptacles are provided.

The good thing about these projects is that usually the village, town, or city will help you dispose of the trash that your volunteers collect, at a minimum. If they aren't in the habit of regular maintenance, they may be shocked at the volume of trash, but their sense of honor will make them haul it away, even if it takes a few days.

Vacancy

Let's say that you have vacant land or vacant commercial buildings that are not "abandoned," as we described earlier. In other words, someone regularly picks up the trash, mows the grass, and tries to rent or sell the property.

I hate to tell you, but that vacancy still might be a problem. If you have too many vacant lots, it can signal lack of demand for your community. It also may spoil the community design effect. A missing row house ruins a whole block, for example. Two vacant lots in a row showing the footprints of old buildings makes us wonder about that block, even if the lots are otherwise neat as a pin.

In the case of residential lots, you need to actively seek infill projects. Find a local developer who likes to build houses in small numbers, three or four at a time rather than whole subdivisions. Check out how to do this on the vacant lot page.

The beautification project of choice for vacant lots is clean-up, planting, and sometimes uniform fencing.

Vacant commercial buildings need to look occupied, so if that means blinds on the windows, someone's teapot collection in the storefront, or a few desks and chairs in space that should be office space, you in the neighborhood organization might find it worthwhile to take these steps. Try to talk the property owner into it, but if you can't, see if they will allow you to do so.

Alleys

If your neighborhood has alleys, they too seem to be a magnet for trash. Alleys can be positive because they keep the number of automobiles parking on the street down to a dull roar. They also provide realistic spaces for dumpsters and thus relegate garbage collection to the rear of the house.

Beautifying them isn't easy, but tidy them up and perhaps make them green. The alleys page will lead to plenty of ideas.

Some More Negatives Awaiting Beautification

Now you're ready to consider sources of ugliness or mediocrity. We'd like to refer you to some resources for four of these:

• Signs and visual clutter. Every business thinks they are entitled to a sign, and they compete to outdo each other in size and garishness. Before you get too critical, wouldn't you feel the same? Wouldn't you want the biggest, baddest, reddest sign on the block if your livelihood depended in part on attracting passersby?

So it's the competition element that you need to eliminate through reasonable standards that relate to the speed of the traffic, the setback of the business from the street, and the ability to group signs into meaningful clusters. By the way, on the signs page, we take a peak at newspaper boxes too, which can get quite out of hand in the same way as signage.

Eliminating sign clutter is hard work, but it pays dividends even more surely than a positive beautification campaign.

• Big Box stores. You might not be familiar with the term but you know big boxes unless you just dropped in from another planet. These are the large stores, usually furniture, discount, or electronics stores, with an even larger parking lot surrounding them. Although they may have other smaller stores attached, many of them are freestanding.

The problems are two: (a) the large and often unattractive parking lot causing the loss of pedestrian scale along the street, and (b) the planned obsolescence of these stores is such that they frequently move or go out of business, leaving you with a very large space to try to rent, refurbish, or re-purpose.

• Office towers. The office tower also presents the problem of the large parking lot, thus interrupting any possibility of street life along the road leading to it. People usually must drive there. In addition, many are extremely uncreative and lack any hint of human ingenuity and variety. They contribute to blandness in community life.

Beautification of big boxes and office towers requires significant distraction.

• Manufactured housing. At the other extreme, many communities and rural areas suffer from unattractive or outdated mobile homes. Most do not age well, so even if they have underskirts, attractive landscaping, and a real porch, eventually there comes a time when the mobile home(s) will be problems. They are not built with the expectation of a life cycle as long as a stick-built home, so the problems are inherent. And yet, they are practical for rural housing when there are not many carpenters available to build an inexpensive home.

How Prevention Leads to Better Community Appearance

The first principle of community or neighborhood beautification should be prevention. To the extent ugliness is predictable, try to nip it in the bud at the zoning stage. As soon as you see a business moving out, ask the owner what's moving in. If someone is having trouble maintaining a home, see if there is a temporary circumstance causing the problem. Offer to help. Stay mindful of community beautification if you want property values to remain steady and increase over time.

And when you see an adverse condition that might be covered under local building or property maintenance codes, ask the code enforcement office to investigate.

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