Harbor Springs Is Already a Planned Development

For over a century, Harbor Springs has been exactly what a planned development aspires to be. Long before anyone coined the term, people with foresight and a sense of nuance carved out 1.3 square miles along Little Traverse Bay and built something extraordinary: a walkable, livable, beautiful small town with distinct neighborhoods, a vibrant downtown, access to water, and a character so compelling that people travel from across the country just to be here.

That’s not an accident. That’s a plan. And it worked.

So when our planning commission proposes making planned developments available on virtually any parcel in town, down to a single residential lot, we should ask a simple question: what problem are we solving?

The Case for Restraint

Under the previous zoning, planned developments required a minimum of ten acres. That threshold wasn’t arbitrary. It was a filter. It said: if you want to reconfigure an area of town, the project needs to be large enough to deliver a genuine public benefit—something that serves the broader community, not just one property owner’s vision. And because there aren’t many ten-acre parcels in a 1.3-square-mile town, the rule also communicated something deeper: we’re not really looking for this. What we have is working.

The new proposal removes that filter almost entirely. Under the revised zoning, a planned development could be pursued on a single lot, by a single owner, for a single home. In a town with roughly 1,600 individual parcels, that’s 1,600 potential requests to deviate from the zoning that has served us well for a hundred years.

The Real Cost

Proponents of planned developments argue that the review process itself is sufficient protection. After all, a planned development requires planning commission review, city council approval, extensive studies, and then another round of review before construction begins. With that much oversight, what’s the harm in allowing them?

The harm is the process itself.

Every planned development application consumes city staff time, planning commission hours, and city council attention. It generates neighbor notifications, public hearings, and inevitably, controversy. It invites litigation. It exhausts volunteers who serve on our boards. And all of this happens in a town with limited administrative capacity, a small government being asked to absorb a big-city planning tool.

The planning commission often cites a project off Lake Street as an example of the kind of creative small-scale development they’d like to encourage. Twenty years ago, a property owner assembled a small area and proposed a cluster of four or five homes in a new style. It was held up as a model of what flexibility could achieve. But here’s what actually happened: two decades later, the project was never fully built out. It has two homes on it, owned by the same person. That’s not a success story. That’s a cautionary tale about what happens when individual ambition meets the reality of a small town that didn’t ask for reinvention.

Who Actually Lives Here

The case for planned developments often gets framed around attracting visitors and enabling creative architecture. But that misreads who Harbor Springs actually serves.

People live here year-round. They raise families here. They send their kids to school here and coach their teams and shovel their driveways through March. They chose Harbor Springs not because it was trendy or novel, but because it was steady. Harbor Springs is a place with a rhythm and a scale that makes sense for a life, not just a long weekend.

And yes, people come from across the country too. From every walk of life. Because Harbor Springs is the antidote to the relentless reinvention that defines the rest of their world. They didn’t choose this place because it was like everywhere else. They chose it because it wasn’t.

Nobody is asking for more bed and breakfasts. Nobody is clamoring for more downtown development. And that instinct is right, because buildings don’t make a downtown thrive, entrepreneurs who understand the community do. The character of Harbor Springs wasn’t built by zoning flexibility. It was built by people who understood this place and were committed to it. Planned developments don’t produce that. Community does.

The Consultant Trap

A planning consultant’s job is to bring you the best practices of a hundred other towns. That’s legitimate work, and we’ve had capable professionals offer their perspective. But adopting the best practices of a hundred other towns is not the city council’s job. The city council is chartered with a hundred years of Harbor Springs.

Those are fundamentally different mandates. One asks: what are other places doing? The other asks: what has made this place work? When consultants look at Harbor Springs and recommend planned developments, more flexibility, a modernized zoning toolkit, they’re applying a framework designed for towns that need reinvention.

Harbor Springs doesn’t need reinvention. It needs stewardship. And Stewardship is hard.

The risk isn’t that the advice is bad. It’s that it’s generic. A century ago, Harbor Springs solved the problem these tools, like planning best practices and RRC, are designed to address. The answer isn’t to import someone else’s solution. It’s to recognize that ours is already working.

The Abundance Argument

There are billions of square miles in the United States. If an architect has a creative vision for a planned development, there is no shortage of places to pursue it. There are towns that want growth, cities that need reinvention, and rural areas hungry for investment.

Harbor Springs is not one of those places. We are not archtectural digest. Voters said so, loudly and clearly, through a referendum. During that campaign, we spoke with more than a thousand residents. Not one asked for planned developments. Not one said Harbor Springs needed more flexibility for individual property owners to reimagine their lots. What they said, overwhelmingly, was: we love this place. Keep it the way it is.

A Question for the City Council

This is ultimately a city council decision, not a planning commission recommendation. The planning commission has done its work exploring options, and we can respect that effort. But the council’s job is different. The council answers to voters. And voters have been clear.

If the city council feels it must include planned developments in the zoning code, then the ten-acre minimum should be restored. That threshold says something important: changes to Harbor Springs should serve the whole community, not the whims of a single property owner. And if someone points out that there aren’t really any ten-acre parcels available to develop…. well, that’s rather the point.

Harbor Springs has been a successful planned development for a hundred years. The best thing we can do is stop trying to plan a new one inside it. An important shift in viewpoint as we choose who to help us with the next community master plan.

Stewardship has worked for a long time.

This opinion piece was authored by Carter Williams, who can be reached at carter@oiventures.com