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[Lee Haslup <bigleehimself AT yahoo.com>]

I am a New Urbanism skeptic, I'm afraid.  Don't get me wrong, I love
the places they create -- Seaside Florida is wonderful, for instance,
as is Farington Village -- but I'm not sure I've ever seen one that
really makes much progress towards their stated goals of combatting
urban sprawl and building a community where people can walk to work.

New Urbanist communities all suffer, in varying degrees, from the same
problem.  They are too nice, too desirable.  Because they are desirable
places to live the housing tends to be rather expensive.  Because they
are nice places to spend your time people want to work there and wages
in the business tend to be low -- people will factor in the intangibles
in evaluating their pay.  The result is that the people who live there
work somewhere else and the people who work there live somewhere else. 


Seaside is something of an exception, of course.  Many of the people
who run the "businesses" in Seaside do live there but a large
percentage of the businesses in Seaside are properly hobbies --
something for the wealthy residents to do with their time so they don't
get bored.  And more power to them; if I had the money I could see
myself opening a coffee shop in Seaside.  They could use another one, I
think.

Southern Village in Chapel Hill is a more typical example.  The people
who live there work somewhere else -- many of them in RTP.  The people
who work there live somewhere else.  The local grocery store is nice
but rather pricy.  The locals do some shopping there but sneak out to
Food Lion down the street for the bulk of their groceries.  The Lunima
(the local theater) is very nice but it only has four screens and most
of the time the movie you want to see is playing across town.  Life in
Southern Village is still all about spending half your time in your
car.

I must confess that, as a libertarian, the notion of urban "planning"
does tend to get my hackles up -- but then nice thing about the New
Urbanism in real life is that, for them most part, it is done by
visionary developers on a modest scale that doesn't need governmental
mandates.  The New Urbanist communities are big enough to get the sense
of what they are trying to do but small enough so that a nice-sounding
bad idea doesn't lay waste entire cities.

BigLee



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