It Takes a Village: In praise of the New Urbanism

National Review, July 14, 2003 by Catesby Leigh

Nevertheless, traditional streets strike a better balance between the car and the pedestrian than the conventional suburban blueprint, on which Le Corbusier's preoccupation with unimpeded traffic flow (fully shared by local fire departments) has had a profound influence. On traditional neighborhood streets, which often offer parallel parking on at least one side, drivers have to go slow-particularly in New Urbanist communities, where streets bend in order to shorten sightlines.

In their recent book, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and their colleague Jeff Speck make a number of rather high-handed recommendations ranging from transportation policy to regional economic planning. Still, their insights into what makes suburbia grow so quickly while the core cities stagnate-and into how the inept regulation of real-estate development and redevelopment shapes the picture-are extraordinary. Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck are worthy descendants of Jane Jacobs, whose 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, has been admired by many conservatives.

Indeed, some New Urbanists are aware of ways in which their model addresses conservative concerns. Peter Katz, author of The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community, observes that it is better to provide affordable housing by design-by providing a diversity of building types in proximity to one another-than by law. Requiring that a certain number of units in an apartment building be subsidized can exacerbate social tensions; enforcing such mandates eats up lots of bureaucratic staff time.

Still, modernist planning is deeply entrenched. In most of the country, getting traditional, mixed-use neighborhood projects approved is a Herculean task, for the simple reason that they are illegal under postwar zoning ordinances. Under the modernist regime, builders specialize in plopping down substantial quantities of homogeneous "product" in self-contained precincts. One builder does apartment houses, another single-family homes, another hotels, another office towers, another warehouses, and so on.

The financing of real estate follows suit. "Real estate has become a financial commodity," New Urbanism author Katz says. "A fund manager in Boston looks at the latest market forecasts to identify a solidly performing use category in a hot growth corridor. He can invest in self-storage in Denver or hotels in Seattle without getting on an airplane. He certainly isn't going to trudge around a warehouse district in St. Louis looking for the next urban hot spot."

At the same time, Katz notes, a local banker often can't afford to make a loan for a mixed-use development, no matter how well such loans perform, because they can't be sold into a secondary mortgage market- where the loans are bundled and repackaged as securities-since that market is itself single-use-oriented. Lending for mixed use means that the bank's money can't be rolled over; it's tied up for the life of the loan. The rigidity of this approach seems perverse: A couple of shops on the ground floor of an in-town apartment building would provide a nice hedge against a possible downturn in the local rental market.