Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [64]
The key to active street life is creating a twenty-four-hour city, with neighborhoods so diverse in their use that they are inhabited around the clock. Eating, shopping, working, socializing—no one activity can flourish in the absence of any other, since they are all mutually reinforcing. As Jane Jacobs observed, a business district such as Wall Street normally cannot support fine restaurants, as there are not enough local residents to generate adequate dinner traffic; the restaurants are forced to make all their money between 12 and 2 p.m. The same is true of other businesses, such as health clubs, which rely on both daytime and evening clientele. Urban revitalization must begin, then, by reinstating the balance among the widest range of local uses.
CIVIC DECORUM
The first job of city government, as any resident or business owner will tell you, is to “keep it clean and safe.” Suburban developers have taught prospective home buyers to expect both scrupulous security and excellent maintenance. When it comes to security, customers demand not just safety but the perception of safety, which means that all potential signs of danger must be eliminated, including graffiti and litter. These are not truly difficult to eliminate, but they must be specifically targeted and assigned a dedicated staff member, since they often slip through the cracks of city bureaucracy.
Reuben Greenberg, the much-admired police chief of Charleston, South Carolina, has an effective method of dealing with graffiti. When an officer or a citizen spots new graffiti, he calls the police station, where forty-two colors of paint are stocked, including one called “old concrete.” At four-thirty the same day, an officer drives by with a state prisoner, who paints over the graffiti in minutes with a perfectly matching color. “We can cover it faster than they can put it up,” says Chief Greenberg, who has gone so far as to stage a public graffiti artist versus painting convict race to prove his point. No graffiti, be they on public or private property, stay visible for more than twenty-four hours, even in the poorest part of town.
Chief Greenberg, more than just an aesthete, is acting in accordance with the best crime-fighting intelligence. It has been demonstrated that graffiti, litter, broken glass, and other seemingly innocuous transgressions create an environment of civic demoralization in which serious crime is much more likely to occur. In recent years, concerted attention paid to the little things has proved to have a significant impact on the big things.
Suburban maintenance derives much of its effectiveness from providing management in small increments, through homeowners’ associations (HOAs). The willingness of tax-averse citizens to pay considerable monthly fees to these associations demonstrates that elective taxation is viable if the revenues are spent in proximity, where residents feel they have some control over the outcome. The same technique can be applied to the city, and has been used with success. There are over one hundred private management districts in New York City alone, the most notorious of them focusing on Times Square. Many have complained about the sanitized, tourist-oriented outcome, but few will suggest that it has not achieved its aim.
Whether or not it implies the creation of private management districts, the success of the suburban HOA has a lot to teach the city regarding the appropriate scale of governance. The faceless bureaucracy of a large city tends to become accessible and responsive if it is broken down into neighborhood-scale increments. Indeed, some issues that seem irresolvable at the citywide level, such as parking policy, are best addressed street by street.
PHYSICAL HEALTH
Fifty years ago, America’s cities provided a pedestrian environment