Traffic moves along State Highway 965, the main north-south route through North Liberty, as workers continue a streetscape project near Golfview Drive and Fairview Lane. (Brian Ray/ The Gazette)

By Dave DeWitte, The Gazette

North Liberty’s development patterns have left a city that looks like no other in Iowa — and for some that is a good thing.

The city has no traditional downtown area. For that matter, there’s been no serious attempt to create a commercial area with a downtown feel.

Developments consisting of townhouse, 12-plex and duplex condominiums spread out across fields in which not long ago were planted corn and soybeans, often in hopscotch fashion, between Highway 965 and I-80.

Stores and offices are spread out in a series of strip centers along the town’s major arteries.

Whether this is anything to get excited about is a matter of opinion within North Liberty.

Mayor Tom Salm doesn’t think the city’s appearance is a negative.

“North Liberty has been a bedroom community for so long that there was really a need to have a downtown with a lot of square brick buildings,” he said. “We didn’t have to develop a downtown, per se.”

University of Iowa Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning Jerry Anthony was called by a former city administrator to speak to the North Liberty Council nearly a decade ago about good planning practices. He said the city council at that time wasn’t much interested.

“The council wanted to just build things or offer up opportunities for developers to come in and build whatever they wanted to build,” Anthony recalled.

He said the city not only didn’t seem to impose too many restrictions, it didn’t seem to offer much guidance at that time.

Since then, Anthony said the city has hired a talented planner and adopted better planning and zoning practices. The results of non-planning remain evident, however, and Anthony worries that the city’s deal to bring in University of Iowa Community Credit Union demonstrated a weakness in the city’s dedication to planning.

Anthony and other critics have argued the project, which rezones the site from multifamily to commercial, does not conform to the city’s comprehensive land-use plan.

North Liberty lacks a visual focus, Anthony said, and “is so fragmented in some ways that the mental image people have of North Liberty is disjointed.”

When a group of University of Iowa students was asked to provide some downtown planning advice for the city of Solon some years ago, leaders of that city offered North Liberty as the example they’d prefer to avoid, said Peter Fisher, a former UI professor of urban and regional planning.

“They said they wanted to look more like Mount Vernon and less like North Liberty,” Fisher recalled.

Asked for his own reaction to North Liberty, Fisher said it is “almost a case study of what happens if you don’t have long-range planning.”

Fisher described North Liberty’s street planning as “bizarre,” and said it’s not very pedestrian friendly. He described several examples of incompatible land uses that have been allowed to develop side by side.

North Liberty Planning Director Dean Wheatley said there was a lot of discussion before he arrived in the new post about need for a downtown area.

“My reaction was, why do we need a downtown?” he said.

One of the criticism Wheatley has heard repeatedly of North Liberty is of the amount of commercial development near the I-380-Penn Street interchange that is somewhat disconnected from the rest of North Liberty. He said the developments around the I-380 interchange are there to service specific needs related to the interstate highway, however, and differ from the commercial developments serving the city’s neighborhoods.

“People have this misconception that cities develop land,” Wheatley says. He says neighboring Coralville does some land development, “but that is the exception.”

Several developers did not return calls seeking comment. Developer Gary Watts of Prime Ventures said he thinks North Liberty is “doing the right thing” in imposing requirements needed to do what is best for the community. He typically develops master plans for entire subdivisions from the outset and provides visual depictions that show city leaders what the subdivisions will look like.

The large amount of cookie-cutter condominium and townhome development appears to be designed to appeal to the price range of younger buyers most interested in North Liberty. Watts said the city has several attractive subdivisions in the higher prices ranges of $350,000 and upward, however.

Wheatley said there’s something to be said for the more prevalent styles of housing in North Liberty.

“There’s quite a bit of density here,” Wheatley said, “and in the planning world, that’s what we’re supposed to strive for. It gives you economies in extending services and reducing urban sprawl.”