Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [77]
True neighborhoods mix different uses within individual buildings as well. Many mixed-use buildings containing apartments, offices, and shops have been constructed in new traditional towns such as Seaside. The most progressive of these, by Stephen Holl, has received considerable praise in the architectural press. Most nonarchitects consider it ugly, but that doesn’t stop them from shopping there, and its presence on the town square contributes tremendously to the vitality of the community.
The “city building”: Steve Holl’s contribution to downtown Seaside contains housing over offices over shops, a combination rarely found in suburbia
CONNECTIVITY
If a new neighborhood is to contribute more to its region than traffic, it must do more than just mix uses. Its relationship to its neighbors is important as well. In order to avoid the inefficient hierarchical street pattern of sprawl, in which virtually every trip uses the same few collector roads, the new neighborhood must connect wherever practical to everything around it, even if its neighbors are nothing but single-use pods.cy One must say “wherever practical,” because it is obviously not possible to connect across superhighways or riverbeds, nor is it advisable to connect to oil refineries or trucking depots. But all compatible land uses should be connected, especially between residential areas, the most common adjacency.
This is easier said than done. Whenever we design a new neighborhood, we make every effort to convince the adjacent subdivisions to allow us to connect to them. We’ll go so far as to place the most luxurious housing directly abutting the neighbors, whatever the quality of their housing. We hand them photographs and testimonials from our other developments, and appraisals demonstrating their impressive financial performance.
For example: Seaside is connected in no fewer than three places to preexisting Seagrove, to its east. There is almost no perceptible seam between the two communities. As a result, lots in Seagrove have shared in Seaside’s 25 percent average annual appreciation since 1980, rising in value approximately 10 percent each year. On the other hand, there is The Orchards, a town house development adjacent to the new town of Kentlands, which was not allowed to connect. While lots at Kentlands have been appreciating at 12 percent since 1991, The Orchards has hardly kept pace with inflation.2
Rejecting the gate: Seaside connects directly into the Seagrove street grid to its east
Even when presented with the evidence, subdivision residents rarely want to associate with us. In a recent project in Warwick, New York, a woman went so far as to drag her six-year-old daughter to the microphone to wail about the suffering she would endure from the proposed development. At the hearing for another project, in suburban Utah, a neighbor circulated this letter:
[The planner] states, with deliberate intent to deceive, that “The lives of kids are enriched with narrow streets; kids are everywhere, they can play in the streets and alleys.” Street play is mindful of tenements in the big eastern cities, where yards are absent. When kids are not in your yard, but are away from your supervision and out where kids govern, the gang culture prevails. Might and fear will rule the street. We will experience the drive-by shootings that are gang-member