Dispersal would have happened in any case, because of the desire of the ‘upwardly mobile’ to seek a better environment, either in the suburbs or in smaller towns and villages. However, the consequence of that trend has all too often been the ‘swamping’ of places that lack the capacity to take further growth…
— 2006 essay by Chris Glossop on the the UK’s ‘New Towns’ movement (1947-1976) which aimed at dispersing residential and commercial development to areas outside of major cities by providing government subsidies for new towns.
Last month, Daily Post columnist Louis Cannon took a humorous look at the ‘Garden City’ theories of English stenographer Ebenezer Howard, who published his one and only book — To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform — in London in 1898. Subsequent editions bore the title, Garden Cities of To-Morrow. Although Mr. Cannon occasionally appears to be a hopeless sentimentalist, his essay about Mr. Howard and his ‘Garden Cities’ scheme may have exuded a trace of cynicism.
Regardless of the fact that Ebenezer Howard spent his life as a court stenographer, his 150-page book seems to have had, and continues to have, an outsized impact on the theories that guide modern urban planning, in the UK and in America.
Yesterday, in Part One of this editorial series, we touched very briefly upon some of the sociological ideas of urban planner Jane Jacobs, which she outlined in considerable detail in her 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Like Mr. Cannon, Ms. Jacobs offers occasional cynical comments about Ebenezer Howard and his ‘Garden City’ concepts. Ms. Jacobs saw, in large cities, a particular vitality and excitement that naturally attracts people to them… people like, for example, the 380,000 new residents who have moved to San Antonio, Texas since 2001, or the 350,000 new residents who relocated to Phoenix, Arizona during the same period.
Ebenezer Howard, on the other hand, saw cities as breeding grounds for disease, crime, poverty, and misery, and as something that desperately needed to be replaced by his bureaucratically-controlled, suburban ‘Garden Cities’. And if we look back at the suburban sprawl that has served as the dominant housing pattern in the US since the 1940s, we might be tempted to say, Mr. Howard got his way. Sort of.
Howard’s perspective, that large cities were failures… and would only become more and more miserable… and ought to be abandoned… found a prominent place among the blossoming theories of the urban planning profession at the beginning of the 20th century.
Jane Jacobs rejected the idea that cities were failures. In fact, although she was an urban planner, she rejected many of the theories then embraced by the planning profession — especially, the theories behind ‘urban renewal’. Looking back, we can see that the wholesale destruction of ‘slum’ neighborhoods, and their replacement with high-rise public housing projects, was an unmitigated disaster, and in her book, Jane Jacobs offered some cogent reasons why that disaster was unfolding.
Lack of diversity, first and foremost.
And with lack of diversity comes lack of vitality… lack of the indispensable public interactions that make a neighborhood into a neighborhood… and the end result: the Great Blight of Dullness.
Many of those mid-century projects — which became notorious for criminal activities, and misery — were later abandoned, and demolished, beginning in 1972 with the razing of the Pruitt-Igoe high-rise towers in St. Louis, Missouri.
Approximately halfway through her 450-page book, Ms. Jacobs offers us a chapter entitled, “The self-destruction of diversity.”
After detailing how successful urban neighborhoods become thriving centers of diversity and vitality, Ms. Jacob acknowledges that, in many cases, the same demographic forces that made a neighborhood attractive, ultimately cause the diversity and vitality to be replaced by the Great Blight of Dullness… as the ‘upwardly mobile’ elements of the city, attracted by the energy and excitement, move into the neighborhood and gradually make it unaffordable for the mixture of businesses and families that had previously been generating the neighborhood liveliness and diversity. The mix of older, lower-rent buildings and regularly-repurposed shops and homes that contributed to the neighborhood’s success are replaced by expensive new luxury residences and offices, and the neighborhood’s former vitality disappears.
The former neighbors are priced out, and the neighborhood slowly loses its essential energy.
How to keep this from happening? Ms. Jacobs doesn’t seem to have an elegant planning professional’s solution. Maybe it’s just the way things go, and there’s not much we can do about it.
Jane Jacobs was living in New York City in 1961, observing and writing about the changing character of various neighborhoods, and the efforts (and apparent mistakes) made by the city’s urban planners — and the politicians and business interests they served. Some of the changes she analyzed were incremental and barely noticeable; others were cataclysmic, when whole sections of the city were bulldozed and reconstructed according to then-popular planning concepts.
In particular, she was living in Greenwich Village, on the lower west side of Manhattan — a former slum that had, in 1961, become fashionable among the city’s Bohemians, artists, musicians and counter-culture elements, and which was gradually becoming one of the most exciting and attractive neighborhoods in New York City.
Her observations and theories are fascinating, and from what I understand, her writing and activism caused something of a ideological revolution among certain factions of the planning profession.
Maybe cities weren’t the enemy, after all. Maybe the enemy was a lack of understanding, about how a city functions, and becomes successful?
To Ms. Jacobs, the definition of ‘successful’ had little to do with ‘economics’ and everything to do with diversity and vitality. Everything to do with human activity and interactions. In that sense, Greenwich Village, in 1961, was one of the most ‘successful’ neighborhoods in New York.
60 years later, Greenwich Village has undergone extensive gentrification and commercialization. In 2014, Forbes magazine ranked the four ZIP Codes that constitute the Village – 10011, 10012, 10003, and 10014 – among the ten most expensive in the United States… with residential property sale prices in the West Village neighborhood typically exceeding $2,100 per square foot in 2017.
By comparison, when I checked a sample of Pagosa Springs homes currently for sale, it looks like a typical asking price for a single family home is around $350 per square foot.
But that’s not the whole story, because, in 2012, the typical asking price for a single family home in Pagosa was less than $200 per square foot.
We know former neighbors are being priced out. But are the neighborhoods slowly losing their vitality?
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.