They built one here, but it replaced a hideous indoor mall that had no character whatsoever (think Fast Times at Ridgemont High). It’s a vast improvement.
You missed at least one /quote tag. There is a bug in posts over a certain length where if a /quote tag is missing, the post appears blank.
Since you did get your post to appear finally, I won’t fix the other.
Well, it all depends (to me) on what the old building(s) looked like. And whether the new construction displaced low-income residents. I like old stuff. That’s why I’m a history major, live in an Art Deco building, and am considering a career in preserving historic sites.
I like going into my friend’s house, staring at an odd circular piece of wood on the living room wall, and figuring out that it is covering the old hole for the coal-burning stove. I’d have liked it better if the coal-burning stove was in there, but hey. I liked staring at the strange bits of pipe sticking out of my old apartment’s wall and figuring out there used to be radiators there. Once again, actual radiators would have been cooler.
I like examining old architecture and imagining what it looked like when it was new, all the people that lived and died there. But then, I also love going to new construction sites and seeing the skeleton of a building and figuring out what will be there. Eh, I’m a weirdo.
If the old apartment buildings lacked any sense of archetectural style, and the new construction is aesthetically pleasing, I’m ok with it. I realize not everyone shares my love of old stuff simply because it’s old, and age does not automatically qualify something as good.
I live in a smallish city whose downtown is currently undergoing gentrification. I like that downtown is getting revitalized, that I have 4 different Thai restaurants, an Indian restaurant, a couple of French places, and Og only knows how many Chinese places within walking distance. But I hate the huge condos going up. The big, box-like, lacking any style ones. There’s a few with really nice architecture, and I’m ok with those. Even this place, which is just going up, I’m interested to see. It might be a hideous monstrosity blocking the waterfront view, but it’s a unique and interesting monstrosity. I prefer the townhomes they’re putting up, by and large they have better style.
There is a small part of me (the 17 year old part) that longs for the days when downtown was a shithole where the only people you’d meet while drinking in alleys were a few bums we knew by name (or the one we never talked to, nicknamed Finger-like Projection because of an unfortunate growth on his forehead). I don’t like walking to my dive bars and crossing the paths of drunk yupies, but what can you do?
I hate suburban sprawl, and love being able to walk just about everywhere I want to go, even if I still drive if I’m running late or it’s 94 degrees. I lost 10 pounds when I moved here, and don’t worry about designated drivers or possibly misjudging how much I drank, I just walk to the pool hall. I appreciate any attempt at urban planning which encourages walking and bicycling, even if the new construction and attempt at old-timey-ness can be a bit hokey. I’d take a town center with a variety of stores and restaurants and housing all clumped together (and built vertically!) than miles of strip malls and gated communities.
I hate how these developers are pushing out lower-income folks and tearing down affordable housing. That’s what gets me, not the “soulless-ness” of new construction. Affordable housing is a major issue here, a lot of people are being forced out. There was a huge kerfuffle about homeless people sleeping in donated tents on private (charitable organization) property, culminating in an incident where police officers slashed up the tents with boxcutters. The St. Pete Times ran a lot of articles talking about how affordable housing is torn down in favor of building new, exorbitantly-priced condos and townhomes, and then we wonder why we have tent cities spring up on empty lots.
Anyway, enough ranting and rambling. Carry on.
Damn, you beat me to it. Perfect quote for the occasion.
While we’re quoting:
“The only place you can find a Main Street these days is in Disneyland. And just try to buy a gun there.” – Hank Hill
I’d never heard of these things before, so I checked out a few of the links.
Good lord. I believe I may end up owing Ray Bradbury an apology before too long.
That sounds like two new malls that have been built in the past few years near where I live in central North Carolina: Southpoint mall in Durham, and Triangle Town Center (or Towne Centre, or whatever) in Raleigh. They’re nice and all, except parking at the former can be a nightmare, especially around holidays.
The OP’s lament seems to be directed more towards the mixed-use developments that have residential and commercial properties combined in one huge area, like Southern Village and Meadowmont in my hometown of Chapel Hill. And I will hand it to those two developments: they both seem to have emphasized attracting local businesses to their shopping areas, particularly Southern Village, where even the movie theater is an independent one. For my part, I actually prefer the fake-town layout to a sprawling strip-mall complex, because getting out of your car and walking around from store to store is encouraged a bit more. These “town centers” even have outdoor events and community gatherings from time to time. While I don’t like the idea of taking established downtown areas and turning them into prefabricated cookie-cutter deelopments (urban renewal of depressed areas is another matter), if an area is going to be ripped up to build another shopping center, then at least let it be one that is nice to walk around in and isn’t al about walking from your car to a store and then back to your car and then to another store.
The “fake-town” layout that’s now in vogue with developers is not really that new. During the 50’s in Northern California, there were a number of Town & Country Villages built that were designed to look like a cross between a small town main street and a modern shopping center.
Regardless of what the OP says, whatever their flaws, I prefer phony town centers to ugly strip malls with all the personality of a Styrofoam cup. I believe that many over-sized sprawl-ridden suburban cities (like the one where I live) suffer from lack of identity and sense of place. They just seem to be an area on a map with a border arbitrarily drawn around it (i.e, "there’s no ‘there’ there’). Pre-fab town centers may be fake but at least they’re better than having block-after-block of fast-food places, mini-malls, and strip shopping centers represent your city’s “core.”
Right. I’ll tell that to the 4000 other people who live in the town I spent the first 18 years of my life in. . .that I’m naive about how people treated each other.
Sure, there were plenty of suspicious assholes in that town. But if that’s the impression you take away from living there, it makes me wonder just which circles you run in.
The developer has proffered brick, stone, EIFS, and stucco building materials. The townhouse units pick up the architecture and style of the row houses and forms found in the Fan district here in Richmond (constructed between 1910 and 1925). The detached single family houses are a mixture of arts and crafts-style bungalows and similar styles.
As for displacing low-income residents, these apartments were largely vacant and had been for a long time. The developer gave the remaining residents a year’s notice that they would be razing the buildings and set up a relocation committee. Everyone still has a home.
Bah. I went to college in a very anti-growth town. There’s more than a few Dopers who can tell you about the inability to purchase underwear within the town of Davis, CA. Right when I was about to leave Borders was trying to open a store there. Oh the cry went up, look to our poor local book stores! Whatever shall they do? They can’t compete against this corperate monstrosity! They will be pushed out of town by the soulless, corperate big-box store!
Never mind that one of the local book stores had another store that was doing just fine in the urban sprawl of near-by Sacramento. Now the poor little book store owners with their nice big houses away from those rambunctious college kids will have to starve as they trim down their margins. Bah, I say.
I’m not sure I’d agree that the new fake stuff is necessarily worse than what had preceded it, but I’m impressed by the way you write. You might enjoy reading some theory that broaches the same general subject matter – specifically, the writings of Jean Baudrillard and Walter Benjamin… except the latter took his life, and I don’t want to encourage any such imitation. (His was an authentic suicide, you see…). :dubious:
My guess is that he’s too busy rereading the Wikipedia entry on the Situationists to bother responding to any of this.
I’m moving into one of these places, and I’m looking forward to it. It’s not built quite yet, but I expect that it’ll be great once I live there. Good location, a decent book/coffeee shop, electronics, and restaraunts? Without having to drive? Yes! I hate driving with a passion (I delivered pizza for two years), and any excuse to hop on my bike or take a walk is one I’ll gladly take.
Ah, but can you build a treehouse?
Maybe, but it would have to be prefab!
You should have heard the ruckus last year when we voted to gasp! bring a Target into town! :eek: Its not like it will competing with the boutiques selling expensive dresses for the anorexic and clothes made out of hemp anyway.
I was out and about this weekend and ran into a situation that made me think of this thread. Rather than going to the indoor/outdoor MegaMall of the type descried here – a very nice one, IMO, with fountains, restaurants, theaters, and shops – we went to the converted-warehouse, exposed-brick “shoppes” of the independent and local variety. A nice change, no question, and I’m all for supporting local business.
One of these shops sold Hallmark cards. The shop keeper had used the gold seals they sometimes give out (gold round stickers with the Hallmark crown on them) to cover up the Hallmark price, which is printed on the back of the card, and pencilled in new prices. Though I didn’t peel off the seals to check, these prices were at a guess two to three times the actual cost of the card – I remember that one was $6.50, another was $8.00.
Now, I’m happy to support local business as I said, but there is no way in hell I’m paying 8 bucks for a Hallmark card. I realize there are issues of overhead and inventory and costs that a small business owner can’t carry month to month that a big chain can, and I realize that these costs sometimes must be passed on to the customer. But I’m still not paying 8 bucks for a Hallmark card. So it was nice to walk through the shops, but I will continue to do my actuall shopping at the mall, where the selection is greater and the prices are less.
I may want privacy, a big lawn, and a nice big new house.
I may also want to sit on my ass and eat twinkies all day.
In the past few years, we’ve learned that the second thing will kill you. In the future, we learn that the first one will kill us just as well.
Sometimes, what we want is ultimately not the best thing to do. A few decades ago you would be called an elitist for eating in a way to avoid disease and encouraging others to do the same. Now we recognize the value of a healthy lifestyle. One day, we will recognize the value of a healthy living situation. Urban planning is not simply a matter of personal preference. It is a matter of public and personal health.
How many of our current social ills can be blamed on bad urban planning? I believe this list includes obesity , depression, racism, poverty, crime…of course, I may be overstating things. But who can argue that childhood obesity is not linked to the fact that our kids can’t walk to school because the school is five miles away, and they can’t play outside because we don’t know our neighbors well enough to trust them not to kidnap our loved ones?
I don’t have all the answers. And I know that even if the “good old days” actually were that good (which they wern’t), we could never go back. Homesteads are dead. Villages are dead. Small towns are dead. Downtowns are dead. Suburbs are dying. The future will be some form of living together that we havn’t thought of yet.
But since this future probably won’t include the amazingly ineffeciant system of daily mass scale long distance individual transit, and we are still under the illusion that the gods of science are going to save this unworkable monstrosity with some kind of magic fuel, it’s gonna take a while. Took us a while to figure out perpetual motion wouldn’t ever work, and this is basically the same thing. In the meantime, I’ll hang out with the yuppies and DINKs and expat trustafarians and street people and whatever looking for a better way to live.
You’re talking about a different critter, though, inasmuch as (judging from the Wiki article you linked) it doesn’t incorporate housing into the mix. (Am I mistaken about that?) We have a similar place in Atlanta: Ansley Mall. But even though the layout is unusual (and as you describe), when you get right down to it, it’s still a mall.
It’s the housing component that makes the new developments different.
I feel the same way. And the two Atlanta mixed-use projects mentioned by whole bean replaced a polluted brownfield left by an old metalworks, and a decrepit Atlanta Gas Light building parked on a vast plain of asphalt, respectively. So I embrace both of those changes.
Woodland’s gonna lose a lot of money now…