Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [69]
All of the above techniques depend to some degree upon managed retail, a concept that causes some to bristle. “Whatever happened to a natural diversity?” they ask. “Are there any real places left?” The surprising answer to that question is that a lack of management has proven to be the enemy of diversity. It is why Key West has become an emporium of T-shirt shops, and why the only lunch available on Rodeo Drive for under ten dollars consists of potato chips and a soda. When left alone, retailers tend to repeat easy successes and entire sectors become homogeneous. Variety is achieved not through natural selection but through careful programming. Thanks to management, the main street of Disney’s Celebration provides not only restaurants for four different price ranges but a bar that is required to stay open until the last movie gets out. Even if there are only two customers, martinis are available at midnight. Does this make Celebration any worse, or any less real?
MARKETING
Suburban developers have lapsed into a bigger-is-better, “build it and they will come” mentality. Typically, they direct their efforts at the largest market segments only, providing huge tracts of housing and big-box retail. This approach may make some sense in the urban periphery, where a critical mass is necessary to attract customers, and where homogeneity is considered a virtue. But in the city, where a diversity of form and activity already exists—and is cherished—development must be approached on a smaller scale, and with a thorough understanding of the customer base.
One of the most effective ways to revitalize an underbuilt city core is to subdivide undeveloped superblocks into smaller increments affordable to individual investors. This technique opens the door for local stakeholders to become small-scale developers, lessening the city’s dependence on the few national-scale real-estate corporations. The town house lot, usually no more than twenty-four feet wide, is an ideal increment of development, as it can hold a home, a business, or both. Many superblocks now lie fallow, thanks to the unsuccessful mega-projects of the eighties, “quick fix” solutions that failed owing to their reliance on unrealistically large increments of investment.
In addition to operating at the correct scale, renewal efforts must proceed with realistic expectations about who will move downtown, and market accordingly. According to William Kraus, the market segment that pioneers difficult areas is the “risk-oblivious”: artists and recent college graduates. These are followed by the “risk-aware”: yuppies; and finally by the “risk-averse”: the middle class. City developers must anticipate this often inevitable sequence, and provide the appropriate housing at the appropriate time. For example, the risk-oblivious are not well served by finished units with separate bedrooms but by lofts, which are large, tough, inexpensive, yet easily converted to yuppie housing upon the arrival of the risk-aware.
Developers often fail to recognize this. In Providence, when we advocated new housing construction downtown, we were confronted by a local developer who said, “It doesn’t work—I tried it.” Skeptical, we asked to see his building. Sure enough, it was outfitted with dishwashers, carpeting, and frilly curtains, like a garden apartment in suburban New Jersey He had forgotten that urban pioneers, in addition to wanting to save money, cherish their edgy self-image and eschew iconography that smacks of middle-class contentment. Their taste for roughness cannot be overestimated. If the walls of the elevator are covered with Formica paneling, better to rip it off and just leave the glue.
To encourage urban pioneers, cities must be prepared to bend the rules a little. Zoning that prohibits housing in commercial and industrial