Austin Suburb Adopts Street Grid And Code To Deal With Flooding And Sustainability

[M II A II R II K]

Texas City Adopts Street Grid And Code


NOV. 15, 2019

By ROBERT STEUTEVILLE

Read More: https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/201...-grid-and-code

Code: https://www.cityofbastrop.org/page/buildingbastrop

Bastrop, Texas, adopted new, groundbreaking land-use regulations this week that address flooding and establish a street grid as a framework for growth, one of the first cities in the US to do so since the middle of the 20th Century. The Bastrop Building Block (B3) code is the result of the Building Bastrop initiative, launched in August 2018 with the goal of creating fiscally sustainable, geographically-sensitive development that is authentic to the city.

- “We started this process last summer to address flooding in Bastrop and create a roadmap for responsible development that honors our authentic past and prepares for our sustainable future,” said Bastrop Mayor Connie Schroeder. “Like many cities and towns across the country, Bastrop has been faced with tough decisions related to significant growth combined with aging infrastructure and outdated land-use regulations. With Building Bastrop, we are controlling growth rather than letting growth control us.” — Bastrop recently conducted a fiscal analysis of revenue per acre and productivity. The analysis, by the Dallas firm Verdunity, looked at whether each parcel in the city was “revenue positive,” measuring return-on-investment of the city’s development patterns. Like many cities, Bastrop has grown in a “drivable suburban” form. “The current development is not fiscally sustainable. We’re $7.2 million upside down now,” says City Manager Lynda Humble. “The goal is that everything built at least pays for itself going forward.”

- To find answers, Bastrop looked at the built part of the city that has survived for more than a century. The city hired Simplecity Design based in San Marcos, Texas, to “analyze the DNA” of downtown. “We found the solution to our problem is under our nose,” says Humble. “It’s downtown Bastrop.” The urban designers found that the square downtown blocks are a quarter the size of historic farm lots. Farm lots could therefore be divided into four “Bastrop Blocks,” which can be configured in many ways—all of which have built-in stormwater capacity. — The city is therefore determined to grow, like downtown, in the form of a grid—one that responds to geography and nature. The city adopted a Transportation Master Plan that establishes a street grid not only in undeveloped parts of the city, but also in an extraterritorial jurisdiction (ETJ), for which the city has transportation, environmental, and subdivision controls. “We had to have gridded streets in order to have fiscal sustainability,” Humble says. The grid is based on 770-by-770-foot farm lots, which are divided into four 385-foot blocks (330-foot-square plus the right-of-way), the Bastrop Block.

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