June 14: New Urbanism doesn't work

David Morrill

If you read the newspaper op-ed pages and watch the television news magazines you probably know about the perfect place to live.

It's a neighborhood of cheerful, closely spaced, single-family homes inspired by designs from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The streets are narrow, inviting biking and walking and discouraging automobile traffic. It is a place where neighbors talk to each other on front porches and over backyard hedges, where folks walk to work and shop with the butcher, the greengrocer and the haberdasher down on Main Street.

Despite the fact that this neighborhood resembles, in some respects, American neighborhoods built before World War II, this one is new, built from the ground up in an urban setting. It is the invention of the New Urbanists, a loose confederation of architects, planners and social scientists who came to prominence in the early 1990s and who continue to dominate urban design ideas. Although a number of New Urbanist communities have sprouted up around the country, the most notable are in Florida: Celebration - the Disney town near Orlando - and the Panhandle community of Seaside on the Gulf coast.

It's difficult to find fault with New Urbanism's objectives: the efficient use of land, resources and infrastructure. Its advocates have, in fact, staked out a noble mission: to lead the country out of the wasteland of urban sprawl and away from its addiction to the automobile.

But there is a problem with New Urbanism. Its ideas hold no appeal for the vast majority of Americans.

As a product of the creative spirit, New Urbanist neighborhoods are duds. Just as architecture lost its bearings in the second half of the 20th century, coming to rely on imitation and gimmickry, urban designers long ago lost their enthusiasm for the future. When New Urbanists conjure ideas, they squint into the rearview mirror of their imaginations and see Mayberry, USA. They look more closely and see Aunt Bea and Opie sitting on the front porch. Then they superimpose this tableau on urban America.

What New Urbanists and their developers have created, in fact, is a collection of upscale resorts. Like the caricature villages at Los Angeles and Orlando theme parks, they are great fun to visit, if you can afford it. In Seaside, the poster child for New Urbanism, less than 15 percent of the homes are owner occupied. The rest are vacation rentals and the weekend haunts of doctors and accountants from Memphis and Birmingham who maneuver SUVs down streets built for bicycles and Honda Civics.

The handful of New Urbanist communities that are mostly residential are populated overwhelmingly by affluent yuppies despite the developers' good intentions of providing affordable housing and hosting a cross-section of society. The cost of a house in Celebration is nearly twice that of comparable property in nearby subdivisions. And those quaint little shops on its picturesque main street? Many have gone belly up because the citizens of Celebration, like good Americans everywhere, head for the mall when they do their serious shopping.

New Urbanism's fundamental mistake is its misreading of the American character. Its designs of compact, intimate villages ignore the ornery, raw-boned reality of what Americans are made of. We are a people who have, historically, needed our elbowroom and our privacy. We are a people who demand our space.

This is a nation formed not only of refugees from religious persecution, but of bounders, drifters, and renegades, those groups not being mutually exclusive. A fair number of our forefathers came here, quite frankly, because they could not cut the mustard in the old country. Overlay this with the Puritanism that fired the public imagination in the 17th and 18th centuries and you have a race that is highly suspicious of its fellows, a race not easily socialized.

De Tocqueville noticed this 170 years ago, blaming much of American's suspicion on what he considered the untenable concept of equality. Some of his British contemporaries remarked with astonishment on the large number of Americans who abandoned the comforts of the eastern cities to live in the wilderness.

The country is young enough that this anti-social heritage still runs strong in the veins of its sons and daughters. The puritan spirit that prompted American pioneers to gallop freely through the forests and across the prairies in search of their own piece of the earth has today, with the aid of the automobile, led them in search of the three-quarter-acre lot in the suburbs and the mall a few miles down the interstate.

There is evidence that New Urbanists are becoming aware of their miscalculation, although their reaction is one of animosity toward their countrymen, not acknowledgement of their own boneheadedness. In a recent Associated Press interview, James Kunstler, author of "Geography of Nowhere" and New Urbanism's chief cheerleader, revels at the prospect that a coming economic meltdown will finally force Americans to abandon the suburbs and atone for their profligacy. Kunstler figures that Americans, properly chastened, will then see things his way.

Until that day arrives, however, this is a free country where people make free choices. To be a beneficiary of those choices and to make a significant difference in the national landscape, New Urbanists must pay more attention to their clientele.

David Morrill is a Florida journalist and Northern California native.