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A friend who works in a municipal government in Canada wrote to me
recently (reprinted with permission):
The town I work in (where I am a planner) just approved
a project in which we tried hard to get close to the traditional
city ideals you promote (and I firmly believe in). We pushed the
developer HARD on narrow streets and we ended up in a major battle
with our own Engineering and Fire Departments. British
Columbia’s building code requires 6 metres clear paved width for
streets for fire/emergency access so that was the narrowest we
could get to. Once you get to fitting all the utilities in, 11 or
12 metres was as narrow as the right of way could be….. and
yet they seem to fit everything into 6 metres in Japan and
elsewhere.
Planners can only achieve so much I guess. Jeff Speck’s recent
book which talks about how the specialization of the various
professions involved in city building is ruining cities is spot
on….. it totally killed us in this case. The Fire
Department cared nothing for the urban design of this project,
only how it would be accessed with their hugely oversized fire
trucks.
In the end, we were able to achieve our goals only partially, but
I think we will get *sort of* close to a more Japanese
style SFDR neighbourhood:
· 37 single-family
and duplex lots (with carriage houses and secondary suites) in
1.81 hectares gross land area, 1.47 hectares net of road
dedications
· 11 metre right
of way for the main shared street (this ROW width and the shared
street thing was a HUGE battle with our engineering guys) The
actual paved width of the street is the minimum 6 metres that the
Fire Dept. would let us do, plus unfortunately there is
“scalloped” on-street parking. (total width about 8.1m although
because the parking is in the scalloped bays the street will at
least appear narrower.)
· 8 metre right of
way for the access lane way, 5.2 metres paved width.
Apparently no one could conceive of anything between a lane and a
street, so I lost the battle for something more in the Japanese
type of street that is really part street part lane in its
functionality from a western perspective.
· Small setbacks
(up to 4 feet from property line) but of course a large driveway
if the eventual buyers want it.
I have attached the permit site plan for you to check out.
In the end, I think (and like you comment on your website) most
people are not visionary, and doing anything different is
unfathomable until someone else succeeds (gets rich) at it.
That said, from what I see in my daily professional life I think
we are slowly moving back towards the traditional city, albeit
VERY VERY slowly.
This gives some idea of what people are dealing with as they try to
implement Traditional City methodologies, in an intellectual
environment where such ideas are still quite alien. We humans have
been doing this for thousands of years, and others elsewhere do it,
but for some reason it strikes people today as very difficult.
Click for larger version.
Click for larger version.
The fact of the matter is, building things involves a lot of people.
These include:
Municipal governments, including:
"Planners" like my friend here
Engineering
Fire Departments
Developers -- the person who actually organizes the property
investment and construction process. Developers then interact with:
Investors -- other, relatively passive equity
investors in the project
Lenders -- banks and other lenders on the project
Architects, engineers and private-sector
"planners": These are the people who actually design the building
plans for the project
Construction companies
Marketing people
For anything to get done, these people need to cooperate. They can
disagree on minor points, but in the context of achieving a shared
goal. If they have completely different goals -- one guy wants to
build high-rises and another guy insists on single-family homes, and
each has project-killing ability -- then the project will not get
built, or at the very best, it would be some kind of compromise
between the two which is neither fish nor fowl.
Second, we should recognize that building things has a lot of
responsibility. There's a lot of money involved. There's business
risk. Whatever you build will be there for decades. Just as the
house is often a family's primary undertaking, besides raising
children (and of course they are related), also on a societal level,
one of the most important things we do is make the built
environments that we live in.
From this, you might think: if it's so important, then why do we
keep making the same hideous shit year after year, like some kind of
superexpensive copy machine gone bonkers?
Good question.
The basic answer is that all of the uncertainty involved makes
people nervous. Thus, they want to do the same old solutions.
Another answer is that the people involved don't actually have to
live there. Their primary risk is not that they build some kind of
hideous shit that they have to live in. No. Their primary risk is
that they lose their job (municipal bureaucrats, bankers), lose
their business (architects and others involved in the process), or
fail to make a profit (developers and investors). Once they ring the
register, they are off to some other project.
All of this makes them more risk-averse, and it also means that they
don't really suffer if what they happen to build turns out to be a
stinking dog turd. Even a stinking dog turd can be profitable, at
least marginally.
I ran into these same issues with another fellow who contacted me.
He was in the early stages of planning a multi-phase project
adjacent to a commuter train station in New Jersey, basically a
suburb of Philadelphia. He was also inspired by some of these
Traditional City ideas, and began to think about how he could
implement them in his project, in a specific, real-life kind of way.
One of the things he discovered is that there were a lot of balls to
juggle. For example, just to get a proper proposal, he had to hire
some architects and planners. However, these architects and planners
had spent their whole life building the kind of dogshit that litters
the North American continent today. Despite this, they managed to
put their kids through college, and thus considered themselves
"successful" in terms of money, and perhaps even in terms of
spending their lives building beautiful things for people to live in
and use, according to their sadly limited viewpoint.
So, at the very least, he had to convince these architects and
planners to actually produce something that itself didn't suck -- in
the form of some ideas on paper. I tried to help here, and I have to
say that I too dropped the ball somewhat, as I was also in the early
stages of understanding the sort of thing that might be done in a
place like this. I was experimenting with some ideas, and did not
get to the point of a fully-formed proposal. In any case, the
developer would have had to lead and instruct his architects and
planners to do something that was different than what they had
always done.
He had to do this even though the architects and planners would
spend all their time convincing him that they were the
experts, and he was not, and if he just left everything to them,
it would work out fine. After all, that is one of the premises of
their business, which allows them to put their kids through college
and etc. etc.
In other words, he had to be a leader. This is what visionaries do.
When Steve Jobs decided that he wanted to make the iPhone, and the
related software environment, he had to convince his teams of
hardware and software designers to follow his vision, and create
something new and wonderful, even though he himself was not a
hardware or software designer. When he got the usual backtalk about
"that is not how it is done, and I would know because I've been
doing this for twenty years, including work for Panasonic, Samsung,
Sony, Nokia, and all the people who dominate the business that you
are just trying to get into, and yadda yadda," he would then say:
"That is how it was done, and that is how others might do it, but
that is not how we will do it. Now go back and do it again."
The result was wildly successful. Jobs' vision allowed Apple to take
hardware with a $150 production cost and sell it for $650. In short,
he took some basic materials (generic electronic parts assembled by
a Chinese OEM manufacturer) and, because he combined them in
different ways, he created way more value, which turned into a big
fat profit margin. For a while, Apple made more money selling
smartphones than all other cellphone manufacturers combined,
until, of course, the others started imitating Apple.
In 2Q12, Apple made 77.1% of all the profit
of all cellphone/tablet manufacturers globally. This was from a
product made from generic parts from a Chinese OEM (Foxconn).
We are doing the same thing here. By taking basic materials -- land,
asphalt, concrete, wood, construction labor -- we can create
something that is vastly more valuable than what we have otherwise
been creating with the same materials, namely, Suburban Hell. This
excess value translates into a potential big fat profit margin, very
different from the marginal (in the spreadsheet model) to
in-fact-negative (in real life) return on capital from reproducing
Suburban Hell.
January
20, 2013: HTMAPODWTTC 11: The Diminishing Returns of Suburbia
To put it another way:
If, instead of making Suburban Hell single-family homes on
eighth-acre plots, with lots of space wasted on 60-80 foot wide
gigantic roadways which are utterly miserable to have in a living
environment;
Typical Suburban Hell "snout houses."
You can create the perception that the townhouse/Trad City combo is
far more desirable than the Suburban Hell alternative;
And thus sell it for way, way more than the cost of the land and
construction.
April
10,
2014: How to Make Billions While Making People Happy and Saving
the Planet
Or, if you wanted to have single-family detached housing, as is the
case in this specific example, there are many proven methods for
that too:
July
31,
2011:
How
To
...
Make a Pile of Dough With the Traditional City 5: The New New
Suburbanism
target="_blank" July
17,
2011:
How
To
Make
A
Pile
of
Dough...
the Traditional City 4: More SFDR/SFAR Solutions
Japanese single-family detached "suburbs."
But, like Steve Jobs, you have to be a leader. And a visionary.
My developer friend found that he did not have the confidence,
commitment, and leadership qualities that would allow him to
organize all of these people, who have spent their life doing things
one way (the Suburban Hell way, possibly of the "Transit-Oriented
Development" flavor), and apparently being successful at it, and get
them to cooperate together to do things a different way. When I last
spoke to him, he was basically being led down the path by the
architect/planner (being led not leading) to making the sort of
mediocre "transit-oriented development" project that is popular
today among the kind of ding-dongs who do this thing in North
America.
You have to have the kind of person who says: "Yes, everyone does it
that way, and the result is so shitty that I will absolutely not do
it that way. I would rather risk potential failure instead of
embracing certain failure by reproducing the usual Suburban Hell
catastrophe."
People are motivated by two things: to make something great; and to
make money. Or, at the very least, to not lose their job.
Making something great is actually a big motivation. The Chrysler
Building in New York didn't have to look like that. It could have
just been a featureless rectangle. Grand Central Station, or the old
Penn Station, didn't have to look like that. It could have looked
like ... the new Penn Station. But someone, somewhere, decided to
make something great. And somehow, he inspired all the hundreds or
thousands of people involved to cooperate with him to actually make
something great.
The desire to make something great can be strong enough that people
then devote themselves to finding a way to make money at it --
or, in other words, to overcome the various difficulties involved in
manifesting this great thing in the real world. Profit is a biggie
for developers, but for municipal engineers, it might be things like
adequate drainage.
So, how do you do this?
As I said, the "vision" is, in large part, a vision,
that is, a picture in people's heads. This is what we started with.
target="_blank" May
23, 2010: Transitioning to the Traditional City
In other words, you have to show people pictures. I show lots and
lots of pictures.
Then, I describe, in short and simple terms, what they are looking
at. Typically, this involves a lot of repetition like Really Narrow
Streets and Buildings Side By Side with No Setback, that kind of
thing. Because, everyone has seen photos like this before, or they
have even been to places like this in person, but it made little
impression because nobody was telling them what they were looking
at. People (sadly) have to be given the words to be able to create
some kind of mental construct.
Of all the people involved, the person who most needs to be sold on
the concept is the developer IMO, because that is the person who is
actually building something. It is their baby.
Usually, developers are quite welcoming to this kind of stuff,
because they are by nature people willing to dream dreams and do
things that are inherently risky. Developers usually respond quite
well both to the motivation of Making Something Great and Making a
Lot of Money.
target="_blank" August
22, 2010: How to Make a Pile of Dough with the Traditional City
However, things being what they are in North America today, close
cooperation with municipal planning departments is necessary. In
this particular case, where the municipal planner has the vision,
that is not a problem: the problem, first, is getting the developer
on board.
Once you get the Visionaries aligned, then the other character types
can be persuaded to cooperate:
target="_blank" June
6, 2010: Transitioning to the Traditional City 2: Pooh-poohing the
Naysayers
However, they too should be given The Vision: they should know what
they are cooperating with.
Once you have people who share the same goal (if even in a
begrudging fashion), then the various other problems can usually be
overcome without much difficulty. The fact of the matter is,
building Traditional City environments, even in a contemporary
context possibly with the need to accommodate a lot of automobiles,
is not that hard.
The basic problem I see in the Canadian example that we begin with
is that the various parties apparently literally do not know what
the others are talking about. Agreement or disagreement is (perhaps)
not the issue, but actually what it is that one might agree or
disagree on. Basically, they are taking a "19th Century
Hypertrophism" or "Suburban Hell" arrangement -- using very wide
Arterial-type streets in residential areas -- and making small
tweaks to it ("New Urbanism") because that is the fashion today,
since even the most knuckleheaded municipal engineering type has got
the message that Suburban Hell is kinda El Stinko and needs to be
fixed.
target="_blank" April
13, 2014: Arterial Streets and Grand Boulevards
target="_blank" July
26, 2009: Let's Take a Trip to an American Village 3: How the
Suburbs Came to Be
Engineers and fire department types shouldn't be decision-makers.
They should find ways to make various plans work, within the context
of their fields of specialty. But whose plans? Ultimately, the plans
of the Developers, with the cooperation of the municipal "planners,"
and the architects and planners that are hired by the Developer.
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