By Leigh Gallagher.<\/p>\n
Many years ago, I read a number of books on the New Urbanism.\u00a0 There are a lot of good titles, most notably The Geography of Nowhere (1994) and Home From Nowhere (1998), by James Howard Kunstler, as well as the pretty picture book The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community (1993) by Peter Katz.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
So when I started this book, I was prepared to settle into the same type of book, but I was disappointed.\u00a0 Ultimately, the difference is, in large part, that the prior books were written by experts in the field and this one was written by a journalist.\u00a0 She provides something of a broad overview of U.S. urban and suburban development historically, and of the New Urbanism movement in particular, and features anecdotal accounts of families unhappily living in the suburbs, and finding new life in the city.\u00a0 She correctly observes ways in which far-flung suburbs risk being unsustainable (for instance, people unable to afford their long commutes if gas prices rise \u2014 which she seems to hope for; and low density requiring heavy tax rates to pay for basic community infrastructure such as roads and water service), and points to a number of trends suggesting something of a shift.\u00a0 But she ultimately doesn\u2019t pull the various strands into a single whole, and they don\u2019t all even seem to fit together in the first place.<\/p>\n
What are her trends?<\/p>\n
First of all, the appeal of New Urbanism-style developments.\u00a0 New Urbanism originally had a very specific definition, with designs adhering to concepts developed by the Congress for the New Urbanism, but\u00a0uses this as\u00a0a catch-all term for developments which aim to recapture an urban flavor.\u00a0 And it\u2019s true that suburban infill developments generally favor denser housing, and that, at least around here, there has been a lot of high- or at least mid-rise condo construction at the commuter train stations.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Second, the changing demographics.\u00a0 The population is aging (though she doesn\u2019t link this to a renewed preference for urban living \u2014 seniors generally want to stay in their homes, not leave them for a more urban environment), and young people are more likely to live with their parents (again, no link to urbanism).\u00a0 She doesn\u2019t really address the impact of the drop in the birth rate \u2014\u00a0the increasing percentage of\u00a0childless individuals and couples does in fact lead to a preference for urban life, as well as the delayed age of marriage and childbearing among the middle class.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Third, the increasing preference of millenials,\u00a0especially the middle-clss,\u00a0for an urban lifestyle when they do move away from home (though, so far, there\u2019s no actual experience to tell us whether this is just the temporary preference to live in a bar-hopping trendy neighborhood while young, or a long-term preference to stay there when older).<\/p>\n
Fourth, a trend to some degree (not documented with data) of families raising children in the city by choice.\u00a0 Not working-class or even middle-class families, mind you \u2014 they\u2019re not the ones able to afford the pricetags \u2014 but the upper-middle-class and the wealthy.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Fifth, some corporations are moving their headquarters into cities (though I\u2019m not impressed, since the size of tax incentives is a large factor in the decision).<\/p>\n
Sixth, far flung subdivisions, partially completed or even just barely begun when the bust began, are empty, and even being bulldozed.\u00a0 But then she veers off course, and cites Detroit:\u00a0 \u201cwhich experienced the largest depopulation of an industrial-age American city and in response bulldozed hundreds of homes and turned over much of its land to fields and farmland that lay there before.\u201d\u00a0 (Hello?\u00a0 Detroit isn\u2019t a suburb \u2014 and she\u2019s got her facts wrong, anyway, as the plan to establish urban farming hasn\u2019t materialized yet.)\u00a0 <\/p>\n
But she never really brings these different threads together.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
And\u00a0while many people are drawn to urban-like areas, they still generally want to be able to load up their car at the grocery store, and keep an eye on the kids playing in the backyard when they get home.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Besides,\u00a0nearly all of the inhabitants of her book are upper-middle-class, at least; she writes about what she knows, in that regard, I suppose.\u00a0 As fertility trends produce fewer and smaller\u00a0upper-middle-class families and larger and more working class and poor families, and an ever-increasing percentage of immigrant families, it\u2019ll be these groups that\u2019ll drive housing trends and preferences, and we get nary a thought about them.<\/p>\n
So I\u2019m disappointed.\u00a0 At least it\u2019ll motivate me to head back to the library and see what else the library has in the adjacent call numbers.\u00a0 <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Leigh Gallagher. Many years ago, I read a number of books on the New Urbanism.\u00a0 There are a lot of good titles, most notably The Geography of Nowhere (1994) and Home From Nowhere (1998), by James Howard Kunstler, as well as the pretty picture book The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community (1993) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n