Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (41 page)

The Law of Sprawl

If so many people want to live in or near walkable urban spaces, why have so few been built in the last few decades? Why can’t any town just retrofit its troubles away?

One reason stems from contradictions within our own preferences. Although it is true that most of us say we would prefer a walkable community over one that forces us to drive long distances, most of us
also
want to live in a detached home with plenty of privacy and space. In other words, we would like to have our cake and eat it too, the ideal world being one in which we reap the benefits of
other people
choosing to live in apartments and town houses nearby, but not close enough to disturb our sleep.
*

This ideal world happens to be pretty much what Robin Meyer wants in Mableton, which is a fine coincidence because it is exactly what sprawl repair can provide her, thanks to the heteroscedasticity of society. More than a third of Americans would actually be willing to live in an attached home or apartment if it also gave them an old-style walkable neighborhood. Millions of people are waiting for those places to be born, and they are increasingly willing to pay a premium to enjoy them. There’s evidence of this in the real estate market, which is showing a tectonic shift. In the Washington, DC, area, for example, the highest housing price per square foot in 2000 was in estatelike suburban neighborhoods—25 to 50 percent higher than the price in walkable urban neighborhoods. But by the end of the decade the situation had reversed, with home prices 50 to 70 percent higher per square foot in walkable urban neighborhoods. So demand is not the issue.

The problem is that most of sprawl has already been sold, zoned, and occupied, locking the existing system of land use into place. In order for sprawl repairs to function as complete systems, they need to work at a significant scale. That can mean rezoning and redesigning many acres of land. Sometimes all it takes to put the brakes on redevelopment is one stubborn property owner. Governments do have the power to exercise “eminent domain,” or the right to seize private land for its own use or for resale in the interest of the community, but doing so can involve a hell of a court battle, not to mention ethical concerns. This is why most retrofits have grown from dead and dying malls—large parcels of land with single owners.

But the biggest obstacle to the retrofit project has almost nothing to do with demand or landowners’ resistance to change. It is that the system that built sprawl—huge state subsidies, financial incentives, and powerful laws—is still in place. In fact, in most jurisdictions in the United States and Canada, the sprawl-repair vision is not merely unfamiliar. It is totally against the law.

Mableton is a perfect example. Most of the things that Robin Meyer imagined—things that would make Mableton more walkable, slower, safer, healthier, and more welcoming for kids and seniors—are forbidden by zoning codes and road standards in Cobb County. You cannot build the kind of apartments above shops that you see in Paris or Copenhagen, or in any of North America’s best-loved neighborhoods, because county codes strictly segregate the various functions of the city onto separate parcels of land. Not only do these rules keep housing away from business and jobs, but Cobb County has different zones for residences on two-acre lots, one-acre lots, three-quarter-acre lots, half-acre lots, and so on, right on down to duplexes, condominiums, and rental apartments, and there are strict controls about what can happen on those lots. Everything has its place—far from everything else.

It is also against the law to build anything in Mableton without surrounding it in a sea of parking. The requirement for every professional office to have one parking spot per 250 square feet or for every bowling establishment to provide five spaces per alley might seem reasonable, but the rules also forbid two different businesses from sharing parking, even if one attracts daytime visitors (say, accountants) and the other attracts nighttime visitors (say, bowlers). Such inanely simplistic rules mean there are an estimated eight parking spaces for every car in the United States.

It doesn’t stop there. You cannot push a commercial building close to the street. Nor can you squeeze streets down to the friendly dimensions of the old main streets that people love to visit. Nor can you take a state-controlled artery such as Floyd Road and give it dimensions that will slow drivers down when they pass through town; that would violate state highway standards and safety regulations.

Look at your own city. Zoning and building codes have shaped almost everything you see. Code controls the way everything looks and feels. It controls the width of streets and the height of curbs. It controls the distance between your front step and the sidewalk. It organizes the system of the city, and thus the lives led in it. Code is the reason you can or cannot walk from your home to a corner store. It is not market-based, nor is it democratic. Chances are you did not vote on the code that shaped your city. As I wrote earlier, these days most American municipalities take the easy route and simply adopt their code from Municode, the generic online source.

A city’s traditional zoning code functions as an organism with very strong intentions about how city life should work. The best neighborhoods in America could not be replicated in Mableton or in most other places on the continent, because all the things that are great about them would break the rules.

Code Wars

The godlike power of code struck Tachieva’s mentor, Andrés Duany, shortly after he began his career as an architect in Miami in the 1970s, when he realized that every commission began with a search through a four-inch-thick binder titled
City of Miami Zoning Ordinance 11000
.

“I remember the book—that horrible book always waiting on my desk. I was aghast that there was something that would tell me, the architect, what to do in terms of form. Then I realized that the power that shapes our city is in the code, not in the people. Miami looks the way it does, and Savannah the way it does, Paris the way it does, and New York City the way it does, and San Francisco the way it does, because of codes,” Duany told me. What was worse, the codes he worked under were forcing him to create structures that he knew would destroy the human scale and social life of the city. “Code appears to be neutral, but it isn’t. However neutral the language is, however neutral the metrics, however fair it seems to be, the outcome it has in mind is sprawl. What we needed to do to make great places was not to fight the code, but
take it over
.”

The code revolution began in the wilderness. Duany and his creative partner and wife, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, famously found their opportunity on eighty acres of private property on a desolate stretch of Florida’s Gulf Coast, in a county with no zoning regulations whatsoever. The property’s owner, Robert Davis, wanted to re-create the aesthetic and the functional appeal of towns built before the age of dispersal. It would be impossible to accomplish that dream by following the rules that had governed almost all suburban development for the better part of a century. They had to invent an entirely new code.

The trio toured such classic old towns as Savannah and Charleston, taking photos and sketching along the way. Then they created a set of basic design rules to approximate the best of what they had seen. Their new code prescribed a compact town of narrow, interconnected streets, alleys, and small parks, populated by traditional-looking houses with deep front porches, wood siding, pitched roofs, and quirky one-room towers—and it encouraged the mix of uses that new towns had been missing for fifty years. Within those standards, Davis let buyers and their architects design whatever they wanted for each lot.

The resulting resort town of Seaside was the most influential piece of urbanism of its era—and among the most controversial. It was an almost dreamlike idyll of pastel-painted cottages, picket fences, and picture-perfect squares. Many critics hated it for Duany’s prescriptive aesthetic codes. They dismissed it as a manufactured fantasy of instant urbanism, a criticism heightened by the choice of Seaside for the setting of the 1998 dystopian film
The Truman Show
. But Seaside turned out to be exactly the kind of place people loved. Davis sold lots for as little as $15,000 in 1982, but land values climbed 25 percent almost every year in the next decade. Even after the real estate bust of 2008, town houses several blocks from the ocean were selling for nearly $2 million, and condominiums sitting above shops in the town center—a form that had been considered unsellable for decades—were fetching $800,000. These days, the most common criticism of Seaside is its lack of socioeconomic diversity—a condition created
specifically
by its wild popularity. People will pay a premium to live or even spend a few days in places that feel and function like traditional villages and towns.

The experiment has inspired copycats around the world. But its real value is in the way it demonstrated the power of the zoning code: change the code and you change the city.

In 1993 Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and a group of like-minded architects and planners came together to wage war against the rules and practices that had produced sprawl. They called their movement the Congress for the New Urbanism—the name a cheeky reference and reaction to the CIAM—Congrès Internationaux d’architecture moderne—the fraternity formed by Le Corbusier and other European modernists in 1928. The New Urbanists were determined to undo the modernists’ work. They wrote a manifesto calling for compact, mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhoods of walkable street networks, with transit and attractive public spaces, all framed by buildings that responded to the local culture and climate.

The Congress for the New Urbanism has now grown into a powerful movement with thousands of members. Their ideas, which incorporate much of what Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander and Jan Gehl first proposed decades ago, have become accepted thinking among new generations of city planners. But for all their influence, the New Urbanists have been responsible for only a tiny fraction of built America, even during the boom years. The places they envision—no matter how loved they are, no matter how well they sell—are still essentially illegal in the vast majority of cities. The result: most New Urbanist communities have been built far from city limits, out along the highways, in swamps and farmers’ fields, or on dead mall sites or abandoned industrial lands—which means, of course, that they are unavailable to any family not wealthy enough to also operate a couple of cars—while the urgent work of repairing existing cities and suburbs languishes.

The greatest problem facing anyone who would repair sprawl remains the godlike power of code. Code is to the city what an operating system is to a computer. It is invisible, but it is in charge. So the battle for American cities has moved from architectural drafting tables to the dense, arcane pages of the zoning codebooks. The winners will determine the shape of cities and the fate of suburbia.

There are many fronts in the code war, but the New Urbanists’ favorite weapon has become the form-based code, a set of rules that prescribes the shape of spaces and buildings without necessarily dictating what can happen there. Most form-based codes specifically do away with the strict segregation of uses that characterized twentieth-century zoning plans, so that work, play, domesticity, and commerce could begin to intermingle again. To develop his own base code, Duany drew from the ecological sciences, using a transect, or cross section, to show how human activities should occur in a gradual spectrum from wilderness to city center, just as natural ecosystems gradually change from mountainside to seashore. Dubbed SmartCode, it basically states that the closer you get to an urban core, the denser buildings and uses should become.

The code ends the intrusion of essentially rural forms such as highways into village and town centers, and the plunking down of downtown forms such as apartment buildings in the middle of nowhere. It offers certainty to people like Robin Meyer, who want a village to drive to, but do not want an apartment tower next to their four-acre lots. It also offers developers more certainty about what growth will look like. Someone who builds or buys into a block of spiffy town houses can be assured that the immediate neighborhood will grow with a similar scale rather than being surprised by a glass skyscraper next door, or a mini-mart fronted by a big parking lot. It helps towns avoid what happened down the road from Mableton in Smyrna, where, after having secured building rights on a chunk of land beside the new town green, a developer turned around and built a strip mall–like structure, with its ass to the green and its face to a big parking lot.

Mableton’s New Operating System

A code can’t be smart if it is imposed from a distance. In the summer of 2010, a year after the Atlanta Regional Commission first spurred them to action, more than a hundred residents, bureaucrats, politicians, architects, designers, and traffic engineers spent a week in the cramped cafeteria of Mableton Elementary School, hashing out a plan to fix the town. It was a sweatbox. There were no windows, and the air conditioner was broken. The ideas came like fire. The architects drew them on poster board as fast as the people could throw them out.

What they came up with looked a lot like what Meyer had envisioned that sunny day in the post office parking lot. They saw Floyd Road tamed—although the county would have to regain control of it from the state of Georgia to do so. They saw the patchwork of parking and lawn and vast, empty spaces along Floyd disappear underneath a pleasant town center. They saw the Racetrac gas station receding behind a curtain of shops. Just north of the post office, Governor Barnes’s farm would sprout old-folks housing and services around a public square. Disconnected streets would be connected. The closer you got to the new town square, the tighter the urban fabric would become. The dying mall, the Village at Mableton, would become a real village, with new customers for its shops living above them, around them, and in the gently densified neighborhoods—where people would gain the right to add an extra residence or two to their own properties—within the magic five-minute walk.