Urban designer – and my former Carnegie Mellon colleague – David Lewis has long said that our older suburbs are the greatest urban renewal challenge of modern times. Lacking concentration, density, transit, historic architecture, and highly developed infrastructure like older center cities, he said, the suburbs pose a much greater challenge to redevelop. Over at The New York Times’ By Design blog, Allison Arieff offers some interesting perspective – and possible solutions (h/t: Allison Kemper).
The problem now isn’t really how to better design homes and communities, but rather what are we going to do with all the homes and communities we’re left with … As I learned in artist Julia Christensen’s new book, “Big Box Reuse,” when a big box store like Wal-mart or Kmart outgrows its space, it is shut down. It is, apparently, cheaper to start from scratch than to close for renovation and expansion … The silver lining in Christensen’s study are the communities she’s discovered that have proactively addressed the massive empty shells they’ve been left with, turning structures of anywhere from 20,000 to 280,000 square feet into something useful: a charter school, a health center, a chapel, a library. (And, in Austin, Minn., a new Spam Museum.) …
But exurban communities are a unique challenge. The houses within them are big, but not generally as big as, say, Victorian mansions in San Francisco that can be subdivided into apartments. So they’re not great candidates for transformation into multi-family rental housing. I did visit a housing development last year that offered “quartets,” McMansions subdivided into four units with four separate entrances. These promised potential buyers the status of a McMansion with the convenience of a condominium, but the concept felt like it was created more to preserve the property values of larger neighboring homes than to serve the needs of the community’s residents …
I still dream that some major overhaul can occur: that a self-sufficient mixed-use neighborhood can emerge. That three-car-garaged McMansions can be subdivided into rental units with streetfront cafés, shops and other local businesses.
Wondering what others think, and strategies you may have come across in communities around the world?
January 14th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Lacking concentration, density, transit, historic architecture, and highly developed infrastructure like older center cities, he said, the suburbs pose a much greater challenge to redevelop.
I don’t see that at all.
I see the close in ‘burbs being revitalized in a number of Chicago communities by taking advantage of their existing commuter rail stations and developing the downtowns around those stations. Where once you might have had a one story strip mall across from the station, developers knock that down and rebuild with multi-story, mixed use facilities. Retail locates on the first floor, and residential is above.
Call it the urbanization of the inner ring ‘burbs, and it is all predicated on relatively short commutes to the Loop on commuter rail.
For whatever reason, the Chicago ‘burbs seems to be on the cutting edge of this phenomenon. I don’t see this happening on Long Island, for example, which also has lots and lots of communities with rail stations, but no urbanization is occuring. I hear from people that they don’t want Nassau to become like Queens, so there is grass-roots resistance.
January 14th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
Arieff’s observation reminds me of the Robert Stern’s comments on the long-term need for buildings to be adaptable. Stern was writing about modern office buildings: their large floor-plates (and therefore large core-to-envelope distance) makes them unsuited for adaptation to anything other than big corporate offices. (Why? Because the outside walls are so far from the building’s core that you can’t divide the floor and still have windows for all units.) Stern praised older office buildings (pre-open concept), which are slimmer and therefore easier to adapt to other uses (you can divide a floor up and still provide for windows with walls for each new unit).
“Adaptability” is a great criterion, imo, for evaluating built form. Maybe McMansions are the residential correlate to corporate office buildings? Both are very hard to adapt to different uses.
I look at all the small condo units that go up in my city, none of which are suitable for families (and square-footage-wise, it’s still much cheaper to buy a SFH in the suburbs), and I wonder who will be using all those 400 to 700 sq.ft. units a generation from now. I’ve asked developers and architects whether it’s possible to build them with options for combining two units to make one large one, but the idea is usually dismissed as unworkable for financial reasons. However (unless their financing collapses), at least two developers plan to build condos with added-on “lock-offs,” studio-sized condos that can be locked off from inside the main condo and also accessed from the hallway. These are intended as secondary suites for renting out by the main condo unit owner (mortgage helpers), or as teenager suites, elder relative suites, care-giver/maid suites, etc.
Maybe thinking about the adaptability of buildings is sort of like having a five-year plan in economics, vs. looking only at the quarterly profit reports. Too bad “quarterly” thinking spread like kudzu to other social areas.
January 14th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
When I was working on my (still unfinished) dissertation in the early 70’s (Impact of the interstate highway system on non-metropolitan population redistribution)one of the clear patterns was that the greatest relative* population growth impact of the new highway was on counties with something else, in addition to the interstate, such as a college or military base. I wonder if a similar pattern occurs with the network of rail stations which spread out from the center city?
* By relative I mean county population change relative to total state population change. Growing 5% during a period when the total state growth was flat was as more of a relative success than growing 10% in a state with overall population growth of 15%.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:46 pm
I’m curious as to just what David Lewis considers an older suburb.
Certainly in Chicago but even in my hometown of Detroit the suburbs I’d consider older i.e. those that were more or less fully developed before World War II and the post war era of freeway construction are generally quite amenable to redevelopment. While they may not have the density of older urban cores they were usually built along rail lines the the Chicago suburbs Buzzcut talks about. This is true even in Metro Detroit where the old rail and streetcar lines are long gone. Suburbs like Ferndale, Royal Oak, Dearborn, and Wyandotte were either developed with their own smaller cores along the old transit routes or grew from smaller market towns that those transit routes were built to reach. In an era of cheap gas and oversized appliances they fell out of favor, losing population to newer more distant suburbs served by the postwar freeways but they seem ripe for redevelopment if we can keep some local politicians from implementing harebrained re-zoning schemes requiring larger house and lot sizes and massive amounts of new parking for commercial development as means of increasing property tax revenues and fees.
January 14th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
“I did visit a housing development last year that offered ‘quartets,’ McMansions subdivided into four units with four separate entrances.”
Maybe this is trying to squeeze everything into a limited paradynm of separate living. Those McMansions might be great group living spaces for extended families, young singles, etc., who could also share cars and other big ticket items. It might also provide enough density for some transit.
Some immigrant groups whose culture is more extended family communal are already fitting more than one “nuclear family” and their elders into a big house with a yard. My aunt in Salinas has complained about this for years.
And I don’t know about McMansion with storefront cafes, but with some zoning changes small businesses could be run out of them — with the owners living next to rather than over the shop. Some old Victorian houses had offices with separate entrances for professionals like doctors. Tele-commuting and FedEx expand these possibilities much further.
January 14th, 2009 at 11:29 pm
We went to hear Michael Pollan speak last night, he’s a food writer for the NY Times and author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He was saying that to get in touch with their food people should tear up their lawns and plant vegetable gardens, that in WW II 30% of America’s food came from Victory Gardens. Of course this is easier in single family suburbia than in high-rise condos.
There are so many agendas. Suburbia and McMansions might have possibilities we haven’t yet imagined.
January 15th, 2009 at 3:53 am
Try selling a house with its garden dug up for allotments – it’s a really big selling point….
I love the penultimate paragpraph of the original article:
“That three-car-garaged McMansions can be subdivided into rental units with streetfront cafés, shops and other local businesses”.
What planet do these people live on? As Richard points out in his introduction, these suburbs have extremely low dwelling per hectare density – that’s even before you factor in the even lower people per hectare density (the wealthier families that live in these areas having far fewer children and dependents) – would you want to open a cafe, shop or other local business where a) there is no passing traffic b) there are very few people and c) no-one walks anywhere?
Bulldoze them, cover them in parkland, hike taxes on car fuel. That will force people to move closer to jobs, and into more space-efficient homes.
January 15th, 2009 at 6:53 am
Lots of good stuff here. I think Buzzcut is right in that the inner suburbs have a higher density and therefore will convert into urban living easier, particularly if they are near public transit.
Those suburbs further out that have a commercial strip mall once every mile at intersections are going to have a rougher time of it if the real estate market continues in free fall, and exurbia, forget it.
Still, the credit crunch seems to be thawing a bit. Look at data from November and December.
January 15th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
The Smart Growth community is developing the concept of ‘greyfields’ – redevelopment of mall/big-box construction that sits in a lake of decaying asphalt. I for one will be interested to see what they do and how well it works.
January 19th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
How do you address suburban decline within an area that is at the edge of the metro region, does not have access to regional mass transit, and contains a population that resists redevelopment? Sterling Park is a 1960’s master planned community in Loudoun County which is the edge of the D.C. metro area. The community of some 3,000 homes has a gross density of 4 units per acre, lacks distinguishable architecture, contains aging and outdated infrastructure, and includes deteriorating housing. Most of the development contains single-family detached homes averaging approximately 1,500 to 2,000 square feet. There is little opportunity to mass transit as the old rail line that traversed the community has converted to a shared-use trail that leads bicyclists into D.C. An examination of its neighborhoods shows an increasing concentration and segregation of lower-income, minority residents. Crime (within the context of Loudoun) is on the rise.
All signs point to its continued declined. While the redevelopment of older inner-ring suburbs can take advantage of its proximity to the City and transit, what about the older “outer-ring” suburbs? From what I have read, there is no “one size fits all” approach. And complicating matters is the long-time residents lack of openness to change, with reactions being far more reactive (put money into public safety, no redevelopment, kick out the immigrants, etc.-see http://www.loudoun.gov/Default.aspx?tabid=2132). Yet, the decline continues. Perplexing indeed.
February 26th, 2009 at 1:55 am
From a neophyte in sustainable land use planning:
Clearly a vast transformation in settlement or habitation patterns is needed. But that degree of redevelopment lies far in future. In the near term has anyone examined retrofitting auto corridors for mass transit, light rail most likely, though maybe a bus lane would work? Congestion and energy pricing may generate demand for light rail along these corridors.