Well, they’re building three in one go in my urban area. And they’re fucking up my neighborhood. The whole neighborhood is lower rise buildings and prewar apartment buildings, so they have character. And then they knocked down a grocery store to put up these three ungodly ass warts.
Good neighborhoods should have a mix of older and newer buildings.
From Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Thank you for sharing that excerpt! Definitely a concept I had not thought about, makes perfect sense, and is seen demonstrated in the gentrification process.
Yeah, she definitely has some thought-provoking explanations on how cities work.
I would say gentrifying 1 building is ok, and is something you can do every 5 years or so to help boost the economy and modernize the building stock. But it becomes a problem when an entire block or an entire neighborhood becomes gentrified all at once. It’ll lead to a slum in the long run.
They did a bunch of them near where I used to live. The problem with these (and really all unplanned high density housing) is that while their intent is to create walkable communities (a great idea in itself), they ignore the reality that most people are going to commute to a job, and they create the nastiest traffic bottlenecks ever. They’re not bad when they’re located next to a major highway with preplanned egress/ingress, but many of these halfwit developers will plop them with an entrance exit on an already busy 4 lane road and wonder why everything is all wacko.
Only if the infrastructure is there tbh. Every time I get on my bike I have to make peace that I might just die that day because I can’t hardly get out of my apartment before a car tries to hit me. And we even have bike lanes all over here they just aren’t set up well. Tons of people don’t want to do that even if the alternative is to sit in traffic for longer than it takes me to bike somewhere
My neighborhood has been pretty long standing in its current state. This is part of a hugely explosive new wave of gentrification. I’m seeing it happen before my eyes. It’s pretty sad.
Indeed. I will say that we certainly need to rethink the way we go about planning and engineering our cities in a way that removes the necessity for cars as a primary means of transportation, but these designs need to come from a higher collective level within local governments that allows for a more intertwined planning and management. As of now, you have individual developers doing whatever they think is best (aka most profitable) and it tells these subpar effects.
so they have character
The problem is that so much of the “character” that people want to preserve in cities is low density housing. If you want sustainability, that’s not it.
“Low density” housing is not all too common in nyc. Go out to queens, sure. But I’m talking mid rise buildings, hundreds of units.
When you’re talking about areas that are already very dense, then building up is the only rational way to go. (I’d prefer building down, but that’s more expensive.) I’ve seen facades preserved while higher, more modern buildings were built in the same footprint, and I think that’s a good compromise on “character” versus density. But when it comes to 2- and 3-flat buildings with fenced in yards, bulldoze 'em and put in high density.
