Urban living is to be bound by neighborhoods. That's my answer to Louis Wirth, Jane Jacobs, and David Goldfield. *Urban living* is a matter-of-degree predicate, so examples of urban living lie on different parts of the spectrum. It's easy to imagine some degree of urban living in a so-called *town center*.
The way I describe this development style is "an inside out mall with some high density housing". I agree with much of what you said and I just shrug my shoulders as it is what it is and it's just not worth wasting much mental bandwidth on. That said, what I really dislike about our version of this (Parole Town Center) is it is an island bounded by major arterials and US 50 that is very hostile to get to unless in a car. Anne Arundel County's general development plan basically shovels new development in these areas so as to placate the rest of the suburbanites and sadly they and MDOT will never make the changes in the road network that would allow better non-auto access and make them nicer urban places despite a huge amount other high density development in the area. It ends up being the worst of both worlds, high density AND autocentric, not the intended best of both worlds.
Oh great point on the mismatch of the road network with density. Yeah I see that too, I don't think funneling density into these specific places without changing anything else is good overall land use policy.
I think change will eventually happen if/when the density gets high enough that automobility completely breaks down and people demand changes such as workable transit (that has to be regional AND local) to allow for car free or at least car light living. But that's a long way off (culturally and temporally) and the money for that kind of transit will never emerge IMO, for example a rail connection to DC and street cars into Annapolis.
This is kinda the funny thing about most zoning. Zoning tries to prevent density to avoid the exact fear you describe (too many people creating too much traffic), which ends up heavily warping your housing market.
The trouble is that nobody here seems to think that at higher densities you can have more efficient forms of travel. They just assume that people won't use it, or that other options won't crop up, and so we have to avoid density altogether.
In other words, we choose the centrally planned authoritarian option over the free market option when it comes to city planning. And don't get me started on the irony of that often being propped up most by folks on the right who normally hate that kinda thing. But then, I think we're already pretty used to ideological inconsistency these days, across the board.
Yeah, people being people will chose the easiest/cheapest/fastest mode depending on the context. People who do not want to shift modes will self select out of a place that doesn't support their desired mode. But that shift does require change of many stripes which as Addison has talked about recently, existing people don't want.
I feel like these sorts of developments are like following a recipe without using all the ingredients. Which is to say, it might still work! But often you'll be missing something important that leads to a less than ideal outcome.
Also, I definitely find it interesting that folks expect the mayor to be picking what businesses go where. It's a strange phenomena in a country where people don't trust government to also assume that it has, and even should have, a lot more power than it does. It makes me think that governments could get away with doing a lot more than they think they can, for better or worse...
It's also disappointing that most folks have no idea how governments (or the economy as a whole, for that matter) actually work. That can be really dangerous for a democracy.
Good article. I used to think these developments were a good idea for most of the same reasons you gave. Lately they've started to rankle me. I go to Pike & Rose a fair amount. I don't really see how pulling into the parking garage there and walking around the faux downtown is much different from pulling into a mall parking lot and walking around the mall. It's actually worse, because garages have bottlenecks that giant parking lots don't have.
And it's not like they need the density because of where they are. It's surrounded by lots of nothingness on one side and an ugly highway on the other. Building up a town center is useful if you're *also* going to encourage things to get built *around* the center. A walkable neighborhood that you can't walk *to* from a neighborhood next to it isn't really a walkable neighborhood, it's just an outdoor shopping mall.
Do you remember Princeton Forrestal Village? It was kinda the same deal, and turned into a ghost town when the novelty wore off.
Nice comment. Yeah my thoughts pretty much. That is so funny, I would never, ever have remembered that, but now that I think about it I'm quite sure we went when I was a kid in the 90s.
Urban living is to be bound by neighborhoods. That's my answer to Louis Wirth, Jane Jacobs, and David Goldfield. *Urban living* is a matter-of-degree predicate, so examples of urban living lie on different parts of the spectrum. It's easy to imagine some degree of urban living in a so-called *town center*.
The way I describe this development style is "an inside out mall with some high density housing". I agree with much of what you said and I just shrug my shoulders as it is what it is and it's just not worth wasting much mental bandwidth on. That said, what I really dislike about our version of this (Parole Town Center) is it is an island bounded by major arterials and US 50 that is very hostile to get to unless in a car. Anne Arundel County's general development plan basically shovels new development in these areas so as to placate the rest of the suburbanites and sadly they and MDOT will never make the changes in the road network that would allow better non-auto access and make them nicer urban places despite a huge amount other high density development in the area. It ends up being the worst of both worlds, high density AND autocentric, not the intended best of both worlds.
Oh great point on the mismatch of the road network with density. Yeah I see that too, I don't think funneling density into these specific places without changing anything else is good overall land use policy.
I think change will eventually happen if/when the density gets high enough that automobility completely breaks down and people demand changes such as workable transit (that has to be regional AND local) to allow for car free or at least car light living. But that's a long way off (culturally and temporally) and the money for that kind of transit will never emerge IMO, for example a rail connection to DC and street cars into Annapolis.
This is kinda the funny thing about most zoning. Zoning tries to prevent density to avoid the exact fear you describe (too many people creating too much traffic), which ends up heavily warping your housing market.
The trouble is that nobody here seems to think that at higher densities you can have more efficient forms of travel. They just assume that people won't use it, or that other options won't crop up, and so we have to avoid density altogether.
In other words, we choose the centrally planned authoritarian option over the free market option when it comes to city planning. And don't get me started on the irony of that often being propped up most by folks on the right who normally hate that kinda thing. But then, I think we're already pretty used to ideological inconsistency these days, across the board.
Yep. There's this cool graph from Arlington, VA showing traffic down from the 90s, at the same time as a big density/population spike.
Yeah, people being people will chose the easiest/cheapest/fastest mode depending on the context. People who do not want to shift modes will self select out of a place that doesn't support their desired mode. But that shift does require change of many stripes which as Addison has talked about recently, existing people don't want.
I feel like these sorts of developments are like following a recipe without using all the ingredients. Which is to say, it might still work! But often you'll be missing something important that leads to a less than ideal outcome.
Also, I definitely find it interesting that folks expect the mayor to be picking what businesses go where. It's a strange phenomena in a country where people don't trust government to also assume that it has, and even should have, a lot more power than it does. It makes me think that governments could get away with doing a lot more than they think they can, for better or worse...
It's also disappointing that most folks have no idea how governments (or the economy as a whole, for that matter) actually work. That can be really dangerous for a democracy.
Good article. I used to think these developments were a good idea for most of the same reasons you gave. Lately they've started to rankle me. I go to Pike & Rose a fair amount. I don't really see how pulling into the parking garage there and walking around the faux downtown is much different from pulling into a mall parking lot and walking around the mall. It's actually worse, because garages have bottlenecks that giant parking lots don't have.
And it's not like they need the density because of where they are. It's surrounded by lots of nothingness on one side and an ugly highway on the other. Building up a town center is useful if you're *also* going to encourage things to get built *around* the center. A walkable neighborhood that you can't walk *to* from a neighborhood next to it isn't really a walkable neighborhood, it's just an outdoor shopping mall.
Do you remember Princeton Forrestal Village? It was kinda the same deal, and turned into a ghost town when the novelty wore off.
Nice comment. Yeah my thoughts pretty much. That is so funny, I would never, ever have remembered that, but now that I think about it I'm quite sure we went when I was a kid in the 90s.