Myers: Centre Region faces unfinished planning and zoning work
Recently, information about new building development in the State College area has been hard to miss. From the imminent demolition of the downtown Days Inn, to a huge student development just outside of downtown on East College Avenue, to high-rises proposed and being built on West College Avenue that will effectively extend downtown into Ferguson Township, all these are close to the urban core.
The building boom does not end there. A strip center is slated out on West College Avenue and three separate Town Center developments are on the books, one on Blue Course Drive, one near the Aldi on North Atherton Street and one at the Waddle Road interchange of I-99. These projects are large and will add considerable living space, commercial space, and traffic to the region. Left out are other apartment and single housing developments along with more high-rises slated for downtown State College. This is not the same area it was 50 years ago when I moved here as a teenager. All things change and I am not lamenting the years.
As a past, longtime serving, member of the State College Borough Planning Commission and more recently a former two-term State College Borough Council member, I have worked within the borough and the Centre Region to help better plan. I fear that I and others who have worked to achieve regional cooperation have left a lot of unfinished work when it comes to strategy and planning. The real work ahead is to address forthrightly the problems this kind of large growth will bring and how we navigate our community to be the inclusive, diverse, livable and neighborly place we want it to be. It’s not that there aren’t mechanisms in place in within the region to get this done.
Some of the issues facing State College Borough spill out across the region. They are affordable housing, preserving neighborhoods, sustaining a vibrant downtown, adequate parking in downtown, regional biking infrastructure and connections. In addition, loss of hotels near Penn State and in the downtown core is important as is regional cooperation on zoning districts, so that areas with different uses in adjacent municipalities are not at cross purposes.
State College Borough has worked on tackling the issue of a complete zoning rewrite for years. Some progress has been made — but not enough. It has been too slow, and I do lament that my involvement in the process was not able to move it along faster.
The zoning changes could address a more unified downtown while at the same time preserving neighborhoods. It could address the trend away from retail space while the current zoning encourages it — we do need to find that right mix. It could address our HARB that is patchwork at best. It could address a much better relationship with Penn State so that there is pedestrian, bicycle, traffic, and scale integration between Penn State and not only State College Borough but the other municipalities. An example of poor cooperation is the Penn State power plant in the middle of downtown — it could have been reserved for a better and safer use to help keep downtown vibrant.
All this is taking too long, and things are getting away from us. It can be fixed but will take regional willpower and all the members of the Centre Region Council of Governments working to take a unified approach to solve these issues. In the meantime, we are pushing the boulder up the hill, only addressing what is in front of us hoping we won’t slip and have the big stone roll uncontrollably over us. The bottom line is that much development is occurring and we need a holistic community-wide plan and zoning. If we can’t get it together, I am not sure what the community will look like in the coming decades. It is part of the unfinished work that our community faces.