"Americans sense that something is wrong with the places where we live and work"

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/96sep/kunstler/kunstler.htm

by paganel • 16 years ago

141 83 16 years ago

hsmyers• 16 years ago

I spent almost a decade as an art major at various campus's across the US and one of the dirty secrets was that while we put up with shit from the business majors 'cause we knew better (we told them to try and sell their products in plain unmarked brown paper bags), we all snickered when anyone talked about 'talent' and 'architecture'...

evizaer• 16 years ago

I'm not a particularly fast reader. I'm genuinely interested in what this article may be trying to say, but there's so much lard in this writing that I had to stop reading after a few paragraphs to save myself the potential huge time loss inherent in getting through the entire thing and being disappointed by the end meaning. The writing is so full of overwrought huge abstractions and hyperbole instead of concrete fact that I can't push myself to even get halfway through it.

I do share the feeling that it describes, though, about the uncaring nature of the way we seem to construct towns these days.

gte910h• 16 years ago

That's what the Atlantic is like. They rarely take pieces that aren't in a similar style.

edw519• 16 years ago

From September, 1996.

Can the momentum of sprawl be halted?

It's already started. That McMansion 40 miles from town has already lost half its value since 2006. What will it be worth when gas hits $10/gallon?

Cheap energy built the sprawl; expensive energy will kill it.

But things still may not play out like OP would like. In my hometown, mom and pop businesses are still being replaced by big box chains, even in town. I never thought I'd see Home Depot, Target, & Costco 3 miles from downtown. If it's too expensive to drive to the sprawl, we'll just bring the sprawl to them.

jerf3• 16 years ago

Oil is going to get expensive; there's no particular guarantee that energy is going to get expensive, though. (It will if we mindlessly continue our current policies, but expensive energy will have a way of clearing our minds about certain priorities.) And given that we're talking decadal time scales, how will "sprawl" be affected when we're using time-shared automatic-driving electric cars (and generalized transport network)?

I think there's a lot of fervent hope from a lot of people that sprawl is doomed by expensive energy, but personally I rather expect that technology will end up "saving" it in the end, a further testament to the trend towards decentralization, not erasing it.

usaar3334• 16 years ago

What feels so strange is that the price of gas matters so much,

Sure a commute 40 miles each way will increase in cost from $5.33 to $13.33. But $8 seems hardly a concern when you are wasting 1.5 hours a day driving.

Cheap energy is certainly necessary to create sprawl, but it isn't the only thing. Rather urban areas are often downtrodden in the US. Take a look at San Francisco, a pretty nice place by big city standards; compared to its suburbs, it has worse transportation infrastructure, worse schools, more congestion, more noise, more expensive, more danger, more pollution. The benefits win out in my 20s, but I sure wouldn't want to raise a family there.

philwelch• 16 years ago

Transportation infrastructure and schools reflect poor governance more than anything, and for that matter so do many of SF's other flaws. Unfortunately we have political systems where population density counts against your political power.

stretchwithme4• 16 years ago

Free highways built the sprawl too. If you had to actually pay for the costs of the highway that lets you sprawl, perhaps one would think twice.

usaar3334• 16 years ago

A lot of roads are done by private developers.

Freeways in rural areas aren't that pricey. The interstate highway system cost about $500B inflation adjusted. Only about $1700/person amortized over 35 years. Or about $13M per mile.

To see how this isn't that pricey, consider the Central subway project in San Francisco which will cost $1.6B for 1.7 miles - $1900/resident

zoomzoom• 16 years ago

Don't we pay taxes?

japherwocky2• 16 years ago

where do you think that building goes when people move out? talk about legacy hardware..

Jeema3000• 16 years ago

"Cheap energy built the sprawl; expensive energy will kill it."

Everyone always says this, but nobody ever seems to consider the fact that the US is also a very very big country with tons of cheap land. Our population density is 83 people / sq. mi. Germany and the UK, on the other hand, are 593 and 660, respectively. Slightly more dense.

That's the biggest factor as to why we have sprawl IMO. As expensive as energy might get, it's still going to have to compete with the lure of cheap land...

wyclif• 16 years ago

Upvoted you for the cheap land observation. As late as the mid-1990's, you could still purchase 50 acres of ranchland in eastern Wyoming for about 28-29K.

jazzyb• 16 years ago

The author of this article gave one of my favorite Ted Talks on the same topic:

http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_subu...

wpeterson• 16 years ago

I wish this TED talk were the topic rather than his older Atlantic Essay. Much better job of advancing and conveying his ideas.

jerf3• 16 years ago

Ah, yes, the classic "Deep down inside, everybody really thinks just like me" essay.

I do not think everybody in America thinks just like an "architecture critic". In fact I suspect most people in America, if introduced to an "architecture critic" would say "And what's that?"

If people were really upset about this, it wouldn't be happening. Alas, deep down inside, "everybody" pretty much likes what's happening.

mech4bg2• 16 years ago

Haha exactly what I thought when I read this.

Also with lines like this:

>We hear this unhappiness expressed in phrases like "no sense of place" and "the loss of community."

People are ALWAYS complaining about something, and usually talking about how much better something or other was (while quietly forgetting/ignoring all the problems with the previous state).

Personally I think it's a pretty rad time to be alive. Something for everyone.

mech4bg2• 16 years ago

Even more interesting, this was written in 1996 by the looks of things?

brc• 16 years ago

It's a common sentiment - the essay in which the author laments how everything is wrong, because they don't agree with it.

In one of the pg essays, he reflects (I'm paraphrasing from memory) how it might be lamentable how everyone prefers fast food and reality TV to Mozart and Fresh produce, but you can't call it wrong. I think pg calls this 'trying to say that up is circular or down is blue' Because if that's what people prefer, it's what they prefer. The job of people contributing to society is to provide what people want, not to try and herd people into your own vision.

In a democracy, there's going to be large amounts of people who live life in a different style to your own. One of the hardest things for people as they get older is to learn to accept this and let them be. You don't have to make fun of them, or try to change them, just let them be, and ask that they leave you be as well. There are far too many people trying to boil the ocean these days and institute social changes where it isn't wanted or needed. People will adapt and change as their circumstances and tastes change. The market will follow them.

ams61102• 16 years ago

It's my experience that its the young who think they know it all and what's best for everyone. Certainly as I've gotten older my philosophy on what's appropriate for government/society to regulate and what should be individual choice has changed a lot (I am quite a bit more on the individual choice end of the spectrum now).

nostromo• 16 years ago

I actually think the 15 years since this article was written have proven the author's point quite well.

* The exurbs have fallen drastically in price compared to urban dwellings which retained most of their value in the recession. Urban dwellings in the US's biggest cities have increased dramatically in price since the article was written, even including the recent drops.

* An urban renaissance has occurred in the US, with young people and investment again flowing to city centers. (Compare NY 1996 with NY 2010 - the progress is amazing.) The culture has followed. Most sitcoms (and many movies) of the 80s occurred in the suburbs, now they are almost entirely urban.

* Many cities started promoting more-dense zoning and mass transit, helped along by mid-decade energy spikes. Some cities have stopped providing water rights to new areas to combat sprawl.

* McMansions (not even a widely used term in 1996) have gone from must-have to gauche. The Hummer, a status-symbol of the commuting class at the time, was dismantled this year after several years of terrible sales.

ams61102• 16 years ago

I think you are giving examples of fads not long term changes. It's the "grass is greener" syndrome. People living out in the suburbs look at their long commute, the cookie-cutter culture, and think that urban life is more exciting and sensible. After a while, they look at the crowds, the filth, the noise, their tin-can car or lack of one at all, and think that suburban space and quiet and freedom looks pretty good all of a sudden. So it's an ebb and flow.

russell• 16 years ago

What the critics seem to forget is that when these wonderful places were built they were out of reach for most Americans. My grandparents did not have running water or central heating. In the cities most people, especially immigrants, lived in tenements.

After WWII there was pent up saving and pent up demand. People bought cracker box houses because they were cheap and way better than what they had been living in. They bought cars, because they were affordable, enabling urban sprawl.

As a kid, I lived in a farmhouse in Maine with little heat, no plumbing, no running water and cold as hell. I remember my parents drilling a well, putting in a bathroom and heat. What they and others did wasnt pretty, but in the prosperity of the times we joined the middle class.

kemiller• 16 years ago

More to the point, those grand houses (not to mention, all manor of nice public works like subways in NYC) were built on the cheap labor of people who couldn't dream of owning their own home. The reason that kind of architecture became scarce in the 50's is that it became prohibitive for the merely-rich (as opposed to super-rich) to hire armies of artisans to cater to every detail.

grellas• 16 years ago

I grew up in a town of 80,000 in the midwestern U.S. and remember it as being completely undistinguished in terms of "character" - it had very average homes, many clustered about a fading downtown, it had light suburban sprawl, it had a meat packing plant and a lot of agricultural-related enterprises and a very few smokestack industry buildings with related infrastructure (railroad lines, etc.). It had absolutely nothing to commend it as far as "character" goes. On top of everything else, it had almost no aesthetics to speak of, being covered for much of the year in deep (and often dirty) snow blankets and drifts. Yet it had more "soul" and "community" than most of what I have experienced in living in more sophisticated places (San Francisco, Silicon Valley) in 40+ years since I moved from there as a kid. Why? Because it had great people. That is what makes "community," not buildings as ends in themselves.

Now, a place like San Francisco has incredible character in many of its neighborhoods. Aesthetically, it can't be beat for those qualities that make a place special. But I would wager that the vast stretches of Silicon Valley lying south of the City contain large majorities of their residents who couldn't stand city life and far prefer the openness of the suburbs, sprawl and all. I have lived with such people for many years. They love such qualities as "safe," "quiet," "consistent" [as in quality of a neighborhood], and the like. When a Wal-Mart opens up, they are excited about the savings they will get in shopping there. And the same goes for all the other elements that we associate with "sprawl."

Now, it may be spiritually consoling to some, as it is to the author, to be able to walk past and appreciate the fine qualities of old courthouses and other custom-built buildings of the past. In a free society, however, such aesthetics are always balanced against utility and, when people have a choice, they will often choose utility. Yes, we would all love to own that old Victorian that has so much character and that sells for $3 million in a cute San Francisco neighborhood but many people don't have the luxury of being able to afford such a thing, no matter how aesthetically pleasing. For some, that little house on a busy corner of an undistinguished suburban town will have to do because this gives them an affordable home in which to live and to raise their kids. Those are the kinds of homes I and my friends all grew up in and we did not think for a moment that our souls were being deprived of what we needed or that our close circle of friends somehow lacked community just because we couldn't run with the snob crowd.

I think an article like this reflects one legitimate way of looking at life but it is a mistake to project this view on society at large. While the author's viewpoint might be seen as commendable from an idealistic perspective of how things ought to be, I would guess there are few people who consciously think this way in living their day-to-day lives. A vast number of them have lived many years in such places as "plastic city" (what San Jose has been called for years) and not given even a second thought about the alleged deadening of their souls as a result of that experience.

davepeck• 16 years ago

The problem is that the "utility" of suburban sprawl is in no small part due to the historical price of energy.

If and when energy prices go higher (and there are good reasons to believe they will) I think we'll see a necessary shift.

Aside #1: I think of "walkable neighborhoods" as an interesting counterpoint to "sprawl." The health benefits of living in walkable neighborhoods are well established. Aside from health, the folks at walkscore.com recently highlighted research that suggests home values retain better in walkable neighborhoods: http://blog.walkscore.com/2009/08/new-study-shows-one-point-...

Aside #2: Kunstler often makes entertaining points about the aesthetic of sprawl, be he's also a bit of an overwrought doomsayer -- I take his work with several grains of salt.

drinian• 16 years ago

As a counterpoint, I think that it is possible to have Wal-Mart, privacy, consistency, etc. without the isolating effects of sprawl. For example, imagine if stores were forced to internalize the true environmental and traffic costs of large outdoor parking lots, such that they could only build parking on top of their stores. Imagine a park the size of an average shopping center lot -- it's huge! Or imagine houses there.

Tokyo is about as close as any city comes to accomplishing this. Aesthetics aren't the greatest, but communities, local businesses, etc. seem much stronger than in some other large cities. It's worth noting that Tokyo's population density is actually lower than New York's.

samd• 16 years ago

It doesn't sound like you lived in a place all that bad. The problem with the sprawl that I've lived in is that there is no chance for the community to develop. For a community to form there has to be some place where members of the community gather and see each other enough times to form relationships. That doesn't exist in my hometown, everybody gets in their car and drives to some place miles away then drives home. Even if you get to know people at these places the sprawl is so massive the odds are that they live miles and miles away from you. The closest (geographically) friend I had in high school lived 7 miles away; and I didn't live in a rural area, that was 7 miles of sub-divisions and strip malls.

CWuestefeld• 16 years ago

I was going to say much the same thing.

The NJ town I live in has something like 4K residents. It's almost entirely zoned residential or residential/agricultural [1], but for a tiny corner where there's a single strip mall having a Chinese restaurant, a video store, and an auto parts store.

Because the laws so thoroughly prevent non-residential uses, the people of the town have nothing to bring them together. I think this is the reason that, of my 4 neighbors, I've never met 2 of them although they've both lived there for about 2 years.

Really, the only way in my town for people to meet is when they've got children sharing classes in the schools. I don't have kids, so I'm effectively not a part of whatever community there is.

I wish that there was a nearby little grocery, or something. For practical purposes I'd like it, because I have to actually travel two towns away for anything I need to buy. But also for community purposes: if there were some place that I could bump into my neighbors occasionally, they'd be alot more like ... neighbors.

But as the article notes, this is forbidden.

[1] "Agricultural" doesn't mean a farm in this case, it means somebody who can pull off the fake farming requirement of generating >$500 of income from agricultural activities. I have one friend with a big lot that sells some firewood every year in order to lower his property tax by being agricultural.

anigbrowl5• 16 years ago

It's an....odd article, though given its 1996 byline I suppose it felt like some sort of millenialist manifesto. Some parts of it make perfect sense to me, and some none at all.

I do empathize with his basic point about sprawl - I don't enjoy driving and neither does my wife, so the fact that San Francisco has fairly decent public transit and is generally walkable is a big plus. We'd have to make a lot of adjustments if I moved to a suburb, and Mrs. Browl (who grew up in SF) likes being near a high-density urban environment. It's an awesome city, and the rich architectural and cultural heritage play a big part in that. I also like that there are a lot of skyscrapers, because when I was growing up in Europe they were something I saw only in movies :-)

However, you're quite right that the economics of it don't make sense for most people. We've been looking for a house over the last year and staying inside the SF city limit comes at enormous cost. Besides the up-front expense, another city problem is the relatively poor quality of the available choices. San Francisco buildings are either old (expensive to maintain, quirky) or if new, very expensive and either tiny, badly constructed, or both. Coming from a slightly cooler area in Europe, it astonishes me that such a wealthy city is full of houses with such cheap windows and building materials. When my parents visited us earlier this year the very first thing my mother asked about on the way in from the airport was why so many of the houses looked like they were built out of cheap wood. Every place I've ever lived in Europe feels like a bomb shelter by comparison; indeed, visiting some friends who bought a 5-year old suburban house a couple of hours' drive from SF gives me major house envy. It's not going to win any design awards, but the house is large, well constructed, fairly efficient, and the community it's in is nice. The same money in SF will buy only an undersized firetrap in a chronically dysfunctional neighborhood - on paper it seems like a good investment, in reality anything but.

The sad fact is that land prices dominate all else here, and so most of us live in terrible buildings, which are shockingly bad value for money. I've been in some very, very expensive homes here that are still terrible; the people who built them would probably be shaking their heads at our failure to capitalize on a century of architectural and other knowledge in regard to most of our own dwelling conditions. We have some wonderful, historic civic architecture, and some fantastic commercial buildings (in a few places, both at once), but apart from a few genuinely unique/historical neighborhoods most of the city would be better torn down and rebuilt with a minimum of 6 floors, which might allow sensible use of the space at ground level. Sad to say, I think it's going to take a large earthquake to get everyone back on the same page and recalibrate perceptions about the long-term development of the city.

(It's not all gloom and doom - there's 2 or maybe 3 huge redevelopment projects taking place over the next decade, on Treasure Island, Hunter's Point, and maybe the old Port district. But for smaller development projects, the planning/review process is a nightmare beyond parody.)

It's weird; on the one hand I have a great quality of life, one which epitomizes a great deal of what is cool about a world city like San Francisco: if my 20 or 30 year old self took a time machine into the present, he/I would be amazed at how lucky I am. On the other hand, I keep daydreaming about moving to...Sacramento. It's cheap, it's pleasant, it's small enough to get around on foot or by bicycle. Immediate proximity to the fount/drain of state government also make for a more interesting environment than most people suspect.

pjscott• 16 years ago

> We have some wonderful, historic civic architecture, and some fantastic commercial buildings (in a few places, both at once), but apart from a few genuinely unique/historical neighborhoods most of the city would be better torn down and rebuilt with a minimum of 6 floors, which might allow sensible use of the space at ground level.

I'm curious: why isn't it? On the face of it, this sounds like a great opportunity for some investors to make a lot of money. Buy some land in SF, rebuild with taller, better-constructed buildings, and then collect the increased rent money. Is there some Kafka-style government bureaucracy prohibiting this, or weird tax disincentives?

mtviewdave• 16 years ago

>When my parents visited us earlier this year the very first thing my mother asked about on the way in from the airport was why so many of the houses looked like they were built out of cheap wood. Every place I've ever lived in Europe feels like a bomb shelter by comparison;

Houses in California are going to look less "solid" than houses elsewhere because houses elsewhere are often built out of brick or stone, materials that are vastly more likely to fail in an earthquake. Wood-frame, wood- or stucco-sided homes are common in California because they are much more likely to withstand earthquakes.

jrmg• 16 years ago

On the point of cost of housing, I believe the author's intent is that, if we built new places as he describes, they needn't cost any more than current suburbs.

To add my own point, I am sure that house prices in San Francisco are high because of high demand and limited supply, not because they are intrinsically more expensive to create.

lkrubner6• 16 years ago

It is perfectly valid for you to write this:

"contain large majorities of their residents who couldn't stand city life and far prefer the openness of the suburbs, sprawl and all"

but you can not combine it with this:

"In a free society, however, such aesthetics are always balanced against utility and, when people have a choice, they will often choose utility."

Suburbs require gigantic subsidies to be made to work, so you need to be careful how you use the phrase "free society". Because the population is relatively sparse in the suburbs (compared to a dense city), the cost of procurement of infrastructure tends to go up on a per capita basis. Just think of the energy loss carrying electricity, kilometer after kilometer, in the suburbs, and compare that to carrying the same amount of energy in the city, where the power does not need to travel as much of a distance (per capita). For any given 100,000 people a dense city allows the cheaper availability of roads and sewers and power and transport. Such density is economically rational.

Think carefully about some of the things that people love most about the suburbs. One thing people love is the wide open spaces, and the lack of crowds (especially compared to a dense urban core). And yet, the crowds in the city are usually economically rational, especially compared to the expense of provisioning the suburbs. Think about the wide open highways of Texas - "wide open" means "used less than a road in New York City" and the greater use that the road gets in New York City means the money spent on it is more wisely spent.

The suburbs need to be seen as a luxury item. Since the USA is wealthy, it can afford many luxuries, and the suburbs are one of them. But the suburbs are more luxurious than the cities, and the cities are more economically rational.

And of course, in the suburbs, one has to use a car to get anywhere. This is, of course, a tremendous use of resources, on a per capita basis. In a dense urban core, such as New York City, you can travel by mass transit, which uses less resources per capita. And you can even travel by foot or by bicycle. The suburbs depend on the use of automobiles, and automobiles, too, need to be seen as luxury items. Again, because the USA is wealthy, it can afford many luxuries, but again, the heavy dependence on the automobiles makes the life in the suburbs more resource intensive, per capita, than life in the city.

Where you use the phrase "free society" I would prefer the use of the phrase "subsidized society".

Where you use the word "utility" I would use the word "subsidy." And yes, of course, everyone would like to live in a heavily subsidized society, so long as you can get the subsidies from someone else.

lkrubner6• 16 years ago

Why is this being downvoted? Does someone want to make the argument that life in suburbs in less resource intensive per capita than life in a dense urban core? If so, they should make that argument and I'll make my counter-argument. But my point is fairly obvious: people living close together can share be provided with infrastructure with less resources per capita, or to put it another way, the denser the population the more intensely used any given piece of infrastructure is likely to be used (the same point, stated the other way round). Think of a road in New York City, and then think of a road west of Washington DC, in the suburbs of Virginia. Which gets more use?

I suspect that anyone wanting to downvote my comment is someone who themselves lives in the suburbs, and they are downvoting my comment because my post makes them uncomfortable. But just because an idea makes you uncomfortable doesn't make it untrue. My point is entirely valid, and it is correct.

ellyagg• 16 years ago

I assume you were being downvoted because your comment claims to be specifically rebutting a claim in the parent, but doesn't do that, and instead just sets up a soap box for you to pontificate from.

I'm not going to waste the time dissecting it in detail, but your comment is full of not-quite-sensical comparisons ("[S]ubsidized society" vs. "free society"? Intercity highways are "unwise"--where do cities get food?) and provocative language ("Suburbs require gigantic subsidies"--so do cities, right, even if smaller per capita? Suburbs are "luxuries"?).

anamax3• 16 years ago

> Suburbs require gigantic subsidies to be made to work, so you need to be careful how you use the phrase "free society".

I think that you're confusing "costs more" with "is subsidized".

> Such density is economically rational.

Ah yes, another cost-benefit analysis that ignores benefits.

Here's another one.

Going to Fiji to scuba dive is economically stupid because travel from San Jose to Fiji costs money.

Whether going to Fiji to dive is economically stupid depends on the price, and the relevant prices are different for different people.

samlevine• 16 years ago

In my experience you can find good people anywhere (even LA), but I wouldn't trade a mortgage and a car for the tiny studio I live in in Seattle. I feel more alive, connected, inspired, healthy, happy and ready to experience new things on a daily or semi-weekly basis.

Umalu• 16 years ago

For a different perspective on this, check out "The Grass is Indeed Greener: How I gave up dreaming about the big city and learned to love the suburbs". http://architectureandmorality.blogspot.com/2010/10/grass-is...

Mz• 16 years ago

Semi-abandoned dream of mine was to go into urban planning or something related. So I have an interest in the built environment that goes back a few years.

Surprising and eye-opening occurrence in my life: I gave up my car closing in on three years ago. Me and my two adult sons do a lot of walking locally. Walking has caught on in my neighborhood, in spite of a lack of a side-walks and huge undeveloped tracts of land and other types of discouragements. With more people walking locally, the local air is cleaner and the plant life is healthier...etc...which seems to encourage more people to walk. The neighborhood also seems to have gotten safer, this based on certain subjective impressions but also on the fact that we no longer get police cars staking out the entrance to our apartment complex, which was a routine thing when we first lived here.

Anyway, how people behave is apparently less dependent upon the built environment than I thought and that behavior is important in building the fabric of community. People know each other more now and are friendlier and the streets are safer...etc. The neighborhood has changed a good bit in the time I have been here.

stretchwithme4• 16 years ago

The buildings that survive are the ones we are left to look at.

And in such a young, rapidly expanding country, a far smaller percentage of the buildings are old, even if every one of them had survived.

japherwocky2• 16 years ago

So much of what this guy rambles about is so moot to anyone who's ever actually worked in the building industry.

Why is he even qualified to have this opinion?

The premise that buildings "nowadays" are universally cheap and inferior is stupid:

There have always been shitty buildings that don't last, because poor people also need homes.

Cheap buildings today are significantly better protection against the elements than shacks from the "good old days".

I agree with the spirit of the articles, so I guess I don't care (Yes, we should encourage people to spend more money in the building industry! Yes, hire a local artisan to make something!), but I think an economic argument is more compelling than an emotional one.

whatusername• 16 years ago

Thankyou for that. I've been a bit on the 'good-old-days' side about Buildings and completely forgot about survivorship bias.

Just like all the music these days is crap (when we compare to only the best songs that we remember from 30 years ago).

I think there might be something in the idea that we did it 'better' for public buildings in the old days (Are there any buildings that cost remotely the amount of National GDP that the Pyramids or the Great Wall did?) -- But I think you're absolutely right when thinking about averages.

grantheaslip• 16 years ago

> There have always been shitty buildings that don't last, because poor people also need homes.

(Haven't read the article yet) That's probably where his mistake came from. He's judging the buildings of the past by the ones that are around now, which are (by nature of the fact that they still exist) higher quality. All of the shoddily-constructed ones are gone now. Textbook selection bias.

jacques_chester2• 16 years ago

Labour used to be much cheaper. The master builders could afford to build beautiful buildings with twiddly adornments.

Where I was living earlier this year was near Guildford, in Perth, Australia. Not far away is the old Midland Rail Yard. The site is dominated by three giant industrial sheds built for rail engine maintenance. Internally they look much like any 1900s factory, with brute thick walls to support fixed cranes and fantastic natural light from 2-story wall windows and sawtooth roof windows.

Outside the brickwork is formed into lovely arches with tasteful adornments. All in all these utterly functional buildings are beautiful.

(Only half-decent photo I could find online: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sengster/134135743/in/photostre...)

Today you could not justify the cost. Brickwork of that kind takes too long and so costs serious money; windows like those allow too much heat in. So instead we get lego buildings, giant concrete cubes without soul or feeling.

Where the money is spent these days is no longer on craftsmanship, it's on wanktastic monuments to some puffed up architect's desire to win an architecture award. Go find a building in your city that has won any such award since the 60s. Dollars to donuts it is ugly and impractical.

powera• 16 years ago

"Labour used to be much cheaper." - with 10% unemployment in the US (that's higher if you use more accurate measures), I'm not quite sure why the reason for this would be a lack of available labor.

jacques_chester2• 16 years ago

I didn't say "lack of labour", I said "cost of labour".

kgermino• 16 years ago

Unfortunately with modern day unions and minimum wage laws high unemployment doesn't translate into lower wages, at least not for craftsmen.

snth• 16 years ago

One of the things the author doesn't mention is fire codes. I assume this is one of the reasons buildings are built further back from the road, and also one of the reasons that catastrophic, city-demolishing fires are a thing of the past in the U.S.

mhb• 16 years ago

Counterpoint:

http://www.metropolismag.com/html/content_0898/aug98wha.htm

enjo• 16 years ago

The complaints in that article mostly stem from systemic problems with abandoned city cores. In areas that have seen large-scale gentrification the schools have predictably seen similar increases in achievement. Crime tends to follow a similar trajectory.

What he's describing the headache that comes with being an urban 'pioneer'.

I'll also take exception with gems like:

Nobody lays in their bed in Plano and hears gunshots half a mile away.

Except that they do. I still own a house in Plano (in the most suburban 'safest' part), and in the year in a half that we lived there (2005-2007) we:

* had a neighbor (3 houses down) forced at gunpoint back into their house, tied up, and robbed blind. All happened in broad daylight.

* had a gun-fight in the parking lot across the street from our development

* had multiple muggings and car-jackings all within close proximity of our house.

akgerber• 16 years ago

The places we currently build are by no means the product of a free market. Automobile-based transportation is heavily subsidized both through direct taxation paying for automobile-optimized roads as well as minimum parking requirements that essentially proscribe building anything resembling a walkable neighborhood in many cities. And those requirements mean that anyone who doesn't drive to a business is forced to share in the cost of providing parking for a business (which can be tens of thousands of dollars a parking space). It's also quite rare for a business to ask employees to pay for parking or to give any money back to employees that don't use free parking.

erikpukinskis• 16 years ago

The problem goes much deeper. Everything we consider culture--architecture, holidays, leisure activities, beauty standards, music, movies, career norms--have evolved over the last fifty years to exploit us most efficiently for cash.

Our culture no longer cares about us. It exists only to fuel "economic growth".

I'm sorry if this seems reactionary or trollish. It is my true belief.

elblanco• 16 years ago

One of the problems is that there are actually relatively few big cities in the U.S. that also have the quality of being nice places to live. Most of them are huge (or formerly huge) manufacturing centers, populated by people looking for unskilled jobs. Cities are generally built as "nice places to live", they arise because cities are efficient nodes for economic exchanges to take place. Some urban areas have almost no housing at all! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tysons_Corner,_Virginia

Outside of parts of New York, SF, Seattle (and maybe 2 or 3 others), most urban centers are high crime dumps with the additional quality of being frighteningly expensive to live in and then completely surrounded by vast heavy industrial wastelands.

Don't get me wrong, I'd give my left leg to live in NYC at the standard of living I have in boring suburbia. But back of the envelope calculations show I'd have to make 3-7x what I make now.

At least the nice folks that built my suburb designed it with a walkable layout to a commercial town-center stocked with everything from a Gym and Movie theater to a dozen restaurants and groceries so I can pretend I live there.

Most people who write this kind of stuff really don't mean "people should live in cities"...what they really mean is "people should live in city (singular), and that city should be NYC or SF (or Seattle in some cases)".

cturner• 16 years ago

"Even the best streets in the world's best towns can accommodate people of various incomes."

I wonder how the author can say this with a straight face. The only way to prevent clumping into income groups is through the dystopian planning law - which he claims elsewhere to criticise.

If people see cheap housing near where they're friends live, they'll buy it and convert it, and it becomes expensive housing.

Symmetry• 16 years ago

Really? If you consider that more poeple would be living in and paying rent for the cheap housing than for the expensive housing it isn't obvious that this would all go one way.

I don't think that we can or should try to totally eliminate the variations in income among neighborhoods, but we can stop passing laws that make it worse.

qaexl2• 16 years ago

Steve Blank wrote an article http://steveblank.com/2010/11/24/when-its-darkest-men-see-th... on why the traditional barriers of entry for businesses, particularly Internet-based businesses, are -simultaneously- falling down ... at the same time that a large number of recent-collage grads are entering the workforce in the middle of recession, with the real estate market still crashing around us. It means that not only is it easier to start your own business, many people are forced to.

qaexl2• 16 years ago

Wow. Hacker News ate my text. Let's try this again.

Indeed, http://www.fastcompany.com/1707431/the-rise-of-the-homeprene... talks about the "homepreneurs", having home-based business.

One interesting thing reading this and reading the interviews in Founders At Work was that many of the tech founds then and the founds now say that it is much more acceptable now to operate a business from the home than it was say, in 1980. The idea of a garage-based business in Palo Alto is the stuff of legends, but the reality was that in mind 1970s, 1980s, even the early 1990s, you don't get as much credibility with a home-based business. With the number of big IPOs and "rags-to-riches" stories, garage-based businesses are more acceptable. So is the fact that people can rent Class-A digs to woo customers and investors.

But think about this in the context of that Atlantic article. The article talks about how the traditional mixed-use neighborhoods wove residential with commercial concerns. Someone living in a traditional neighborhood could get all of their basic living needs by walking, all within a 5 minute walk.

In other words, it -seems- that a "home-based" business is more acceptable in the present than in the past, but dig deeper into a past when towns were planned around neighborhoods instead of zones, and you see this is actually an American tradition.

What's different now is that the barriers of entry are falling particularly for web-based businesses. People outside of IT -- and even inside IT -- don't know this, but virtualization has changed the game since 2005. In late 1990s, the cost for setting up your server and a landline was in the tens of thousands. In 2005, it has dropped into the thousands, and probably less. With virtualization now, we're talking about ~$10/mth for base cost; expert labor costs much more than the servers themselves.

Even product-based businesses operate virtually now, as described in Tim Ferris's Four Hour Workweek. Product fulfillment can be outsourced to competent firms. So are product design and marketing. Just-in-time inventory has made its way to small businesses, so there isn't a need to warehouse inventory yourself.

My point is that the numbers of people with a non-traditional job -- that is, unless you look all the past 1920s when it was traditional to own your own business -- can fly under the radar of zoning laws. And further, there will be an increasing demand and pressure for traditionally-planned, neighborhood-based communities. I don't think homepreneurs want to live in surburbia. I have friends who drive out to the local coffee shop, to get their socialization while "working from home". And if that coffee shop was instead a pleasant, 5-minute walk away?

"Americans sense that something is wrong with the places where we live and work"

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