Where are the New Urbanist developments?

(Sorry for the funky look below -- but Typepad changed the blog template on me without my choice and I haven't figured out how to restore my defaults yet.)

City Journal had a piece recently on New Urbanism.  I found this passage particularly interesting:

After more than a quarter-century of New Urbanism, proclaimed Stefanos Polyzoides--who, with his wife Elizabeth Moule, heads a top-flight urban-design practice in Pasadena, California--"there's no indication that the system of building in this country is even dented." In other words, sprawl still reigns, and so do the sundry forms of architectural dysfunction afflicting the nation's public realm. The New Urbanists have changed the conversation, but they haven't changed the world. At least, not yet.

One of the things I've always liked about the New Urbanists is their cockiness, their professed willingness to compete in the marketplace.  Their attitude is, "We've got a better product."  It's just a matter of lowering the barriers.

But Polyzoides' statement raises an interesting question:  Why aren't there more New Urbanist projects?

I try hard not to project my own preferences onto others.  But I find it hard to believe that the typical person prefers this:

 

to this (which is not an actual New Urbanist development, but illustrates what New Urbanism is trying to recreate*):

 

There are new New Urbanist projects, especially smaller infill projects, but why aren't new village-scale projects being built left and right in places like Houston or Dallas? 

Here are the barriers I see to large-scale New Urbanist projects:

1. Anachronistic zoning codes.
2. NIMBYism, as colorfully detailed in Witold Rybczynski's Last Harvest.
3. Builder comfort.  It's easier for mass-production and strip-mall builders to develop standard the standard suburban pod.
4. Lender comfort.  Lenders exercise a lot of de facto control, and it's easier for them to pencil out a standard pod development than a complicated beast like a New Urbanist development.  Lenders consequently require less upfront equity for standard developments than complicated mixed-use developments.
5. Complexity.  An NU development has a lot of pieces that must be coordinated in subtle ways.  This requires more design up front and longer lead times.  It translates into higher costs.
6. Subsidies of alternative development patterns.  Special depreciation rules for strip malls, for example.  (Since we're talking about greenfield developments here, I think highway subsidies are less important.)

I'd like to believe that if these barriers were lowered through more flexible zoning and greater neighbor, builder and lender comfort, we'd see more developments.  But, as always with land-use issues, things are not quite so clear-cut.  Here are some arguments why the barriers above might not be as impenetrable as they appear:

1. Zoning codes can be changed if there is popular support for changing them.  Zoning often (but not always!) follows the market.  If people are clamoring for NU projects, then there should be a willingness by governments to change the codes.
2. New Urbanism has been around for 25 years now, plenty of time to grow a crop of specialized NU builders and lenders comfortable with the product.  There are specialists but, for whatever reason, they have remained niche builders rather than become mass producers like Lennar.  
3. There is no way to eliminate the additional complexity.  But many NU principles are capable of standardization and with a stable of builders expert in single-family, multi-family and commercial/mixed-use development, it ought to be easier these days to put together a village-scale development.
4. NIMBYism is hard to eradicate, but it's less of a problem in the suburbs of Houston and Dallas than, say, in Orange County.

Perhaps most Americans don't really care about "place making."  We're a mobile society; the average American moves every six years or so.  That discourages investment in exterior, neighborhood amenities and encourages investment in interior amenities.  Maybe Americans don't want to spend a lot of time with their neighbors.  The New Urbanists assume Americans do, but while you can choose the class of your neighbors, you can't guarantee that you'll like them.  Perhaps for these reasons Americans aren't as willing to invest in "places," which means they're not willing to pay the New Urbanist premium.

My own belief is that development patterns take a very, very long time to change.  As the obstacles to New Urbanist developments continue to recede, we'll see more of them.  There is real demand for New Urbanist development, as evidenced by the prices they command.  In the end, though, we can't control demand; we can only level the playing field.

*I pulled the second photo from a pamphlet on New Urbanist design.  The photo unfortunately was not captioned.  Does anyone recognize the town?

Comments

[Ian]

I think your photos reveal more of your own bias than they do of fundamental differences between the two styles of development (although I do happen to share that bias). Add some trees to the sprawling development (they'll come eventually), zoom in to deemphasize the roads, and take some of the fantastic but hardly characteristic-of-new-urbanism architecture from the urban picture, and I think you'll have a harder time convincing people that one type of development reins supreme over the other, at least solely from the pictures.

[Ian]

Another large hurdle that I see is that pod-style suburban development can be (and is) designed piecemeal -- because they're designing for cars, your standard developer doesn't have to worry about coordinating development, amenities, restaurants, retail, etc. The residents can just drive from their little alcove to some other little alcove. For a denser, urban development to be really successful, it needs to be connected to and surrounded by other dense, urban development with amenities that complement each other. Otherwise, people aren't going to walk and bike to their destinations -- they're going to drive. And then they're going to demand parking. And then you destroy the very density that you're trying to establish.

In other words, dense, urban areas support and nurture other dense, urban areas; you can't build an urban development just anywhere like you can a suburban pod.

[Ian]

Oh, I guess that would just be an expanded version of #5 - complexity.

[AC]

I could have called it a coordination problem, but it's possible to solve, as places like the Kentlands show.

[M1EK]

Inertia. There's an awful lot of political and economic inertia at play here - and those with the most invested in the old way of doing things also have the most power to bring to bear (think Jeff Jack).

[heyzeus]

The VMU brouhaha in Austin is instructive; The majority of Austinites disfavor the environmental degradation of sprawl and favor walkable neighborhoods with nearby amenities. But God save the developer that plans a walkable, urban development on anyone's street or near anyone's property. Walkable, diverse, high density development belongs in someone ELSE's neighborhood. It's just out of the scale and character of my neighborhood here, you see.

NIMBYism - the one force in the universe that brings together republicans and democrats.

[Tory]

From your link: "The problem is that, despite their often stated preference for walking, Americans have developed a taste for low prices and variety, and they don't mind driving great distances to get them." Big boxes serve most of our retail needs very well: groceries + hardware (Lowe's or Home Depot) + misc stuff (Wal-Mart or Target). Many other retail needs fall in the "errand" category - done from the car while going to/from somewhere else, like work: banking, dry cleaning, Starbucks, etc. So start by taking most of that slice of shopping away from new urbanism. Here's the problem with supporting NU/mixed-use developments with "the rest" of our retail needs:

Stores need a pretty high volume of customer traffic to be viable. Foot traffic from a few stories of apartments or condos on top are nowhere near enough, so that means people have to be drawn there in a car from the surrounding city. Little or no frontside parking means people have to park a bit farther away and walk (like maybe a backside garage). People are only going to do that if there are a variety of stores/restaurants they are interested in after they get out of their car (if they're only going to one specific place, a strip mall or "lifestyle center" is far more convenient). That is essentially the definition of a "mall" - a collection of retail compelling enough people are willing to park at some inconvenience and walk around for a while. To succeed, these developments essentially must become an open-air mall with apartments/condos on top. That's fine, but realistically, a city can only support one mall every few square miles - putting a pretty low limit on how much new urbanist development a city can support. That, and, of course, in any existing city, those malls already exist somewhere, and so a new development must displace an existing one that already has critical mass and has probably cornered most of the premium retailers (how many Banana Republics can a city support? ;). Doable, and some clearly do it and succeed, but that doesn't mean it's not very challenging.

That, in a nutshell, sums up the major headwinds on more new urbanist developments: they are essentially malls, there's a limit to how many a city can support, and they have to displace the existing entrenched retail districts/malls that are already there. Note that those headwinds come from the retail side. As you point out, clearly there is plenty of demand on the residential side - it's getting the matching retail to work that's tricky.

[AC]

Interesting analysis.

Note that I don't believe that it's either appropriate or feasible for developments to be self-contained. In other words, I don't expect developments to put all the jobs and shops within an easy walk. That would destroy the economies of scale that a large city offers. That said, the kind of "village"-scale project I'm talking about (e.g., Kentlands or Stapleton, with lots of single-family and multi-family) will generate its own demand for retail. It may not be enough demand to support a Lowe's or Home Depot, but it will support a fair amount of smaller-scale retail, the kind of stuff people want close at hand.

Something is dampening the supply of NU projects, though. Maybe it is retail. I just see a lot of successful retail organized in the traditional NU style.

[Dog]

I think you forget that most Americans still like their yards, their bigger homes, and their cars more than the supposed conveniences that come from living in an urban apartment. We like having our own space with our slice of greenery outside that we can control and call our own. While I appreciate the New Urbanist concepts (and condos), I wouldn't trade my current cookie-cutter for one.

[AC]

Large NU developments always include a healthy amount of single family with yards. It's just organized on traditional street grids, integrated with a broader variety of housing, and located near retail. No one believes that most Americans are about to start giving up single family homes & yards.

[M1EK]

And the statement "Americans will always like X more than Y" depends on the price of X and Y. For 60 years, we've been making X artificially cheap compared to Y, and making Y artificially unattractive by other methods as well.

[Dog]

I think the statement "Depends on the price of X and Y" is indeed a very good point. If NU developments had units with 2400 sq ft of house on a normal-sized lot for a reasonable price, then most people would buy. But they don't. Right now in Austin you can get a condo half the size (with no yard) for twice (pr three times) the price. It doesn't make sense and indeed it's totally unattractive.

[M1EK]

Dog, that's actually completely backward. I bought a condo in Clarksville in 1997 for half what a smaller house and a third what a similarly-sized house would have cost. The equation still holds even though all three types have appreciated.

New condo construction, of course, is going to be expensive; just like new houses in Hyde Park cost more than old ones (except for the historic ones).

[Dog]

M1EK - that assumes that you're buying a house in downtown. But condos in downtown versus a house just five or ten minutes from downtown... no comparison. The house is cheaper and bigger and offers more privacy and a backyard.

[M1EK]

Yeah, and condos five or ten minutes from downtown are cheaper still. Why would you compare condos downtown to houses farther out and then presume that condos are a bad deal?

[Market Urbanism]

Check out Forest City's Stapleton project in Denver:
http://www.stapletondenver.com/
Planned by Peter Calthorpe.

[Robert]

Across the nation large scale urban redevelopments are happening. Where I work in the Boston area former industrial mills and depressed urban centers are receiving incredible amounts of state, federal and private money to redevelop into "new urbanist"-like condos, apartments and downtown areas. Examples include Jamaica Plains, Beverly, Lawrence, Lowell, Haverhill In the Denver area where I attended school, developments like Stapleton, large parts of Boulder, Light Rail TOD and the redevelopment of LoDo, Denver show an array of new urbanism, multi-use, affordable, etc. happening in a progressive yet very sprawled low-density area. Even the small Indiana town of Richmond were my family is from has some sort of downtown growth plan.
Its happening, I am not worried about the lack of growing options. What I see as a future plan is that these neighborhoods are mostly marketed to single and/or young people and not as places to raise a family. Proximity to bars, professional sports, employment, and city life is everything that a young professional until he/she gets married and starts a family and if "influenced/forced/given the option" to move to the suburbs where privacy, safety, school systems, and a proven investment (a house) take precedent.
I dont think most Americans want to live in sub-developments and shop at Wal-mart for the rest of their lives but the values of the suburbs are currently prevalent in the suburbs and not in areas where new urbanism can be found. Until this is changed cookie -cutter homes will sell, the US will consume more gasoline, and urbanist like us will be arguing wether mainstream America is ready for new urbanism.

[Andrew]

The real reason these developments don't prevail is that they need specific types of infrastructure to support them.

While projects on the size and scale of Stapleton can and do create this infrastructure themselves, most developments simply aren't that big.

Now, as for the idea that New Urban developments aren't strongly growing in the market, that isn't really true.

The entire wave of new developments in the inner-city infill segment is at least in some part a reflection of the New Urban movement, even when the individual developments don't exemplify the principles of New Urbanism very well.

These all work because in the older urban places there is a functional interconnected street grid that can support multi-modal transportation and transit, thus making walking feasible and desirable.

However, in a greenfield suburban setting, the prevailing pattern is to develop small tracts as pods off of the former rural transportation networks (FM roads etc).

When these are developed there is almost no infill street pattern. Smaller local developers don't study emerging trends or patterns, they just look at the bottom line. Market data shows that houses in the $150 range are in demand, lets build those. How little can we spend on streets? Well, cul-de-sacs cost less to build than a continuous network of streets. How can we market exclusivity and security in a nervous world? Gated neighborhoods, one way in, one way out.

Forget about zoning or lack there of. Your point that zoning follows the market is spot on, those laws can be changed, and besides that they offer variances all the time and always will.

Developers in greenfield settings won't be able to effectively build new urbanism until cities start planning a dense street grid again, and get away from the suburban street hierarchy.

Thoroughfare, collector, local, 60-80' ROW, that's the problem. Until the transportation engineers wake up and smell the emissions new urbanism will remain an infill or super-scale project only.

Thankfully, groups like the Institute for Transportation Engineers are starting to realize that they have a role to play, AND that traditional urban street networks actually outperform the conventional suburban design.

NIMBYism, then, plays the last, great role. The hardest part of the whole battle is explaining to homeowners why it's important that their street be connected to all the others. "No! No! Not CUT-THROUGH TRAFFIC!!!" they shout. But if ALL The streets go through then it isn't a problem.

So, long story short, transportation investments are the one and only solution to our urban form issues. Until we get back to building streets from a COMPREHENSIVE CITY PLAN we won't have places that look like your second picture. That's the only real difference between the two, the rest was done automatically by the market.

[AC]

I don't see any solution to the NIMBYism problem. Even proposals that would result in trivial increases in traffic set off protests, at least in Austin. They hate it more than new housing.

Apparently it's not limited to suburban types. I read that a developer proposed putting a NU development next to Seaside, and wanted to connect it to the Seaside grid. The Seaside residents refused.