Search Results for: "herbert gans"

Jane Jacobs and the Mid-Rise Mania

The next time you travel through a city, see if you can find many four-, five-, or six-story buildings. Chances are, nearly all of the buildings you see will be either low rise (three stories or less) or high-rise (seven stories or more). If you do find any mid-rise, four- to six-story buildings, chances are they were either built before 1910, after 1990, or built by the government.

Click image to download a five-page PDF of this policy brief.

Before 1890, most people traveled around cities on foot. Only the wealthy could afford a horse and carriage or to live in the suburbs and enter the city on a steam-powered commuter train. Many cities had horsecars—rail cars pulled by horses—but they were no faster than walking and too expensive for most working-class people to use on a daily basis. Continue reading

37. The Berkeley Fellowship

Between the end of fall semester at Yale and the beginning of spring semester at UC Berkeley, we had time to drive across the United States, spend a few days at our Oak Grove home that was still for sale, find housing in the Bay Area, take a trip to the Oregon Coast, and move the things we needed from Oregon to our temporary home in Walnut Creek. I had looked for housing in Berkeley and quickly decided that housing on the other side of the Berkeley Hills in Contra Costa County was more affordable. I lucked out in finding a serviceable home that was scheduled to be torn down and replaced with apartments, so the owners rented it for a reasonable price.

This meant that, for the first time since high school, I commuted by transit instead of by bicycle or foot. From the house in Walnut Creek, I walked a short distance to the BART station and took the train to Berkeley. With a change of trains, I could get off within two blocks of my office. If I took my bicycle, which was allowed during non-rush-hours, I could avoid the change of trains and cycle about two miles to the office.

On the walk to the BART station I passed through a neighborhood of pre-war homes that realtors would describe as cute or cozy. Most were about 1,000 to 1,600 square feet on small, irregularly shaped lots. A few for-sale signs indicated asking prices of around $400,000, which seemed astounding for someone used to Oregon’s prices. However, I learned, that was only the starting price, as the homes sold rapidly after bidding wars that could easily add $100,000 to the price. This was the result of the urban-growth boundaries in Contra Costa and all other Bay Area counties (except San Francisco, which was entirely urbanized). Continue reading

Remembering Jane Jacobs

An article in The American Conservative commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The publication also asked the Antiplanner to join a number of New Urbanists and others in an on-line seminar about the influence of Jacobs on American cities.

It is very useful in cardiac viagra sales in india diseases too. Ask them about cialis line prescription their business and compensation plan. NAFLD contributes to the progression of other liver diseases such as heart disease, high blood pressure, levitra best prices deeprootsmag.org diabetes, etc. It can also lead to monetary troubles, career issues, legal online cialis problems and a variety of other therapies by professional and experienced sports therapists in Dublin. The Antiplanner’s response was that “Jacobs was highly influential and highly overrated.” She understood that planners didn’t understand cities as well as they thought they did, but she herself didn’t understand cities as well as she thought she did either. In successfully stopping what then passed for urban renewal, she spawned a “new-urban renewal” fad that turns out to be just as destructive as the old one.

At least six of the other eight participants in the webinar are hardcore new urbanists, so naturally they disagree. In my opinion, the best review of The Death & Life was by an amazing sociologist named Herbert Gans, and it is available on the web to subscribers of Commentary magazine. If you are a subscriber, I heartily recommend the review.

The Pernicious Jane Jacobs

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs’ 1961 book, “may still be the most indispensible volume in any urbanist’s library.” At least that what urban economist Edward Glaeser writes in a recent issue of The New Republic.

Glaeser’s article is actually a defense of Jacobs’ nemesis, Robert Moses. But the Antiplanner has to say that Jacobs in general and The Death and Life in particular are highly overrated.

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Keep Your Bureaucrats Out of My Sense of Community

One of the things that make the Antiplanner see red is whenever anyone talks about the need for government to help create a “sense of community.” John Gardner, of Common Cause, thinks of government “as a critical partner in” restoring a sense of community, and particularly would like to see more federal involvement.

As noted here last week, David Brooks thinks the infrastructure stimulus bill can build a sense of community by helping to “create suburban town squares.” Architect/planners like Andres Duany think their designs create a sense of community for the people who live in them.

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Class: The Unmentionable Topic

The recent brouhaha about Barack Obama calling small-town Americans “bitter” brings up an issue Americans rarely talk about: class. Unlike Britain, America does not have an inherited aristocracy, and we like to think we are economically mobile, so we don’t think about class.

Certainly, we use terms like upper class, middle class, and lower class, but these are strictly economically defined, and since (we tell ourselves) we are economically mobile, the labels do not permanently stamp anyone as one thing or another.

But there is another term we sometimes use: working class. Perhaps because of my egalitarian American upbringing, this term puzzled me when I first encountered it. Most families have at least one worker, so how is the working class distinguished from any other class? Are working-class incomes higher or lower than middle-class incomes?

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Who Are These Planners, Anyway?

Many of my posts in the last two months criticize planning and argue that, no matter who does it, planning is bound to fail. Yet some people are still planners. Who are these planners and why do they do it?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there are about 31,650 urban & regional planners practicing in the United States. This probably does not include most forest planners working for the Forest Service, watershed planners working for the Corps of Engineers, or other agency planners. Yet national forest and other federal agency planning processes are remarkably similar to urban planning, so it is likely that these agencies hired at least a few urban planners to help them design their processes.

In 2005, planners earned an average of $57,620, meaning we spend close to $2 billion on planning salaries alone. This is not a large sum by government standards, but neither is it a trivial amount.

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