That's a sucker punch, but also a good reminder that "urban removal" was not only a big city phenomenon. I'm also interested in the question you pose, why legalizing the old ways of city-building seems impossible. I wonder if it has something to do with the technocratic culture of modern city planning as a profession, or simply the nature of bureaucracy itself. If it's technocracy, the temptation is to forever perfect the policy or plan, when the best thing to do is to simply eliminate it; whereas bureaucracy demands a process, often for process' sake. Rare, perhaps, is the planner who rejects the precepts of modern planning.
I'm also fascinated by this question. I agree that the planning profession tends to not be great at considering the possibility of its own lack of necessity; but I think it's larger than that. There's a real public demand for some kind of planning and process; the general public tends to react negatively to the suggestion that things could simply work themselves out, even though that process was how cities were built for thousands of years.
I do wonder if there's something inherent to post-car development that leads people in this direction.
Yeah. This is like the most obvious question but the most difficult one. I have this theory that highly developed societies lose the frame of mind where we can just accept that kind of self-organizing rough and tumble. Not truly impossible, but sort of physiologically collectively impossible for us to bear when we have the choice not to. Which is a lot deeper and could apply to a lot of things.
I think part of it is that everyone has come to expect a certain level of polish on everything produced, including our built environment.
A century ago, maybe slightly less, people knew that some buildings were ugly and some pretty, and generally wanted pretty buildings. They knew that streets needed traffic signals and crosswalks.
Today, people want the crosswalk to be THIS wide, with ADA-compliant curbs, beg buttons that make ADA-compliant beeps, and a dozen more features (not trying to single out the ADA!). And if they have a complaint, it goes onto some backlog that the city won’t get to for several months or even years, if ever. When the city DOES get around to it, some other NIMBY is gonna come along and lodge a new complaint, AND everyone’s going to complain about how it costs the taxpayers $700k for a freaking stoplight.
It’s no wonder that people want things built to a perfect, finished state. In some ways, this is reminiscent of our crisis with the filibuster: It’s so hard to go back and fix mistakes, everyone’s double afraid to change anything in the first place.
Definitely cosigned. It’s what I see in my own neighborhood, where the big new developments waste tons of ground floor space on their admin offices or amenities that could EASILY be on the second floor, where their setbacks are too high and hostile to pedestrian commercial traffic, and they charge insanely high rents for the few ground-floor retail businesses they do have.
The area already HAS "a lot of residents". It's the local nightlife and shopping district.
What it currently lacks is *services*. The only grocery store in walking distance is a pitiful mess hanging on by a thread. Businesses struggle to fill space because the commercial rents are too high, because the landlords are all holding out to see if they win the lottery of having their property get picked for the next mega-development to pave over it. And those developments aren't doing anything to fix the situation by, say, competing with their own retail space, because they can charge more to rich commuters by splurging on useless lobbies that stay empty 97% of the time.
The thing is, if you keep doing this, eventually you end up with an entire neighborhood full of people living in big buildings with lush ground-floor amenities, and they all have to drive 5 miles to the grocery store.
Smells like the exact same kind of nonsense as “rich people are hoarding all the new apartments and keeping them empty” (which is verifiably false).
In fact my hometown’s downtown has a neighborhood completely full of block-sized apartment buildings, and one of the developers built a Publix at the bottom of one of the three block-sized developments he built.
And those apartment buildings are offering great rent specials to keep their prices competitive so I think someone just saw a nice, walkable neighborhood and sat there stewing until they could invent a problem with it.
Maybe that's happening in your neighborhood; in which case, good for you. But it's not happening here. Development isn't magic; government has to actually care and have a plan. My local government is basically an old-school political machine that's at best malignantly neglectful when they're not trying to exploit their only cash cow for the next mega-deal.
And I say all that as someone who deeply wishes they WOULD develop the area well, because it has SO much potential.
So, maybe be less hostile to those of us who aren't lucky enough to live in well-governed places?
The government may not have *forced* them to build a Publix, but it sure didn't get in their way. There are plenty of ways to skin a cat.
The problem up here in CT is that there are already tons of stakeholders with their hands in various cookie jars. They use government as a weapon to keep competition out of their jar. I'm not making this shit up; municipal corruption practically happens out in the open -- our PD, for instance, rakes in humanly impossible amounts of "overtime" from private contractors under a city mandate for all roadwork to have an officer "directing traffic", which usually just means "playing cellphone games while they sit in a city squad car".
Just because this doesn't sound familiar to you or is unrecognizable doesn't mean it isn't happening.
One avenue, which virtually no city has done as far as I can tell: the City or a partner agency could buy the property from the landowner. Then, it could do a plan with the residents, parcel it up into small parcels and sell it off in a manner much like the historic pattern. The City could incrementally improve the infrastructure as well, to show its commitment to the idea. That avoids the big developer issue, and all the associated typical responses. Instead, cities usually just go the RFP route for a developer, which inevitably leads to a large development project.
It can't be built in the original style unless you remove parking minimums and multi-staircase requirements.
And I'm not entirely sure "big developer" is a real issue so much as one that people just made up. I can go to historic parts of London full of townhouses that all look the same and nobody's complaining. Bath, England was built entirely at once.
Yes. The distinction I draw (which many people probably don't) is the difference between a big builder building a lot of buildings at once which are lots owned separately, versus a "mixed-use development" which is managed by a single commercial landlord. Both might have dozens of enterprises or structures, but one is allowed to evolve according to all of those different owners and the other is managed as a single property or enterprise.
You’ve given me food for thought when you talk about large mixed use developments dominated by one landlord. Right now in my town everything seems to be working out okay (except one urban-style renovation of a failed mall that seems to be not doing well itself). But it’s been only 25 years of experience so far for some of the oldest mixed use developments, which despite retail turnover, mostly do well due to the high demand for housing here.
That's a sucker punch, but also a good reminder that "urban removal" was not only a big city phenomenon. I'm also interested in the question you pose, why legalizing the old ways of city-building seems impossible. I wonder if it has something to do with the technocratic culture of modern city planning as a profession, or simply the nature of bureaucracy itself. If it's technocracy, the temptation is to forever perfect the policy or plan, when the best thing to do is to simply eliminate it; whereas bureaucracy demands a process, often for process' sake. Rare, perhaps, is the planner who rejects the precepts of modern planning.
I'm also fascinated by this question. I agree that the planning profession tends to not be great at considering the possibility of its own lack of necessity; but I think it's larger than that. There's a real public demand for some kind of planning and process; the general public tends to react negatively to the suggestion that things could simply work themselves out, even though that process was how cities were built for thousands of years.
I do wonder if there's something inherent to post-car development that leads people in this direction.
Yeah. This is like the most obvious question but the most difficult one. I have this theory that highly developed societies lose the frame of mind where we can just accept that kind of self-organizing rough and tumble. Not truly impossible, but sort of physiologically collectively impossible for us to bear when we have the choice not to. Which is a lot deeper and could apply to a lot of things.
I think part of it is that everyone has come to expect a certain level of polish on everything produced, including our built environment.
A century ago, maybe slightly less, people knew that some buildings were ugly and some pretty, and generally wanted pretty buildings. They knew that streets needed traffic signals and crosswalks.
Today, people want the crosswalk to be THIS wide, with ADA-compliant curbs, beg buttons that make ADA-compliant beeps, and a dozen more features (not trying to single out the ADA!). And if they have a complaint, it goes onto some backlog that the city won’t get to for several months or even years, if ever. When the city DOES get around to it, some other NIMBY is gonna come along and lodge a new complaint, AND everyone’s going to complain about how it costs the taxpayers $700k for a freaking stoplight.
It’s no wonder that people want things built to a perfect, finished state. In some ways, this is reminiscent of our crisis with the filibuster: It’s so hard to go back and fix mistakes, everyone’s double afraid to change anything in the first place.
Definitely cosigned. It’s what I see in my own neighborhood, where the big new developments waste tons of ground floor space on their admin offices or amenities that could EASILY be on the second floor, where their setbacks are too high and hostile to pedestrian commercial traffic, and they charge insanely high rents for the few ground-floor retail businesses they do have.
You need a lot of residents in an area to support retail space. Ground-floor admin/laundry/lobby/gym is a pretty good idea.
The area already HAS "a lot of residents". It's the local nightlife and shopping district.
What it currently lacks is *services*. The only grocery store in walking distance is a pitiful mess hanging on by a thread. Businesses struggle to fill space because the commercial rents are too high, because the landlords are all holding out to see if they win the lottery of having their property get picked for the next mega-development to pave over it. And those developments aren't doing anything to fix the situation by, say, competing with their own retail space, because they can charge more to rich commuters by splurging on useless lobbies that stay empty 97% of the time.
The thing is, if you keep doing this, eventually you end up with an entire neighborhood full of people living in big buildings with lush ground-floor amenities, and they all have to drive 5 miles to the grocery store.
"the landlords are all holding out to see if they win the lottery of having their property get picked for the next mega-development to pave over it"
This sounds like a job for the Land Value Tax!
Smells like the exact same kind of nonsense as “rich people are hoarding all the new apartments and keeping them empty” (which is verifiably false).
In fact my hometown’s downtown has a neighborhood completely full of block-sized apartment buildings, and one of the developers built a Publix at the bottom of one of the three block-sized developments he built.
And those apartment buildings are offering great rent specials to keep their prices competitive so I think someone just saw a nice, walkable neighborhood and sat there stewing until they could invent a problem with it.
Maybe that's happening in your neighborhood; in which case, good for you. But it's not happening here. Development isn't magic; government has to actually care and have a plan. My local government is basically an old-school political machine that's at best malignantly neglectful when they're not trying to exploit their only cash cow for the next mega-deal.
And I say all that as someone who deeply wishes they WOULD develop the area well, because it has SO much potential.
So, maybe be less hostile to those of us who aren't lucky enough to live in well-governed places?
At no point did they government force them to build a Publix; they just did it because it’s good for residents and good for the developer.
It’s Alabama, the government is completely hands-off.
The government may not have *forced* them to build a Publix, but it sure didn't get in their way. There are plenty of ways to skin a cat.
The problem up here in CT is that there are already tons of stakeholders with their hands in various cookie jars. They use government as a weapon to keep competition out of their jar. I'm not making this shit up; municipal corruption practically happens out in the open -- our PD, for instance, rakes in humanly impossible amounts of "overtime" from private contractors under a city mandate for all roadwork to have an officer "directing traffic", which usually just means "playing cellphone games while they sit in a city squad car".
Just because this doesn't sound familiar to you or is unrecognizable doesn't mean it isn't happening.
>>Smells like the exact Kim same kind of nonsense
This is not a coherent sentence.
One avenue, which virtually no city has done as far as I can tell: the City or a partner agency could buy the property from the landowner. Then, it could do a plan with the residents, parcel it up into small parcels and sell it off in a manner much like the historic pattern. The City could incrementally improve the infrastructure as well, to show its commitment to the idea. That avoids the big developer issue, and all the associated typical responses. Instead, cities usually just go the RFP route for a developer, which inevitably leads to a large development project.
It can't be built in the original style unless you remove parking minimums and multi-staircase requirements.
And I'm not entirely sure "big developer" is a real issue so much as one that people just made up. I can go to historic parts of London full of townhouses that all look the same and nobody's complaining. Bath, England was built entirely at once.
Yes. The distinction I draw (which many people probably don't) is the difference between a big builder building a lot of buildings at once which are lots owned separately, versus a "mixed-use development" which is managed by a single commercial landlord. Both might have dozens of enterprises or structures, but one is allowed to evolve according to all of those different owners and the other is managed as a single property or enterprise.
so remove those requirements, too. Easy enough.
Riffing on Kevin's comment, is this something that a land trust could do—buy a parcel like this and redivide it into smaller parcels?
Thanks for featuring Chambersburg. My ancestors settled there.
You’ve given me food for thought when you talk about large mixed use developments dominated by one landlord. Right now in my town everything seems to be working out okay (except one urban-style renovation of a failed mall that seems to be not doing well itself). But it’s been only 25 years of experience so far for some of the oldest mixed use developments, which despite retail turnover, mostly do well due to the high demand for housing here.
in NYC its the store-front churches and the Pot shops that seem to be thriving in smaller neighborhoods