Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [119]
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Malcolm Gladwell, “Blowup,” 36. In another study, taxi operators in Munich, Germany, were given anti-lock brakes and secretly observed over a three-year period. Initially safer drivers, they were found to drive more and more recklessly until they regained their prior accident rate. This type of phenomenon has been termed risk homeostasis. People naturally adjust their behavior to the level of risk that they are comfortable with.
Narrow streets and difficult intersections are useful in communicating to drivers that they do not, in fact, own the road. Under ideal circumstances, drivers passing through a well-designed residential neighborhood are made to feel that they are borrowing the street space from the people who live there.
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The same is true of moving down. Seniors seeking a smaller house are often forced to abandon their familiar community and start over someplace else.
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This situation is exacerbated by distance. In the contemporary metropolis, the wealthy suburbs typically grow in the opposite direction from the poor side of town, which grows in its own direction. Diverse groups are located miles apart, in an extreme form of spatial inequity.
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Wyndcrest, another Maryland project, also demonstrates that new developments need not conform to the price-point-segregation model. Values vary even more widely, with subsidized town houses at $77,000 facing market-rate houses at $297,000.
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Unfortunately, low-income renters would not participate in this windfall, and might be forced to move. This flaw, an inevitable result of success, should not be allowed to discourage initiatives for neighborhood revitalization. Instead, a responsible local housing policy must be in place to ensure the continued presence of affordable rentals within the neighborhood. Of course, if one wishes to provide new affordable housing that will never appreciate in value, the easiest solution may be to provide it in an incompatible avant-garde style.
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The live/work unit can take many other forms as well, such as an office inhabiting the ground floor of a conventional house, or a house set to the rear of its lot, behind a front shop and courtyard.
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While quite common in older neighborhoods, outbuildings are all but absent from suburbia, primarily because ordinances prohibit them. These ordinances arose mostly from abuse: too many outbuildings were built too large, eating up green space and taxing municipal infrastructure. This outcome can be easily avoided by limiting the size of outbuildings and the amount of plumbing they can hold.
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There are other contributing factors as well, such as the fact that many municipal housing agencies have imposed institutional standards for construction and ease of maintenance on low-income housing developments, standards that cause these developments to appear even more out of place in their neighborhoods.
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Like most monocultures, impoverished neighborhoods are dangerously brittle. One of the manifestations of poverty is the fragility of normalcy. A broken-down car or even a broken window can represent a severe economic hardship. In such an environment, the evidence of small, untoward events can quickly accumulate into a critical mass of blight.
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This calculation ignores the fact that most Americans are barraged by advertisements suggesting that their social stature depends on their driving something considerably more expensive than a Ford Escort. American automakers spend almost $40 billion annually promoting their products (Jane Holtz Kay, Asphalt Nation, 17).
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These mortgages are currently available in Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles. Vice President Core took this idea national and created a new $100 million Fannie Mae program that offers higher-valued loans to families that buy homes near transit. Along with the loan, families receive thirty-year transit passes as well.
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Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the