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

The BBQ Pit
61

[QUOTE=Dinsdale]

Personally, I think I’d be happiest living in or near a smallish college town. And when possible I tend to prefer the “authentic” over the imitation.
[/QUOTE]

Again, though, what makes a place “authentic?” It’s a question that planners have been struggling to answer for years. Like I said before, the critics of the 1920s panned places like Chicago’s bungalow belt for being “soulless” and “inauthentic” - the same arguments that you hear when people criticize New Urbanist development today. Is it time? If so, than places like Celebration, Kentlands and Seaside will become “authentic” in about fifty years, if they’re just left alone.

Nobody calls Shaker Heights, Ohio “fake”, but there are few differences between it and a large New Urbanist residential development, except time and a mature tree canopy. Both are planned communities. Both tend to be upscale. Both were developed at once, not over a period of decades. Both have a street pattern that is a variation of a traditional street grid. Both incorporate classical urban design ideas such as terminal vistas. Both have a “sense of place” that is lacking in surrounding communities.

Does the lack of pretension in a retail district make it “authentic” If so, then why aren’t New York’s Fifth Avenue, Chicago’s Michigan Avenue, or Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills considered “unauthentic”?

So, what does “authentic” mean to you? To the OP, a 1970s strip center is authentic, because it was built with “sincerity”. is that enough? Metal sheds housing auto body shops in poor exurbs were certainly built with “sincerity” by their owners, but does the intrinsic value of “sincerity” redeem their inherent ugliness?

62

[QUOTE=Trunk]
Well, I don’t know where you went to college, but little “college towns” actually seem to me to be some of the last places where cool coffee shops, and bookstores still thrive.

“easy to get a refund” doesn’t begin to make up for it.
[/QUOTE]
It does, actually, if the “cool local shops” offer a poorer selection than the chains, at inflated prices, with lousy treatment of customers. Which has been my experience in some small towns (the alleged nirvana you are talking about probably has more to do with certain university districts in larger cities. And there’s a degree of exploitation even there).

Some individually-owned stores do have atmosphere, and goods and services it’s hard to duplicate elsewhere. But there’s a less attractive side to the “downtown” retail experience that gets overlooked in the rush to nostalgia.

63

[QUOTE=elmwood]
Again, though, what makes a place “authentic?”
[/QUOTE]

That’s a really good point, and properly acknowledges that considerable planning and organization went into the development of most towns/neighborhoods. I used the quotes to emphasize the imprecision of my term.

I guess if I were to attempt to clarify, I’d probably offer that “artificiality” increases, as the number of contributors/developers decreases. So it is one thing to plan an area with certain areas set aside for residential, commercial, and recreational development to take place by different actors at different times, as opposed to an all-inclusive project being developed at one time.

Another factor concerns the extent to which involved parties are local, instead of simply a regional manifestation of a national or international entities. Add in the extent to which a development speaks to elements that are uniquely local.

Regarding the “authenticity” of shopping districts, I recently read that the final local retailer was leaving Chicago’s Mag Mile (Hanig’s Shoes IIRC). So I can imagine that the lack of local variety might be undesireable factor in my equation.

I’ll be giving this more thought. Thanks.

64

[QUOTE=VCO3]
I’d rather live in soulless suburban sprawl than a fraudulent, prefab “Town Center.”
[/QUOTE]

I am so sick of this ridiculous “truth” that’s so often flogged on this Board like it’s a deep and original thought. Yes, there are plenty of things that are wrong with suburban development. There’s also plenty of things that are wrong with public housing, but I don’t see the smug need to characterize its residents as “soulless” because where they live doesn’t meet your standards.

Oh, that’s right, people in projects are trapped there by circumstance but people move to the suburbs because they’re racists. And people who live in the sticks and in expensive neighborhoods sure aren’t, nope. They have souls.

[QUOTE=VCO3]
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?!).

You know, there’s a reason that anyone building new housing won’t generally cater to hipsters. Because all they ever do is complain! They whine and then they take their overly soulful, authentic, reflective, sensitive, some-assembly-required selves and move to some ridiculously overpriced hipster ghetto like Williamsburg, Brooklyn so that they can slouch through their day without having their senses assaulted by the sign for a chain store, a Hummer, or a fat person. Honestly, now, you used to complain like hell to anyone who would listen about that ugly strip mall (and I’d give odds that “charming wooded area” was a corn field before your parents raised the property taxes and drove all the farmers out) – and you hated your hometown growing up.

You hated the chintzy little Mom-and-Pop record store that never had any imports and would have jumped up and down in they tore it down (with the owner still inside) and put up am HMV. You hated the bookstore that had nothing but used Harlequin romances. You hated it and you left, and now you’re annoyed that the people who still live there – who are still there because that’s where they grew up, because that’s what they dreamed of, because they actually enjoy the sense of community it provides, because they want their kids to play on grass and be able to go to a school without armed guards and have other kids to play with, because they like actually owning a home and having the neighbors close enough to know but far enough off so they can’t heard them talking – not because they have no souls and are hateful automatons with big SUVs and bigger strollers and a uniquely overdeveloped sense of entitlement – you’re annoyed that these people didn’t think to preserve the town as a museum to your childhood. What bad people they are for not thinking of you.

[QUOTE=VCO3]
I literally broke down and cried when I saw it - when I saw what had been done to my humble hometown.
[/QUOTE]

It’s hard to believe you’re that much of a drama queen. Even Joni Mitchell managed a chuckle at the end of “Big Yellow Taxi.”

[QUOTE=VCO3]
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!™”
[/QUOTE]

You know, you sound just like a hippie. Hippie writings are full of this kind of sentiment. Suburbs are an evil trap, man, Little Boixes Mae of Ticky-Tacky, full of robots, we all need to live off the land or move to the ghetto and give away food to the Indians! Please note that in 2007 about 0.001% of hippies are still living in yurts off the grid and the rest are living in soulless condos with the rest of the hoopleheads. Not because they are bad people, but because once the initial excitement dies down not that many people really want to live in a goddamned yurt and bathe in a 20-gallon maple syrup pan once a week with water they carried from the creek. Some do, and Goddess bless 'em. Most people don’t. And so they gave away their Foxfire books and cast-iron cookstoves and one day the clouds parted and they somehow saw whatever good there is to be seen in the wicked old suburban tract home or the condo complex. Because after all these places whatevr their flaws are still filled with humans even if the houses all arrived on flatbeds yesterday.

Bedford Falls isn’t a myth. There are plenty of little towns like that. There’s one not far from where I grew up. It was entirely built around a brickyard by the brick company. Soulless corporate housing. Now it’s a charming little town. Go figure.

Lasy year I spent 9 months looking for a house in the Hudson Valley – small cities, farming towns, little artsy-craftsy towns, houses in the middle of nowhere, whatever I could afford. Do you know what an area looks like when there’s no planning whatsoever and people are allowed to built whatever they want? It looks like a trailer park that’s been rolled down a hillside. That’s what “organic sincerity” looks like. Your beloved urban enclaves and bricky little college towns were designed and built by people trying to make money, and many of them were initially regarded as inhumane hellholes. Now they are authentic, not because of the impulse with which they were built, but because of what the residents brought to them. Which involves staying put, building community, dealing with local problems, talking to your neighbors. I’ve been hearing hispters flog this same crap for 25 years now: solve for x, where comercially produced popular music of x years ago is authentic and human, while that more recent is contrived. It’s an oversimplification.

[QUOTE=even sven]
Don’t worry. Soon enough the chain stores will fail, the place will turn to a ghost town, and with the magic that only a city in it’s natural state could conjure up, the place will be filled with ethnic restaurants and local stores. Well, either that or it will stay a ghost town.
[/QUOTE]

Really? Magic is how it happens? Believe me, if every chain store suddenly went belly-up, the results wouldn’t be described by anyone as magical.

[QUOTE=even sven]
I think the thing that makes these developments so repulsive is that they admit to the things our cities once had and that we now long for- public space, walkability, local ownership. a sense of place, variety, spontanaity, a public life. But they don’t really offer that. Generally, you gotta drive your cars to these places and everything is heavily regulated (try, say, shooting a student video in one, or holding a protest, or being a street musician).
[/QUOTE]

And they’re offering some of these things, anway – public space, walkabiility. Local ownership hasn’t been proved or disproven to me yet. The rest – sense of place, variety, spontaneity, public life – are provided by the people who occupy that space, just like in a failing urban neighborhood or a factory being converted into lofts or a bunch of grass huts in the middle of the woods. Because of your prejudices you choose to find it repulsive rather than participate, and think less of the people who do.

65

[QUOTE=Jackmannii]
It does, actually, if the “cool local shops” offer a poorer selection than the chains, at inflated prices, with lousy treatment of customers. Which has been my experience in some small towns (the alleged nirvana you are talking about probably has more to do with certain university districts in larger cities. And there’s a degree of exploitation even there).
[/QUOTE]
Maybe it’s you.

I grew up in a small town where my dad owned a pharmacy – we knew and traded with everyone in the downtown district, and my folks still do. Every where I’ve lived I’ve gotten to know the local merchants. . .that’s small towns, and college towns (Ithaca, NY and Corvallis, OR), and Baltimore.

Right now, I live near the local shop owners, see them jogging, see them at the dog park, the movies. They know my name when I go in.

Our hardware store carries stuff that fits the houses that are within walking distance of it.

If you live NOWHERE, then you probably don’t appreciate these things. If you prefer a good return policy over personal attention and friendship then it’s no wonder you don’t mind Consumerismville.

66

Sorry about these blank posts, clearly I am a white picket fence looking for some graffiti.

I am so sick of this ridiculous “truth” that’s so often flogged on this Board like it’s a deep and original thought. Yes, there are plenty of things that are wrong with suburban development. There’s also plenty of things that are wrong with public housing, but I don’t see the smug need to characterize its residents as “soulless” because where they live doesn’t meet your standards.

Oh, that’s right, people in projects are trapped there by circumstance but people move to the suburbs because they’re racists. And people who live in the sticks and in expensive neighborhoods sure aren’t, nope. They have souls.

You know, there’s a reason that anyone building new housing won’t generally cater to hipsters. Because all they ever do is complain! They whine and then they take their overly soulful, authentic, reflective, sensitive, some-assembly-required selves and move to some ridiculously overpriced hipster ghetto like Williamsburg, Brooklyn so that they can slouch through their day without having their senses assaulted by the sign for a chain store, a Hummer, or a fat person. Honestly, now, you used to complain like hell to anyone who would listen about that ugly strip mall (and I’d give odds that “charming wooded area” was a corn field before your parents raised the property taxes and drove all the farmers out) – and you hated your hometown growing up.

You hated the chintzy little Mom-and-Pop record store that never had any imports and would have jumped up and down in they tore it down (with the owner still inside) and put up am HMV. You hated the bookstore that had nothing but used Harlequin romances. You hated it and you left, and now you’re annoyed that the people who still live there – who are still there because that’s where they grew up, because that’s what they dreamed of, because they actually enjoy the sense of community it provides, because they want their kids to play on grass and be able to go to a school without armed guards and have other kids to play with, because they like actually owning a home and having the neighbors close enough to know but far enough off so they can’t heard them talking – not because they have no souls and are hateful automatons with big SUVs and bigger strollers and a uniquely overdeveloped sense of entitlement – you’re annoyed that these people didn’t think to preserve the town as a museum to your childhood. What bad people they are for not thinking of you.

It’s hard to believe you’re that much of a drama queen. Even Joni Mitchell managed a chuckle at the end of “Big Yellow Taxi.”

You know, you sound just like a hippie. Hippie writings are full of this kind of sentiment. Suburbs are an evil trap, man, Little Boixes Mae of Ticky-Tacky, full of robots, we all need to live off the land or move to the ghetto and give away food to the Indians! Please note that in 2007 about 0.001% of hippies are still living in yurts off the grid and the rest are living in soulless condos with the rest of the hoopleheads. Not because they are bad people, but because once the initial excitement dies down not that many people really want to live in a goddamned yurt and bathe in a 20-gallon maple syrup pan once a week with water they carried from the creek. Some do, and Goddess bless 'em. Most people don’t. And so they gave away their Foxfire books and cast-iron cookstoves and one day the clouds parted and they somehow saw whatever good there is to be seen in the wicked old suburban tract home or the condo complex. Because after all these places whatevr their flaws are still filled with humans even if the houses all arrived on flatbeds yesterday.

Bedford Falls isn’t a myth. There are plenty of little towns like that. There’s one not far from where I grew up. It was entirely built around a brickyard by the brick company. Soulless corporate housing. Now it’s a charming little town. Go figure.

Lasy year I spent 9 months looking for a house in the Hudson Valley - small cities, farming towns, little artsy-craftsy towns, houses in the middle of nowhere, whatever I could afford. Do you know what an area looks like when there’s no planning whatsoever and people are allowed to built whatever they want? It looks like a trailer park that’s been rolled down a hillside. That’s what “organic sincerity” looks like. Your beloved urban enclaves and bricky little college towns were designed and built by people trying to make money, and many of them were initially regarded as inhumane hellholes. Now they are authentic, not because of the impulse with which they were built, but because of what the residents brought to them. Which involves staying put, building community, dealing with local problems, talking to your neighbors. I’ve been hearing hispters flog this same crap for 25 years now: solve for x, where comercially produced popular music of x years ago is authentic and human, while that more recent is contrived. It’s an oversimplification.

[QUOTE=even sven]
Don’t worry. Soon enough the chain stores will fail, the place will turn to a ghost town, and with the magic that only a city in it’s natural state could conjure up, the place will be filled with ethnic restaurants and local stores. Well, either that or it will stay a ghost town.
[/QUOTE]

Really? Magic is how it happens? Believe me, if every chain store suddenly went belly-up, the results wouldn’t be described by anyone as magical.

[QUOTE=even sven]
I think the thing that makes these developments so repulsive is that they admit to the things our cities once had and that we now long for- public space, walkability, local ownership. a sense of place, variety, spontanaity, a public life. But they don’t really offer that. Generally, you gotta drive your cars to these places and everything is heavily regulated (try, say, shooting a student video in one, or holding a protest, or being a street musician).
[/QUOTE]

And they’re offering some of these things, anway – public space, walkabiility. Local ownership hasn’t been proved or disproven to me yet. The rest – sense of place, variety, spontaneity, public life – are provided by the people who occupy that space, just like in a failing urban neighborhood or a factory being converted into lofts or a bunch of grass huts in the middle of the woods. Because of your prejudices you choose to find it repulsive rather than participate, and think less of the people who do.

67

I’d like to point out that downtown centers didn’t “just die” as if it were an unfortunate coincidence. They didn’t “just die” of natural causes, as if the loss of business revenue and consumer traffic were accidental, or the result of some kind of cosmic business cycle, or God’s hand sweeping down and destroying good, proud, small business owners on His whim.

They died because people stopped going. Because people wanted to live in their happy, all-natural suburban house with their 0.40 acres of yard and a pony, with the white picket fence, and yet still have the mom-and-pop Happy Days hardware store and the local market and the service station with the full-service pumps and the mechanic named Earl. Statistics that I just made up show that 90% of Americans are in favor of small-town charm that other people will pay for. And furthermore, mostly what we want is for other people to take public transportation so that we can have an unobstructed 5-minute commute in our cars.

I don’t like the small-town conglomeration of chain stores in faux Bedford Falls every 5 miles. But the alternative was tried in the 70s and 80s, the massive megaplex conglomeration of shopping malls every 30 miles that congested traffic in a knot for miles around.

Nearly every town west of the Appalaichans has been a planned town. In the New World, we didn’t let our towns grow organically, for the most part. They have been ruthlessly planned, almost every one, for the last two centuries at least, because we have had the space to do so.

I don’t see these little towne centres as a unilaterally bad thing. A horde of chain stores has the clout and capital to fund the construction of a big project like this. And they have the resilience to close one of their shops down if it doesn’t work out, which would leave open a ready-made nest with a ready-made customer base for some small business to hop into. There was a Dairy Queen in town, once — but DQ built a newer, more sparkly store 5 blocks away, and in their old building is now a local coffee shop. (Or coffeee shoppe, maybe.) City Hall tried to put up a big white two-story building for office space, but grew out of it. Now it’s a comic book store. The local mall had a Pietro’s Pizza, which morphed into Sbarro’s, but now it’s a Thai restaurant owned by a local family. The local cineplex opened a newer, bigger branch with better seats and sound system; now their old auditoriums are filled by a local church.

The real tragedy is if they built these Localle Towne Shoppes on brand-new land, left, and nobody moved into the vacated spaces.

68

[QUOTE=even sven]
Don’t worry. Soon enough the chain stores will fail, the place will turn to a ghost town, and with the magic that only a city in it’s natural state could conjure up, the place will be filled with ethnic restaurants and local stores. Well, either that or it will stay a ghost town.

I think the thing that makes these developments so repulsive is that they admit to the things our cities once had and that we now long for- public space, walkability, local ownership. a sense of place, variety, spontanaity, a public life. But they don’t really offer that. Generally, you gotta drive your cars to these places and everything is heavily regulated (try, say, shooting a student video in one, or holding a protest, or being a street musician).

It’s like if you had a dead friend, and you were given a life sized doll that looked just like him, but without the soul. It’d be outright depressing. Well, our cities are dead, and now we are being offered this. What can this do? Provide a poke in the ribs to our nostalgia while slightly delaying the real work that needs to be done in making our cities liveable once more?

And, well, goddammit I don’t want to live in Disneyland. And it makes me sad that my fellow citizens, who I feel free to look down on at this moment, do. Maybe I’m elitist. If thinking one thing is better than another thing, than I am. But before you squak, look who weighs 300 pounds and on prozac. Our urban planning is killing us, and we gotta do something about it soon.
[/QUOTE]

I love you.

69

[QUOTE=VCO3]
I love you.
[/QUOTE]

Get a condo, you two!

70

[QUOTE=Ichbin Dubist]
Get a condo, you two!
[/QUOTE]

I know of a lovely little place, and it’s within walking distance to work and shopping!

71

“You can never go home again, Oatman…but I guess you can shop there.”

72

One of the driving forces behind these developments is the price of land. Here in Richmond, prime development sites along West Broad Street run about $1 million per acre. As a developer, it makes much more economic sense for me to try and get as much density as I can on the smallest piece of land possible. That this involves vertical construction vs. horizontal construction is a given. Instead of seas of asphalt that are only going to get used during the Xmas season, create huge amounts of surface runoff that I need to contain and treat (BMPs are very, very expensive holes in the ground when land is $1 million per acre), and are soul-less expanses, I create gridded streets with onstreet parking, parking decks, and other “urban” amenities. I mix uses in the same building (living above the store). I build condominiums and townhouses that are close to the street, with small yards (lots of people don’t want to cut grass, etc. etc etc). The “new urbanist” movement has lots going for it from both the developers side (see above) and the local gov’t side (tax revenue).

73

Oops. To clarify, I am not a real estate developer - I work on the other side of the table; however, I’m VERY familiar with their rationales and can see their point in many instances. I just finished reviewing a proposed new urbanists center that is taking the place of over 1,000 apartments built in the 1940s. They’ve long since outlived their usefullness, are a blighted community, and the land is worth more than the buildings. 2000 residential units (aparts, townhouses, and single family detached), along with office, retail, and hotel space are going in their place. What’s wrong with that?

74

[QUOTE=whole bean]
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.
[/QUOTE]

Holy crap, THAT’S what the finished product looked like? I got out of the area in August of 2005, and none too soon, I can see (even then, the traffic for IKEA alone was fucking nuts). “Hey, you know what might be a good solution for all the gridlock and congestion around here? A big-ass shopping center in the middle of it all!”

75

[QUOTE=plnnr]
… 2000 residential units (aparts, townhouses, and single family detached), along with office, retail, and hotel space are going in their place. What’s wrong with that?
[/QUOTE]

It’s fraudulent!.

76

[QUOTE=even sven]
Our urban planning is killing us, and we gotta do something about it soon.
[/QUOTE]

Who’s “we,” you and the other tongue-clucking trustafarian expatriates? I’m giddy with anticipation.

77

[QUOTE=Trunk]
I grew up in a small town where my dad owned a pharmacy – we knew and traded with everyone in the downtown district, and my folks still do.
[/quote]
It’s..it’s so lyrical.*

Well I was born in a small town
And I can breathe in a small town
Gonna die in this small town
And that’s prob’ly where they’ll bury me*

Well, Andy of Mayberry, it’s swell that you and the local merchants are all cheek-to-cheek.

I think you’re more than a little naive about town-gown relationships and small town suspicion of outsiders, though.

78

[QUOTE=BMalion]
It’s fraudulent!.
[/QUOTE]
Ha ha! What does that even MEAN in this context, anyway? I’m sure the people buying those condos and townhomes know exactly what they’re getting!

[QUOTE=Vinyl Turnip]
Who’s “we,” you and the other tongue-clucking trustafarian expatriates? I’m giddy with anticipation.
[/QUOTE]

I live in a suburb that prides itself on its urban roots (it’s a suburb that borders Chicago). You can walk everywhere, the houses are old, it has all that “authentic” stuff (including “authentic” crime, noise, and dirt! :slight_smile: ). I like living here, but I’ll tell you, it sure does come with it’s share of insufferable pompous jerks. Sometimes I think I’d be thrilled to live in a community where people are comfortable with the fact that they want to live in a place that is clean, pleasant, and safe for their kids, rather than people who can’t admit that there is a lot about the urban environment they don’t like, because to do so would ruin some sort of imaginary street cred they think they have earned by living there.

79

[QUOTE=VCO3]
I love you.
[/QUOTE]

Would you please interrupt your lovefest long enough to participate in the thread you’ve started, perhaps as a start by defining fake streets and fake Macy’s?

80

[QUOTE=Dewey Finn]
Would you please interrupt your lovefest long enough to participate in the thread you’ve started, perhaps as a start by defining fake streets and fake Macy’s?
[/QUOTE]

Maybe he means “prefab”.

As opposed to the organic, sprung from the nether-regions of Buddha, olde-towne, folksie, Mount Pilot-type places.

Tell Floyd the barber I said “hey.”