One thing to keep in mind is even in northern cities, street vibrancy doesn't come from skyscrapers. Highrises kill vibrancy on the street. The deadest portions of Manhattan (pre-COVID) in the evenings were the most highrise-heavy portions of Midtown. And in Chicago, somewhere like Gold Coast is very sleepy/quiet despite having a nominally large residential population.
I remember reading this article a few years back that talked about the "vertical suburb." Essentially very tall buildings cause a lot of features to retreat inside of a building. You can have a residential building with a gym, coffee shop, or even a post office, daycare, etc. In rare cases schools or mall-like shopping areas occupy floors within a large mixed-use structure. When you add to this how tower bases don't tend to interact well at street level (even when they have one or two retail establishments which front on the sidewalk) and you end up with a dead section of town.
The ideal density for street-level vibrancy is probably somewhere in the range of a six-stories, with copious levels of smaller-scale, ground-floor commercial mixed in. Stuff like this is being built in the south (as it is in many cities) but due to parking requirements it's often in the "Dallas donut" style, which means while parking is shielded, residential density can never match what old walkup districts could allow for.
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Originally Posted by KB0679
Yeah it's pretty much the only historic mill village in the core of the city. Distinct for sure. I'm more partial to Old Fourth Ward and the Victorian neighborhoods (Grant Park, Inman Park) myself. And, although outlying, Vinings.
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I've never found Grant Park or Inman Park to look particularly Victorian. They have a lot of bungalows and foursquares, and very much appear to be early 20th century Streetcar suburb. Honestly while they have nice architecture, they don't really feel like they display a distinct local vernacular either. They could be nice streetcar suburban neighborhoods anywhere.
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Originally Posted by cabasse
at least it's well done in this example. i'd rather see well done faux-historical than shitty modern with bad proportions, of which there is plenty. (and i prefer modern styles myself typically) also - it's in the middle of intown atlanta, in between pre-war neighborhoods like grant park, cabbagetown, ormewood park and east atlanta village, so of course there's history there.  |
I'm not saying there's no historical houses nearby, but the neighboring historical neighborhoods are basically suburban in layout, even if they're prewar, insofar as they're dominated by detached single-family homes set generously back from the street, with a fair distance of space between them.
The detached single-family homes section of the development is quite nice. It seems a little different from the local vernacular, and it's built more densely, but both are forgivable. The townhouses though really do look like they're attempting to recreate a DC or Baltimore vernacular which isn't native to Atlanta (
aside from the famous "Baltimore block" which is now used as medical office space).
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Originally Posted by pj3000
Little Havana has improved, but it’s certainly not a cohesive business district by a long shot. Much of it totally sucks... generic chain stores with parking lots and drive thrus. Anyone who goes there expecting to see something cool should expect to be rather disappointed overall.
Miami/South Florida is very, very densely developed. But it is very dense suburban, auto centric development. It is not continuous urban density.
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Miami and LA are very similar cities in terms of their block layout, wide main roads, time the core was built out, and even their vernaculars to a certain extent (basically both were meant for the streetcar). The big difference is LA upzoned most of its residential core in areas like Koreatown decades ago, which meant the little houses got knocked down and replaced with decent-sized apartments. Unfortunately, they didn't loosen use restrictions, and up until very recently didn't change the commercial strips from single-use commercial, which led to weird high-density residential blocks which have these shitty little one-story commercial strips - which even include strip malls - surviving in the urban core.
In Miami, densification seems to have been limited almost entirely to Brickell, but the city could learn from LA's failures by fixing commercial zoning before tackling residential zoning.
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