Planners urged to rethink subdivisions

BANGOR – If local development leaders are willing to shift their thinking and policies regarding residential subdivisions, many of the landscape features that make Bangor and communities like it special can be preserved.

Those features range from natural – forests and fields – to manmade, including old farmsteads, rock walls and stone bridges.

That was the upshot of a brief workshop presented Tuesday by nationally known development expert Randall Arendt, senior conservation adviser at the Natural Lands Trust in Media, Pa., and a fellow of the Royal Town Planning Institute in London.

Arendt was here on Earth Day to talk about how communities can add new homes and keep scenic views.

Though the attendees came from several communities, Arendt’s ideas proved especially relevant for Bangor officials, who are about to embark on an overhaul of the city’s comprehensive plan.

A desire for more family-friendly subdivisions also is an issue that the city’s planning board members have been grappling with in recent years.

As Arendt sees it, the problem with many of the residential subdivisions built in recent years is that they were designed to maximize the amount of developed space.

The result is house lots that tend to be on the large side served by streets that are wider than need be, making them costly to build and maintain. Preserving open space and natural features, if required at all, often is an afterthought.

“We’re destroying the resource and we’re not even creating a neighborhood,” Arendt told about 20 area planners and municipal officials from Bangor and beyond.

A better approach, he said, is to preserve valued landscape features, shared open space and scenic views first and develop house lots around them.

That, he said, yields compact neighborhoods that are “walkable” and leaves space for social gatherings such as the village greens that once prevailed in many of New England’s 18th-century towns and cities.

The approach provides savings for developers and municipalities because shorter, narrower streets and denser neighborhoods are cheaper to build and maintain, he said.

Arendt warned, however, that local leaders and neighbors need to convey their expectations to developers up front. By the time projects get to the public hearing stage, plans have been firmed up and thousands of dollars have been spent.

He also said local leaders should be required to walk the site of proposed subdivisions early in the process: “If you don’t get on the ground, you don’t vote because you don’t know what’s out there.”