Visitors to the City of Wilmington’s website will learn that the last comprehensive plan prepared by the city government was completed in 2003.
No matter that the 2003 document is posted online, Leonard Sophrin, the city’s current planning director, disagrees.
“The last comprehensive plan in the city was done in the 1960s, when we tore down our neighborhoods, built Interstate 95 and lost 81 square blocks of beautiful buildings in 10 years,” Sophrin says, leaving little doubt that he’s hardly enamored with how Wilmington has evolved in the past half-century.
Later this year, Sophrin says, the city will start the heavy lifting on development of a new comprehensive plan. But, he adds, many of the new plan’s pieces have already started to come together, thanks in large measure to neighborhood-based revitalization plans drafted with minimal input from City Hall.
These initiatives – most notably West Side Grows Together, Eastside Rising, West Center City Futures, the South Wilmington Neighborhood Plan and the new Creative District – share the common thread of being grassroots efforts, with community involvement as their foundation.
“We’ve studied all these plans, and they’re very good,” Sophrin says. “In the past, this office has reacted cautiously to outside plans, and that’s not a very good response. Outside planning is fine; the question is how you stitch it all together.”
That process is beginning slowly, with Sophrin and his staff hoping to complete a definition of the scope of work for the plan by the end of the summer. By the end of the year, he hopes his staff will have completed a definition of the values the city will consider most important in the planning process – items like better parks, improved mass transit, making streets more pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly and so on.
“From that point it would be a year to a year and a half, which may take us well into 2017” – by which time Mayor Dennis P. Williams and Sophrin, his appointee, might no longer be in office – “to address those values and possibly propose reforms in zoning and in the ways the city reviews projects,” he says.
One thing that is certain about whatever results from the effort is that the new plan will not resemble its predecessors.
Earlier planners, Sophrin says, “drew a circle around downtown, separated it from the neighborhoods, built thoroughfares to get cars in and out of downtown, and made sure that suburbanites could get in and out before dusk. That’s what we did to our city.”
“One of the interesting things about urban planning,” says Christian Willauer, a coordinator of the West Side Grows Together planning project, “is that some of the best things we can do today are undoing the mistakes we made yesterday.”
Wilmington planning initiatives in the last quarter of the 20th century – projects like the Brandywine Gateway and the Christina Gateway – centered on strengthening the commercial and economic viability of the downtown area. But, Sophrin says, they never “tried to remediate the damage that was done by constructing the interstate that bisected the city, or to build back the areas that were demolished.”
“We want to have a plan for what the city will look like five, 10, 15, 20 years from now,” says Cleon L. Cauley, the mayor’s chief of staff. “We know there will be differences from community to community, and we want to help them create what they want to become.”
Overall, Sophrin says, he expects that the framework of the plan will be aimed at “making our city a much more pedestrian-oriented place to live, reconnecting our neighborhoods to downtown and to one another, and rebuilding our parks so that they are a destination, no matter which neighborhood they’re situated in.”
Some of these ideas are already on the drawing boards, showing the potential for literally reconnecting neighborhoods while the master planners figuratively stitch together the community-based planning initiatives.
Sophrin points, for example, to the long-delayed plan to build a bridge over the Christina River to link South Market Street (U.S. 13) to the now-booming Riverfront area. State funding issues have pushed the project to the back burner for now, but Sophrin is confident the bridge will eventually be built.
The bridge, conceived primarily as a way to provide easier access to the Riverfront from south of the city and to reduce evening congestion at the conclusion of major events there, would actually do much more, Sophrin says. Residents of Southbridge and south Wilmington would no longer have to travel up Walnut Street and across Martin Luther King Boulevard to reach the Riverfront and areas west of Interstate 95 like Browntown and Hedgeville. “The bridge will be a transformational piece for the city … a walkable, bikable link that never existed before,” he says.
The downtown area offers another example of a planned redesign that would connect neighborhoods while making Wilmington more walkable. In the middle of the city’s 800 block, pedestrians can now zigzag from Walnut Street through Peter Spencer Plaza, then alongside the Grand Opera House onto Market Street. The Buccini/Pollin Group plans to extend that path westward by creating a plaza next to the Chelsea Tavern between Market and Shipley streets and another walkway through to Orange Street between the two buildings in its planned Residences at Midtown Park luxury apartment complex.
That pathway would extend from the edge of the Eastside Rising revitalization area through the downtown business and entertainment district into the proposed Creative District between Shipley and Washington streets.
Taking the idea a step further, plans for the Creative District and West Center City Futures include the “Seventh Street Arts Bridge,” an eclectic mix of mural art, pocket parks, sculptures, decorative crosswalk treatments and creative lighting that could become an attractive pathway from Market Street to Madison Street in West Center City.
Any effort to make the city more livable to its residents and more hospitable to visitors and workers must address the issue of vacant properties, a problem that has stymied city planners throughout the nation for decades.
The General Assembly, with strong support from Wilmington legislators, this week passed legislation that authorizes cities and counties that have a long-term residential vacancy rate of 3 percent or more to create non-profit “land banks” that would be able to acquire vacant properties at sheriff’s sales and from government agencies and hold them until it finds a buyer with the resources to return the property to productive use.
The land bank concept has been used effectively in other cities to bundle blighted properties that are clustered together for redevelopment as housing, parkland and community centers, Sophrin says.
“Basically, land banking gets properties out of the purgatory of long-term vacancy and gets them back into the hands of people who are not just speculating but who want to make it affordable for a first-time homebuyer or appropriate for a community use,” says Willauer, the West Side Grows Together coordinator.
Once the legislation is signed by Gov. Jack Markell, which is likely, the Wilmington City Council can develop its own ordinance to establish a land bank organization in the city, Sophrin says.
As the city moves forward with developing the comprehensive plan, Sophrin said he expects to lean heavily on the residents who have been involved in developing their community plans.
“We’re trying to connect people who live in different neighborhoods who share the same objectives,” he says.
“For example, we want Browntown working with Hedgeville. They both flank Maryland Avenue. We don’t want them to think of Maryland Avenue as a boundary, but as a gathering place, a destination for residents of both communities,” he says.
Vernon Green, chief operating officer of the Woodlawn Trustees, which recently began a phased redevelopment of The Flats, its 100-year-old rental community on the West Side and is assisting in the Eastside Rising effort, is impressed with the city’s low-key planning efforts. “They are truly embracing these local movements and trying to help guide them,” he says. “I see the Williams administration reaching out to the community and responding to the community.”
Sophrin has been working closely with West Side Grows Together, says Henry Smith, president of that organization. “He’s got a lot of good ideas. We’ve gotten good support from him, and from Parks and Recreation too.”
Smith recognizes the challenges Sophrin and other city planners face in developing a comprehensive plan that takes into account the interests of communities who share the same long-term goal but might have different needs.
“We realize there is work going on in other communities. We cannot view any of the others being in competition with us,” he says. “There is a common interest across the entire city.”
