New Urbanism is great, if you're rich
So I went to see two new New Urbanist communities this weekend - Warwick Grove in the Mid-Hudson Valley, about 50 miles from NYC, and Plainsboro Village Center in central N.J.
I haven't generally drank the New Urbanist Kool-Aid - I'm a bit too fond of both the Old Urbanism and many of those things they love to hate (like those cool four-level freeway interchanges). But I gotta hand it to the developers of these two communities (Leyland Alliance and Sharbell Development, respectively) - these communities are about ten times better than what's being developed around them. You can walk to (some) shops, they are at impressively high densities, and they just look great, at least as great as a brand-new retro place can. I think these places are going to develop real character over time.
But you've gotta have big bucks to live there. At Warwick, a 2BR/2BA condo will set you back over $400k (and you'd better be over 55 - no kids, because, of course, kids = school taxes). At Plainsboro, prices start in the $530s for a townhouse.
I thought New Urbanism was supposed to help create a wider range of housing choices - with accessory apartments, starter homes, etc., combining with the higher densities to make things more affordable. Is it actually doing this anywhere? I'd love to hear from anyone who can describe a New Urbanist development that someone besides the wealthy can afford (and HOPE VI doesn't count - I'm talking about something that isn't publicly subsidized).
If these two developments are typical, then New Urbanism seems a bit more like nice looking houses for rich people than the revolution in development that its supporters proclaim.
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CNU report on affordability
Here it is: http://www.cnu.org/node/2006
Re: Urban New Urbanism in Jersey City
I think that a few places, including Jersey City and NYC, may be the exceptions, and I'll grant you those rare exceptions. Liberty Harbor North, in Jersey City, will indeed be a very urban place, more or less continuing the pattern of existing development in the historic Van Vorst Park neighbourhood just to the north. The concept of Liberty Harbor North is very similar to Battery Park City just across the Hudson River, evoking traditional high density Manhattan development, a mixture of high rise apartment buildings and lower brownstone-type buildings. Incidentally, much of Battery Park City was designed and built well before Andres Duany and "New Urbanism" came into vogue. Look at the site plan for Liberty Harbor North and you will see that it is very very similar to BPC... the design elements are nearly identical.
A couple questions:
The site plan for Liberty Harbor North is dated 2001. Now, six years later, it appears that nothing yet has been built...?
It is my understanding that Liberty Harbor North will consist primarily of market-rate condos, meaning that a 1-bdrm., 750-sq.ft. apartment will probably cost $600k and up., which brings my second question which pertains to affordability. Won't this just become another Wall Street/yuppie enclave...? So yes... great if you're rich...?
That portion of Jersey City which lies just opposite Lower Manhattan (east of the NJ Turnpike Extension and south of the Holland Tunnel approach), some of it formerly the site of huge RR yards, has been undergoing intense development for the past 3 decades. Thousands of residential units (mostly in high-rise towers); dozens of office buildings, including some of New Jersey's tallest buildings, plus the Newport Centre shopping mall atop the Pavonia PATH station, have all since been built, not to mention extensive renovation of Brownstones in the Van Vorst Park neighbourhood. This portion of Jersey City is a virtual extension of Manhattan with prices to match.
(I know Jersey City and Battery Park City well because I lived on Rector Place in BPC for about 5 years during the early 1990s, commuting across the street to my job at the Port Authority in WTC Tower 1. One of my on-going tasks at the Port was to track development in Jersey City. Coincidentally, several years previous to working for the Port, I worked for the Jersey City Planning Dept., commuting by subway and PATH from an earlier residence at 73rd & Broadway in NYC).
Christopher C. (chrisinsobe)
The perfect and the good...
Thanks, everyone, for your thoughtful comments. I particularly wanted to respond to Payton's detailed response, which I thank him for. I agree that the perfect should not be the enemy of the good - again I do think these developments are much better than the alternative and are worth fighting for. And I'm glad to hear that CNU is working on these issues (please send me a copy of the report when done and perhaps I'll blog on that) and that there are some good examples out there I hadn't heard about before of NU developments providing affordable housing.
That said, your post seems to imply that there are certain core principles of New Urbanism that developers really should fight for, and that affordability is outside of that core and is an add-on once you get those other things. The CNU charter includes a serious discussion of having a mix of incomes. So why is that a lower priority than having a great design code?
Scale and power
Adam raises a good point: the Charter of the New Urbanism contains dozens of principles, all given equal importance and not sorted into greater and lesser. However, the Charter does distinguish the responsibilities of urbanists at three broad scales: the region, the neighborhood, and the block/building. It's not a question of whether a principle is core to New Urbanism, but rather whether it's appropriate for that scale of New Urbanism. A single neighborhood cannot hope, in the absence of a citywide (and hopefully region-wide) policy, to solve an area's inequity problem.
Similarly, a single neighborhood cannot compensate for a region or city's lack of adequate transit service -- even though New Urbanists coined the term "transit oriented development," a quality regional transit network is a created at the regional, rather than the neighborhood, scale. Just as a governor can only clumsily address the proper proportions of streets and squares, an individual builder can only hope to address in some small way the broad issue of farmland preservation (yet another regional issue addressed by the charter).
New Urbanists also differ substantially in their own priorities. NU is a forum, not a formula, and what are key values for some may not be so for others. I personally think that a place like Windsor, Florida (with perfectly proportioned classical architecture in an isolated exurban resort environment) a failure of New Urbanism due to its lack of transit connectivity and, yes, diversity of uses, types, and people. Yet others evidently feel otherwise.
I suppose that one could then argue that New Urbanism has failed at the regional scale, but unlike individual buildings or neighborhoods, a successful regional policy can take generations to fully manifest itself. Furthermore, since few American cities have existing formal regional governments (all regions, of course, have informal power structures that set policy even if only inadvertently), affecting change at the regional level requires inventing entirely new systems -- not an easy task, and one which other schools of thought in the professions haven't even bothered with.
Moreover, given our capitalist economy and very strong built-in policy bias towards higher home prices, affordable housing is a particularly thorny, difficult, and expensive issue to resolve. Building a development requires achieving consensus across a great number of players: the developer's team, obviously, but also its buyers, neighbors, lenders, and elected officials. Right now, it's tremendously difficult for all those players (particularly the financial players, a role that government participated in for much of the later 20th century but has retreated from) to agree that affordable housing is a high priority -- and in a capitalist system, those with money determine the priorities. Buyers, on the other hand, do seem to highly value the "frou frou" touches that many associate with New Urbanism, like picket fences and front porches.
Just saw the new issue of TNAC; good work, Adam. (And sorry for the delay -- got caught up in APA related stuff.) Maybe we'll see you at the Congress next month in Philly?
Perfect, meet good.
Let's put this into perspective. The median asking price for houses now on the market in Warwick is $495,000; for new houses in Plainsboro, $458,657. The asking prices, although certainly high, are not out of line.
These developers have already spent many long, grueling years to get their "ten times better than what's being developed around them" projects out of the ground, and our thanks to them? "Good, but not perfect enough. You should have spent an extra five years of your life trying to convince the evil NIMBYs who run suburbia to accept even higher densities and poor folks." Do we really expect New Urbanist developers to be not just idealists, but masochists as well -- even while we give their competitors, the sprawl-builders, a pass?
Meanwhile, let's also congratulate the many New Urbanists who have made a commitment to unsubsidized affordable housing: from Del Mar Station in Pasadena [an infill TOD, I might add], which voluntarily set aside affordable units even before the city adopted inclusionary zoning, to New Town at St. Charles, which brought sub-1,000 sq. ft. (Lilliputian by Middle American standards) cottages and rental apartments to suburban St. Louis, to the valiant efforts that resulted in the Katrina Cottage (a whole house for $30K!) being the first handsome affordable housing sold "ready to wear" by a national retailer since 1940, to the city planners nationwide who are attempting to craft ways to subtly add density to existing neighborhoods without raising NIMBY ire.
Affordable housing is a dilemma that we as a nation cannot hope to solve through good intentions alone -- and unaffordable housing (aka "rising property values") is something most Americans will readily vote for. The sad reality is that it's neither cheap nor easy to build houses in most of the country, and that "market" prices will reflect that reality.
That said, CNU will shortly publish a report on a meeting held to discuss unsubsidized ways of producing affordable housing and has formed a committee to continue to advocate for innovative solutions. Stay tuned.
PS. It seems that there are misconceptions about what New Urbanism is. May I suggest a short refresher?
Repackaged suburbia...
New Urbanist developments are repackaged suburbia (for the middle and, increasingly, for the upper middle classes), nothing more, nothing less. To the extent that they achieve higher densities and thereby occupy less land, and (may) reduce car dependency, they are an improvement on "old" suburbia, however.
Christopher C.
Urban New Urbanism
Anyone who thinks that New Urbanism is just "repackaged suburbia" should look at DPZ's Liberty Harbor North project at http://www.dpz.com/project.aspx?type=6&Project_Number=9901&Project_Name=.... DPZ says that this thoroughly urban project is "the most thorough exemplification to date of the principles of the New Urbanism."
There is a common misconception that New Urbanists just build suburban projects among people who have just heard about a few of the most high-profile examples (such as Celebration). In fact, the basic principles of New Urbanism, such as a continuous street system and development oriented to the sidewalk, apply at many different densities.
Charles Siegel
The newest and shiniest is always the most expensive
Looking to new development of any sort, New Urbanist or not, to provide an area's affordable housing seems a little off the mark to me. (Especially in Plainsboro, which is all of five miles away from Princeton, NJ, and the hyperexpensive housing in that burg.) Without either direct public subsidy or regulatory subsidy (in Ann Arbor, MI, developers of PUDs are required to have 15% of residential units be affordable), new construction is going to be targeted at the folks who can pay for something shiny and new.
Like you, I'm more interested in the Old Urbanism, or Existing Urbanism, and I think that's where we need to look to create affordable housing. Rehab of existing buildings in existing neighborhoods is probably going to produce a more affordable result than wiping the slate clean and building fresh - if the site development costs and much of the physical structural costs have been paid already, 20, 50, 100 years ago, then why not take advantage of that existing value?
I'm no fan of "New Urbanism" in cornfields. I think the CNU has some clarification to do as to how New Urbanism fits into existing built areas and incorporates old structures before it can be a real tool for affordability. (And, yes, I'm certain I'll have some rabid New Urbanists jumping on me to say, "But New Urbanism already includes that!" These protesters need to work to clarify NU's brand identity - as long as the first image of NU development that pops to mind is Seaside or any other "new town", rather than infill, I don't see NU being a tool for much more than new town gentrification.)
Amenities.
Sadly, IMO the issue is that so many amenities are tacked on to these projects, the rents get bid way up. I'm not sure I can name an affordable NU development around here, that's for sure.
NU _infill_ projects are usually more expensive, due to different reasons but the developer still wants to make a margin and carrying the paper takes longer, driving up costs.
But I suspect that many NU projects have that label tacked onto them by developers as marketing eyewash.
Best,
D
I originally got into the
I originally got into the field of urban planning due to New Urbanism, which I understood, at the time, as the creation of new places that are urban (logical, no?). After visiting dozens of N.U. communities, I have discovered that this is not what it is about. Basically, N.U. answers the question, "How can we create more fulfilling communities for upper-middle-class suburban homeowners?" They provide a very good answer to this question, but is this really the most important question to ask?
Read Suburban Nation!
I think you confuse New Urbanist principles with market forces.
In describing the creation of Seaside, the authors of Suburban Nation indicate that their New Urban development was not more expensive to create than a standard development - but the demand for what they had created drove the prices up. In summary, they conclude that builders everywhere should pay attention when new urban neighborhoods are appreciating by 25% year after year...
So, besides government regulation and intervention, what should New Urbanists be doing differently? Nice places command a premium.
A place that does not allow children is clearly not playing by the New Urban rule book, in any case.
I think DPZ's development in Saudi Arabia might fit your criteria. http://www.dpz.com/pdf/0116-Project%20Description.pdf
-AH
www.countrymiceandcitymice.com
Sprawl Is Terrible, but you still have to rich
I don't mind that more and more New Urbanist projects are market driven. They may be in more demand now because there are so few of them. But, let's not forget the bigger picture - Housing price increases during the last five years did not discriminate between sprawl developments versus not-so-sprawly stuff. Your ugly standard tract home will still set you back a good fortune. Prices aside, let's keep the good stuff coming.
Does New Urbanism have to be Expensive?
I agree that it would be nice to see a broader range of housing types and prices built using New Urbanist principles. The lack of price diversity should not be used as a sign of failure to live up to it's promises however. Rather, it points to the need to continue to mainstream the core principles to make new urbanist development easier and more adaptable to a broad range of settings. It may be that some of the current expense involved comes from the need to secure special exemptions and permits, or from hiring the best of a few practicing designers? If so, then time, practice, training and greater public acceptance will mitigate these effects.