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The dread of sprawl could be reduced if developers broke their cookie-cutter molds. Pending state legislation can help, but home buyers should demand more choice
Sunday, June 11, 2000
By Paul R. Flora
If the market delivers what people want, then why have successful, environmentally correct housing developments not been widely replicated?
Pittsburgh's mayor framed the question more concretely in his speech before an Urban Design conference at Harvard:
Paul R. Flora, a regional planning and economic analysis consultant, lives in North Point Breeze.
"Long ago . . . Pittsburgh was fortunate in that its Buhl Foundation developed and financed an outstanding example of good urban design. It's Chatham Village, as sound today, as livable today, as sought for today, as it was in the early 1930s when it was conceived and built.
"The question that Chatham Village always raises is: Why don't we build more like it in the Pittsburgh district and in the nation?"
The mayor speaking was David L. Lawrence; the year was 1956.
Today, Chatham Village on Mount Washington still thrives. Once, and always, a model for the world of an ideal planned suburban garden community, its residents continue to enjoy vegetable gardens, hiking trails and attractive, quiet common spaces nestled among its roughly 275 housing units.
The mix of two-, three- and four-bedroom brick townhouses are now individually owned, but the community remains cooperatively managed. With its proximity to Downtown and its timeless good design, Chatham Village homes are exceptionally hard to come by. After nearly 70 years, it remains an unqualified market success.
Beyond Pittsburgh, there has been scattered success over the past decade at creating the sense of place that new urbanists like Miami-based architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk strive for in their design of Seaside, Fla., and Kentlands, Md. They've defined their principles of New Urbanism in a book, co-authored with Jeff Speck, entitled "Suburban Nation."
An attack on sprawl, not suburbs, "Suburban Nation" makes the case for good design principles that generate lively social interactions, reduce dependence on automobiles and use private and public resources efficiently. This is accomplished by providing for a prudent mix of commercial and residential uses; a mix of housing by cost, ownership and household incomes; and physical design elements with spatial efficiency and visual appeal.
Village Homes in the university town of Davis, Calif., epitomizes much of what sustainable development advocates and New Urbanists recommend. As at Chatham Village and Kentlands, people queue up to buy a house in 70-acre Village Homes. Its smallish-sized, privately owned homes command high premiums.
Village Homes was completed in 1982 with a design emphasis on energy conservation, natural -- even edible -- landscaping, natural storm water drainage and community social interactions. Visit today, and you'll see children careening home from school on bikes and skateboards and on foot. Their parents may commute to campus by bike, and parked outside the community day-care center you will find the tricycles of their younger siblings.
Weekly potlucks are held among some families in clusters of homes that feature active and passive solar energy systems, and even a few underground houses. An extensive harvest is produced each year from orchards and other edible plantings that comprise the natural landscape. Residents share freely of the produce, with a portion sold to offset the community's maintenance expense.
But despite its obvious market success, it too has spawned few, if any, copies by market-oriented developers seeking to meet the latest trends in housing.
Why then does the disconnect exist between successful innovations in housing development and acceptance by market providers?
My theory attributes the disconnect to a pervasive shortcoming of our market economy. Call it the "white bread syndrome." Through competition, the market is very successful at driving the cost of production lower for most goods. But for some goods, there is an unsavory side effect.
Over several generations, advances in production and convenience permit price reductions to be offered as enticements for switching to a marginally, sometimes imperceptibly, poorer product. The resulting ill effect is readily apparent in basic food products, like bread or beer. To be sure, consumers willingly trade the rich-tasting, nutritious home-baked bread for the relative convenience and low cost of commercial white bread. But tastes are oft acquired only through experience. Many in my "Wonder Years" generation never tasted home-baked bread, and never knew what they were missing while chowing down on that quintessential staple of the 1950s pantry -- Wonder Bread.
Happily, consumers and their palates are resilient, such that upon exposure to broader choices -- home-baked or local bakery bread -- many break away from the malaise of "white bread syndrome" and seek tastier alternatives.
As demand rises, markets respond with more choices. The resurgence in the last two decades of rich-tasting specialty breads by national and local bakeries, as well as the recent popularity of bread-making machines, bears witness to the reawakening in tastes and the re-awareness of nutrition.
So if these markets have responded, then all is right in our economic world? Not quite. Bread, beer and other basic food products are low-cost goods to produce. For a national manufacturer or a local bakery to test a new line of multigrain, high-fiber bread poses limited risks. Sadly, our markets for new home construction -- with high production costs and significant risks to experimentation -- also tend to fall victim to the "white bread syndrome."
The same generation that was raised on Wonder Bread was also raised in "little boxes." "And they're all made out of ticky tacky, And they all look just the same," was the disparaging portrayal of our stale 1950s conformity penned by Malvina Reynolds and popularized by Pete Seeger.
It's not that today's builders don't offer a quality product with desirable features. Many do. And it's not that today's developers don't do quality work for the plans they design. Many do. And a few create some excellent plans in the style of New Urbanism within the constraints of our local land use planning system. But, the typical suburban development is justifiably accused of creating a physical space that raises barriers to -- though it doesn't prevent -- the social interaction that bonds people with a sense of community.
But they typically don't start out that way. It evolves -- or devolves -- like bread. New suburbs are typically settled by a homogeneous group of families whose characteristics are determined largely by the cost, style and location of the development. This self selection process is sufficient to create a sense of community for the first generation of residents.
Today, developers justify their suburban tract developments with the simple defense that they are providing what the consumer wants. But if only "white bread" is produced, only "white bread" can be bought. Area developers -- and their financial investors -- prefer not to experiment with alternatives. That would be too risky.
There is clearly a case to be made that Americans face absurd amounts of red tape in many aspects of life. So many people casually side with free marketeers who argue that if only government would move further out of the way, then the market would be better able to deliver what consumers really want.
It is equally clear to most that government regulations are an essential tool for protecting consumers and preserving public goods by prodding recalcitrant businesses into doing the right thing, if not for consumers, then sometimes for themselves.
As it happens, what builders and developers deem to be onerous regulations, often results in a more desirable product and can sometimes be delivered at little or no additional cost.
For builders, developers, municipalities and financial institutions, the learning curve of adopting new practices (and new codes) can pose as great a barrier as cost or the lack of demand.
And given the ridiculous number of local governments with which land use controls are currently vested in Pennsylvania, and with which local developers must contend, the learning curve to adopting new practices is greatly heightened.
Pennsylvania's small municipalities lack sufficient professional resources needed to evaluate and revise their codes to reflect best practices. Small fragmented government entities tend to discourage large developments that create entire new towns, as in other regions, in part because the scale of such development would encompass multiple municipalities.
Without deep pockets of large development companies to assume some greater risk of trying new approaches, the local housing market is less able to break out of the "white bread syndrome" and offer the range of choices that consumers deserve.
In Harrisburg, two legislative remedies are moving through the General Assembly that will provide some relief: House Bill 14 and Senate Bill 300. The more important HB 14 passed the House last Tuesday by an impressive margin of 175 to 17, and is now before the Senate. SB 300 will face votes in both chambers in this final week of the legislative session.
Neither bill will fully dismantle the handicap under which Pennsylvania municipalities conduct land use policy, but if passed as is, House Bill 14 accomplishes much.
The bill avoids mandates, but enables municipalities and counties to cooperate and voluntarily create and implement joint land use plans. It also provides incentives -- such as preferences when awarding state grants -- to encourage such arrangements.
Multi-municipal planning allows cooperating municipalities to develop zoning and subdivision ordinances that are consistent with each other -- making life simpler for developers. Plans may designate growth areas to target for infrastructure, development and special streamlining procedures, while also preserving rural areas for rural uses, where desired.
This legislation is long past due. Each new subdivision platted and each new house erected creates a nearly irreversible impact on the energy efficiency of the house, the land consumption per household, the contribution to problems of sprawl and the housing choices of future generations.
Passing these bills does not guarantee that innovative residential developments will be built in the future, but it removes one of the greatest obstacles. It will be up to consumers to be demanding, to developers to be creative and to local governments to be accommodating.
Then people will only have to eat Wonder Bread and live in ticky-tacky developments, if they truly prefer it to alternatives they can taste and see.
