Not a huge fan of the writing style, but this article makes a solid underlying point: whatever the other incentives for building high-rise residential buildings, they’re terrible if you care about the social health of your city. I’m sympathetic to motives like decreasing housing prices in general, but if the tradeoff is between inexpensive housing and annihilating the social fabric, I’m not sure you’ve actually made any improvements to the situation. We’ve known more-or-less how to build healthy cities for decades now, thanks to the work of people like Jane Jacobs; that that Le Corbusier shit still seems to exert a powerful influence over urban planning should be a civilizational embarrassment.
@jadagul replied to your post:
I suspect most of the action is less in building high-rises–though I like high-rises–and more in moving single-family deatched homes into three- and four-story residential complexes. Which are exactly the sort of thing that happened in the areas Jacobs celebrated. I’m not sure even high-rises are anti-Jacobsian if you still have plenty of ground-level retail etc.
Yeah, that last point is part of it; it’s not the density, it’s that isolating neighborhoods or regions of a city to be purely residential or purely commercial makes them either commuter neighborhoods where everyone spends their time bottled up in their personal living space bubble, or sterile wastelands where nobody can just wander down to a cafe for breakfast on a Sunday morning if they feel like it (or, for a less furiously bourgeoise example, you don’t have to spend an hour going to and from work every day).
And the thing is, on some level, developers must know this is a terrible way to design cities: think of how many shopping malls in America are designed to imitate the mixed character of a major thoroughfare of a small town or a cozy European neighborhood: it’s like they see the benches and the wrought-iron lamposts and think they can, in cargo-cult fashion, summon the necessary spirit to make this a desirable place to pass the time, but they’re not actually investigating what makes a street pedestrian-friendly. The clearest memory I have of this is a street in I think Sydney, which tried to do inviting shopfronts and cafes with outdoor seating and all that, but was otherwise surrounded by blank flat walls, and was devoid of any other visible human life besides me and the person walking next to me.
I think I am far from alone in thinking that a neighborhood where I can walk downstairs to the shop, buy some stamps, then post a letter, all over such a short distance I question whether it’s really worth it to even put on shoes, is far more pleasant a place to exist than one where I trade that for a half-acre of lawn and slightly less traffic noise. You could build a futuristic arcology-style high rise like that, that packed together a lot of different types of residential and commercial spaces, but it seems like zoning laws and practical considerations mostly prevent that in reality.
I am almost as anti single-family homes as I am high rises; urban sprawl is as ruinous to a healthy, livable city as artificially separating residential and commercial areas, and insisting every house be an island surrounded by its sea of grass sort of necessitates that kind of segregation anyway. The really crazy thing is that it feels like the U.S. has only been living this way from, like, the end of World War 2 or so, so it’s not like we’ve irreversibly committed our civilization to this path. At the very least, not actively punishing that kind of mixed development would be a start.
Huh, so I associate “no high-rises” with “no mixed-use”. As you point out they’re obviously separable. But the sort of zoning regulations that bar the one often also bar the other.
Whether or not most people would, in practice, enjoy mixed-use development, a lot of people are very vociferously opposed to it. Which is part of why it’s illegal in most places.
Who are these mixed-used haters, seriously? This is an honest question; the advantages of medium-density mixed-used development are praised in literally every media source I see and by 100% of my peer group, so I have a very hazy notion of who opposes it and what their real or supposed motivations are.
People who want to make sure no one is on the streets outside their house ever.
Like, the reason a lot of people dislike mixed use housing is pretty much exactly the same Jacobsian reason it’s a good idea. There’s always people on the street and things happening. People who want not-that find it unpleasant.
Okay, this gives me at least a vague idea of the reference group: people who are aesthetically pleased by the suburban notion of vast regions of Just Houses.
People are allowed to have that preference; but why are they allowed to oppose the existence of mixed-use even if they don’t have to live there?
And could they be bought off by an alternate strategy?
