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QUOTE It doesn’t solve the problem to buy a hybrid and retrofit your house if all of that takes place 20 miles from your job. You’d still consume more energy (“suburban single family green”) than an urban household without the latest green tech (“urban single family”). And that has as much to do with associated transportation emissions as the size and efficiency of your home.
The implication is that if more suburbanites opted to move out of their low-density detached homes and into walkable, mixed-use urban communities (or if we retrofitted suburbia to better resemble such places), right there we’d be on our way to taking a real whack at carbon emissions. UNQUOTE
I like the retail-on-ground-floor/apartments-above model. Standardize away. Most towns and cities could use more of it.
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Leinberger, an urban land-use strategist and professor at the University of Michigan, includes the Grocery Anchored Neighborhood Center on his list of the 19 standard real estate product types dominant in post-war America. Also on the list: suburban detached starter homes, big-box anchored power centers, multi-tenant bulk warehousing and self-storage facilities. All of these products are designed for drivable suburban communities. (...)
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But we overbuilt these 19 models, he says.
“We built the wrong product in the wrong location, and nobody wants it any more,” he says. “That’s the reason for the housing crisis, and therefore the mortgage crisis, and therefore the Great Recession.”
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...Leinberger estimates that a good 90 percent of new development in the [DC] area has lately been planned for walkable, high-density living... These are the real estate products Leinberger believes we’ll need going forward: ground-floor retail with rental apartments on top, hotel/convention centers with condos above and a subway corridor below. These models may very well become standardized, too.
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Fascinating talk by Charles Marohn - at about 5min., I was reminded of Gordon Price's "Motordom"… Must think about the two in tandem… Also, his talk touches on the problem of down- or offloading by senior levels of government to lower levels of government. And just get a load of the talk at around 9min. So true, so sad. "We're so obsessed with moving cars…" It's all about the cars, which are hogging everything related to infrastructure, and it's sapping the economy. Not "a value-creation machine." The way we physically structure our (suburban) environments retards innovation, which is based on interaction.
Based on Boston.com's photo-essay of "human landscapes in SW Florida," Kaid Benfield's blog entry notes:
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Among land use characteristics, poor street connectivity is the best predictor of a neighborhood's low rate of walking, and the second best predictor of a high rate of driving.
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The images drive (no pun intended) that point home...
Must-see photo essay:
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Many homes there are empty and have been for years. Huge developments sit partially completed among densely built up neighborhoods and swampland. A guest stated that there were "enough housing lots in Charlotte County to last for more than 100 years". Boom and bust residential development has drastically affected parts of southwest Florida for decades now, and I spent some time (with the help of Google Earth), looking around the area. With permission from the fine folks at Google, here are a few glimpses at development in southwest Florida. (26 photos total)
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Nice presentation by Ellen Dunham-Jones on retrofitting suburbia. "We need to retrofit the corridors" - so true. Let new urbanism do a do-over of arterials. "Restore the local ecology" - restore the original wetlands: hmm, that's what the City of Victoria should have done at the View St. and Vancouver St. intersection! Another idea: "eco-acre transfer." Possible problems: astro-turf and urban streetscapes but suburban parking ratios.
Discussion of Freiburg suburb, Vauban, and its "car-free" environment:
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Street parking, driveways and home garages are generally forbidden in this experimental new district on the outskirts of Freiburg, near the French and Swiss borders. Vauban’s streets are completely “car-free” — except the main thoroughfare, where the tram to downtown Freiburg runs, and a few streets on one edge of the community.
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In Germany, a country that is home to Mercedes-Benz and the autobahn, life in a car-reduced place like Vauban has its own unusual gestalt. The town is long and relatively narrow, so that the tram into Freiburg is an easy walk from every home. Stores, restaurants, banks and schools are more interspersed among homes than they are in a typical suburb. Most residents, like Ms. Walter, have carts that they haul behind bicycles for shopping trips or children’s play dates.
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The original buildings have long since been torn down. The stylish row houses that replaced them are buildings of four or five stories, designed to reduce heat loss and maximize energy efficiency, and trimmed with exotic woods and elaborate balconies; free-standing homes are forbidden.
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A great post by Ryan Avent critiquing the notion of "sunk costs," particularly as (speciously) applied to suburbia. In particular, Avent shows why, when talking about suburban housing, the concept of "sunk cost" is not (or should not be) a disincentive to selling.
Have had this article open in a browser tab for days now -- time to bookmark. Along with posts by CEOs for Cities, or Richard Florida, this article too points to the effect that gasoline prices are having on suburban housing, and on the "sudden" desirability of urban living. (Well, I say "sudden" because I've *NEVER* understood why anyone would want to live in suburbs instead of living in cities/ densely packed neighbourhoods where you just have to walk a block or two, or less, to find social activity...)
From the article, QUOTE:
"Expensive oil is going to transform the American culture as radically as cheap oil did," predicts David Mogavero, a Sacramento-based architect and smart-growth proponent.
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Even though the area's housing market has been wracked by price drops of 25% in the last year and one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country, Mr. Friedman says he already has sold nine of 28 town houses near downtown that he recently completed, and three more are under contract, "which is not bad considering the dismal state of the Sacramento real-estate market."
Mr. Morris, the developer, says the housing downturn is hurting the places that have the "dumbest growth. Smart growth works when the rest of it doesn't."
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"Expensive oil is going to transform the American culture as radically as cheap oil did," predicts David Mogavero, a Sacramento-based architect and smart-growth proponent.
"The New Urbanism and suburban sprawl have something in common: they’re uncool. New Urbanism is uncool because it is basically traditional; modernism is still the thing in architecture, notes Andrés Duany, the most influential New Urbanist."
For some reason, City Journal is impossible to annotate (neither highlights and consequently "stickies" work), which is too bad. Some good ideas in this article, but I can't mark it up.
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A gifted crew of architects and planners, they have changed the conversation about urban planning in the United States. They reject conventional postwar developers’ essentially quantitative, two-dimensional, single-use-oriented blueprints for residential subdivisions and office parks in favor of a qualitative, three-dimensional, mixed-use approach to designing neighborhoods and towns that generally involves reliance on traditional architectural styles.
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Perhaps the New Urbanists should cherish their outsider status. A gifted crew of architects and planners, they have changed the conversation about urban planning in the United States. They reject conventional postwar developers’ essentially quantitative, two-dimensional, single-use-oriented blueprints for residential subdivisions and office parks in favor of a qualitative, three-dimensional, mixed-use approach to designing neighborhoods and towns that generally involves reliance on traditional architectural styles.
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Fascinating article on how planned "new urbanist" American suburbs are being studied by international delegations (specifically China) for replication in those countries. Kind of scary.... (Blogged this, April 18/08)
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Members of the group studied the streetscape, the golf course, the spa, the cybercafé, the health care amenities and the design of the single-family homes at Sun City Festival, a 3,000-acre, planned community for people over 55. They commented on the cleanliness and orderliness of it all.
The 25 Chinese who toured the Del Webb development were not seniors planning their retirement but government officials and their spouses, a couple of architects and a banker. Their mission: study American suburbia with an eye toward replicating it back home.
For good or bad, the USA's suburbs have become a living laboratory for the world. Developing countries contending with explosive population growth and economic expansion are looking here for hints about how to manage growing cities. For many, modern suburbia — a largely American concept and lifestyle for more than 50 years — is a nirvana worth emulating. Others want to avoid it.
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Add Sticky Note"They both admire and fear it," says Robert Lang, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. "There are two lessons they take out of the U.S.: unfettered development or sprawl and an appreciation for well-done, master-planned communities."
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Yule Heibel on 2008-04-19Eeek!
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