A Conversation With ... Brandon Biskup

Tell me about the mission of the Urban Land Institute and what you wanted to accomplish by opening a chapter here.
When I was getting started in my career, I was very involved in community issues, with nuisance properties and different planning and zoning. I always had a desire to find a group that could network and provide camaraderie across disciplines, people that were very invested in creating good development and prosperous communities. There wasn’t really an organization that fit that bill. I went to a ULI Northwest Arkansas conference and it immediately clicked. It brings all of the disciplines within the built environment, within real estate development and planning together to really network and learn best practices and innovation, but to then take that knowledge and advocate for better communities. ULI’s main mission is building better communities, building transformative impact. We do that through building connection across industries and then providing education on best practices, innovation and last, it’s inspiring people to go out and engage, use that in their practices and as a voice for building better communities. We are 501(c)(3), so we’re nonpartisan, currently all volunteer-led. The sentiment around development has been entirely negative and the engagement, particularly between private professionals and public officials, really only happened at Planning and Zoning meetings. We really are working to change that narrative and show the development industry is accessible. The developers, the engineers, architects, they are in this because they obviously make a living, but they want to build a better community for themselves, for their business, and for their families and stakeholders.

What are the most transformative changes Forward SGF, the city’s new comprehensive plan, and its code update allow for in our community?
Forward SGF really changes the tone on how we address development in Springfield. Whether it’s our corridors or housing, it’s really taking the step to look at and say, “We are a legitimate city.” We need to start to act and implement policies that look at how we grow as a sustainable city. That looks different from the way we’ve grown for the last 40, 50 years, where that’s grown more horizontally. We’ve had more subdivision, more suburban growth. I hear a lot that Springfield is built out, that we don’t have any space, but I kind of reject that, and I say we just need a different type of development. That is going to be more infill, more small-scale, looking at reducing parking minimums that will open up opportunity for new types of development. That’s a big notion that I think Forward SGF strives to set when it talks about annexing new land and our utilities and infrastructure that we’re putting into that. Corridors are definitely a big part of that, too. Very encouraged to see the emphasis on corridor placetypes and reimagining what those corridors could be going forward. You look at a lot of our commercial corridors that are just very underutilized and could be a lot more prosperous if we allowed different types of development within those corridors and different types of arrangements, setbacks, parking requirements and lot sizes that will allow new investment, new development to come into those corridors and really shift what that corridor is going to feel like. Our corridors take a lot of traffic, but they’re kind of at that cap. How do we make healthy corridors that are not only serving just the vehicular population but serving the pedestrian and the bike/cycling alternate modes of transportation?

The city is bringing back investment into Kearney Street. The tax abatement incentive previously attracted seven redevelopment projects. What does the city need to do to incentivize redevelopment in that area?
The incentive is a great tool, but that really has to be coupled with the vision of what that corridor can be and what the community wants that corridor to be, and then it needs to be followed up with the regulations to allow that vision to come into fruition. A really good reference was with the 71B project in Arkansas. Fayetteville took over a section of (state highway), four or five miles, and they took a very traditional commercial corridor, rezoned it, and they’re working on relandscaping and changing the street width so it’s more pedestrian-friendly, more multimodal; it’s going to be more walkable, and it really changes the character of that. But then they took the zoning in conjunction with that and allow up to eight stories of mixed-use development. So, then you’re reintroducing residential into the corridor so it’s not only thriving off of people that have to drive from outside of the neighborhood, but you actually are building more community on that corridor.

Some high-density housing projects have been met with pushback from residents. Are there opportunities to create better connections with an organization like yours and community members?
Education is a really big part of this. We have to get out there and educate and provide examples. Missing-middle housing is the big buzz term. What does that mean? The wrong way to say it is that missing-middle housing is just more density, but it’s not your five-story tower apartments. It’s the two-unit to your three-story apartment units, which is going to be up to an eight- to 12-plex. I think a lot of people just don’t understand what that type of housing and what that type of development looks like. Most of everything that people [see] are four- or five-story apartment buildings and then typical commercial, which is your strip center with the out-lots or big box retail. There’s a lot of variance between that with the new codes and being able to show, adding a component of commercial to existing neighborhoods. It is more along the lines of you have a duplex that has a small lawyer’s office on the first floor, or maybe it’s like a six-plex that has two retail shops on the bottom. A small apartment building that has a commercial component to it, that honestly would fit into almost any neighborhood. You can take a small percentage of the single-family lots in our community and [by] introducing some flexibility in allowing duplexes or triplexes or (accessory dwelling units), you could provide thousands of new homes for people in the community, and almost no one would be able to know that those are not single-family homes. It would look very similar to the community.

That makes me think of The Heritage apartment complex in the center of Springfield. Do you think that that's the way that the city needs to move? Do you see that on Kearney?
Mixed use everywhere just doesn't work. There's got to be a certain level of density of residential homes in that area to be able to really support mixed use. If you look at Glenstone and Kearney and that intersection that you do have a certain level of activity, that becomes kind of a node and you would think development would kind of taper off from that. It's not really realistic to say all of Kearney is going to be mixed use and you're going to have apartments up and down. What a lot of cities are doing is allowing for flexibility, so where developers want to come in and add in some residential with a small commercial component, allowing that type of flexibility is really good for the long term.