Nobody Goes There Anymore, It’s Too Crowded
I think trying to build housing in shopping malls is a potentially promising idea. It’s a reminder that I’ve been meaning for a while to write a post about separating the idea of “walkable urbanism” from the idea of “living in a city.” A city is, of course, a political concept. But walkable urbanism is a geographical and lifestyle concept. In the DC area, walkable urbanism exists in the parts of Arlington County that lie along the Blue and (especially) Orange line corridors as well as near the Silver Spring and Bethesda Metro stations in Montgomery County even though those places are “in the suburbs.” And parts of the city don’t exhibit the features of walkable urbanism. And by the same token, traditionally a great deal of walkable urbanism took place in small towns rather than in cities, and also in small cities (see Douglas Rae’s account of New Haven) and “streetcar suburbs” rather than big cities.
All of which is a throat-clearing way of saying that if we see a big increase in the amount of walkable urbanism available to American families, an awful lot of it will probably exist outside the city limits of the municipalities that form the hubs of our metropolitan area. That will mean, yes, converting existing elements of the build environment rather than simply abandoning everything and trying to get everyone to move willy-nilly into downtown Cleveland. In other words — more housing in malls.
But I wanted to end with the observation that I got this item via Felix Salmon who introduced it thusly:
Do you want to live within easy walking distance of shops, restaurants, and other such amenities? Do you want to live in a condo with a doorman, its own private grounds, a screening room, and similar bells and whistles? Up until now, answering “yes” to such questions meant that you had to live in the city — something which many people don’t like doing (dirt, smells, noise, bad schools, you know the drill) and which in any case is often very expensive.
This is like saying that most Americans don’t like BMWs — after all, they’re so damn expensive. Obviously, some people really do have an extremely strong preference for a sizable yard and driving-oriented lifestyle. But equally obviously, people respond to prices and living in desirable urbanist areas is “often very expensive.” That reflects both the intrinsic appeal that such areas have to many people and the short supply that they’re in. This is one of the reasons why we need to build more communities featuring walkable urbanism.
98 Responses to “Nobody Goes There Anymore, It’s Too Crowded”
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December 31st, 2008 at 10:54 am
I think trying to build housing in shopping malls is a potentially promising idea.
That’s an old idea:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpZtj1o9Z1I
December 31st, 2008 at 10:57 am
You’re overlooking the sizable dog-owner bloc. See current movie “Marley and Me”. And kids really don’t like being cooped up in condos.
Plus the US government supported wide dispersal of urban suburbs during the Cold War because such are hard to destroy with nuclear warheads.
December 31st, 2008 at 11:02 am
If you are 1-2 miles from a 1 Megaton nuclear airburst, you are fucked no matter how deep a shelter you put in your backyard.
In contrast, you can survive merely by sitting in your basement if you are 15 miles from the city core.
The Cuban Missile Crisis scared the shit out of a lot of people. I suspect that it –and the relatively low capital requirements — fueled the growth of the suburb pattern during the Cold War.
December 31st, 2008 at 11:12 am
In the DC area, walkable urbanism exists in the parts of Arlington County that lie along the Blue and (especially) Orange line corridors as well as near the Silver Spring and Bethesda Metro stations in Montgomery County even though those places are “in the suburbs.”
One could probably argue that Arlington, as well as downtown Silver Spring and Bethesda, are neighborhoods of Washington, DC that happen to lie outside the arbitrary borders of the District of Columbia. These areas have always been at least as urban as anything west of the Park in the District.
The most ambitious new urbanist development I’ve seen in the DC area is King Farm, which is near Shady Grove station. This area was mostly empty 15 years ago, but now it’s a dense, walkable development full of townhouses, parks, centrally located shops, and office space with a shuttle to the metro station. As best as I can tell, the housing stock is mostly full and selling at prices that are somewhat higher than the surrounding suburbs.
It’s also, to my eyes, a bit creepy and artificial looking… but perhaps that’s just because it isn’t old and grimy enough to look like a real city.
December 31st, 2008 at 11:20 am
One could probably argue that Arlington, as well as downtown Silver Spring and Bethesda, are neighborhoods of Washington, DC that happen to lie outside the arbitrary borders of the District of Columbia.
Before 1850, when Congress gave it back to Virginia, Arlington was within the arbitrary boundaries of the District of Columbia.
December 31st, 2008 at 11:24 am
some people a strong preference for big yards?
No offense, but you are hopelessly out of touch w/ middle America. It is not just a small fringe of people that want big yards and it’s this desire that created the burbs all across America. This post just proves you’re an elitist.
December 31st, 2008 at 11:25 am
This makes me think of Springfield Mall and its environs, particularly the nearby Kingstowne area. It’s all very densely developed by suburban standards, but it’s a world built for cars, and the idea of walking or taking a bike from Kingstowne to the mall or the other nearby retail is kinda nervous-making.
But if the concentrated retail and the residential units were in the same place, rather than a few hundred yards away, it would all be a lot easier.
December 31st, 2008 at 11:27 am
I think the point about cities being expensive is not just about the cost of housing, which you might say just reflects high demand. Almost everything is more expensive in a big city – taxes are higher, and private education is often the only palatable option.
December 31st, 2008 at 11:34 am
And by the same token, traditionally a great deal of walkable urbanism took place in small towns rather than in cities
I like to use the example of the towns in old westerns. People walking up and down the street, saloons and banks and churches, apartments up above, houses on side streets, usually a train station nearby – but as small town/rural as anyone could ask for.
December 31st, 2008 at 11:35 am
No offense, but you are hopelessly out of touch w/ middle America. It is not just a small fringe of people that want big yards and it’s this desire that created the burbs all across America. This post just proves you’re an elitist.
Tastes change. I’ve long had a sneaking suspicion that one of the pins that burst the housing bubble was suburban exhaustion. The market for poorly built, hard to maintain McMansions and so on played itself out. Once enough people have a ‘Great Room’ it ceases to be a status symbol. Sure, most folks still equate success with the so-called American Dream, but memes like that change. I have friends with kids who moved to suburbs because that’s what they thought you were supposed to do and now regret it. You are right to infer that suburbs do appeal to the lowest common denominator.
December 31st, 2008 at 11:38 am
It is not just a small fringe of people that want big yards and it’s this desire that created the burbs all across America.
Thank you for checking your get and telling us what it feels.
In fact, the two reasons given by people to explain their preference for suburbs are 1) better schools and 2) lower crime/safter neighborhoods. Neither of those things, of course, have anything to do with yards, lot coverage, or single-family-home style buildings, but are mainly a consequence of greater wealth and lower poverty in suburbs.
December 31st, 2008 at 11:39 am
I’d agree that Silver Spring is a DC neighborhood even though it is (just) outside the District line– it basically caps off the Georgia Avenue corridor. Not so sure about Bethesda.
December 31st, 2008 at 11:41 am
BTW, the wife and I sold our downtown condo because having a kid in a building with no yard, keeping the car in nearby municipal garage, and other details of that style of living were inconvenient.
So now we have single-family house with a yard. On a 4500 square foot lot. In a walkable neighborhood. A little farther out in the same city.
December 31st, 2008 at 11:55 am
Um, the dirt, smells, and schools of rural Indiana are worse than anything I ever encountered in a city. Noise and price, those are fair points, okay. But has no one ever smelled a hog farm? Or been taught “science” by a series of creationist wrestling coaches? The quality of life (even factoring out (lack of) walkability) in rural America is nothing to be proud of.
December 31st, 2008 at 11:56 am
Housing in malls is ridiculous, and comparing it to urbanism is also ridiculous. The comparison only really works if you think of urbanism as “walkable” and “close to retail.” Malls usually provide a limited type of retail and are often cut off from the surrounding areas by large streets and highways, thus requiring cars to get to, say, the grocery store or school or the tailor or the laundromat. Walled gardens, without the beauty. Visit the Natick Collection outside Boston. It’s bizarre.
http://www.nouvelleatnatick.com/
In downtown Long Beach, on the other hand, we have housing in a mall in a downtown area, a redundancy that only developers could think is a good idea. Unlike Natick it’s an open air mall, but this means that there’s one building plopped smack in the middle of the mall parking lot (it’s one of several buildings in the sprawling, blocks-wide mall complex).
http://www.archstoneapartments.com/Apartments/California/Los_Angeles/Archstone_City_Place/
And instead of a Nordstroms and Neiman Marcus we’ve got a Nordstroms Rack and a Walmart. Don’t worry, though, the condos are still way too pricey for most of the people who shop at the mall to afford.
Now if we could take a few of the less successful malls and -convert- them into affordable housing, that might be a worthwhile idea.
December 31st, 2008 at 11:58 am
Aside from adding housing to mall sites, there’s sometimes already transit going to these sites. That transit could be improved or modified to link to other areas better. In addition, because people don’t like losing their yards, carving out new walkable urban parks nearby the new housing can make the denser living more practical, especially for those with kids. Those of us in the smart growth community are advocating a multi-faceted approach to converting and reusing the “built-out” land in a wise and desirable manner.
A ULI report on Charlotte’s Eastland mall holds some interesting ideas for how this can potentially be done on one such site.
December 31st, 2008 at 11:59 am
This housing/shopping is a new trend in Las Vegas – they have been building high rise towers just off of Las Vegas Boulevard and the Strip, Green Valley Ranch has “New York City type lofts” above the shops. I commend this idea, but there is one big flaw – there is no public transportation, and driving it takes well over an hour to get from one side of the city to the other, not during rush hour.
December 31st, 2008 at 12:00 pm
My (not very interesting) story:
We moved from Brooklyn to NJ 26 years ago when my daughter was 2. We had lived in a high rise. I think the most difficult year was the first year, when getting the baby outside on a cold winter day seemed to take forever. A full Saturday was taking the car to a supermarket in another area of Brooklyn. And it left us exhausted.
The first 10 or so years in NJ were very good. There were tons of kids my daughter’s age on our block. The street was very quiet and safe from traffic. As she grew she was able to walk to elementary school and middle school. Most of her friends lived in a walkable distance. The social network that my wife and I made was small and centered around the schools.
Routine family-sized shopping in the suburbs has been much easier. It takes seconds to get in the car (we now have 2) and minutes to get to one of a few super markets. Getting groceries to the car and, when home, from the car to the kitchen is 10x easier. Simple things like garage door openers make a big difference. It would be close to impossible to live where we live without a car. The nearest set of stores is 1.5 miles.
My daughter is finishing high school. High school has not been great. By mid high school kids adapt to the car culture in unpleasant ways. At first it seems like freedom and flexibility, but then its apparent that there is still little to do. The limitation of the suburban environment is crushing. kids yearn for day trips to the city and escape by going to college.
My wife and I are planning on returning somewhere in NYC. The recession and bust in housing values may make that difficult. We’re trying to figure out how to move, live on a limited home budget and pay for college.
December 31st, 2008 at 12:04 pm
It’s worth pointing out that what constitutes ‘walking distance’ has significantly shrunk throughout the years. In the nineteenth century, it was pretty standard to walk two or three miles to a streetcar stop in order to get into town. Nowadays, walking across the mall parking lot is ‘long distance’—hence the endless circling to snag the close-in parking spaces.
Also: arcologies, anyone?
December 31st, 2008 at 12:05 pm
I like to use the example of the towns in old westerns. People walking up and down the street, saloons and banks and churches, apartments up above, houses on side streets, usually a train station nearby – but as small town/rural as anyone could ask for.
Sounds just like the neighborhood I grew up in –smack in the middle of Chicago, Illinois.
December 31st, 2008 at 12:09 pm
We moved from Brooklyn to NJ 26 years ago when my daughter was 2…My daughter is finishing high school. High school has not been great…We’re trying to figure out how to…pay for college.
Well, look on the bright side. Based on your description, I doubt you’ll have to pay for her to attend Harvard.
December 31st, 2008 at 12:09 pm
km,
It’s a process. First you add in the housing. Then some public buildings in the parking lot. Then a school. Then you turn a big chunk of the parking lot and an adjacent lot into a series of residential streets, with strong pedestrian connections to the “mall.” Pretty soon, you’ve got a neighborhood.
December 31st, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Are you nuts? I have seen Dawn of the Dead. Who in their right mind wants to live in a mall when the zombies come?
-GSD
December 31st, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Soparano,
I’ve often observed that in both physical design and lifestyle, traditional urban neighborhoods and traditional small towns have much more in common with each other than either has with sprawling suburbs, or their urban analogues (like housing projects, radiant city highrises, and urban-renewed downtowns).
December 31st, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Are you nuts? I have seen Dawn of the Dead. Who in their right mind wants to live in a mall when the zombies come?
-GSD
What if a 1 megaton bomb creates zombies?
December 31st, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Well to be honest I, having lived in both city and suburb, can appreciate why suburbs would be more appropriate for families (at least my family).
One of the nice things about having a nice big house with lots of open space is that it is a lot less conducive to injury in infants. Another is the ready availability of (safe) playgrounds. Also, the socio-economic homogeneity of the suburbs, I suspect, appeal to parents suspicious of unknown elements and fiercely protective of their children.
One of the things I have observed in Canada is, well, once you have urban-style communities in the suburbs, the schools and safety get almost just as bad, due to the varied economic mix. Unless a builder is going to build exclusively, say, 2000-square foot apartments for families, inevitably some small units will be occupied by larger, poor (and mostly immigrant) families and of course some middle-class parents will feel threatened. And so they go back to the big McMansions.
To illustrate: apartments in one Canadian city would be built close to a quasi-suburban train station (walking distance). This would seem ideal, unless you realise that realtors started telling prospective buyers of middle-class homes that they are not close to the train station and advertising it as an advantage.
And also, you must realise how utterly impractical public transport, even perfectly implemented, would be for a typical American family of 4 and a dog. It is simply incredibly easier to drive them all in a Dodge Caravan than to lug them all along in a train, especially if you are going shopping for lacrosse and soccer gear for the kids. Think about it: a whole load of sports gear and trying to secure the kids on the train.
December 31st, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Sorry italics and bold got messed up.
December 31st, 2008 at 12:34 pm
I take issue with the whole notion of suburbia being “good for the kids”. The entire reason I’m interested in urbanism is that when I was a little kid, some of my family lived in the city (east Baltimore) and some lived in the suburbs and all I ever wanted to do was be in the city all the time because I could go outside and do things without waiting for my parents to ferry me around in the car. Somebody above said kids don’t like being “cooped up” in condos, but I don’t think kids like being “cooped up” in suburban houses either — kids like to go outside and run around and have fun.
It’s the right time of year for “A Christmas Story” which is the perfect example of a kid growing up in the city and being able to do stuff with his pals without waiting for his mom or dad to take him around.
December 31st, 2008 at 12:35 pm
They do this in India and it is a complete disaster
December 31st, 2008 at 12:39 pm
This could be one in which it pays to take a deep breath before declaring a trend. It’s a single article, from a time in which a housing bubble meant people thought they could build and sell anything, and too often could. It also describes new communities whose success we can’t yet judge, unfamiliar names that we can’t be sure are representative, sales that sound mixed at best, and instances in which the key selling feature is that you don’t realize you’re in the mall. That doesn’t sound like a good sales pitch for the concept itself.
It could have the drawbacks of dense living and no greenery combined with the drawbacks of exurban living, with only box stores, chain restaurants, minimal transit options, and no sidewalks. In sum, it might sound a little like perhaps America’s worst example of a major city, Washington (which hmm by coincidence Matt has to cope with). So suppose we just keep an open mind on this one.
Also, it’s not that new a point, although a good one, that small cities like New Haven can have some of the strengths of large ones. And be careful of how that fine book about New Haven is being cited, since it’s something one can read as about the rise and subsequent decline and fall.
December 31st, 2008 at 12:44 pm
“No offense, but you are hopelessly out of touch w/ middle America. It is not just a small fringe of people that want big yards and it’s this desire that created the burbs all across America. This post just proves you’re an elitist.”
I wonder why homes in the city sell for double or triple/sq foot then?
Posters like this cannot imagine that someone might have different tastes than they do.
I live in Oak Park, il. One of the walkable suburbs, and costs there for the same house are 2X what they are in Plainfield. There is huge demand for being able to walk to a coffee shop and your kids to school, a few resturants to walk to, and for dad/mom to take the subway into downtown in 25 minutes. Any place that is not filled with bombed out housing that fits this bill is extremely expensive in Chicago. I make good money and can barely afford the worst neighborhood in Oak Park.
The reason for it being expensive is high demand relative to supply. The clown who wrote the quote at the top does not appear to understand economics 101, or the point of Matt’s post. He thinks that Matt wants to turn all communities into dense urban areas. What a moron.
December 31st, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Let me know when you move to New Haven. I suspect the answer is never, unless you have a death-wish.
And frankly, Georgetown is a lot more preferable for me than Manhattan. It is convenient, nice, upbeat, and without most of the annoying disadvantages of Manhattan, like impossibly to find parking or terminally dirty streets. I suspect most Americans would prefer the same as well.
December 31st, 2008 at 12:48 pm
To all those so far who have auditioned to replace Mixner: Sorry, but you just don’t have that relentlessly grating quality we’re looking for. But we’ll keep your resume and headshot on file.
December 31st, 2008 at 12:48 pm
I see a lot of people making these kinds of statements. They pick a couple of things that are tougher to do without a car and act like that makes everything else moot. Do you have to take your dog shopping for lacrosse gear? Assuming your kids can walk, is it that hard to get them to follow you on a train? Can’t you take a taxi back with your big bags of equipment?
Really, taking one solvable problem and acting like it negates the 99% of the time when you aren’t faced with that problem seems a little silly.
December 31st, 2008 at 12:49 pm
No offense, but you are hopelessly out of touch w/ middle America. It is not just a small fringe of people that want big yards and it’s this desire that created the burbs all across America. This post just proves you’re an elitist.
And this just proves that you’re stupid. The mass popularity of more-square-feet-than-the-lot-size McMansions should show just how much most people value a big yard. It’s not to say that all things being equal most people wouldn’t rather have more of a yard than less of one — it’s just that it comes way down on the priority list for the overwhelming majority of people. Brand new giant house with no yard or old rancher with a tenth of an acre of grass? People generally pick the McMansion. Exurb place spread out on a half acre, or smaller house in an inner ring suburb with a 15 minute commute? Most people pick the closer-in place if they can afford it. A farmhouse with a lot of land and rural schools, or a smaller and more expensive house with a tiny yard in a good suburban school district? I know what anyone with kids will pick.
Really, unless you have a medium-sized-or-bigger dog, yard size is normally your last priority. What people in cities like Chicago and New York (and increasingly DC and the bigger cities out West) have realized is that you can get many of the same benefits of the small house in the attractive suburbs in the city itself, plus you have the added benefit of walkable restaurants as well. Really, the only sticking point now is the schools — and where public schools are good or affordable private alternatives are to be had, city living is outrageously expensive.
December 31st, 2008 at 12:50 pm
nester,
Nice post, but the for my family we have basically all that you have above, plus the ability to walk to about 5 resturants, 2 coffee shops, the train that comes every 7 minutes every day to work, schools, pharmacy, an art district, ice cream, music and martial arts studios, walk to parks and tennis, bike to the pool, parks, and more tennis, bike to downtown and the Y, and bike to 15 more eateries.
It is a nice life in a walkable community.
December 31st, 2008 at 12:54 pm
I can’t recount how many dystopian visions of the future featured people who live out their entire lives in shopping malls. For my part I can’t imagine anything more soul-sucking than a mall, and I can’t imagine that it would be at all appealing to people who like to, you know, go outside once in a while.
Secondly, I can’t imagine how you could shoehorn livable space into a shopping mall anyway. The buildings simply aren’t designed to be condos or apartments; you’d wind up tearing the whole thing down and rebuilding from scratch anyway.
The other problem is that malls tend to be put in the middle of nowhere – they construct them where land is cheap and plentiful and where there’s plenty of highway access (which should but usually doesn’t correspond to mass transit access). They’re surrounded by highway and not much else. So let’s say you did put a high rise condo on top of a shopping mall – it would be surrounded on all sides by several hundred yards of parking lot and nothing beyond. You could walk to the stores below, but not any parks, not to where you work, and you couldn’t make it to any other retailers.
December 31st, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Somebody above said kids don’t like being “cooped up” in condos, but I don’t think kids like being “cooped up” in suburban houses either
Suburban neighborhood are the worst for being cooped up, once you get to a certain age. I lived in a small town on a decent sized lot. However, there were certainly plenty of places that were easily within walking/bike riding distance. Since the main streets were all 25mph, and bike paths were built it was relatively safe. I think that the description of small towns and urban walkable communities being comparable is pretty apt. Urban towns that are walkable doesn’t mean high-rise condos. It means not zoning a 5×5 mile square for housing only. Many small towns are far more walkable than any suburban neighborhood and many people live in a single family residences in these small towns. It’s still considered “safe” despite having to go to school with people from various socio-economic backgrounds (oh, the horrors).
December 31st, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Do you have to take your dog shopping for lacrosse gear?
Well, say if the vet and the pet salon and the sports-shop are in the same suburban mall? That would be one trip wouldn’t it?
December 31st, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Living in apartments or condos connected to a mall probably would be terrible for families with children, but I could see the attraction for older “empty-nesters,” especially if the mall complex included several restaurants and a cinema. Older people often like to do their exercise walking in malls, too.
December 31st, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Living next to a mall always seemed pretty cheesy to me. That said, when some friends of mine were living in a Pentagon City apartment building, it also struck me as ridiculously convenient: Directly above a full-size supermarket; 50 yards from an outdoor plaza w/ restaurants/bars; close to a Metro stop (w/ a 20 minute ride to downtown DC); and obviously nearby to everything in the mall.
It may not be the best move for those who have impulse control problems regarding their buying, though…
December 31st, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Stephen: under your scenario, I’d pile the kids in the car when I wanted something. Under my scenario, I’d hand my kid a dollar and say, “go down the street and get your father a newspaper while I finish my beer.” I know which one I prefer.
Your scenarios only make sense when there’s some necessity for the kids to be constantly dependent for transportation from the parents, requiring every activity to turn into a “family trip.” But that’s only necessary when nothing is within walking, biking, or transit distance.
Also, you can’t find street parking in Manhattan? Amateur. The parking situation in Georgetown is pretty bad (why? few transit alternatives in order to get there).
December 31st, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Well also what sort of mall are we talking about, too? The sort with Abercrombie and Target, etc, i.e., good malls, or crappy ones? Because if all there is in the mall is Old Navy, then by god, no.
December 31st, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Let’s not even get started on Manhattan. I have friends whose families pay more for monthly parking spots in Manhattan than most people pay for rent in other cities.
December 31st, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Under my scenario, I’d hand my kid a dollar and say, “go down the street and get your father a newspaper while I finish my beer.”
Well, the allowable basis for that would be if it was a very safe neighbourhood. Which is not the case at this moment in most of the remotely urban places in America right now. That might change, of course, but I am still waiting for it.
December 31st, 2008 at 1:15 pm
Nothing really new here; there’s a location like this in Tirana (Qendra Tregtare Europiane).
December 31st, 2008 at 1:20 pm
> Which is not the case at this moment in most
> of the remotely urban places in America right now.
I guess that depends on your definition of “most”. I would estimate that such behavior is both safe and common in 80% of the City of Chicago proper, population 3 million, today. For those who hate cities I guess 20% qualifies as “most”.
December 31st, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Stephen, you keep confusing “walkable” with “urban.” That and, quite honestly, there are mass numbers of small cities/walkable neighborhoods that are safe. The problem is that they’re also expensive.
Seriously, is it really considered a “given” that sending a kid down the street to the drugstore by himself is inherently dangerous? As in, more dangerous than driving to the mall?
December 31st, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Well, the allowable basis for that would be if it was a very safe neighbourhood. Which is not the case at this moment in most of the remotely urban places in America right now.
Eh? Got a cite for that?
For me, I think my ideal place to be a kid would be one of those central Brooklyn neighborhoods like Midwood or Borough Park.
December 31st, 2008 at 1:38 pm
I’d only like this if the residents are given priority parking, and priority in things like restaurant reservations and the line at the grocery store. Otherwise this is a recipe for aggravation where everything you do is one big line.
December 31st, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Well, the allowable basis for that would be if it was a very safe neighbourhood. Which is not the case at this moment in most of the remotely urban places in America right now. That might change, of course, but I am still waiting for it.
One of the advantages of raising children in an urban environment, it seems to me, is that your children don’t grow up to be marks. They spend their formative years assessing danger in a complicated and multifaceted environment, and as a result don’t turn into quivering quislings who cross the street to avoid people of an opposite race later in life.
I see tons of kids unsupervised on the streets and subways in NYC. They seem to be doing quite fine. They’re probably smarter than I was at their age.
December 31st, 2008 at 1:51 pm
And frankly, Georgetown is a lot more preferable for me than Manhattan. It is convenient, nice, upbeat, and without most of the annoying disadvantages of Manhattan, like impossibly to find parking or terminally dirty streets. I suspect most Americans would prefer the same as well.
Considering that the entire population of DC (coudn’t find the population of Georgetown alone) is about 580,000, while that of Manhattan is 1.6 million, I suspect you’re wrong. If most Americans would prefer it, they’d move their instead of DC.
Well, the allowable basis for that would be if it was a very safe neighbourhood. Which is not the case at this moment in most of the remotely urban places in America right now. That might change, of course, but I am still waiting for it.
Complete nonsense. NYC, for example, is one of the safest places in America.
December 31st, 2008 at 2:00 pm
I am frankly rather astonished that people are seizing onto the Georgetown vs. Manhattan comparison. I thought it was a given that Georgetown is nicer than Manhattan. Nobody is arguing that Staten Island is nicer than Greenwich, CT.
And Tyro, I forgot to see, I wanted to know if the neighbourhood I liked was close to what you were thinking about.
December 31st, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Forgot to say*
December 31st, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Unless, of course, one is comparing Georgetown to UES.
December 31st, 2008 at 2:09 pm
my (not very interesting) story, contd:
Final irony: my daughter, although she’s has almost never been to Brooklyn, casually says things like “I wouldn’t mind it if we moved to Brooklyn”. Brooklyn is trendy now. Not so much 16 years ago.
also, mickslam (36): yes, we would have made different decisions if we had it to do again. But could we afford your neighborhood? Is it in Brooklyn or NY?
December 31st, 2008 at 2:11 pm
This kind of thing is pretty common in Asia and seems to work well. Each time one visits the US the decay is palpable beginning with the primitive airports continuing on the second class road network and most obviously with the backward mobile networks and ultra-slow internet. It is a good job Americans don’t travel much as it would cause riots when they realised they rubbish they out up with.
December 31st, 2008 at 2:15 pm
I, for one, can’t wait to move into a shiney new corporate arcology.
December 31st, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Maybe not in NY, DC or San Francisco, but in most parts of the country, the “urbanist” developments in the suburbs are at least as expensive as comparable places in the core cities. (Where I live, condos in the most highly touted urb-in-the-burb developments cost more than units in the city’s version of the Dakota.) Unless you plan never to leave the campus, you’ll still need to drive as much as a lawn-mowing suburbanite. And the new faux-cities are usually zoned into the most traffic-heavy parts of the suburbs.
December 31st, 2008 at 2:23 pm
I am frankly rather astonished that people are seizing onto the Georgetown vs. Manhattan comparison. I thought it was a given that Georgetown is nicer than Manhattan.
Manhattan: Park Avenue, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center, MOMA, the Village Vanguard, Central Park, Rockefeller Center, Madison Avenue, Barneys, Bergdorfs, Saks, Times Square, Broadway theatres, Off-Broadway, Madison Square Garden concerts, the Knicks, the Rangers, Le Cirque, Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, Blue Water Grill, Aquavit, Nobu, Chanterelle, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, Museum of Natural History, Birdland, the Blue Note, the Apollo, Bryant Park, the Strand, Union Square, Columbia University, NYU, Yeshiva University, Washington Square Park, Michael’s, Shakespeare in the Park, the Public Theatre, Chinatown, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Cloisters, Grand Central Terminal, Little Italy, Macy’s, Bloomingdales, the NY Public Library, the Plaza, Wall Street, Trinity Church, SoHo, the United Nations, the Chelsea galleries, Bowery Ballroom, Arlene’s Grocery, the Lower East Side, the Metropolitan Opera, etc. etc. etc.
Georgetown: Um, well, uh……
December 31st, 2008 at 2:24 pm
But could we afford your neighborhood? Is it in Brooklyn or NY?
Brooklyn is NY.
December 31st, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Manhattan is also a borough of 1.6 million, as noted above, while Georgetown is a neighborhood. It’s not really a valid comparison. It’s like saying Park Slope is nicer than Iowa.
I’m sure some neighborhoods in Manhattan are nicer than Georgetown, and some are not as nice. I find it highly unlikely that Georgetown’s nice than all of them.
But having only been there a handful of times in my life, I’m largely ignorant of DC’s character, which is why I refrain from commenting on it…
December 31st, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Small world — I actually had friends who lived in that exact building (until they moved to Idaho for new jobs). If you were young and childless, it was a very cool place to live — lots of restaurants and a movie theater close by.
One of the better ones I’ve seen is Paseo Colorado in Pasadena, where they were smart enough to put in a grocery store along with everything else. So far, I’ve liked a lot of the “urban living” solutions that Pasadena has come up with, including apartments with light rail running under them, which would be very handy for people who work downtown.
I do think the biggest problem is people with kids. You can probably wrangle one kid around a condo/apartment and still afford private school, but two or more would get problematic very quickly.
December 31st, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Don, you’re crazy. I raised my dog in the city, in the heart of downtown Boston. It was great. He had a million dog friends that the hung out with in the Comm. Ave Mall. City dogs are FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR better socialized than the crazy nutcase hyper-territorial dogs we’ve met since we moved out to western Maine. I think dogs are just like people–the ones in the city like mingling and interacting, and understand that they have to share space with other dogs. Suburban dogs are paranoid and hate anyone coming near their property.
December 31st, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Also,all the major malls in Boson have residential, hotel, and office space built above them in towers. See, Copley Place, the Prudential Center, the Longwood Galleria, The Mandarin Oriental etc. Its only for the super rich, but people seem to really like it.
As for “kids don’t like being cooped up in Condos,” again, are you crazy? Kids in the ‘burbs are the cooped up ones. They can’t go anywhere. I think it would be pretty awesome to be able to take the elevator down to the video game store, then meet my friends for fries at cokes at the food court without needing a ride from mom.
December 31st, 2008 at 2:40 pm
“And also, you must realise how utterly impractical public transport, even perfectly implemented, would be for a typical American family of 4 and a dog. It is simply incredibly easier to drive them all in a Dodge Caravan than to lug them all along in a train, especially if you are going shopping for lacrosse and soccer gear for the kids. Think about it: a whole load of sports gear and trying to secure the kids on the train.”
In the city you can walk to the field.
December 31st, 2008 at 2:45 pm
And also, you must realise how utterly impractical public transport, even perfectly implemented, would be for a typical American family of 4 and a dog.
Don’t take the dog.
December 31st, 2008 at 2:52 pm
No, NYC is one of the safest cities in America. It is freakishly crime free for it’s size. In general, the larger the city, the higher the crime rate. While there are exceptions, like plucky little Baltimore being as crime prone as Philly, New York bucks the trend dramatically.
However, it has a higher than average crime rate compared to the nation as a whole – about 600 violent crimes per 100,000 people compared to about 470/100,000 for the USA.
December 31st, 2008 at 3:04 pm
I grew up in the city of Philadelphia. We had a big house with a big yard. There was convenient public transportation. We could walk to many stores and easily buy what we needed and carry it home. We had to; we never had a car.
Now I live in a DC suburb. I have a tiny house with barely any yard. I can’t walk to anything except other tiny houses with tiny yards. While the Metro is nice, the buses suck. To use the Metro, I need to drive to it.
December 31st, 2008 at 3:04 pm
I wrote this originally, and judging by the somewhat hateful responses the sarcasm was lost in the tubes. My point was that Matt comes from a super-urban perspective and I think his views reflect that to a large extent. I’ll try again in 2009.
December 31st, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Well we who obey Fermi-Dirac laws can’t just pile everything into the same place like you Bosons do.
December 31st, 2008 at 3:09 pm
Could be worse, Dustin, you could be this guy.
December 31st, 2008 at 3:10 pm
It’s interesting that everyone points to schools as the problem with staying in cities with kids. We could change the way we fund schools so that there were not such disparities between city and suburbs and rural areas. Imagine if the lower income kids were distributed around to more schools instead of concentrated into a few bad ones? Oops. That’s right–we live in the real world. (But seriously–why do we consider this a completely unchangeable problem? We’re now talking quite seriously about universal healthcare. When can we start talking about equalizing school funding? Now that property values are falling, it seems like it should be something we could at least think about changing.)
December 31st, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Well we who obey Fermi-Dirac laws can’t just pile everything into the same place like you Bosons do.
Nice.
December 31st, 2008 at 3:23 pm
I’m late to this party, but would like to point out that the Columbia Mall (suburban Maryland) is at the center of, and is surrounded by residential housing that was built in the 70’s and 80’s as a part of a Utopian, walkable collection of neighborhoods. The mall is like any other inside, but there are thousands of units of single family homes within walking distance.
People talk about new urbanism like it is a brand new concept, without discussing the experiments, some successful, some less so, that have gone on in the not too distant past.
December 31st, 2008 at 4:21 pm
That will mean, yes, converting existing elements of the build environment rather than simply abandoning everything and trying to get everyone to move willy-nilly into downtown Cleveland.
We’d all like to flee to the Cleve, Yglesias, but we fight those urges, because we have responsibilities.
December 31st, 2008 at 4:35 pm
As we used to say in physics class, we’re all bosons on this bus.
December 31st, 2008 at 4:37 pm
A viable public transport option would suit this family quite well, actually, especially if they can only afford the one car. Try getting two parents to work and back at different hours, two kids to school and back, and still get down to your lacrosse games with just the one Dodge Caravan! There’s no denying that it’s easier for families to stock their fridge by filling the trunk at the supermarket, but plenty of car-owning households find that it saves time and money when not all of their trips are made by car.
As for Matt’s post, though – I can’t really get on board with the idea of a shopping mall somehow having anything to do with “urbanism.” Sure, I guess if they contained housing they might start introducing luxury supermarkets and more everyday stuff. But malls are not affordable urban retail districts that can organically respond to local demand, especially as doing so would compromise their appeal to the far-flung shoppers who drive in from afar to use their free parking and buy the sort of stuff you wouldn’t need to nip down from your condo for.
Plus, until they start putting schools, medical services, parks, churches, and so forth into malls (let’s not!), their potential residents would continue to drive cars roughly as frequently as everyone else in the surrounding suburbs. However, you could make the same places more walkable by limiting the ground-level size of new developments, adding more high-density housing near existing non-mall commercial districts, and requiring large-scale housing developers to affordably supply a certain amount of space to useful commerce and civic facilities…
…but that’s assuming that Americans would rather live in a well-rounded neighborhood than upstairs from Macy’s and Panda Express. I could be dead wrong about that.
December 31st, 2008 at 6:27 pm
This is similar to what happens in Hong Kong, though it’s slightly modified. The metro/subway company (the HK MTR) is in essence a property developer. They build malls with apartments atop their subway stations.
This creates a very virtuous cycle, which results in a very stong incentive for them to run very frequent, efficient, fast and clean subway services to their malls, thus bringing shoppers. The more shoppers, the more valuable the residential property above the mall.
It’s a very organic growth process and has led to the MTR being quite a solidly performing company.
It’s got a lot to recommend it as a model to follow in many, many parts of the world and reminds us of the inherent importance of transport as a really truly fundamental part of a thriving city’s architecture.
December 31st, 2008 at 7:11 pm
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December 31st, 2008 at 7:14 pm
but that’s assuming that Americans would rather live in a well-rounded neighborhood than upstairs from Macy’s and Panda Express.
I would be quite happy to live atop Saks or Neiman Marcus, actually. I don’t see the complaint here. Malls, by their nature, are efficient because they sell a large volume of high-value goods to a wide, non-immediate-distance clientele. The resident in the mall benefits from the large, externally-driven turnover. To illustrate: a HK resident benefits from cheap shopping because a lot of foreigners shop there.
Speaking of HK:
They build malls with apartments atop their subway stations.
This creates a very virtuous cycle, which results in a very stong incentive for them to run very frequent, efficient, fast and clean subway services to their malls
Have you actually lived in HK? Because I have, and I cannot think of one person I know who wouldn’t want HK to have more suburban residential space, at the expense of great tranport. It is probably the most uncomfortably cramped place in the world next to Tokyo.
By the way, public transport in HK any time between Easter and Labour Day is just a hellish torture because it is so hellishly hot there. Sure some are air-coned but you still have to be exposed to the heat at some point, and it is by no means tolerable for the average American. Yet you could not really drive in HK because the traffic is bull. HK residential arrangements are hardly a model to be emulated.
December 31st, 2008 at 7:51 pm
That’s because it was…a farm. No, really. It was the last farm in Gaithersburg. I grew up there (we moved there in 1968), and the King family held out for years after all the other farms were gone, because they already had more money than God.
Really? You’re right about the grime, and it is artificial. But I think they did a pretty good job of designing the houses so they look like they’ve been there a long time. Some of the historic infill houses in my old Nashville neighborhood look a bit off, and I don’t get that impression from the ones in King Farm.
Compare it to the other New Urban development in G’burg—whose name escapes me at the moment—which looks a half-assed studio backlot.
December 31st, 2008 at 8:33 pm
I beg your pardon, sir, but you are talking about my home town.
May the ghost of Pierre L’Enfant reach up from the grave and snatch you bald!
January 1st, 2009 at 2:53 am
Compare it to the other New Urban development in G’burg—whose name escapes me at the moment—which looks a half-assed studio backlot.
The Kentlands? That one’s pretty well-known in urban planning circles, so I checked it out when I visited DC in May 2007. I was less than impressed — the housing looked pretty nice, but the neighborhood isn’t really urban. In terms of how the area operates, it’s still just a bedroom community an hour outside of Washington, not any kind of real small town. The commercial area has the same mix of retail and restaurants as any other new suburbia; I doubt many of the workers there can afford to live in the nearby neighborhood.
The physical form of the Kentlands is improved compared to comparable suburb, but they shouldn’t kid themselves; it’s an improved suburb, not a new kind of urbanism.
January 1st, 2009 at 9:40 am
Let me know when you move to New Haven. I suspect the answer is never, unless you have a death-wish.
I live in New Haven. I like it here. I actually live on a street where, if you go a few blocks in one direction, you’d think my neighborhood was a post-apocalyptic survivor’s camp, but if you go a few blocks in the other, it looks totally upper-middle class. My upstairs neighbor is a cat lady who only leaves her apartment to go to work, but there’s Somali immigrant family down the street with some adorable kids who play soccer on our block all the time (there is VERY little traffic, and their mom’s always watching them). I feel totally safe walking my (relatively small) dog there at night.
January 1st, 2009 at 12:37 pm
You have a very good point, Lila. However, I am speaking in generalities. I know my college town, Middletown, to be pretty unsafe (you do run a genuine stray-bullet risk when walking anywhere close to downtown, even in broad daylight; someone was shot in the leg just last month). I have only visited New Haven, not resided there, but my Yale friends tell me it is actually worse in New Haven, and frankly, it is hard for me picture what being more unsafe than Middletown is like.
I remember, with some hilarity, the Yale college rep addressing the question of safety. She fumbled it pretty badly. The only thing she came up with was Urban Outfitters on Broadway; hardly helpful.
January 1st, 2009 at 9:16 pm
No wonder you’d like to live at Neiman Marcus!
January 2nd, 2009 at 4:16 am
Building housing in shopping malls is a recipe for Intersection Valhallah: the ultimate achievement of life clustered around transportation nodes and plastic designer place-making. Accept this new age of real estate and for the sake of walkability, you cede any value of history, memory and wide-scale mixed-use and mixed-communities as sustainable development. Don’t take me there. I’d rather sit at home in an old crumbling city with a shopping bag over my head. But call me an old-fashioned European! See my blog post on Natick:
January 3rd, 2009 at 3:46 am
The planners of Kentlands had a much more ambitious vision, but it was such a new concept in suburban development that no bank would finance it. Thus the compromises in the development as built. Still, it’s far more pleasant and walkable than most subdivisions, and it helped pave the way for more genuinely urbanist projects that have followed.
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