Vancouver: Not for the Masses?

Been a year... No excuses, really. Just been busy living life and trying to fight the good fight. Our neighborhood Main Street is finally getting off the ground after fits and starts...

But today I happened upon a piece about Vancouver's becoming the city of haves. I've spent only a brief amount of time in that great Northwest city. It did seem to have its share of good things going on (I think I may have mentioned the amazing new central library downtown a while back). The article delves into the city becoming a place for the world's wealthy and elite to have second homes (and third homes and so on). It draws into question whether this sort of development can possibly sustain itself. Almost all new development is condominiums; less than 40% of the city's residents are renters. Not sure yet what to make of this analysis, but here's the story.


posted by Kevin at 3:04 PM

Yeah, What He Said, Part 2

The continuation of the aforementioned screed about suburbia. Brilliant. Patio Man and the Sprawl People, Part 2
posted by Kevin at 6:01 PM

Yeah, What He Said

Perhaps the most brilliant writing about suburbia I've ever read, this piece in the Weekly Standard beats the nail to a bloody pulp. See Patio Man and the Sprawl People (Part 1)
posted by Kevin at 5:58 PM

Are We That Inept a Society?

I read way too much. Subscribed to too many lists on the urban condition in America, I am constantly barraged with other-worldly tales of the kind of sad state of our collective psyche when it comes to thinking about how we live in this country. A recent post on ProURB, a list sponsored by folks at CNU (Congress for New Urbanism), had a depressing article about "lifestyle centers" from the NY Times. The focus was a development out in Silicon Valley by Federal Real Estate Investment Trust (the mall-building maniacs up in Rockville, not far from here) called "Santana Row."

It's a commentary on our society that we are now really starting to fashion suburbia after the traditional towns and cities we used to build. The only difference is that these places are not organic--they are not accreted over time and built by many hands. Instead, they are a calculated, monopolistic enterprise designed to control the entire "experience." Much like Disney does. Perhaps the scariest thing I got from this article: the retailers are considering providing logo-emblazoned mini-blinds for the tenants above their "shops" (how quaint) so that they can ensure a uniform look to the window dressings. Guess that's the price you pay for living at a mall.

Here's the article:

Five Rooms, Gucci View
By WILLIAM L. HAMILTON

SAN JOSE, Calif.

CHRISTINE FRANZ, 35, a software consultant who looks like Meg Ryan, was exactly
what developers had in mind when they started Santana Row, a Silicon Valley
crest in the latest, most ambitious wave of shopping malls.

Ms. Franz, demographic perfection, stared out through fashionable sunglasses at
the muddy Main Street of the 21-acre site, now concrete and steel. By August,
when the $475 million "lifestyle village" is scheduled to open, Santana Row's 17
city blocks will boast 100 specialty shops, including Gucci, Tourneau and Burberry.

But shopping is only the start. Santana Row will also be home to the people who
live above the stores in 1,200 studios, lofts, town houses and villas.

Welcome to mall-town America. You can now drop where you shop, a few steps upstairs.

Santana Row is the largest example nearing completion of a new hybrid of retail
development and housing that has seized the imagination of the shopping center
industry in the last year, just as regional megamall developments have begun to
lumber and older suburban strip malls shutter and die.

More than a dozen such malls are breaking ground nationally, in Cincinnati;
Littleton, Colo.; Richmond Heights, Mo.; and elsewhere. Developers and
municipalities say they have the potential for profit, reinventing dead retail
property in older suburbs. Open-air and upscale, with Main Street-style
architecture, they are intended to appeal to young professionals with expensive
brand- name tastes and retirement-ready empty nesters looking for downtown's
retail sophistication.

Commercial developers like to call these shopping villages "communities." The
affluent, amenity-laden life as a salable daydream has a familiar history,
whether as housing at the edge of the golf course green or condominiums at the
tennis club.

Ms. Franz was, to a corduroy-collared, denim-jacketed T, a prime prospect on
Santana Row's open- house tour. "Forgive me for sounding snobbish," she said.
"But the retail sounds like it's going to be top- notch." A 40,000-square-foot
Crate & Barrel will sell the welcome mats.

Fred Smith, 52, an engineer on the tour with Ms. Franz, said: "It's fantastic. I
could go downstairs to Starbucks for coffee, then come back upstairs and work on
my computer, then go back down to Chili's for dinner."

Mr. Smith is the other side of Santana Row's demographic silver dollar: baby
boomers on the brink of retirement, looking for a last place to live ? 20
million of them turning 55 within the next two years.

"And shopping-wise, it's very nice not to have to drive," said Annette Hamon,
55, a graphic artist who owns a house in Cupertino, Calif. "I'd like to live
someplace where you don't have so much upkeep yourself."

The builder of Santana Row, Federal Realty Investment Trust , a retail-property
developer based in Rockville, Md., with $2.5 billion in assets, compares the
mall's mix of shopping and living to a typical neighborhood in New York.

But urbanists debate whether the demography of a private development pinned
specifically to upscale shopping and dining will actually invite the true
diversities of metropolitan life, while retailers weigh the risk that upstairs
residents with eyesore tastes in window curtains could ruin their sales image below.

Santana Row's developers are giving stores the option to dress the residents'
windows above, in certain buildings. The 6,000-square-foot Gucci may, if it
chooses, install blinds in the apartments that will display retail logos when
pulled down, said Marc McQuain, the retail development manager ? an ultimate
brand extension that may or may not bother residents, depending upon the
strength of their shopping allegiances.

"At the end of the day, it's a shopping center," said Barbara Lamour, 29,
touring with her father, Will Heiduk, a retired engineer. "It's not a community.
It's a business."

Santana Row, though it will have street mimes and strolling mandolin players,
will not have public parks, day care or senior-citizen centers, schools or
community boards. And its retail tenants will be well tailored to the tastes of
residents whose incomes will support the proposed rents ? $1,500 to $10,000 a
month. Dean & DeLuca, not Safeway , will be the corner grocery. Santana Row will
have no church, but there will be an imported 18th-century French chapel,
selling flowers.

Lifestyle villages are rapidly eclipsing in scale and civic posture earlier,
smaller residential-shopping developments like Mizner Place, in Boca Raton,
Fla., built in 1988. The Streets of West Chester in suburban Cincinnati and
Birkdale Village, a 52- acre shopping and residential community outside
Charlotte, N.C., have also broken ground in the last year. Housing is also being
integrated, as a second phase, into many of the 25 existing open-air, upscale
shopping malls that developers call "lifestyle centers," to convert them to
villages.

A PricewaterhouseCoopers report on shopping malls issued last year estimated
that 18 percent of the nation's 2,800 malls are dead or dying as commercial
ventures. It cited aging malls' inability to compete with newer malls that
provide a stronger draw with movies and other recreation, and increasing
dissatisfaction among suburban shoppers bone- tired of highway trips and
traffic. Lifestyle centers, many planned to include residences, are replacing
them. Santana Row, which sits at an intersection with two other malls, is being
built on the site of the former Town and Country Mall, now the mud of its new
Main Street.

With one third the retail space of existing regional megamalls, which have a
million square feet or more, these hybrids exclude "big box" department stores
like Macy's as anchors, considered mass-market merchants, preferring higher-end
chains like Williams-Sonoma, which owns Pottery Barn.

Small examples of centers with retail and residence integration, like Phillips
Place in Charlotte, developed in 1997, have succeeded at maintaining a high
level of the right, exclusive retail tenants and a high level of resident
occupancy ? 90 percent at Phillips Place.

"There is `city' life, and there is `some' life, and there is `no' life ? the
suburbs," said Dr. Keoni Udarbe, 34, who lives in a one-bedroom apartment above
Cradle and All, a baby- goods shop at Phillips Place. "If I need to have a
dinner party, I can walk to Dean & DeLuca." Dr. Udarbe, a psychiatric
pediatrician who moved from New York City, had no problems with the urban
character of his new home, including the December toy drive in the courtyard and
the week of ho-ho-hoing below his balcony. "But it's not like living in the
city. I lived in the city ? and this is not close."

Christopher Cole, a director of development on the East Coast for Terranomics
Development, a retail development company based in New Jersey, said that
interest in projects like Santana Row "is driven by municipalities wanting urban
centers, where you live and shop in the same neighborhood."

Susan F. Shick, the executive director of the San Jose Redevelopment Agency,
which rezoned Santana Row's land to allow both housing and shops, said, "When a
developer comes in with more retail ? and high end ? why would you say no?"
Centers like Santana Row, she said, can create a profitable synergy of uses for
developers and a high tax base for the neighborhood, but also, potentially, a
hellishly high density of people and cars at a single site.

In Rochester Hills, Mich., the Village at Rochester Hills, a lifestyle center
now being built, was not allowed residences in its plan largely because of the
congestion they stood to create.

"The whole area's bursting at the seams," said James Fielder, vice president for
acquisitions for Robert B. Aikens & Associates, the developer. "It was shot down
in discussions with the municipality. I didn't think it had a snowball's chance
it would go through."

What gives developers any confidence that there is a market for shopping mall
villages?

"This is the American cultural response to boredom with the suburbs," said Alex
Krieger, chairman of the department of urban planning at the Harvard Graduate
School of Design. "Clothing suburbia in urban mannerisms, for a market of people
who think it's funky to have restaurants and shops downstairs ? it's a great
marketing gimmick, but it's pretend urbanism."

"What the developers don't bank on," he added, "is that if it succeeds, those
folks above Banana Republic and Pomodoro's will start complaining about longer
shop hours, liquor licenses, pedestrian traffic. It's succeeding now because
it's a novelty."

Retailers also question the idea's basic equations.

"For developers it works, because it adds a good-sounding thing to the economic
package," Howard Lester, chairman of Williams-Sonoma, said. "But I don't think
residential means a heck of a lot to retailers. I need 80,000 households to
drive a Pottery Barn or Pottery Barn Kids." Mr. Lester, who is not joining
Santana Row because he already has shops in a mall across the street, added, "I
don't know that the fact people are living above makes it more attractive to me
as a customer."

On a recent Sunday at Santana Row, a dozen shoponauts stomping up the concrete
steps to view model apartments presented a diversity of opinion.

"It's going to attract single people, with fewer attachments," said Karen Dalal,
33, who lives in a ranch- style house a mile away. "I mean, I have a couple of
dogs. I'm not going to bring them into a community like this."

Laura Ward, 32, on tour with her partner, Brent Gregersen, 31, said, "For me,
personally, because I have two children, it just doesn't seem like it will be
right."

Neither dog runs nor playgrounds are in the plans at Santana Row.

But there will be a Starbucks and a Chili's and 19 other restaurants, said
Steven J. Guttman, chairman and chief executive of Federal Realty Investment Trust.

"It's a good example of how the market for something as mundane as housing has
changed from a good that somebody buys to a package of services, only one of
which is a residential living space," said Peter Francese, founder of American
Demographics magazine.

"The people doing this have realized that `it's the amenities, stupid,' " he
said. "What do people want in a lifestyle ? not what do people want in a
four-walled box."

Robert Gibbs, a retail consultant who helps developers incorporate urban
thinking into suburban projects, says that aging baby boomers might well prefer
the mall as a mailing address.

"They're coming onto the market looking for smaller multifamily luxury housing
in town," he said. "They spent their lives in suburbs, driving their kids to
soccer. They want to be able to walk to shops and restaurants. Their tax
advisers are telling them they don't have to own a home ? because they don't
need the tax deduction ? but to sell the four- bedroom $400,000 empty nest, put
the money in the bank, rent a $2,000 apartment and live on interest."

Mr. Gibbs added dryly, "The smarter new shopping centers know this."

Ms. Franz, the software consultant, wasn't packing up house just yet.

"This is huge ? it's like a mall," she said, looking up Santana Row's dirt
avenues. "How do you find comfort living at the mall?"

See the original here.
posted by Kevin at 12:34 PM

A few things.

One, it's been a while, once again. I have been busy with other stuff, though I don't have evidence of it to show you. Perhaps the best I can do is to tell you I've been continuing to learn about this world we share and taking things in.

Two. But I did have occasion to go out again last night to hear James H. Kunstler's newest rantings about suburbia and our "national car slum." Music to my ears, of course. He was giving a short talk at Olsson's at Metro Center (one of three downtown locations of a local bookstore chain, not a big conglomerate, thank you very much). He covered much of the same ground as at NBM, but without the benefit of his usual slide show of examples of horrendous suburban shlock—"franchise fry pits," (fast food joints) "cold storage facilities," (schools, day care centers, office buildings, anything really) and "maximum security prisons" (schools).

He spent a few minutes explaining how places we have built in the past 50 years engender near-psychotic conditions in suburban adults and, most importantly, their spawn. Suburban kids, he says, have no reality based on history (in most cases, the place they grow up didn't exist five minutes before they were born) and no foreseeable future. It was an interesting parallel that he brought to bear on the whole ideal of suburbia and I thought one of the more insightful observations he's made.

Happily, the discussion was well-attended and a Q&A afterward afforded someone in the audience to dispel an earlier questioner's assumption that most of the folks in the audience were from Montgomery County (Maryland). To my pleasure, it was made clear that probably better than half of the audience lived in the city. I also took the opportunity to get my copy of "The City in Mind" signed before my wife and I walked home together.

Three. Today I dropped in on Jeffrey Zeldman's site and happened upon "," a great piece in his continuing dispatches of his "Glamorous Life." In it, he describes many of the niceties of living in a world beyond his individual self, aided mainly by his favorable condition of being a Manhattan resident.
More...
posted by Kevin at 2:25 PM

This Just In...
A good piece from the Philadelphia Daily News about my original fears of people giving up on cities after September 11...Daily News | OUR SECRET WEAPON AGAINST TERROR
posted by Kevin at 5:07 PM

Shellac'ing the Truth

No matter what you call it, it's still suburbia. This ad caught my eye today as I was reading a story on the Post's website. It's for a new subdivision in Vienna, VA (along with others in Tysons Corner and elsewhere in Sprawlville NoVa USA).

This particular link is to "Oakton Village" (don't you just get goosebumps with such a quaint name?). The introduction says it's inspired by Earnest Michaux ("the father of the bicycle"), Joseph Strauss ("builder of the Golden Gate Bridge"), and Hans Christian Andersen ("author of over 168 tales of wonder"). What?

With such amenities as "garages thoughtfully tucked in back", how could you not want to kill yourself in this new bedroom community? And such a steal at $700 K. I suppose "quaint, easily maintained homesites" is a euphemism for "extremely small lots."

For half this, you could have my house on Capitol Hill, and be able to ditch the car.

I guess I just don't get it.

See John Laing Homes of Maryland/Virginia/Washington D.C. - Neighborhood Guide: Oakton Village for more fun.
posted by Kevin at 2:45 PM

Another Great Car Ad...

In another example of our culture's stupidity, I have seen an ad over the past few weeks that captures the essence of our car-centric life. A family of four or five suburbanites leave their uber-mansion and pile into a large refrigerator...er, minivan (maker and model irrelevant) and heads out to do some camping. On the way, the cutaways show the family members each giving one of the virtues of this new addition to the family. Dad talks about how it provides the space needed for all of the junk the family carts around, Mom talks about how sporty it is or some other nonsense, and so on. But the kicker is the teenage girl's line: "It's like a moving couch." Oh dear God. That's just about the saddest thing I've ever heard. These people really need to get out more.

Apologies to those that own minivans or think they feel like couches.
posted by Kevin at 12:54 PM

It's Been a While

I just didn't have the heart to rail about suburbia for the last couple of months, given the tragic events of September 11. But recent weeks have added fuel to my vigor. Discussion is mounting in Washington and in other big cities (notably New York) about decentralizing. Manhattan companies that lost their buildings in the attacks have already relocated to suburban New Jersey and the Federal government will surely use the attacks as fodder for their continued dispatch to Washington's sprawling suburbs.

This scares me for two reasons: (1) the nation was just starting to make progress toward more intelligent ways of developing our resources, partly expressing itself in a movement back toward center cities; and (2) decentralizing will not solve the problem of terrorism. In fact, in at least one way, spreading out may exacerbate the threats of at least one form of terror--bioterrorism. In the Washington Post today, there's a story about the contrast between the response by urban Departments of Health to the anthrax scares and a sprawlville Hamilton Township, NJ's lack of a coordinated health service, which inhibited an immediate response.
See more.

**********

Who'll benefit from this kind of hysteria and poor judgment? Suburban developers and prospectors, of course. An article from last fall entitled "The New Suburban Office: Cost Efficient, High Performance" from the Pension Real Estate Association, captures the nastiness of their ploy best. Particularly noteworthy is the discussion of parking:

"One of the primary perks for today's employee is the location of the work-place. The long commute to a CBD is time consuming, frequently frustrating and often expensive. On the other hand, the Efficient Office is built in the suburbs where many employees live, thus reducing drive time and increasing an employee's personal time outside the office. Then, once in the parking lot, employees do not want to have a long walk to their offices. Therefore, it is critical that free parking space not only be available to all employees, but it also must not be situated at a distance from the office. We have estimated that 5 or 6 spaces per 1,000 SF of office space affords all employees the opportunity to drive to work if they so choose."

Is this guy for real? I don't have much hope for a new era of enlightened development with statements like this.
The whole thing is available as a PDF here

**********

Lastly, a neighborhood friend pointed me to a piece in today's Baltimore Sun singing the merits of a new New Urbanist project in southern Howard County (south of Baltimore). It's billed as "better than Columbia" (the last TND project, built by Rouse back in the 80s and 90s). I find the whole thing laughable, and sad. It's so obvious that people want more "traditional" neighborhoods, but aren't willing to actually live in one. Why? Hmmm. Racism, greed, and ignorance come to mind. An intractable love for the car also does. But mostly, I think, it's a lack of intelligence and logic. If building more of these kinds of boneheaded developments will keep suburbanites at bay, I'm all for it. It'll keep what little green space is within an hour of Washington from being further gobbled up by vinyl-sided "town"-homes.

Get the whole joke here.
posted by Kevin at 12:37 PM

Some Needed Comic Relief

My wife sent along a great piece from The Onion today...

Family Of Five Found Alive In Suburbs

The tongue-in-cheek article shows how the suburbs emasculate society from culture and create places of little cultural value or appeal. It also points out the tedium and mediocrity of public places that suburbanites learn to endure.
-------
My slogan for The Olive Garden:
"When You're Here, You're in Suburbia"
posted by Kevin at 11:42 AM