[mhays]

At least they use less land per capita, and make it easy for some trips (grabbing a few groceries etc.) to be on foot. Those are both worthy. They also integrate multifamily in areas that might not have much otherwise. And if they're on any kind of transit line a lot of people can use transit far more easily.

Sure every store is a chain. That's true with any new building, except in cities like mine where too much retail is required and they often go empty before giving in two years later and renting to a nail salon at half cost. (Breathe!) When they age they'll probably diversify. That's not counting the places that are primarily about retail with a few hundred apartments thrown in...those places could lose their retail components en masse by getting supplanted, since a few hundred units would have a tough time keeping a coffee shop and corner store going.

Sometimes they're not as dense as they look. If the parking is above-grade then you probably get a lot of single-loaded hallways rather than double-loaded, so the building (or a section of it) might be 40% fewer units than it looks. Also the unit sizes also tend to be larger than in urban neighborhoods (guessing) so that's fewer still. How easily we forget....500 units over four acres can be a very quiet place; only when it's also a retail destination and/or a major office/hotel center in a very small area does it become lively.

Visually some of these are clumsy. For example rooflines. Some of these are varied in tiny ways per block. That's clearly just facade modulation of major buildings. Old places that grew organically tend to have more height differences, and anything built to specific zoning, if tight, tend to build the exact same height. I'm overgeneralizing of course. PS, too bad Housemann's Paris reconstruction didn't modulate facades, because then it might be a decent looking city!

So they're good but not great. We tend to get better urbanism when an old town center gets infill, or a new town center is built as a series of pieces by different developers, and regardless when it takes a decade or three. Not that it isn't nice to do it all at once sometimes, and those decades require a lot of patience I don't have.

PS, how depressing it must be to any urbanist who lives in these places and wants the one-story buildings to be replaced by apartments, and keeps an eye out for any news on that front....it's not happening until the retail fails pal...