With an Eye Toward Development

As Land Use Professionals Offer Guidance, Expertise and Admiration, Designing High Schoolers Devise Plans for Fictional Blighted Area

Patrick Saavedra, right, works with Robinson High students Matt Fisk, left, Tommy Barrineau, Chris Brese, Gary Baine and Joe Luensmann. (By Gerald Martineau -- The Washington Post)

The students at Fairfax County's Robinson High School, tasked with creating a redevelopment plan for a mock neighborhood, were stumped. Where could they put office towers without upsetting neighbors? How could they meet the city's demands for affordable housing, yet still make money?

Luckily, they had an expert standing at their shoulders to lend advice: Patrick Saavedra, part of the development team that is building MetroWest, a controversial high-rise project near the Vienna Metro station. Now the students knew what developers experience every day, he told them.

"You're going through the same things we go through," Saavedra said. "These things can take four, five years."

Saavedra's visit was part of an unusual initiative in the Washington area: Local developers are going to high schools in Fairfax, Montgomery and Arlington counties to advise students on land use issues as the students compete over several weeks to produce redevelopment plans for a fictional blighted area. The program is the creation of the District-based Urban Land Institute, a national research and networking organization for developers, architects and planners.

For developers, the program, dubbed Urban Plan, is a chance to counter stereotypes of themselves as rapacious interlopers and to discuss land use in a setting other than the often-tense zoning meetings where they usually encounter the public. Getting to interact with the next generation of potential neighborhood critics -- and potential clients -- doesn't hurt either, said Saavedra, an architect with the Lessard Group of Vienna, which designed the 2,250-home MetroWest project.

"If you have students get engaged early in these ideas . . . they'll understand that density does make sense in certain places. They'll appreciate these things as adults much easier," he said. "It's people being misinformed that makes them reject proposals. They've haven't gone through an exercise like this."

The organizers of Urban Plan are aware that having developers in the classroom could raise hackles in a region so conflicted over growth, and they insist that the program is motivated by more than wanting to smooth the way for future projects. At its heart, they say, is a desire to get young people to think more about the "built environment" in which they live, to understand what trade-offs go into shaping it and to realize that they can have a say in what it looks like.

"The last thing we want is parents saying, 'You're trying to force pro-development [views] down our children's throats,' " said Meghan Welsch, an Urban Land staffer who coordinates the program in the Washington area. "It's really not about that. It's a civic engagement lesson, to create a more elevated level of discourse."

Urban Plan started five years ago in high schools in California, where it was designed by the institute and researchers at the University of California. It has since spread across the country, to New York, Atlanta and Chicago, among other places. It debuted in the Washington area three years ago in Arlington, and this school year it was used in a total of 13 classrooms: at Robinson, Arlington's Washington-Lee High School and Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School.

The institute, which has about 100 developer volunteers enlisted, hopes to recruit more so that it can expand into additional schools, including some in the District.

The sessions don't have overt markings of indoctrination. Government or economics teachers interested in Urban Plan spend several classes introducing students to the redevelopment project's guidelines, which include financial constraints and community demands. Students then break into five-person development teams, with each member assuming a role such as financial analyst or city liaison, and they then use Legos and laptop computers to produce a redesign for the blighted "Elmwood" neighborhood.

Students must decide how best to mix housing, shops, offices, parks and parking, while attaining a profit of at least 15 percent. Challenges include deciding whether to keep a homeless shelter or pay $1 million to move it off-site, whether to include a big-box store and whether to raze run-down historic buildings. Developers visit the classrooms to advise students and then, on the final day, serve as a "city council" to select a winner.