I'd rather live in soulless suburban sprawl than a fraudulent, prefab "Town Center."

The BBQ Pit
1

I just visited my hometown after being away for a good several years. It’s a very typical suburb on the east coast, very low-key and humble.

Apparently, they’ve decided to put in a huge fraudulent, prefab “Town Center” commercial development - kind of like a combination of a big mall, some chintzy condos, a couple office buildings, and a strip mall, but complete with fake “streets” and a “town square” and so on.

Of course, it was all erected at the same time. They bulldozed a cute little strip mall and a nice wooded area to install it. It’s full of big chain stores and restaurants that have nothing to do with my hometown in any way. It has a chain comedy club (who goes to comedy clubs in 2007?!). The condos would be overpriced here in Chicago, but there in my humble hometown, they’re unthinkably overpriced. Of course they’ve all already sold. There’s not a single local business involved with this thing.

Of course the locals have completely embraced it rather than rejecting it for the crass, soulless fraud that it is. Of course the ridiculous comedy club is flourishing, as well as the overpriced shoe store, the California Pizza Kitchen, and the fake Macy’s.

I literally broke down and cried when I saw it - when I saw what had been done to my humble hometown. It’s like aliens fueled on the most synthetic representations of our culture came down and landed a gigantic dropship in the middle of a previously quiet and sweet area. It’s so crass, so vulgar, and so synthetic, calculated, and fraudulent. It’s hideous.

Apparently, these things are going up all over the country.

In 10 years’ time, we’re going to be living in one gigantic test-markted virtual simulacrum nightmare. There will be nothing real, but everything will be labeled “Authentic” so as to let you know that it isn’t in any way.

I guess that’s what people want.

I’ll be shocked if I haven’t put a gun in my mouth by that point.

2

I moved from dingy Worcester, MA to Herndon, VA just over a year ago.

The one thing I immediately thought… “Man, Worcester actually has some personality!”

Herndon is adjacent to a very nasty suburban shithole like the one you describe: Reston. It actually has a “Town Center” portion fully-equipped with said overpriced condos, obnoxiously expensive home stores, and your typical slew of boring chain restaurants.

3

I work in one of the premier example of this . It was actually a nice replacement for the hazardous waste site it was built on (don’t worry, it’s been contained, they tell us, but I wouldn’t eat a tomato grown here). I think there is a certain cheese factor, but at the same time, I think folk like you long for an organic sincerety that never existed. Someone with the same sentiment probably decried the development of Rockwellian main street commercial areas and the allowance of horse-less carriages on the city streets.

4

Where I live there are half a dozen such developments in a 50 mile radius. Neo-urban I think they’re called. Overpriced condos. Prefab town square with shops and restaurants not one of which is local or family owned.

It’s strange and vaguely creepy to me.

5

God, that’s so similar that it could be the same one; they were probably developed by the same company. I’m sure that the “organic sincerity” that I long for probably never existed - Bedford Falls is a myth - but I’d rather have the sincerity of a boring strip mall with a pet store and a fabric outlet than a fake, hyperreal “town center” “where life happens!™”

6

I actually share many of your sentiments on the artificiality of the “planned community” trend, and I commiserate over the loss of the wooded area, but I have to say I’ve yet to see a strip mall that was so “cute” it wouldn’t be improved by a good bulldozing.

7

Ugh… those things make my skin crawl. I’ve been to them in Riverside and Walnut Creek, and I thank my lucky stars that San Francisco doesn’t have any room for such crap.

8

In Albuquerque, on a lot that had been vacant for longer than I had been alive and living there, they finally put up a shopping area. But it’s one of those outdoor mall things with fake little streets. It’s too cold in the winter, too hot in the summer, and too damn windy the rest of the year. Plus it’s all chain stores I don’t care about. Not as bad as the OP’s complaint by any means, but I went there once and have vowed to never go back unless I really need to go to the Apple store.

9

Wow, you could be talking about Virginia Beach. But I’m guessing there are a lot of places that aredoing this lately.

10

Personally, I don’t see much to choose between a crass, soulless, chain-store suburban sprawl development and a crass, soulless, chain-store “neo-urban town center” development. Most strip-mall pet stores and fabric outlets are chain operations too, after all.

To the extent that the “town center” is actually set up to rely on walking, biking and public transit rather than exclusive dependency on automobiles, it has a marginal edge over the suburban sprawl, in my book. Otherwise: meh, tomayto, tomahto.

All right, I’ve gotta know: what the hell is meant by a “fake street”? I mean, a street is something that either is or isn’t, right? How can you fake a street? Are we talking trompe l’oeil backdrops here, where you try to enter what looks like a street and end up skinning your nose on realistically painted bricks?

Or do you just mean a pedestrian street where there aren’t any cars?

11

I’m guessing it has to be a little bigger. It has three mid rises (20 plus stories) and plans for a 60 story high rise. The stores sound a little more upscale too. There is one restaraunt owned by a local restauranter and Ashton Kutcher and Wilmer Valderramma have a bowling alley here. Belive me, it’s hard to defend this place. But there’s one by my house I use all the time, careful (PDF) , right up the street from Little Five Points , the least “generic” place on the planet.

12

So, the condos are unthinkably overpriced, yet they’ve all been sold already? Then I guess the developer should have priced them a bit higher, right? They are worth what people will pay for them, the fact that you don’t want one doesn’t matter, what matters is that lots of people DO want them.

Look, these things are just malls where they don’t install roofs over the main hallways. These are the “fake streets”. They are built like streets, but function as open-air mall hallways. And what’s wrong with that? And what’s wrong with building condos right next to the mall? It makes more sense than building all the condos in another neighborhood. At least now when the condo-dwellers want to go shop in the mall they just take the elevator down and cross the “street” to the mall, rather than jumping in their car, driving across town, and searching half an hour for a parking spot in the vast mall lot.

You want “real” downtowns? Look, there’s a reason downtowns all over the US have hollowed out. They didn’t plop down a pre-fab downtown, they plopped down a mall that looks a bit like a downtown. And the complaint is about how malls are soul-less? How 1983 of you.

13

Yeah, those things are grody. They’re not even convenient to shop in - hard to park, no protection from the weather, tons of walking. They put one up in the already revoltingly pre-fab northeast part of town. Ugh.

14

The answer?

Then they were priced well, and may even have been underpriced.

And there we have it.

Don’t get me wrong. I completely agree with your condemnation of this desire for “instant” history. This is really no different than putting a different set of legs on a sofa to call it a “Chippendale” instead of a “Queen Anne”. Certain items are borrowed to provide a pseudo-authenticity, but the buyer really doesn’t want to sacrifice the recliner with the beverage holder for the sake of historical accuracy. And another one bites the dust.

I seem to remember a story about an actress who was told that makeup and lighting would hide the lines on her face. She replied “I’ve *earned * these lines!” Real town centers have their character because they have earned it over time. Things that worked stayed, things that didn’t got torn down. People just don’t have the time or the patience these days, so developers throw something up to pander to the lowest common desire.

But, all the same, destruction of one strip mall isn’t exactly a huge price to pay.

My sympathies, but you cast your vote when you moved out of town. Seems to me old Thomas Wolfe had something to say about this…

And, in preview, Lemur866 beat me to it.

15

Yeah, but does it have sidewalks? :smiley:

16

There’s one of those near my neck of the woods. It’s like it’s brethren, rather pricey (1 bedroom rents for around $2000!). But, it’s clean and safe and if you like shopping, I guess it’s a way to pretend you live in NYC without being too far from grandma and grandpa.

One question for those who live there, what’s it like to step out of your front door on a Saturday afternoon for a cup of coffee and see 10,000 strangers walking around?

I saw a movie there last week, I didn’t cry because of the soul draining horror of the godless developers, I cried because I was forced to see Spider-Man 3.

17

I’m not sure I get the problem, actually. Isn’t the terrible scourge of the suburban sprawl caused by segregating homes away from businesses? This seems like it’s manufacturing the area I live in (Westridge/Rogers Park) all at once - businesses with an assortment of living options nearby or above the shops, safe places for kids to run and play, parks, etc. Sure, it’s a little Utopian, but it seems better than buying way out in the boonies and waiting for a Whole Foods to open up somewhere between you and the next big city. So everything is shiny new and coordinates and looks pretty. So what? At least it’s not all entirely identical, nor are large chunks of old concrete facade dropping on people’s heads to the tune of jackhammers at 7 am.

18

Similarly, what’s a “fake Macy’s?”

19

I actually like these developments a lot better than the “soulless suburban sprawl.” The “new urbanism,” multi-use idea of having attractive working, shopping, and living spaces intermixed, with lots of paths and sidewalks to encourage walking, is IMO miles better than the “get in your car to drive 3 miles to the grocery” alternative. While the theory is good, I grant that there is some room for improvement in the execution, but IMO it’s better than the older alternative that you yourself describe as “soulless” and “sprawling.” While it’s too bad that in this case a small wood met it’s end, mixed-use grouped developments actually take up less space than the zero-lotted, “100’s-of-identical-tract-homes-with-huge-garages” alternative.

But then, I like the Cheesecake Factory-type restaurants on occasion and I like Macy’s (not sure how I feel about “fake Macy’s”). As a single person, I’ve always liked condo living (though now I’m in a house), and I’d love to be able to walk to the pub, coffee-shop, or boutiques.

I think not enough time has passed to gauge how successful these developments will be in the long term, but personally I think they are more appealing than not.

20

Ditto!