Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [47]
What does traditional neighborhood design require of homebuilders? First, that they adjust their house plans so that the garages are located on a rear alley, or at least set back behind the house fronts, to avoid dominating the street. It also asks them to calm down the architecture: to simplify roofs and to limit the amount of variety within the house facade, recognizing that variety should instead occur at the urban scale, among different houses. In some cases, it demands that they supply front porches, stoops, and picket fences, to better define the transition between the public and the private realms. None of these requirements is particularly onerous, but there is no denying that traditional neighborhood design requires the builder to take a risk: specifically, to take the house plans that have been selling successfully for years, and to change them more than slightly.
Fortunately, the reasons for doing so are becoming apparent. In those few instances in which new traditional product has competed head-to-head against new conventional product, the popular preference is quite clear. In Belmont, a new village we designed in northern Virginia, three separate homebuilders were active: two local firms and a national conglomerate, a veritable 800-pound gorilla. The smaller builders were content to follow our urban regulations, which required front porches, picket fences, and alley-served garages. The national builder, too successful to listen, threw out the code, and insisted on building a standard garage-front product. After eighteen months on the market, sales figures were as follows: Local Builder A: 30 homes; Local Builder B: 14 homes; Gorilla: 1 home. There was little interest in the conventional product when buyers were presented with equal access to its alternative.
Aside from the general conservatism that it shares with land developers, the homebuilding industry finds its reform inhibited by a more deeply rooted problem, one which can be traced to the name of the industry itself. The term homebuilder describes the house as a product that exists independent of its context. This approach would be appropriate if houses floated freely in space, or in some other environment where actual interaction between neighbors was neither possible nor desired. But houses are not meant to exist in isolation, so to think of the individual house as the ultimate outcome of the builder’s craft robs that craft of its broader significance. This point becomes more meaningful when one considers that most subdivision developers are simply ambitious homebuilders, general contractors whose businesses have grown to the point where they are taking on larger and larger parcels of land. For these people to continue thinking of themselves as homebuilders only is like Stradivarius thinking of himself as a string purveyor, ignoring the fact that the string has a much greater value when stretched across a violin. But this misperception persists and is no doubt partially responsible for the fact that most American subdivisions feel like collections of individual homes rather than true neighborhoods.
A VISIT TO THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF HOME BUILDERS’ ANNUAL CONVENTION
If one wishes to understand the homebuilding industry, there is probably no event more eye-opening than the annual convention of the National Association of Home Builders. The NAHB convention can be an unsettling experience for those who have never witnessed it. The typical conventioneer is a skilled no-nonsense small businessman who removed his tool belt only moments before boarding the airplane. Sixty-five thousand people, mostly men, all