Business View Magazine | August 2019

273 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE AUGUST 2019 DES MOINES , IOWA $100 million range or higher. It will not just be downtown-focused; the suburbs already have in their capital plan smaller projects, some of which will be starting this year, that connect the rural, suburban, and downtown areas via our rivers.” Another item on the agenda is a push for more single-family housing. “We recognize that our downtown housing stock is pretty one- dimensional - a lot of one-bedrooms,” admits Olson-Douglas. “We have some good basic pieces that make downtown livable, but we don’t have the large-scale housing stock that people have been drawn to in our city’s neighborhoods. One way we’re looking at this is to recognize that we have a lot of obsolete and aging housing stock on the periphery of downtown, in our neighborhoods, and we are at the leading edge of some neighborhood initiatives to address this. We’re setting in motion a few pilot areas and directing significant resources towards four particular neighborhoods. We’ve tried to balance them geographically and balance the types of housing that they offer. Our hope is that anyone who really wants to live in Des Moines can find themselves a home in any of these neighborhoods that we’re going to be working on. A number of cities have found the closer-in neighborhoods to be attractive for a number of reasons. So, that’s one of the pieces on the family-housing front that we’re working on.” Olson Douglas adds that in order to help ease the way for all types of development in Des Moines – corporate and commercial, as well as residential – the city is going to need to update some of its zoning regulations. She explains, “That’s a major initiative that we have underway, right now– a complete overhaul to our 1960’s zoning code. We’ve amended it hundreds of times and it has become very un-user-friendly to developers; it’s become a hindrance to things that we’ve identified that we wanted to do in certain places. So, instead of paving the way for developers to do the sorts of things that our planning suggests, we have had, in some places, zoning that creates an additional two or three steps of process to accomplish the things that they want to do. The new zoning