The Truth About Transit Villages

"It's long been an irony that the same American who gushes over a delightful corner patisserie in the 16th arrondissement buys into a subdivision that is the antithesis of Parisian street life. There are no corner bakeries in the gently curving streets of suburbia, for an Old World clutter of transit, shops and residences is precisely what's been designed out of the suburban landscape...he number of those who fit the New Urbanism profile, who like corner cafes and easier commutes, is significant and growing...

Like it or not, we need to dispense with the idea that we can solve our housing shortage by paving over the counties to the south and east with four- lane streets and five houses to the acre. If there's one thing environmentalists and the local business community agree on, it's that stratospheric housing prices and the regional costs of sprawl are threatening to strangle the region's livability...

zoning laws, builders and lenders are conservative by nature, and transit villages are still youthful innovators on the American landscape, very much works in progress, with refinements, compromises and lessons learned constantly being threaded into sites established and new."

Thanks to Abhijeet Chavan