Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [48]
The convention floor itself is an astounding sight, a collection of building products that together could serve as a compelling argument against increased GNP: refrigerators disguised as walnut wardrobes, Jacuzzis the size of sports utility vehicles, and home entertainment centers worthy of a film producer. Spectacles abound. Two talented performers juggle Craftsman tools while extolling the virtues of Sears’ Buyer Protection Program. Showgirls dance in front of a fifty-foot-high Koehler display while lab-coated actors demonstrate the latest in high-tech toilets. Amid this circus atmosphere, consultants offer hundreds of seminars intended to give the builders an advantage over their competition. Typical courses are “Designing and Marketing Homes for Aging Baby Boomers” and “Fifty Great and Zany Ideas Guaranteed to Jump-Start Your Sales.”
The Master Bedroom Resort: gimmicks that homebuilders offer to fill the spiritual void created by the absence of community
Year after year, homebuilders return to the NAHB convention in search of those new concepts and appliances that will give their houses product differentiation, that will somehow distinguish their output from everyone else’s. They design and market their houses like cars, characterized primarily by their factory options: will the gimmick be a path-oriented lighting control panel or an integrated garage door opener/burglar alarm deactivator? Meanwhile, by ignoring the issue of context—the quality of the environment surrounding the houses—they miss out on their best opportunity to provide something truly desired: community. Community is the amenity most cherished by those looking for a place to live. According to Fannie Mae, Americans prefer a good community to a good house by a margin of three to one. This fact is the key to the emancipation of the homebuilder from his slavery to the gadgets and doohickeys of the NAHB convention.
Unfortunately, the homebuilders have yet to get this message. Only two or three presentations and panels out of literally hundreds at each convention address the concept of traditional neighborhood development. These seminars are well attended and feature speakers on both sides of the issue, but they make little impact on the bulk of convention attendees. The primary goal of the industry remains to build and sell individual houses as quickly and profitably as possible, to “blow and go,” as they put it. A pro-community panelist at the NAHB convention can’t help but feel like a flower child at boot camp.
Homebuilders, land developers, and marketing advisers are all constituencies that must be won over if the campaign against suburban sprawl is to succeed. Their participation will be meaningful in the long run only if it is driven by the profit motive, because in America at the millennium, ideas live or die based upon their performance in the marketplace. While there are ways in which government intervention is necessary—most obviously in rolling back the federal, state, and municipal policies that continue to promote sprawl—sprawl will not become obsolete by changing laws alone. A higher standard of development will become commonplace only if it offers greater profits to those who practice it.
The generation of developers that pioneered neotraditional town planning—Robert Davis (Seaside), Joe Alfandre (Kentlands), Phil Angelides (Laguna West), Vince Graham (Newpoint), Henry Turley (Harbortown), and even Michael Eisner (Celebration)—were all motivated primarily by a desire to provide a better place to live, and only secondarily by profit. Since then, a second generation of developers, many of them large corporations, are copying these techniques, primarily because they want to duplicate the financial success of these pioneers. If this generation finds traditional neighborhood development to be a better investment than sprawl—as it has so far—it is reasonable to