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Originally Posted by edale
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No, but those are all commercial strips. It doesn't take much for them to look nice - and they look similar across most of the country. I typically use back residential streets to judge urban vernacular, because those vary a lot from city to city (from triple decker to rowhouse to two-flat).
Regarding those examples,
Kearny is fairly ugly once you get off the main drag. Typical northern NJ vernacular of detached wood-framed structures which have been heavily remuddled.
Cranford and
Montclair are more streetcar suburban in terms of their building typology and lower-levels of structural density.
A lot of the issue, as I said, is just the use of wood rather than brick as the vernacular building material. It's a lot easier for wood structures to be functionally ruined in downscale areas. A brick building can survive up to 50 years of neglect as long as the roof is sound, but a wood house starts to decay if it's not painted for ten years. This means wood tends to be replaced by siding in poor neighborhoods. Worse still, often ornate trim is removed, porches are lopped off (or filled in to make more room) or poorly-proportioned windows (horizontal sliding windows, or those all-in-one bay windows) are stuck on a house. All of which can and does occur on brick homes too, but in those cases remuddling is more expensive, so it's less likely to happen. Add to this close setbacks and few street trees to obscure things, and you have a pretty brutal streetscape.