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HIGH BRIDGE CLEANUP: I'd echo a big thanks for helping me breathe easier. A particular thank you to Elizabeth - we don't always have time to do all that we want, but thanks for keeping us in the loop! *************************************************** Now, on to my post....... Let me just suggest that what Erik, Mike & Jeanne are talking about in relation to green space is not ONLY green space, but the scale of development. Traditional neighborhoods don't have mega-developments like Emerald Gardens. When developments are smaller, the role of planners is quite different. With small developments, you are responding to the collective desires of dozens of potential smaller owners. City planners, not developers, determine what is best for a neighborhood. With the big developments of today, you are negotiating things like parking and greenspace with one huge entity who often wields significant political power over the process, and is able sometimes to extract significant resources in exchange. Green space often cuts into their bottom line. A public park might even seem like a kind of subsidy for the developer; why shouldn't they do it for themselves, someone could ask. The question that I don't have a full answer to is this: why are these projects so uniformly large nowdays? Part of it, I'm told, is related to rising construction costs over time, which causes developers to seek per-unit cost savings in larger construction. Similarly, tract housing has taken off in the burbs because of the cost savings of having one developer build a whole neighborhood. Makes some sense. Part of it is a desire of government and other leaders, for reasons both laudable and not, to make a "big impact" on a geographic area. Big impact = big project. Government incentives are probably easier to get with bigger projects. Part of it can probably be explained politcally and economically - like so much else in America, more and more wealth and political control is filtering to fewer and fewer bigger hands. What happens then is that these neighborhoods, as Erik notes, are far less "organic" and ready to change and adapt to needs. You lose the older urbanism - the small scale of owners who may own a building and the store in it and rent out the apartments above is lost. You lose the sense that the neighborhood is made up of PEOPLE. If there is any retail in such developments, it is disproportionately chain retail, and oftentimes pretty darn boring. Again, I'm not talking about density here, because I find parts of Lowertown and my own neighborhood quite acceptable, and one of my more favorite urban neighborhoods is Chicago's Rogers Park, which is incredibly dense, yet retains some standalone homes. I'm saying that in my ideal neighborhood the tall buildings are not full-block affairs; there are multiple owners and often multiple modes of living. Wacouta Commons, which is downtown's newest neighborhood, is of a similar type to Emerald Gardens. It has been, to date, all Lander-Sherman, all the time. Lander-Sherman built Sibley Court, Sibley Park, Essex, Dakota, and is renovating the 9th Street Lofts, not to mention building the new Farmers Market Lofts, and proposing a development for the jail site. There is a lot of good in Wacouta Commons, but in my all-too-ideal world the buildings would still be smaller (not shorter, smaller) and there would be a diversity of owners and developers. So you could say the new Wacouta Commons neighborhood becomes Lander-Shermanville, and the West Side Flats becomes Trooienville, and Koch-Mobil becomes Brightonville. Which, to my mind, still isn't just what I would hope for, even when the design is decent. The dominance of single built forms are often a symptom of a single developer. And at an even deeper level, it may be a reflection of the fact that too often, Americans are a bit nervous about living with people unlike themselves. Isn't there a better alternative? Maybe someone out there has some insight. Bob Spaulding Downtown _____________________________________________ NEW ADDRESS FOR LIST: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe, modify subscription, or get your password - visit: http://www.mnforum.org/mailman/listinfo/stpaul Archive Address: http://www.mnforum.org/mailman/private/stpaul/ _____________________________________________ For state and national discussions see: http://e-democracy.org/discuss.html For external forums, see: http://e-democracy.org/mninteract
