Why Do Suburban Retrofit Projects So Often Get All the Details Wrong?

[M II A II R II K]

Why Do Suburban Retrofit Projects So Often Get All the Details Wrong?


November 12, 2020

By Daniel Herriges

Read More: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/...-details-wrong

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Mid-rise apartments tend to sprout up in little pockets of open land along major roads that were left undeveloped, like holes in Swiss cheese, as development filled in around them. In fast-growing places, the “Swiss cheese” effect is a common phenomenon, as landowners may sit on undeveloped land for a long time to speculate on its rising value, wait for the right market timing to develop it, or navigate a slow and complex approval process.

- There are reasons to look favorably upon the idea of suburban retrofit. These buildings tend to produce dramatically more tax revenue per acre than their low-density surroundings (albeit less than the modest but extremely space-efficient buildings of a traditional downtown). This is why many local governments, watching their liabilities climb as their infrastructure ages, are increasingly zoning for this kind of development where they can often against the strident objections of residents. They need the money. — The promise of suburban retrofit has never just been a fiscal one, either: it’s also been the notion that through this type of redevelopment, you can gradually convert places built around driving long distances into places with the ability to support things like mass transit and walkable 15-minute neighborhoods. — Unfortunately, these buildings are almost always fish out of water. When you get up close, you start to realize that what you’re looking at is an uncanny-valley facsimile of urban development, without any of the actual urbanity that makes people willing to trade elbow room for the advantages of living in the center of the action. Here, you just get the density and the height, without much action at all. Some of the form, none of the function.

- The form of this development checks some "urban" boxes, but only in a way that suggests lack of understanding of the point of any of them. For example, consider the streetscape. A real urban street is a place for people to gather, not merely pass through in their vehicles. The reason an urban street should have welcoming facades, small or no setbacks, front porches and stoops, is that these things create an interface between the private realm of the home and the public realm of the street. They encourage neighbors to stop and chat with each other, kids to play out front instead of in back, and all-in-all transform the street into a true public realm and not just a utility. — Here we have the front doors and porches… sort of. But it’s clear from the landscaping that nobody is expected to use them as a primary entrance you will park in the parking lot and enter from your car. Awkwardly placed utility boxes further undermine the notion that the street is in any real way the “front” of these buildings. — The selling point of real urbanity is concentrated life and activity. You sacrifice a bit of elbow room, peace and quiet in exchange for having stuff going on right near you: the world outside your front door.

- Even if you redeveloped more sites in a similar way, you wouldn’t be able to scale this up to anything resembling urbanism until you change the relationship with that road and others like it. It's only ever going to be an isolated pod, and it's only going to really make sense to leave that pod in a motor vehicle. — If this place is fundamentally built for cars and their drivers and it is then why bother with the streetscape, the front doors, the parallel parking (representing a tiny, inconsequential fraction of the number of stalls in the parking lot), all the things that distinguish this from a 1970's-style garden apartment complex? — New Urbanism, a movement now in its fourth decade, has won the planning and design culture war in one sense and only one sense: the aesthetics of urbanism are now in vogue. In some cases they’re built into zoning codes. The movement has done a remarkable job of mainstreaming some of its ideas about urban form, evoking the traditional American villages that are, genuinely, widely beloved. But those ideas have been adopted in a weird cargo-cult way by developers who don't actually understand or care about the purpose. The aesthetic says "vibrant" to them, and the marketing often uses garbage words like “vibrant,” “live-work-play,” “lifestyle.” Increasingly it even advertises “urban.” But the reality is mostly a new facade on the same old product.

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