At 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 14, Springfield city government is hosting a public meeting at Springfield Art Museum devoted to the ongoing process of implementing Forward SGF, the city’s first new comprehensive plan since the mid-2000s.
This fourth meeting in the Forward SGF speaker series will feature a talk by Joe Minicozzi. He’s a city planner with an urban finance consultancy called Urban3 based in Asheville, North Carolina. Along with Kansas City firm Multistudio, Urban3 is helping Springfield rewrite parts of the city zoning code, in keeping with Forward SGF principles adopted by City Council in November 2022.
Minicozzi’s talk will focus on the economics of city planning — how different zoning types tend to generate wildly different effects in terms of property and sales taxes netted per acre of land.
Phillip Walters is an analyst with Urban3.
In a private briefing for reporters called by the city a day before Minicozzi’s talk for the public, Walters described the ways different land uses translate into tax value per acre. Essentially, a city's buildings pay for its roads, parking and other infrastructure.
“At the end of the day, the decisions that we make in the planning [& zoning] commission, on city council about how we’re going to build, are actually driving our finances,” Walters told reporters.
Walters said single-family home development in the Springfield area typically accounts for some $384,000 in taxable property value per acre. Walmart makes up $512,000 of value per acre, when Urban3 averaged out the values of several Walmart stores located around the Queen City. Meanwhile, urban mixed-use development — for example, the restaurant, retail and coffeeshop-lined sidewalks of Commercial Street — typically nets $9.8 million of value per acre.
Walters said the goal isn’t to tell Springfield residents what to do about land use, but to share information so they make informed decisions when it comes to long-range planning that's not something we typically think about in everyday life.
He said, "I know that the average person's lived experience just doesn't give you what I know and care about so much, that like, 'oh, that road's falling apart every day, that road's expensive.' These are are just not a part of the average person's daily life."
More information about the Forward SGF planning process — including archived video of the three previous Forward SGF speaker events — is available by visiting forwardSGF.com.
