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Design the Neighborhood Option 2: Neighborhood Block Design
A design submission by Mark Waldo Architecture and Design for the Shelter WF Design for our Future - A Housing Design Challenge.
Mark Waldo Architecture and Design
www.markwaldoarchitecture.com
(406) 609-7525
“We’re gonna have to down-scale, re-scale, and re-size virtually everything we do in this country and we can’t start soon enough to do it.”
James Howard Kunstler
The Challenge
The design of this lot will have to trigger a total rehaul of this area that will make it a rich place where people want to be. We need to make it into a place that matters to people.
Design Missing Middle Housing units that prioritize:
Affordability
Accessibility
Fostering a sense of community especially for residents over 50.
The neighborhood benefits from being across the street from Super 1. A cafe is located along the side facing Super 1 to leverage pedestrian traffic in the area. River access is also a huge benefit to the residents as are the stores on the other side of Highway 93.
The core of the development are single lane roads and wide walkable sidewalks. The duplexes and quads are designed in the manner of housing you might see in traditional neighborhoods in Whitefish and Kalispell.
To help transition from the mania of highway 93 to quieter and walkable residential housing, Multi-Unit Housing with commercial on first floor line up along the highway. Designed to have a human scale they allow for a building full of life opportunities for both people in the neighborhood as well as those who are coming to shop in the first floor retail.
Making Highway 93 into Spokane Avenue
Pedestrian Ladder
Cross walks should not be at the intersections. They need to be where drivers aren’t distracted while doing other things like turning.
The pedestrian ladder lays out primary pedestrian paths independently of traffic nodes. A pedestrian ladder has pedestrians crossing at mid-block and has pedestrians walking parallel to the roads but closer to the fronts of businesses than to the highway.
Highway 93 Truck Route
The character of Highway 93 will need to change if senior citizens are going to feel comfortable crossing it, and if we want to protect the walkable character of downtown Whitefish further up the road.
Second avenue can feel threatening to older pedestrians due to the truck traffic passing through. In the future it may become worse since we can expect traffic through town to only increase as supplies are driven through town to developments in Eureka.
A truck route that continues the trajectory of Highway 40 to Blanchard Lake Road / Karrow Avenue where cross haulers would then continue north to 93 would be controversial, but it would allow people with no need to drive through downtown Whitefish to get around it and on their way. This would make a dramatic narrowing of Highway 93 possible allowing this proposed neighborhood to be truly part of a walkable district.
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