I agree wholeheartedly with the mixed use point you made- it drives me nuts to see clusters of houses and townhomes all over the Denver suburbs with seemingly little attempt to make them anything other than “car islands”…granted, many seem adjacent to well developed open spaces/some trails but not easily walkable to any retail for a daily routine. So ok for outdoor recreational needs but less so for community connectedness/daily function without using a car.
Yea that is my thought when I see like an apartment complex that looks great and yay housing but - wait it's the only thing on this exit this far from anything, rising out of the valley? You're definitely not solving traffic and the living isn't convenient with that.
So much of our town/city/neighborhood life would be better if we lowered the bar and removed the red tape for starting a business out of your home. At a certain threshold you can tell people they've gotten too big to be an at home business. But these clusters would be better if people didn't rely on target to come by and bless them with a store, but if they could build a store themselves out of their garage and sell to their neighbors.
Just some thoughts from a central Virginia exurbanite. Clustering commercial development makes sense in exurban and rural areas. That doesn’t just cut down on vehicle miles, by allowing people to combine errands in a single trip, but also makes it economically feasible to provide infrastructure like public water, sewer, and wired broadband - infrastructure that is not always available in exurban and rural areas.
Historically, small towns typically had hard limitations on density because of the dependence on private well and septic, and pre-1910 or so, because of the necessity for carriage houses and grazing space for horses. Not having public water and sewer is still a potential issue, since most of rural Virginia is on private well and septic.
Usually zoning for these areas does allow multiple uses in reasonably close proximity, including both residential and commercial uses, and most localities I am familiar with allow mixed use within current zoning categories. The ubiquitous agricultural zoning, which includes most land in rural areas, normally has both residential and commercial uses by right.
I have mixed feelings about clustered residential development in rural areas, but there is a real demand out here from retirees and singles for local housing that requires less property maintenance. It can be done well or badly, and I am not personally familiar with Lovettesville, so no judgement on those specific developments. It does face the same issues with potentially needing access to public water and sewer, as private well and septic, by design, are not a good fit for dense development.
Virginia IMHO doesn’t have particularly strict codes for most home based businesses, at least not in rural and exurban areas, and I say that as someone who has owned more than one home based business in a rural (later exurban) area.
People often sell at the farmers market and in local stores to avoid having to have a storefront, as well as selling online, since most people don’t really want a stream of strangers coming to their home. Local Facebook groups and Nextdoor are very active in promoting local small businesses, they’re featured in the local newsletter, and many local businesses with storefronts have racks for business cards of other local small businesses.
So I am not sure why you think exurban counties don’t have ample small-scale commerce. Our local village center has plenty of small stores and businesses including in older houses repurposed as commercial space, and my county has a LOT of home based businesses. There are a few national businesses, as in a small local Wal-Mart and a small Sheetz, a farm supply store, plus the ubiquitous auto parts stores and dollar stores. But most of the shops in our local strip plazas are small businesses who serve local residents, not national chains, and the national chain stores are set up on a local scale, not to serve a large surrounding area.
Commercial kitchens of any sort are licensed strictly so you don’t sicken or kill people, which is an actual risk. (Raw milk with potential issues of TB and brucellosis, poorly canned food, cross contamination, e Coli, salmonella, trichinosis.) That isn’t a consideration with most types of home based businesses.
I actually cannot ever remember hearing people out here lament that they couldn’t WALK to a bakery, cafe, corner store, or deli, but we have all of those out here, easily accessed by a very short car trip with minimal traffic, locally owned and operated. I would be very surprised if Lovettesville doesn’t.
Out here isn’t “far away from most things.” It’s closer to different things that many of us out here care about, like horseback riding, hiking trails, the river and boating, fishing, the farmers market, tons of local events at the state park and the village green space - peaceful, social things that make life worth living. There are many more events and activities out here than I have time to attend - small concerts, nature walks, fairs, festivals, you name it.
If you look at the Weldon Cooper Center statistics, when people can telecommute, or when they retire, a significant number choose to move to exurbs and more rural areas. Exurban and rural areas in Virginia are growing faster than the cities and closer suburbs.
It’s really, really nice out here, in its own way, with a different lifestyle. You obviously like city life, and that’s great! Not all of us do, and you know what, how we live is pretty great too.
This is a GREAT comment - the sort of thing I was looking for. I think a lot of the differences come down to you being in central VA - every time I drive through there I think, yeah, maybe I could live here. You don't have a "big city" that dominates the region (Charlottesville I guess, but it's a small city) like we have DC and Tysons (and the job agglomeration in Gaithersburg, etc.) That's why I'm skeptical that a lot of the people in Northern Virginia rural-exurbia actually want that life, or actually sort of root themselves in those local places. I'm sure some do, especially the retirees, but a lot of it is just bedroom community stuff for people in jobs that have no real local element - there is something to the stereotype that Northern Virginia is "placeless" and transient.
Lovettsville does have a small grocery and some local businesses - I mainly picked that because the houses fit that wonky "cluster" look, but it's honestly one of the better examples of integrating that sort of residential development with mixed uses (not walkable, but close enough. Definitely bikeable, if that's your thing.) I believe Lovettsville is actually a town that has new developments around it, though, which is also a better situation than residential clusters that just pop up literally not near anything else.
The whole reason I go on about this is because I *do* think rural/small-town life is a good thing, and my question is to what extent modern exurban development can complement that, versus impose on it. My supposition in Northern Virginia at least is that to a great extent the inner localities have exported their housing crisis to the outer communities, and that this cluster style is kind of a sour spot. I may be wrong, but I don't think that dynamic necessarily applies to central VA.
I'm no urbanist or housing advocate, but I do agree that the 100 apartments example fails because it lacks mixed uses and the street life that sometimes comes with mixed uses. The "4% of island used" diagram reminds me of Jane Jacobs's critique of projects. While in an urban setting, the projects also had no "foot traffic"--no mixed uses and nothing interesting to see--which explained for her the projects' high crime in the early 1960s. There's a relatively new Buzzuto-built large apartment building in exurban Loudoun County southwest of Lovettsville (the corner of the Greenway and 659) that feels like that 4% diagram. I'm sure the crime is low, but it feels out of place.
I do like Lovettsville. Do you have any thoughts about Waterford, also in Loudoun? It's smaller and more touristy than Lovettsvile, but it also seems like what you describe as exurban density.
We lived near the apartment building's intersection in a neotraditional neighborhood called Belmont Greene. The street layout was something like Lovettsville's. The housing in the neighborhood is pleasingly mixed, the garages are accessible to alleys behind the homes, and front porches are ubiquitous. But the general store failed in no time, and despite the narrow streets (I think too narrow for VDH&T), cars rule. I guess the neighborhood is different from, say, Lovettsville because the former is a housing development masquerading as a town.
I think you're right - dense residential monoculture feels weird no matter where it is. Walking through San Francisco, residential areas without corner stores or other activity on the street have always struck me as "dead zones." When I'm going for a walk, I always try to plan my route around commercial streets, and find myself thinking of residential zones as something I have to "get through" before I arrive at the next vibrant mixed-use street. Just a single corner store or hole-in-the-wall restaurant can turn a block in the middle of residential dead zone into a PLACE.
"The first is that exurban or rural density isn’t weird at all—because that’s what a small town is! So why does it feel weird here?"
I don't know if this is what you're getting at, but that image looks god-awful - people packed like sardines into a massive tenement structure rising out of the forest, with absolutely nothing around. I actually don't know which image is worse; I'd probably prefer living in the one on the left, at least then I don't have to pay HOA fees.
Density needs to be appropriately scaled to the size of the town and its relationship to the surrounding area. In this respect, "density" (how close together things are) can be thought of as being distinct from "scale" (how big things are). Cluster zoning is absolutely necessary but also grossly insufficient, if it still results in the typical car-suburb growth pattern. The big problem with "Missing Middle" and similar movements is that they involve retrofitting car suburbs by scaling up in terms of structure size, without necessarily densifying in terms of making neighborhoods actually walkable, or creating distinct "towns" with a focused center, etc.
I'm not talking about the picture there (and the picture is just a visual for the idea that building more densely uses less land). What I mean is that small towns are dense urban areas in the middle of the countryside, but they don't set off that "ugh/wow/what the hell is this?" that those cluster developments out in the country do for a lot of people. And my supposition is that we *think* we dislike the density of the cluster developments, because that's how we're used to expressing dislike of development, but what actually makes them "weird" is that they're residential monocultures.
I haven't really thought too much about my reaction to seeing the clusters firsthand, but I guess I tend to notice three things: 1) There are no trees, all existing natural features have been converted to "green space", 2) the houses tend to be all built to the same 1-3 layouts with that cheap mass-produced look, 3) the developments are never walkable to anywhere, always built to the suburban car-scale model - even when they're rowhouses/townhouses you tend to see the "island surrounding by parking" pattern.
The tree thing may be fixed in time - lots of new developments look like that (my development from the early 80s has a ton of beautiful big mature trees, but they almost certainly were planted when the development was built, i.e. there were no real trees for the first 10-15 years.) But yeah, "dense suburbia" is kind of the worst pattern, because the density doesn't buy you any relief from traffic jams and mandatory car trips.
We should call these subdivisions ("additions" are more accurate, but that term is obsolete). These are bedroom communities. Second, just as some people misattribute density as a reason for disliking a place, other people misattribute density for liking a place. Density is less important than many urbanists claim.
This looks like what urbanists call "hard edges," people packed like sardines into a massive tenement structure rising out of the forest, with absolutely nothing around." Many urbanists consider a hard edge between country and city as an urban characteristic.
I think he meant that the picture was showing the same sort of residential monoculture as the cluster developments I was critiquing. But I think the picture implies there are businesses/services around the homes (it's a figure, not a rendering of a real development).
To make my "small towns aren't weird" point again, Lancaster, PA has very "hard edges" - a small dense city with a genuine functioning countryside. Nothing about that feels "weird." What feels weird is the suburbia popping up around the edges!
I think the defining difference between a small town and an exurb is that in a small town the lives of people living there tend to revolve around the town, but in an exurb people's lives tend to revolve around the nearest big city. Some of these places may eventually develop into towns, but most of them probably won't.
Denser major cities would happen organically and fast if legal constraints to building were relaxed, and would create places that had pluses and minuses for most people, generally netting out positive.
Denser, walkable small-town type environments which combined single family detached homes with walkable local amenities would be a huge hit and wildly desirable with very little perceived downside for residents (especially where weather is temperate, a key to this kind of living in Europe), but would need a more active and prescriptive regulatory regime to accomplish most likely, they probably wouldn't just sprout up on their own via market demand.
What they call "cluster zoning" I would call "dense subdivisions." There is perhaps no better example of a region that does this than DC. It was used as a plot device in The Americans: Phillip and Elizabeth (Soviets agents nested in suburbia) were close-up neighbors with Stan (an FBI agent who specialized in domestic counterintelligence). Yet they were otherwise normie suburbanites.
The threshold for urban density is low.
"The first is that exurban or rural density isn’t weird at all—because that’s what a small town is!"
The answer:
"It feels intuitively like the worst of both worlds: the raw crowdedness of a more urban place, without the street life or commerce or amenities of a city. The distance and compulsory driving of suburbia, without the privacy and quiet and open space."
What characterizes functional urbanism is proximity of various land uses, and it depends much less on density.
"What characterizes functional urbanism is proximity of various land uses, and it depends much less on density."
Yeah, I think that's right. I emphasize that small towns are "urban," but at a much less intense scale than "cities." I think it's telling that cluster zoning and "smart growth" generally was more of an environmentalist idea than an urbanist one - it definitely lacks the full understanding of what makes places good and fully functional beyond just density and green space.
I agree wholeheartedly with the mixed use point you made- it drives me nuts to see clusters of houses and townhomes all over the Denver suburbs with seemingly little attempt to make them anything other than “car islands”…granted, many seem adjacent to well developed open spaces/some trails but not easily walkable to any retail for a daily routine. So ok for outdoor recreational needs but less so for community connectedness/daily function without using a car.
Yea that is my thought when I see like an apartment complex that looks great and yay housing but - wait it's the only thing on this exit this far from anything, rising out of the valley? You're definitely not solving traffic and the living isn't convenient with that.
So much of our town/city/neighborhood life would be better if we lowered the bar and removed the red tape for starting a business out of your home. At a certain threshold you can tell people they've gotten too big to be an at home business. But these clusters would be better if people didn't rely on target to come by and bless them with a store, but if they could build a store themselves out of their garage and sell to their neighbors.
I would so love to see one mid-sized just do this - pilot it for a year, see what happens.
Just some thoughts from a central Virginia exurbanite. Clustering commercial development makes sense in exurban and rural areas. That doesn’t just cut down on vehicle miles, by allowing people to combine errands in a single trip, but also makes it economically feasible to provide infrastructure like public water, sewer, and wired broadband - infrastructure that is not always available in exurban and rural areas.
Historically, small towns typically had hard limitations on density because of the dependence on private well and septic, and pre-1910 or so, because of the necessity for carriage houses and grazing space for horses. Not having public water and sewer is still a potential issue, since most of rural Virginia is on private well and septic.
Usually zoning for these areas does allow multiple uses in reasonably close proximity, including both residential and commercial uses, and most localities I am familiar with allow mixed use within current zoning categories. The ubiquitous agricultural zoning, which includes most land in rural areas, normally has both residential and commercial uses by right.
I have mixed feelings about clustered residential development in rural areas, but there is a real demand out here from retirees and singles for local housing that requires less property maintenance. It can be done well or badly, and I am not personally familiar with Lovettesville, so no judgement on those specific developments. It does face the same issues with potentially needing access to public water and sewer, as private well and septic, by design, are not a good fit for dense development.
Virginia IMHO doesn’t have particularly strict codes for most home based businesses, at least not in rural and exurban areas, and I say that as someone who has owned more than one home based business in a rural (later exurban) area.
People often sell at the farmers market and in local stores to avoid having to have a storefront, as well as selling online, since most people don’t really want a stream of strangers coming to their home. Local Facebook groups and Nextdoor are very active in promoting local small businesses, they’re featured in the local newsletter, and many local businesses with storefronts have racks for business cards of other local small businesses.
So I am not sure why you think exurban counties don’t have ample small-scale commerce. Our local village center has plenty of small stores and businesses including in older houses repurposed as commercial space, and my county has a LOT of home based businesses. There are a few national businesses, as in a small local Wal-Mart and a small Sheetz, a farm supply store, plus the ubiquitous auto parts stores and dollar stores. But most of the shops in our local strip plazas are small businesses who serve local residents, not national chains, and the national chain stores are set up on a local scale, not to serve a large surrounding area.
Commercial kitchens of any sort are licensed strictly so you don’t sicken or kill people, which is an actual risk. (Raw milk with potential issues of TB and brucellosis, poorly canned food, cross contamination, e Coli, salmonella, trichinosis.) That isn’t a consideration with most types of home based businesses.
I actually cannot ever remember hearing people out here lament that they couldn’t WALK to a bakery, cafe, corner store, or deli, but we have all of those out here, easily accessed by a very short car trip with minimal traffic, locally owned and operated. I would be very surprised if Lovettesville doesn’t.
Out here isn’t “far away from most things.” It’s closer to different things that many of us out here care about, like horseback riding, hiking trails, the river and boating, fishing, the farmers market, tons of local events at the state park and the village green space - peaceful, social things that make life worth living. There are many more events and activities out here than I have time to attend - small concerts, nature walks, fairs, festivals, you name it.
If you look at the Weldon Cooper Center statistics, when people can telecommute, or when they retire, a significant number choose to move to exurbs and more rural areas. Exurban and rural areas in Virginia are growing faster than the cities and closer suburbs.
It’s really, really nice out here, in its own way, with a different lifestyle. You obviously like city life, and that’s great! Not all of us do, and you know what, how we live is pretty great too.
This is a GREAT comment - the sort of thing I was looking for. I think a lot of the differences come down to you being in central VA - every time I drive through there I think, yeah, maybe I could live here. You don't have a "big city" that dominates the region (Charlottesville I guess, but it's a small city) like we have DC and Tysons (and the job agglomeration in Gaithersburg, etc.) That's why I'm skeptical that a lot of the people in Northern Virginia rural-exurbia actually want that life, or actually sort of root themselves in those local places. I'm sure some do, especially the retirees, but a lot of it is just bedroom community stuff for people in jobs that have no real local element - there is something to the stereotype that Northern Virginia is "placeless" and transient.
Lovettsville does have a small grocery and some local businesses - I mainly picked that because the houses fit that wonky "cluster" look, but it's honestly one of the better examples of integrating that sort of residential development with mixed uses (not walkable, but close enough. Definitely bikeable, if that's your thing.) I believe Lovettsville is actually a town that has new developments around it, though, which is also a better situation than residential clusters that just pop up literally not near anything else.
The whole reason I go on about this is because I *do* think rural/small-town life is a good thing, and my question is to what extent modern exurban development can complement that, versus impose on it. My supposition in Northern Virginia at least is that to a great extent the inner localities have exported their housing crisis to the outer communities, and that this cluster style is kind of a sour spot. I may be wrong, but I don't think that dynamic necessarily applies to central VA.
I'm no urbanist or housing advocate, but I do agree that the 100 apartments example fails because it lacks mixed uses and the street life that sometimes comes with mixed uses. The "4% of island used" diagram reminds me of Jane Jacobs's critique of projects. While in an urban setting, the projects also had no "foot traffic"--no mixed uses and nothing interesting to see--which explained for her the projects' high crime in the early 1960s. There's a relatively new Buzzuto-built large apartment building in exurban Loudoun County southwest of Lovettsville (the corner of the Greenway and 659) that feels like that 4% diagram. I'm sure the crime is low, but it feels out of place.
I do like Lovettsville. Do you have any thoughts about Waterford, also in Loudoun? It's smaller and more touristy than Lovettsvile, but it also seems like what you describe as exurban density.
We lived near the apartment building's intersection in a neotraditional neighborhood called Belmont Greene. The street layout was something like Lovettsville's. The housing in the neighborhood is pleasingly mixed, the garages are accessible to alleys behind the homes, and front porches are ubiquitous. But the general store failed in no time, and despite the narrow streets (I think too narrow for VDH&T), cars rule. I guess the neighborhood is different from, say, Lovettsville because the former is a housing development masquerading as a town.
Well, you sure sound like an urbanist:)
Yes, I wrote about Waterford! https://thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/what-does-waterford-mean
Thanks. I learned a lot about Waterford there. "It’s fascinating to me that abandonment and disrepair actually preserved these buildings." Yes.
I think you're right - dense residential monoculture feels weird no matter where it is. Walking through San Francisco, residential areas without corner stores or other activity on the street have always struck me as "dead zones." When I'm going for a walk, I always try to plan my route around commercial streets, and find myself thinking of residential zones as something I have to "get through" before I arrive at the next vibrant mixed-use street. Just a single corner store or hole-in-the-wall restaurant can turn a block in the middle of residential dead zone into a PLACE.
Yep.
"The first is that exurban or rural density isn’t weird at all—because that’s what a small town is! So why does it feel weird here?"
I don't know if this is what you're getting at, but that image looks god-awful - people packed like sardines into a massive tenement structure rising out of the forest, with absolutely nothing around. I actually don't know which image is worse; I'd probably prefer living in the one on the left, at least then I don't have to pay HOA fees.
Density needs to be appropriately scaled to the size of the town and its relationship to the surrounding area. In this respect, "density" (how close together things are) can be thought of as being distinct from "scale" (how big things are). Cluster zoning is absolutely necessary but also grossly insufficient, if it still results in the typical car-suburb growth pattern. The big problem with "Missing Middle" and similar movements is that they involve retrofitting car suburbs by scaling up in terms of structure size, without necessarily densifying in terms of making neighborhoods actually walkable, or creating distinct "towns" with a focused center, etc.
I'm not talking about the picture there (and the picture is just a visual for the idea that building more densely uses less land). What I mean is that small towns are dense urban areas in the middle of the countryside, but they don't set off that "ugh/wow/what the hell is this?" that those cluster developments out in the country do for a lot of people. And my supposition is that we *think* we dislike the density of the cluster developments, because that's how we're used to expressing dislike of development, but what actually makes them "weird" is that they're residential monocultures.
I haven't really thought too much about my reaction to seeing the clusters firsthand, but I guess I tend to notice three things: 1) There are no trees, all existing natural features have been converted to "green space", 2) the houses tend to be all built to the same 1-3 layouts with that cheap mass-produced look, 3) the developments are never walkable to anywhere, always built to the suburban car-scale model - even when they're rowhouses/townhouses you tend to see the "island surrounding by parking" pattern.
The tree thing may be fixed in time - lots of new developments look like that (my development from the early 80s has a ton of beautiful big mature trees, but they almost certainly were planted when the development was built, i.e. there were no real trees for the first 10-15 years.) But yeah, "dense suburbia" is kind of the worst pattern, because the density doesn't buy you any relief from traffic jams and mandatory car trips.
We should call these subdivisions ("additions" are more accurate, but that term is obsolete). These are bedroom communities. Second, just as some people misattribute density as a reason for disliking a place, other people misattribute density for liking a place. Density is less important than many urbanists claim.
This looks like what urbanists call "hard edges," people packed like sardines into a massive tenement structure rising out of the forest, with absolutely nothing around." Many urbanists consider a hard edge between country and city as an urban characteristic.
I think he meant that the picture was showing the same sort of residential monoculture as the cluster developments I was critiquing. But I think the picture implies there are businesses/services around the homes (it's a figure, not a rendering of a real development).
To make my "small towns aren't weird" point again, Lancaster, PA has very "hard edges" - a small dense city with a genuine functioning countryside. Nothing about that feels "weird." What feels weird is the suburbia popping up around the edges!
I think the defining difference between a small town and an exurb is that in a small town the lives of people living there tend to revolve around the town, but in an exurb people's lives tend to revolve around the nearest big city. Some of these places may eventually develop into towns, but most of them probably won't.
Have you read this piece by John McPhee about the debate you describe?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1971/03/27/encounters-with-the-archdruid-ii-an-island
Denser major cities would happen organically and fast if legal constraints to building were relaxed, and would create places that had pluses and minuses for most people, generally netting out positive.
Denser, walkable small-town type environments which combined single family detached homes with walkable local amenities would be a huge hit and wildly desirable with very little perceived downside for residents (especially where weather is temperate, a key to this kind of living in Europe), but would need a more active and prescriptive regulatory regime to accomplish most likely, they probably wouldn't just sprout up on their own via market demand.
From the 1990’s—https://verderiver.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/rural-cluster-zoning.pdf
What they call "cluster zoning" I would call "dense subdivisions." There is perhaps no better example of a region that does this than DC. It was used as a plot device in The Americans: Phillip and Elizabeth (Soviets agents nested in suburbia) were close-up neighbors with Stan (an FBI agent who specialized in domestic counterintelligence). Yet they were otherwise normie suburbanites.
The threshold for urban density is low.
"The first is that exurban or rural density isn’t weird at all—because that’s what a small town is!"
The answer:
"It feels intuitively like the worst of both worlds: the raw crowdedness of a more urban place, without the street life or commerce or amenities of a city. The distance and compulsory driving of suburbia, without the privacy and quiet and open space."
What characterizes functional urbanism is proximity of various land uses, and it depends much less on density.
"What characterizes functional urbanism is proximity of various land uses, and it depends much less on density."
Yeah, I think that's right. I emphasize that small towns are "urban," but at a much less intense scale than "cities." I think it's telling that cluster zoning and "smart growth" generally was more of an environmentalist idea than an urbanist one - it definitely lacks the full understanding of what makes places good and fully functional beyond just density and green space.