Hi all -

I did some research on New Urbanism (a key model being used by proponents of Sebastopol's current Northeast Area Plan) and found that some analysts have concerns about New Urbanism's downsides. Here's some of the information that I gathered, which I thought you might find of interest.

I think it's notable that they make some of the same points that local residents have discovered in assessing the plan here, confirming our concerns. I've highlighted key points in red.

Note that most of these articles are older. If you know of other critiques of New Urbanism (NU) please feel free to email the info to me at <info [at] healthyworld.org> (ideally with web citation). Thanks!

Note: I'm not against NU per se. As theory and principles, it can be an interesting part of the conversation. I just object to it being considered gospel to be applied blindly (and dictatorially, against our will), as if it were always true without any provisos, overriding all other perspectives and specific local facts, and with grand claims and promises that might not be true in a particular place or situation.

- PD

p.s. For more info about Sebastopol's Northeast Area Plan (NEAP) - Here's a link to my main NEAP page, where I'm gathering people's concerns about it, as well as links to the main official documents. <www.healthyworld.org/ABetterNEAP.html>

[PD NOTE: This article talks about the crime claims of New Urbanism. Crime seems perhaps less of an issue in our quiet town (though maybe not, if you read their points about mixed used increasing crime). However, this analysis is an example of the caution that's needed when trying to apply these urban ideas to towns. It also talks about New Urbanism theory, and gives an example of the problems that occur when people who operate from New Urbanism notions barrel ahead with general claims that ignore the limits of their theories or the realities of the particular situation that will create the opposite outcome.]

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Architects and urban planners who call themselves New Urbanists say their proposals, including developments that mix residential and commercial uses, have homes with tiny private yards and large common areas, and feature pedestrian paths, will solve all sorts of social problems, including crime. Yet the housing and neighborhood designs they want to substitute for the modern suburb almost invariably increase crime.

Eyes on the Street

The idea that mixed-use neighborhoods reduce crime goes back to 1961, when the social critic Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs described her book as "an attack on the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning." More specifically, she attacked urban renewal, the planning fad of the 1950s and '60s.
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Jacobs never claimed her inner-city urban villages suffered less crime than the suburbs--or, indeed, that any part of her analysis applied to the suburbs. "I hope no reader will try to transfer my observations into guides as to what goes on in towns, or little cities, or in suburbs which still are suburban," she wrote. "We are in enough trouble already from trying to understand big cities in terms of the behavior, and imagined behavior, of towns. To try to understand towns in terms of big cities will only compound confusion."

Thirty years later, the planners Al Zelinka and Dean Brennan made exactly that mistake.

The Overselling of New Urbanism

Zelinka and Brennan are the authors of Safe-Scape: Creating Safer, More Livable Communities Through Planning and Design, published in 2001 by the American Planning Association. As the subtitle suggests, the authors believe the right sort of town planning can reduce crime. Unfortunately, the planning principles they advocate were borrowed from the New Urbanists--a group whose philosophy, Zelinka and Brennan have written, "clearly plays an important role in eliminating fear of crime and the perception of crime."
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There clearly is a market for New Urban-style communities, mainly among young singles, double-income-no-children couples, and people who appreciate bohemian lifestyles. Families with children, empty nesters, and people who prefer a quieter neighborhood are not so interested.

For many New Urbanists, it isn't enough to build to the market. The Congress for the New Urbanism, founded in 1993, declares on its Web site that "all development should be in the form of compact, walkable neighborhoods." New Urbanists eagerly helped write zoning codes that forbade things that had previously been mandated--broad streets, low densities, separation of residential from commercial uses--while mandating things that had formerly been forbidden, such as narrow streets, high densities, and mixed uses.

To promote this crusade, its advocates oversold New Urbanism, promising it would solve every urban problem. Do you commute to work? New Urbanism will reduce congestion. Suffer from asthma? New Urbanism will clean the air. Are you a parent? New Urbanism will improve schools. (In fact, there is no evidence that New Urbanism can do any of these things, and plenty of evidence that it does the opposite. Denser development did not significantly reduce per capita driving; it just increased driving per square mile and thereby increased congestion. Since cars pollute most in congested traffic, New Urbanism also contributed to air pollution. Since New Urban developments mainly attracted singles and childless couples, residents had little interest in improving schools.)

With SafeScape, Zelinka and Brennan added one more urban malady to the mix. Their book asserts, without substantial evidence, that mixed uses, pedestrian paths, and interconnected streets (as opposed to cul-de-sacs) reduce crime. The book's publisher, the American Planning Association, has 30,000 members who work for city and county governments throughout the country, many of whom are New Urbanists eager for support for their preconceived notions. Police, lacking their own experts, often assume that planners know what they are doing: At least one police chief, Mark Kroeker of Portland, has taken it seriously.

The book relied heavily on Jane Jacobs' notion of "eyes on the street." Single-use residential suburbs, the writers claimed, are easily preyed upon by criminals because they "display clearly identifiable behavioral routines and patterns"--that is, most people leave for work all day. Mixed-use neighborhoods "contribute to a safer, more vital public realm" because shopkeepers and shoppers have eyes on the street at all hours of the day.

It might sound persuasive, but there are a few problems with this position. One, as we've seen, is that Jacobs was writing only about cities, not suburbs. Another is that this was one area where Jacobs wasn't even right about cities. Jacobs' claims were based solely on qualitative observations, not on any actual crime data. When the architect Oscar Newman took a look at those data, a quarter century before SafeScape was published, he found a more complex story.
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[Article describes a situation]

The result was his 1972 book Defensible Space, which showed that the safest neighborhoods maximized private space and minimized common zones. Safe areas also minimized "permeability," that is, the ease of entry to and exit from the neighborhood or housing area. Cul-de-sacs are thus a crime-prevention device, and any breaching of cul-de-sacs will predictably increase crime.
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Newman's work showed that mixed-use development led to significantly higher crime, while he couldn't find any evidence that "eyes on the street" would reduce that crime. "'Natural surveillance' is not automatically created by high-density environments," he wrote, "unless the grounds around each dwelling are assigned to specific families."

Table 1 contrasts some of the major differences between the models advanced in SafeScape and Defensible Space. Newman's book shows that virtually all of the things that Zelinka and Brennan want to change about the suburbs actually would lead to higher crime.
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Mixed uses vs. separate uses: "Mixed land-use patterns contribute to a safer, more vital public realm," say Zelinka and Brennan. In contrast, Newman found, mixed uses "generate high crime and vandalism rates," and housing units next to commercial areas "suffer proportionally higher crime rates." More recent research in Baltimore and Philadelphia by Temple University criminologist Ralph Taylor and several colleagues confirms that mixed uses increase both crime and the cost of policing.

The reason mixing retail with residential areas increases crime is simple: Space is only defensible if residents have the clear right to influence and control what takes place there. In commercial or public areas, everyone has the right or excuse to be present, and offenders are indistinguishable from law-abiding citizens. Mixed use therefore reduces residential control over the neighborhood and provides criminals with anonymity as they merge into the background.
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Houses close to the street: New Urbanists want to create "active, vibrant," pedestrian-oriented streets, so they design homes and businesses close to the street and place parking in rear courtyards. Such rear courtyards increase burglary by providing criminals with more public access to private homes and create needless common areas that are costly to protect.
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"I am not very impressed with the work of the New Urbanists," Newman wrote shortly before he passed away in April 2004. "It is nostalgia--a throwback to the past, with little thought about what made those environments work then (long-term occupancy by an identical economic class and ethnic group), and unworkable today. The residential environments they are creating are very vulnerable to criminal behavior, unless, of course, these environments are exclusively occupied by high-income groups." The New Urbanists, of course, abhor exclusive, high-income neighborhoods and insist that communities should include people of all incomes.

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ii. Residential Preferences.

Fannie Mae has been conducting surveys about housing preferences for years. The findings have changed little. Regardless of income, race or current tenure status, 75-80 percent of households would prefer to live in a single family home with a private yard. Whereas it may be possible via creative architectural and landscape design to produce high-density single family home developments in the suburbs that are compatible with these preferences, it is probably impossible at the close-in infill sites promoted by the New Urbanists. Developers are not stupid, large ones have extensive marketing expertise, and in general they produce the housing that buyers want that guarantees their profitability. If New Urbanist-type developments were in demand by consumers, they would be built. Obviously, we have no objection in principle to the idea that producers should offer consumers what they want, and we favor experiments by builders that provide a market test to see whether households are open to a change in residential lifestyles. An interesting question, especially with regard to infill projects, is whether these alternatives are acceptable to the community at large, as opposed to the prospective purchasers. There are many examples of broader community objections to high-density projects, usually on traffic generation grounds.
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iv. Mixed Land Uses.

As implied by the CNU documents, New Urbanist communities are intended to be more than residential subdivisions. The plans are to have shops, a wide array of personal and consumer services, and workplace sites. Only by developing a broad mix of land uses can the goals, perhaps a dream, of walking to work and walking to shop be met. This is one of the plans for Kentlands, perhaps the most successful of the NU communities, yet commercial development there lags far behind. Apart from the pedestrian opportunities objective, however, there is no particular reason why these communities need to create an employment base. The idea of "selfcontainment" was one of the principles behind the creation of the British New Towns. Certainly, with the freestanding New Towns on green field sites (less clearly with the modified Expanding Town concept), it never worked well. Employment centers did emerge, but they did not cater to the local population. For skill mismatch and other reasons, the overwhelming tendency was for New Town residents to work elsewhere while the jobs in the New Towns were filled by commuters from outside. As a result, the strategy probably resulted in more commuting rather than less. This would be more true today than it was then because of ubiquitous accessibility by automobile.
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v. Social Equity Issues.

CNU rhetoric gives substantial attention to promoting equity, fostering residential mixing, affordable housing provision, and reducing central city-suburb income differentials via middle-class infill development. Yet there is little evidence that NU communities have achieved these goals. Instead, they are turning out to be rather elistist settlements with average income levels much higher than in the surrounding areas.
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vi. Communitarianism.

...A more fundamental problem is that many New Urbanist projects are so influenced by the nostalgic longing for the archtypical small town of the past that they fall into the trap of believing that recreating its physical structure (at least to some degree) can simultaneously recreate its social and civic behavior. But society, culture and behavior have changed so much that this is a false dream. ... Duany himself argues that NU communities make American society and human behavior better in three ways: i. making life richer for children; ii. allowing one to age in place (not so much by creating nearby housing opportunities for empty nesters but by making pedestrian mobility possible); and iii. eliminating the need for more than one car (Harvard Design Magazine, Winter/Spring 1997, 53, 55). But the first two are attainable in a wide variety of urban and suburban residential environments, while the third has not been achieved in the sense that community residents have similar automobiles per household ratios to households elsewhere. The explanation of this last point is obvious: the accessibility and mobility needs of individuals cannot be satisfied by constraining them to inside the community, at least within walking distance.

vii. Tripmaking.

This brings us to a major claim of the New Urbanists is that their proposals will lead to major changes in travel behavior: reduced automobile dependence, more transit use, increased cycling, and pedestrian-friendly development. Unfortunately for them, there is little justification for these claims. A high proportion of trips is external to the community (for instance, almost all jobs are outside), and cars remain vitally necessary for mobility. No significant transit services have been developed to link NU communities with nearby centers, for example, the plans for a transit system to link Laguna West with Sacramento (less than 10 miles away) never materialized. The majority opinion is that the NU communities will never be dense enough or large enough to justify significant (i.e. frequent) transit service (see Downs' [1994] critique of Calthorpe [1993]). Duany himself admits that market preferences, heterogeneous housing demands and the open space provisions that drastically reduce gross compared with net residential densities result in relatively low densities compared with transit-oriented neighborhoods. Careful analysis of the tripmaking impacts (Crane, 1996) suggest that it is unclear whether higher density communities will result in more auto trips or less. The limited scope of retail and other consumer services in NU communities (typically, one shopping center at best) means that even within these communities most services are beyond the average American's tolerance for service-oriented walking, i.e. between one-quarter and one-half mile. The NU communities often lend themselves to comfortable cycling, but bicycles remain a niche travel mode, at least for Americans.

[PD NOTE: This article is about Celebration, Disney's whole new town based on New Urbanism, and some of the problems with it.]

EXCERPTS
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But if the spread-out urbanism that currently consumes the U.S. has caused social, moral, and logistical problems, how can cramping everyone closer together release any of they modern tensions? New Urbanists say that people in planned communities will work together for a common goal of creating and maintaining a healthy atmosphere for living, learning, and growing.

But I'm not so sure that people want to live on top of each other. Families choose suburbs over cities, large homes or small ones, and big yards with more privacy over less spacious pieces of property. If you could afford a $600,000 home would you choose to live twenty feet from your neighbor's house, divided only by a seven foot wall which the neighbor's kids can easily see over from their second story windows? Not me. For $600,000 I don't want any tan lines!
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Herbert Muschamp's article in Architecture Review (June '96) claims that New Urbanists overestimate their positive environmental plans since more compact cities lead to new problems.

[PD NOTE: This article is narrative, e.g. wanders in its points, and the writer is a bit dramatic at times. But he brings up some interesting points, such as Disneyfication and how NU's dark side can look a lot like The Truman Show.]

EXCERPTS
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Baby new urbanism was given birth by Miami-based architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, who won recognition in the early '80s for their Florida coastal development knighted Seaside. This husband-and-wife architect team ... attempted to re-create the scale, form and nostalgic feel of a 19th-century rural Southern town. You might be familiar with Seaside; it was the surreal artificial setting for the movie The Truman Show, parodied as Seahaven, the brightly lit suburbia whose daily toothy-white grinning routine imprisons protagonist Truman.

The Truman Show reflects the utopian ideals of new urbanism; there is no crime, no bad weather, probably no swearing, everyone has money, the homes all feel the same, people chat over picket fences, and your neighbors are cut from an identical cookie-cutter mold. Duany and Plater-Zyberk believed they were building a community that encouraged the kind of conviviality that The Truman Show portrays as menacing and kinda creepy. Duany and Plater-Zyberk's cunning scheme went perfectly to plan until it was discovered that Seaside's local housewives were actually being replaced by robots--murderous robots!! No wait, that would be the plot of the movie The Stepford Wives. My apologies.
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[He visits a New Urbanist "town"]

Though the activity of "strolling" is stressed as a new urbanism selling point, there is a large void of "strollers" around the supposed central square magnet of strolling. People simply drive up in their cars, do what they need to do, then drive off. Perhaps all the great "strolling" is to be take place later at the big community stroll-off.
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Since no one is "strolling," I've decided to "stroll" through the numerous, identical neighborhoods that each feel sterile and artificial in their own unique way.
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But where is the small-town community interaction as boasted? One would be led to believe that a big block-party limbo contest would be taking place, with hot-dogs being cooked on the grill by a guy in a clean, white chef's hat and his neighbors breaking into spontaneous laughter.
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My man Muschamp ironically envisions problems with these ideal Disney-topias, isolated from surrounding areas and motivated by the naive belief that a good development design can suddenly create fabricated community building.

"Imagine being stuck in some suburban community planned by the New Urbanism. Talk about isolation: the buildings are close together but disconnected from anything larger than market research."
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[Ending]

Realistically, the pricing level would keep out such riffraff as myself. But since all the residents here don't work and dine at Quiznos, the illusive dream of a self-contained, self-sufficient, walking utopia is shattered by the fact that anyone who lives here has to drive a distance to work or even to dine on something that isn't a sub.

In "open-minded" summary, new urbanism isn't really changing how people live--it's merely another suburban subdivision masquerading as a small town. I came here looking for weird, but all I found so far is a sterile, manufactured sense of beyond normal. Normal we grew accustomed to from our favorite family TV shows. It's an American dream. It's sheltered. It's something that would make you go mad.

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Page last updated 08/05/08
www.healthyworld.org/ConcernsNU.html