When I started traveling the country on writing projects in the 1980s, I used to stay at the Obrero Hotel in San Francisco. The hotel occupied the second and third floors of an unmemorable old building on Stockton Street. It had no elevator, as I recall; you walked up a steep flight of stairs to check in. The rooms were sparsely furnished, the water pressure sometimes faltered, but the host was a helpful woman named Bambi McDonald who made the place feel welcoming, and the price was a free-lancer’s dream. Best of all, it was in Chinatown.
Chinatown — its sights and sounds — appealed. It was the jumble of stores opening onto packed sidewalks. It was the near-constant human activity from morning to evening. Most of all, it was the presence of children. There was a tremendous pleasure in seeing boys and girls interacting with their families and shopkeepers in the midst of a dense city. From my room, I would sometimes hear their voices outside. They gave my business trips a wonderful human spirit.
Are we creating anything like this in the current crop of new urbanist town centers? I’m not sure. There’s a good deal of activity in places like Mashpee Commons, Santana Row, and Blue Back Square, but what bothers me about some new urban developments is the narrowness of their residential constituency.
THE BURDEN OF EDUCATION
The latest example of this is Voorhees Town Center, now under construction in New Jersey on part of a mall site that had been floundering (see page 10, March 2008 issue). The mall’s owner, Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust, proposed a town center in which a full range of people, including children, could live. Officials in Voorhees Township said no; they made the developer cut the number of housing units containing three bedrooms. Taxpayers didn’t want the burden of educating the schoolchildren.
Similarly, in Dover, New York, new urbanist planners and designers have envisioned a town center on part of the site of the former Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center. The Town of Dover, however, inserted into its special zoning district provisions a requirement that no more than 30 percent of the town center could consist of dwellings containing three or more bedrooms. The town further stipulated that not more than 50 percent of the development could be residential — but excluded “age-restricted senior citizen housing” from that calculation. Adults okay, children not okay.
When Leyland Alliance proposed developing Madison Landing, a traditional neighborhood development in Madison, Connecticut, officials in that town welcomed the TND concept but required Leyland to make it an age-restricted development, not a neighborhood for people in all stages of life. The reason, again, was a desire to limit how much the local taxpayers would end up paying to educate schoolchildren.
All of these examples are from the Northeast because this is a part of the country that has gone far toward excluding schoolchildren or limiting their numbers, often in communities that are well-heeled to begin with. “Fiscal zoning” — the adoption of municipal policies to encourage tax-generating development and to limit expenditures on services such as schools — has become entrenched in many suburbs.
I wonder what these policies mean for the liveliness and longevity of town centers now being built or proposed. Conventional shopping centers are not very lively for much of the week; it’s no wonder that consumers quickly abandon retail centers that are 20 years old and take their spending to newer ones. Mixed-use, pedestrian-oriented centers have been a logical response, in part, to the dullness and obsolescence of the uninspired conventional centers. But if municipalities prevent families with school-age children from living in them, how lively will these town centers be? How long will people find them appealing?
One of the attractive features of San Francisco’s Chinatown was its feeling of being a whole, and wholesome, community. If governments do not permit the new generation of town centers to become whole communities, the promise of these developments will be greatly diluted. What good is a town center if it excludes its freshest, least jaded inhabitants?
This article is available in the Month 2008 issue of New Urban News, along with many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue. |