   The Washington Post, September 1, 1996, pp. C1, C2.


   Putting Some 'City' Back in the Suburbs.

      Sounds Interesting --  Too Bad It Doesn't Work

   By Alex Marshall (Alex Marshall is a staff writer for the
   Virginia Pilot in Norfolk and a regular contributor to
   Metropolis magazine in New York.)


   They are proliferating in former farm fields and distant
   suburbs all around Washington, these clusters of brick row
   houses that look as though they were airlifted out of
   Georgetown. Some are imposing, New England style Victorians
   with wrap-around front porches. Others are affixed with
   steeply angled stoops that suggest kids playing stick ball
   and neighbors swapping tales.

   Also known as neo-traditionalism, New Urbanism is the
   architectural and town-planning movement that proposes to
   cure the ills of contemporary suburban life -- from sterile
   communities to cookie-cutter architecture to disaffected
   politics -- by refashioning subdivisions to resemble
   traditional small towns or big-city neighborhoods.

   In these communities, or so the spiel goes, life will once
   again resemble the close-knit neighborhoods where some of
   our grandparents were rased. Families will live close
   together in homes and apartments that front on streets;
   they will walk down sidewalks to corner grocery stores and
   cafes. Young people will once again live next to old, rich
   next to poor.

   It's an idyllic picture, and one that is immediately
   appealing to anyone who has spent hours running errands
   along a crowded, chainstore-lined suburban boulevard or
   lives on a suburban cul-de-sac. It is a concept that has
   caught the imagination of social thinkers nationwide,
   moving from the pages of planning journals to the cover of
   Newsweek, the pages of the Wall Street Journal and to
   dozens of other mainstream publications

   There's only one problem: New Urbanism doesn't work. It's
   proponents are selling something they can't deliver without
   charging a far higher price, and without making changes far
   more fundamental than redesigning a few homes. To
   understand why, it's necessary to look more carefully at
   what we today call the suburbs and how they took form.

   Cities are products of something. They represent the
   effect, principally, of transportation systems. The classic
   19th and early 20th century neighborhoods that many people
   love, and which New Urbanism apes, were created by the
   extension of streetcar lines. Levittown was a product of a
   new car culture. The mega-malls and grab bag of
   subdivisions that surround Washington are products of the
   Beltway and the rest of the superhighway system that laces
   the region.

   New Urbanist developments are supposed to reduce the
   influence of the car. The idea is that people will live in
   small neighborhoods with houses clustered within walking
   distance of a town center. They will have narrower streets
   to encourage more walking and less driving. Kentlands, a
   much-touted subdivision outside Gaithersburg [Maryland],
   was one of the earliest examples of this genre. Haymount
   has been proposed in Virginia's Caroline County, on the
   Rappahanock River just outside Fredricksburg. Other
   less-heralded renditions are sprouting in other areas of
   Maryland and Virginia, and indeed around major cities all
   over the country.

   The problem is that, while these developments mimic the old
   19th century streetcar neighborhoods, they keep the same
   transportation system that produces conventional suburbs.
   In other words, current New Urban developments follow the
   standard pattern for subdivision development. They sit
   right off a main highway. They often have but a single
   entrance. They have winding roads that are just slightly
   less confusing than cul-de-sacs.

   They are, in effect, subdivisions masquerading as small
   towns, except with the homes pushed up to the street and a
   few front porches thrown on. So what you get, at best, is
   a neighborhood that looks like a Georgetown, but function
   like any other subdivision built off the Beltway.

   As a result, it should not surprise us that such places are
   not changing how people live. A resident will still drive
   to a Wal-Mart for a toaster or a McDonald's for a
   hamburger. Because a subdivision is essentially isolated,
   these places do not have the diversity of people, the
   interplay of new neighbors and familiar faces that
   characterize both a small town or a big city. By and large,
   they draw a homogenous group of residents because their
   homes are targeted mostly at upper middle income buyers;
   diversity remains an illusive goal. And because people
   don't actually work within these new towns, they tend not
   to shop there. As a result, the car remains the same
   dominant force that it is in traditional suburbs.

   Indeed, the Achilles' heel of New Urbanist developments has
   been their inability to change the way people shop, and the
   way retailers locate their stores. A case in point is
   Kentlands, where residents had initially hoped to have main
   street-style shopping rather than a traditional suburban
   strip mall. But at the developers' insistence, the center
   was built on the edge of the subdivision with parking lots
   facing the high way -- just like most other suburbs.

   Even when developers have gone along with the vision of the
   New Traditionalists, their creations have not worked
   commercially. A corner store on a sidewalk, more dependent
   on walk-in traffic, cannot make a go of it without more of
   a Manhattan-like density of people around it, or at least
   much higher than anything New Urbanists are proposing. To
   be viable, such a store would also have to be one component
   in a network of traditional streets, not highways and
   Wal-Marts.

   To truly change the standard suburban style of living, with
   its dependence on the car and the heartbeat of the Beltway,
   you have to make more fundamental changes, and more
   politically difficult ones, than altering a few front
   porches or setback rules. You have to mention distasteful
   words like growth controls parking restrictions and more
   investment in mass transit.

   Of all these, metropolitan area growth controls are the
   most important. If Washington somehow managed a coordinated
   effort to limit development on new land, a task that would
   require the region to face its political fragmentation,
   existing communities would begin revive, both in Washington
   proper and in surrounding subdivisions. As the density
   increased so would ridership on the Metro. Freeways would
   make less sense. Commercial development would start to aim
   more at the center than at the fringes. The many scraps of
   vacant land left over in the last 30 years of development
   would begin to fill in.

   But all this would come at a cost. If you limit new
   neighborhood construction in undeveloped, open spaces, you
   will have to raise home pries because the developers are
   right: It is cheaper to build on undeveloped land in more
   distant locates. If growth controls were strict enough, you
   would start changing the economy of cheap goods and cheap
   prices that is the American hallmark.

   As it is, our habit of building huge freeways with
   relatively unbridled development has allowed for a greater
   and greater concentration of selling goods in super-sized
   stores. It's getting so that stationery, tools, breakfast
   cereal, computers, stereos and more are bought at huge
   warehouse stores with rock-bottom prices that sit near a
   freeway interchange. But the clerk at the Circuit City who
   sells you a washing machine, not surprisingly, will not
   know your name. It is a tradeoff. For the most efficient
   distribution systems in the modern world, for the
   elimination of all middlemen, we get a life almost devoid
   of intimate contact between home and the market.

   We can't have it all. We can't have homes, cheap goods --
   a more socially cohesive world comes with a more tightly
   controlled pattern of growth. New Urbanists have a chance
   of generating a realistic debate on how we build better,
   more livable communities. But they have to get their
   priorities straight. They have to give up the dollars
   generated by alliances with home builders intent on moving
   development ever outward. New Urbanism's contribution to
   city planning will remain almost purely stylistic, unless
   it makes more effort to change the basic pattern of
   suburban development.

   Cities of every era have had their drawbacks. Unless we
   start to rethink what we're creating, our era will be known
   for cities that were dynamic, market-oriented and abundant,
   but which were also lonely, fragmented and disposable.

   [Photo] Small porches, strips of grass and picket fences
   fail to create a traditional small town or big-city
   neighborhood at "New Urban" Kentlands.

   [End]

   To see photo:

      http://pwp.usa.pipeline.com/~jya/nurk.jpg

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   For Alex Marshall's earlier desnuda New Urbanism, see:

      http://pwp.usa.pipeline.com/~jya/amarsh.txt







