Essay

The day before we interviewed for the Mullan Area project in November of 2019, I parked on Whippoorwill Drive and walked down the dry grassy hills, past the tiny white flowers of yarrow and to the edge of the sites’ farm ditches. The site was beautiful; long views across yellow grass and mountains in the distance. How would the site change? Would it change for the better? We spoil the wild landscapes we love too much to leave alone wrote the poet Rose McLarney.

The plan was to restore Grant Creek and I could picture the ditches turn into a stream that would flow with water. Mallards and other migratory waterfowl would get a chance to relax and feed on the fish of new shallow wetlands. I wondered if the deer, muskrats, and raccoons that lived in Grant Creek would one day be spotted in re-vegetated wetlands that were – at least on the day I visited – dry creek bed tributaries and bare earth.

I spotted Blackbirds and tan female Cardinals (maybe they were Pyrrhuloxia, do they have those in Montana? Wait … do they even have Cardinals in Montana?) that would live in the cattails, and among the flowering purple and bright orange marsh plants. Tadpoles would swim around.

Anyone involved in land development has mixed feelings when they walk a farm. They worry that they’ll be the last person to walk the farm. I’m personally tired of being the last person to see a beautiful place. But there will be areas that will be rewilded, areas that will see water that don’t now, and stream banks that would be open to visitors – unlike the drainage ditches I walked, ignoring the NO TRESPASSING signs and barbed wire.

Fallow farm fields could be turned into working agriculture; maybe community-supported agriculture with a couple of professional farmers doing the heavy lifting and other people pitching in to grow vegetables, pick raspberries and cherries, and harvest chicken eggs. Raised beds, pollinator gardens, Aermotor-style windpumps, communal berry patches, a new farmhouse built to look like an old one, shaded community areas, and a playground for kids.

I spent two years working on a community farm in Rhode Island, where I grew up. I worked the fields and ran the kid’s education programs. Our fields and gardens grew a range of vegetables for the co-op members and for sale to the community. We donated food to a local soup kitchen. I scanned the horizon for a spot for a roadside farm stand at the edge of the property. Was community-supported agriculture a thing in Montana?

I remember gathering eggs from the mobile chicken coup along with the kids on Casey Farm and the abject horror inner-city kids expressed when I pulled up a carrot, brushed it off, and ate it.

“It’s organic,” I’d say. “There’s no pesticides. You can dig up vegetables and eat them as long as you …”

“You can’t eat that! You can’t!” one kid would say. “Well, I won’t. You can’t make me. You’re going to die, crazy farm teacher.”

Working at Dover, Kohl & Partners I have seen a few of our projects achieve an optimal mix of rural preservation and affordability. Some of our new communities are low carbon polluters or even carbon sinks. They are walkable, mixed-use, and mixed income. A few places embody the smart growth talked so much about but rarely achieved. Sometimes unique art communities and agricultural communities are created. By clustering the units, the total development footprint can be lessened, yet green lawns and meadows can still be weaved through the community, lengthening views, creating an awareness of nature, and cleansing rainwater.

The neighborhoods around the Mullan Road area that I could see provided places for people to live and that was good. But they were a chaotic patchwork. They were better described as subdivisions than neighborhoods. They were more zoned than planned. The strongest tool the urban planner has is zoning. However, zoning works to separate uses to avoid conflict, and it violates an essential characteristic of neighborhood planning when it separates every use with distance.

There is an overhaul process happening in the world of zoning in favor of balanced communities. Progressive urban planners today work to build entire neighborhood units, each with a place for recreational, educational, retail, and residential uses. The Main Streets of those centers offer the opportunity for social encounters and exchanges we typically only experience in historic centers. New communities are greener, meaning that a higher percentage of energy comes from renewable sources, homes have fewer cars and some homes don’t have cars at all, and more trips happen on bike and on foot.

Yeah, maybe we could improve the place. I walked a tractor trail across the farmland and took the dirt road back to where I’d parked.

- Jason King AICP, CNU-a / Principal & Senior Project Director
Dover, Kohl & Partners Town Planning