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[Michael Winslow Czeiszperger <michael AT czeiszperger.org>]

I've combined several responses into one so as to not flood the list 
with posts, making this thread easy to avoid:

On Monday, January 6, 2003, at 10:48 PM, Kristen James Eberlein wrote:
> Southern Village sounds nice. But I need to toot the horn for my
> neighborhood: Old North Durham.

Yup, New Urbanism is modeled after pre-WWII neighborhoods which are 
almost always better than the new versions.

On Tuesday, January 7, 2003, at 01:40 AM, Thomas C. Meggs wrote:
> Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the growth rate 
> for sprawl development far outstrips the growth rate for development 
> that harnesses the ideals of New Urbanism. To some extent, New 
> Urbanism in the United States is really only available to people with 
> (relatively) a lot of wealth. There are bigger problems at play to 
> make it happen. New Urbanism has to be (1) economically feasible and 
> (2) pushed along with a new mind set. The fact of the matter is that 
> only more intellectual people of a certain mind set are going to seek 
> out these communities and pay a little bit more to live in them, for 
> they are the only ones who see the value in it.

New Urbanism is intended to be available to citizens in a wide range of 
incomes. The problem at this point is simple supply and demand-- there 
are much fewer older neighborhoods or new neighborhoods that follow 
these design principles available that the prices are higher than 
normal. In some ways this is necessary at this point in order to 
attract more builders to using this model, although its an uphill 
battle since almost all building codes now actually prohibit building 
using New Urbanism principles. There's lots of examples in the book I 
mentioned.

At this point there are two main ways that I know of for providing this 
type of living environment. The first is to move into an older 
neighborhood that hasn't been gentrified, and put up with the higher 
crime levels that usually accompany such areas until it gets cleaned 
up. The second is new development projects use the size of the living 
spaces to create a range of prices. In Southern Village the living 
sizes range from around 1400 square feet to 3000+, in everything from 
apartments to condos to townhouses to a variety of house sizes. The 
cheapest unit I know of right now is around $118K for a one-bedroom 
condo, which while not cheap, is on the low side if you look at the 
stuff for sale in Carrboro or Chapel Hill.

Chapel Hill/Carrboro's new building codes are requiring that new 
developments have at least 25% of the units be under 1500 square feet, 
which will increase the housing stock available in the lower price 
ranges, and thus help alleviate the price pressures at that range of 
the market. While its a far cry from affordable housing for people 
making minimum wage, its a reasonable alternative to government 
sponsored housing.

___________________________________________________________________
Ending a sentence with a preposition is nothing to be ashamed of.
        -- michael at czeiszperger dot org, Chapel Hill, NC