Bacon's Rebellion

James A. Bacon


 

Baconometer

So cool he's hot!

We Are What We Build

The United States is the richest country in the world. Why aren't we enjoying our wealth more? Because, says New Urbanism guru Andres Duany,  we've made such a hash of our man-made environment.


 

The United States of America enjoys the biggest incomes and highest standard of living in the world, observes architect and urban planner Andres Duany. But does the highest “standard of living” – essentially, having the most stuff – equate to the best “quality of life?”

 

Americans own more cars per capita than anyone else in the world. But that’s because so many live in places that rely exclusively upon the automobile for personal mobility. In the suburbs, it’s impossible to get anywhere without one. Not only does every adult require a car, costing on average $6,400 (after tax) to own and operate, so does every child 16 or older. There simply are no alternatives: Mass transit does not exist, and suburban environments, despite the occasional, oddly placed sidewalk, are utterly hostile to pedestrians. Only in America, says Duany, do people drive to the health club so they can exercise on a walking machine.

 

Americans also own the biggest houses in the world. We invented the “McMansion.” Our houses have more square footage, more bathrooms and bigger kitchens than those of other nations. Now home builders are touting the master bathroom resort” – bedroom, bath, walk-in closet plus exercise area. Fast becoming standard accoutrements in upscale housing are the family theater, and indoor café complete with its own espresso machine. Why do Americans want these things? Why are activities that once occurred in the public realm being “internalized” to the house? Because, Duany contends, the public realm we’re creating is so ugly and stressful.

 

Do Americans enjoy life more as a result of owning the biggest houses and the most cars? Do we have more leisure time than, say, the Europeans? After subtracting the extra hours we work to pay for all the stuff, and deducting the time we spend commuting, schlepping our children from T-ball to Tae Kwon Do, driving an extra 10 traffic-choked miles to save a few bucks at Wal-Mart…. do we have more hours of leisure? Do we spend more meaningful time with our family our friends?

 

No. We are what we build, Duany told several hundred attendees last week of the “Building a Better Richmond” conference organized by the Greater Richmond Chamber of Commerce. And Americans across the country have, with great deliberation and forethought, erected a physical environment that taxes their financial resources and breeds isolation, stress, physical inactivity, alienation and depression. Suburbia, says Duany, is “toxic to our psyche.”

 

It’s not the first time that Duany, a leading advocate and practitioner of the New Urbanism movement, has spoken in Richmond. But it is the first time that he had a chance to preach here the virtues of the pre-World War II style of neighborhood development to an audience this large, this influential and this receptive to his message. As I, and others, have argued in Bacon's Rebellion for nearly two years now, the scattered, low-density pattern of land use and development that prevails in Virginia is seriously dysfunctional. Although there are aspects of the problem that Duany skips over – particularly Virginia’s antiquated system of taxation and local government – he articulates the absurdity of modern suburbia as vividly as anyone I’ve ever seen.

 

In a series of conferences over the past year and a half, the Richmond Chamber has brought in a succession of high-profile speakers who have challenged the comfortable but outmoded certainties that have dominated public discourse in Richmond over the past three or four decades.

 

First, Carnegie Mellon University professor Richard Florida explained how the prime driver of economic development in the Knowledge Economy has shifted from financial capital to human capital. The most prosperous regions are those whose workforces include the greatest proportion of who belong to the “creative class,” the artistically, scientifically and entrepreneurially gifted people who account disproportionately for innovation and economic growth. Then came Rebecca Ryan, CEO of Next Generation Consulting, who prophesied a coming labor shortage later this decade and outlined what it would take communities like Richmond to recruit and retrain the next generation of workers. Most recently, sharing the billing with Duany last week, spoke Tony Nelessen, another fervid proponent of New Urbanism and critic of suburban sprawl.

 

It’s not evident what concrete changes will emerge from the froth of all this free thinking. But it seems clear that the civic leadership of the Richmond region has moved far beyond the 1990s mantra that “regionalism” was the solution to all woes. The new perspectives have percolated up,  even, to a handful of local elected officials, though I have yet to notice that it has influenced anyone in the General Assembly. Perhaps it will in time.

 

Duany and Nelessen, who toured the region by helicopter before the conference, agreed that Richmond has tremendous assets. As Duany put it dryly: “You have a city of some accomplishment.” Nelessen was more demonstrative. The Richmond he saw between Shockoe Bottom and Windsor Farms is exactly what people want. All Richmonders have to do is repeat that pattern of development.

 

Of course, that will be no easy task. The scattered, low-density, auto-centric pattern of development afflicting our suburbs is deeply embedded in zoning codes, VDOT regulations, transportation-funding policies, mortgage markets and the skill sets of developers and home builders, Duany said. It will take far-reaching institutional reform, comparable to the movement that cleaned up U.S. cities in the late 19th century and ushered in the Golden Age of American urban development, to turn things around.

 

The situation in which we find ourselves is “aberrant,” Duany told the Richmonders. “For the first time in American history, ‘growth’ has a bad name.” People fight “growth” – or, more exactly, the physical manifestation of growth in the form of specific proposals to build more housing, office buildings and retail space. People perceive that “growth” creates more demand for schools and roads, hence more overcrowding, congestion and higher taxes. The problem, Duany suggested, is that the current system is unsustainable. “We cannot build and repair enough highways to keep up. The model is crashing.”

 

Duany’s ideal is the classic neighborhood of the early 20th century, where people enjoyed an array of transportation options, including walking, driving or taking a trolley car. (He'll settle today for buses and rail in place of trolleys.)  Neighborhoods contained a finely grained mix of uses, from mansions to apartment buildings, corner stores to restaurants, professional offices to civic buildings like schools and post offices, all within a few minutes’ walking distance. In such neighborhoods, people could fulfill many of their needs – not all, but many – simply by walking where they needed to go.

 

Today’s suburbs contain all the same elements as the traditional neighborhood – places to live, shop and work – but they are disassembled, separated by zoning laws, and connected only by cars. The only walking most people do is hoofing it across vast expanses of parking lot. With all destinations scattered and separated by great distances, every trip requires driving a car.

 

Making matters worse in the suburbs, according to Duany, is the “dendritic” system of roads. All traffic starts in dead-end streets in subdivisions, passes through collector roads, and dumps onto the major arterials. In contrast to the grid-like street patterns of traditional neighborhoods, where there are many possible routes to get from one place to another, there is only one way to get from Point A to Point B in the ‘burbs. Consequently, thousands of cul de sacs are virtually devoid of traffic while the arterials are jammed. “There’s plenty of asphalt out there,” Duany notes. “It’s just not being used.”

 

Another feature of suburbia is the lack of quality public spaces. Traditional neighborhoods have prominent civic architecture like churches, offices and government buildings. They have well-defined parks and public squares with places to sit and congregate. They have neighborhood restaurants and bars. Because people walk places, the streets and sidewalks are busy. Other people sit on porches facing the street, facilitating social interaction. “Walking knits society together,” Duany said. “You meet people face to face. You don’t compete with them like you do in your car.”

 

None of these socially integrating features exist in the suburbs. People drive home in their cars, pull up the driveway and into a garage and step inside the house without risking an encounter with anyone. There’s plenty of “green space” in the suburbs, but it’s amorphous and uninviting. The dominant public spaces are shopping malls, designed to encourage people to spend money, not to interact with one another. Neighborhoods are rigidly segregated by property value, hence income and stage of life, with the result that on those rare occasions when people do encounter one another, they are people of the same age and socio-economic bracket as themselves. Subdivisions, says Duany, are “economic monocultures.”

 

The lack of public spaces in neighborhoods where kids can gather and play has a tremendous impact on suburban culture. Because kids can't anywhere on their own, they rely upon their parents to transport them everywhere, creating the "soccer mom" phenomenon. In addition to all their other obligations -- working, running errands, keeping up the house -- parents moonlight as their children's chauffeurs. The juggling of childrens' schedules, in addition to their own, adds to parental stress.

 

There is nothing inviting about the public space of the suburbs. There is no civic architecture: no monuments, no visual focal points. Public buildings tend to be large, square and, surrounded by expanses of parking lot, connected to nothing around them. The retail sector is dominated by Wal-Mart and other “big box” stores. The high schools are enormous buildings surrounded by vast flatlands of parking lots. Designed for the convenience of school administrators, schools are impersonal. Columbine, anyone? Even the churches are huge – “mega-churches,” Duany calls them – set amid vast asphalt parking lots and unplugged from their surroundings.

 

Suburbia doesn’t exist because people demand it, Duany insists. Well, maybe 30 percent of the population would have nothing else, but most people prefer traditional neighborhood development. That’s why properties in traditional neighborhoods command higher prices, on a comparable square-foot basis, than new housing. The problem is that Virginia zoning codes mandate suburban-style development. It’s so expensive and time consuming for developers to obtain exemptions necessary for a neo-urban design that most don’t bother. Duany advocates a dual zoning code system. Counties should adopt traditional neighborhood codes to supplement their suburban-style codes, and allow developers to pick either one. Unlike many reformers, Duany has no interest in imposing his vision on anyone. He just asks to level the playing field and letting the market decide.

 

It should be evident to any reader that I regard Duany's critique of contemporary suburbia as brilliant and his New Urbanism design principles as inspired. I desperately want Virginians to wake up and embrace his vision. But I also acknowledge that reinventing the neighborhood is only part of the solution. To a carpenter, every problem looks like a nail; to an urban planner, every problem looks like a zoning code. Reforming Virginia's zoning codes along the lines that Duany advocates is, absolutely, a critical step towards meaningful reform.

 

But it's only the first step, as even Duany is quick to point out. Pro-sprawl biases are deeply embedded in a range of U.S. institutions. We need to alter financial practices that favor the building of new homes over the rehabbing of old ones, the development of green fields over the re-development of brownfields. We need to reform governmental structures designed for the colonial era of Virginia's history to make them more reflective of 21st century metropolitan regions. We need to overhaul property-based tax codes that encourage beggar-thy-neighborhood development policies at the local level and subsidize speculators who hold valuable land, which should be developed, off the market. We need to thoroughly re-think transportation allocation formulas that subsidize mobility on the urban periphery rather than re-development of the core.

 

Finally, we need to give creative thought to how we can stimulate the re-development of the last 50 years worth of cul de sacs, shopping centers and wooded office "parks" -- Richard Florida calls them "Nerdistans" -- which now account for the majority of our built environment. How do we fix that?

 

On this particular issue, Duany is a pessimist. There's so little worth saving, he suggests, that "sprawl" style development will simply degrade.

 

Traditional neighborhoods have gone into decline, but they maintain within themselves the potential for revitalization. They can evolve organically. People can buy buildings, renovate them, add on to them convert them from single-family to multi-family dwellings and back again. Developers can convert old warehouses into loft apartments, or old stores into live-work units.

 

But suburbs lack that flexibility. Their zoning codes limit changes to land use. And when the codes don't prohibit something, the homeowner association ordinances do. The sheer ugliness and dis-utility of the cul-de-sac subdivisions make them not worth saving. They lack the character and sense of place that, in other neighborhoods, inspire people to reinvest in their houses rather than walk away from them. A suburban shopping center will live or die, Duany says. There is no middle ground. "You cannot retrofit suburban sprawl."

 

Duany pours his creative energy into either rehabbing old neighborhoods or building new ones from scratch. That's my main concern: Virginia has too much invested in the last 50 years of development just to write it off. We can't afford to ignore these areas. We must develop strategies for salvaging them. (In future editions, we will explore some of the creative work that is being done.)

 

In the grand scheme of things, Virginians need to address their built environment on two levels: the macro and the micro. The macro encompasses governmental structures and tax codes. The micro level focuses on the street-level organization of neighborhoods. The macro issues are so politically intractable that they'll take decades to implement.

 

But Duany's micro prescriptions are so appealing that, I think, we can accomplish them relatively easily -- in a matter of years. Albemarle County already has adopted an optional, neo-urbanist zoning code, and other localities are looking at them, too. Duany-inspired zoning codes may not be the whole answer, but they're a big part of the answer.

 

For all his criticism of existing institutions, Duany's message is immensely heartening. Virginians can re-take control of their lives by re-taking control over their built environment. The potential does exist to convert our unprecedented material wealth into an unprecedented quality of life. So, let's get moving!

 

-- May 24, 2004

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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