Category Archives: Centrifugal Forces

The Computer And The City

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Written in 1995
by Alex Marshall

When the computerized letter sorter at the central post office in Washington, D.C., can’t read the handwriting on an envelope, it flips it into a slot where a live person can look at it.

A person in Greensboro, North Carolina. There, the worker sees an image of the letter on a small computer screen, reads the address, and types it into the computer. Back in Washington, a printer spits out a thin black bar code across the bottom of the envelope-which routes the letter to its destination.

The facility in Greensboro is one of the remote encoding centers that the Post Office is setting up around the country. In these facilities, rows of workers will help computers in other parts of the country route letters.

The mechanism is an example of trends that are restructuring the economy of cities and thus their physical face as well. New technology, principally computer related, is allowing companies to get rid of jobs, move jobs out of center cities and consolidate jobs in back-office suburbs.

Various prognosticators have speculated on this trend and the effect if will have on the economic and physical structure of center cities and metropolitan areas. One of the first to put some solid numbers and facts around the speculation is a new report by the federal office of Technology Assessment, entitled the The Technological Reshaping of Metropolitan America

The 232-page report says new computer technology is leading to further abandonment of downtowns and core cities, and new development on the fringes of metropolitan areas.

In other words, sprawl. “The new technology system is creating an ever more spatially dispersed and footloose economy, which in turn is causing metropolitan areas to be larger, more dispersed and less densely populated,” says the report.

We are in a post-industrial metropolis, the report posits, an era that begun in roughly 1970. Its no longer as simple as downtowns versus suburbs. Instead, old dichotomies between cities and suburbs give way to a more spatially diversified and complex ordering of economic space.

In this new order, some downtown business districts and center cities have thrived, even if most haven’t. In general though, outer suburbs have boomed in population while core cities have stagnated or declined. The Northeast as a region has lost a million manufacturing jobs between 1980 and 1990.

Most recent commentators have focused on the effects of very visible new technology – the personal computer, the modem and the fax machine – and what it will do to re-arrange how people live and work.

Architect Michael Pittas predicted in 1994 (June 1994 Metropolis), that in a decade or two telecommuting would turn center city office districts into “dinosaurs” and “may be the prelude to the extinction of the modern office building as we know it.”

Pittas has redesigned office buildings to allow companies to operate with only a fraction of the usual office space by having many workers telecommute. Because of this work, Pittas was speculating on the end result of a trend that allows the graphic designer in her mountain cabin in Idaho to modem her work to New York.

But even more significant trends on cities and working are being caused by less visible and less publicized technology that is shifting the way entire industries do business, according to Robert Atkinson, who directed the Office of Technology study.

Atkinson spoke not from an office but his home in Northern Virginia. The Office of Technology Assessment, for which Atkinson directed the study, no longer exists. The Republican Congress killed the OTA in a round of budget cuts in 1995. The Reshaping report came out after the office had been killed and Atkinson was speaking on his own time.

Computer technology not related to the personal computer can allow a company to consolidate far-flung offices into a few back offices set up in outer Indianapolis or even India. Many of these workers come from downtown locations, where practicalities forced companies to house relatively non-elite jobs. Because of computers, companies have eliminated many such jobs or moved them outside downtown.

Take the U.S. postal service, said Atkinson. It centralizes human letter readers in Greensboro because it is cheaper than having each central post office, usually located in or near downtown, have its own set of workers.

A variety of unlikely services are still kept downtown, Atkinson said, but this may change as technologies continue to evolve. Banks, for example, still locate check processing facilities near or in downtown, despite the fact that these are low-paid, relatively menial jobs taking up expensive real-estate. Such facilities still need to be near a large central post office, Atkinson said, because processed checks need to be mailed out as quickly as possible. This is both to comply with federal regulations, and more importantly, to gain as much interest or “float” in the few days when the check is between banks.

But new technology like debit cards and check imaging, which promises to replace physical checks with images that are then transmitted from supermarket to bank, mean the use of the paper check is dwindling fast.

These technological changes are not just affecting center cities. The economy of the country is becoming more monolithic. Smaller branch offices or services, like the neighborhood insurance office, that were once marbled through most towns are now being eliminated as computer technology makes them unnecessary.

Some banks now process loans over the phone. Claims adjusters call up policies on a computer and dont need to see policy holders as often in person. Because of this, companies are closing dozens of smaller offices.

The report notes that NYNEX, for example, the baby Bell phone service in New York, once had 133 customer service centers; now it has seven. Aetna now operates 22 underwriting centers nationwide instead of 55. Allstate is going from 28 policy processing centers to just three.

Such trends have huge implications for cities, greater than the ones causes by the growth of personal computers, Atkinson says. There are basically two trends at work.

One is the shift of jobs and people out of center cities and older suburbs, and trend that has taken place over the last 50 years but could accelerate with new technology.

The other is the winner-take-all economy, that is dividing individual companies and cities into winners and losers. Under this trend, some center cities will do well or even thrive, while others will fall even more steeply into disrepair and poverty.

The command cities in a world economy-like New York, London or Tokyo-may survive or even thrive in the new world. This matches analysis by other analysts who have noted that many of these world cities have actually halted or reversed their population losses, with similar trends in crime and per capita income. That’s because the elite bankers, stock brokers, and lawyers will probably still cluster in these big cities. And a city like New York can still be a very desirable and fashionable place to live if you have a lot of money.

According to the report, smaller, mid-sized cities must find “niches” in the global economy. Atkinson notes that Gary, Indiana, a declining core city, used low-interest development loans from HUD to win a postal service remote encoding facility similar to the one in Greensboro.

As technology leans against some inner cities, governments need to adjust rules that presently favor development in the suburbs, the report recommends. Environmental rules now often make it prohibitively expensive to develop old industrial sites in cities, while the mortgage interest deduction rules and standard development policies actually subsidize the construction of new subdivisions on raw land that lead to greater air and water pollution.

In addition, the report recommends that cities, with help from the federal government, initiate job-skill training programs for their residents.

“It’s not just that cities are going to lose jobs, Atkinson says, it’s that the economies of cities are restructuring to have more highly skilled functions that still require face to face contact. But inner cities don’t have a skilled worked force.”

Thats not quite true. Some cities do have highly skilled workers. Its hard to swing a stick in parts of Manhattan or Washington without hitting some overly-talented individual. But its also true that even New York, which is doing better than most cities, has huge percentages of under-skilled, under-educated residents who will have no chance at the good-paying, skilled jobs that still locate downtown.

To counter these trends, and help soften their blows, the report lists 18 policy options, ranging from increasing small business loans to businesses in urban core area, to requiring HUD to assess and quantify in what ways public policies subsidize sprawl.

No wonder the Republicans killed the agency. It was doing exactly what it was designed to do: assessing technology and offering solutions, including ones that relied on government.

Though the OTA initially enjoyed bipartisan support, Atkinson says it was eliminated because of the antipathy on the part of more ideological Republicans, particularly the new freshmen. He notes that the OTA lost points with some conservatives when it was asked to examine the Star Wars technology in the mid 1980s and concluded it would not work.

“It’s unclear whether they really wanted an agency that would provide them with independent critical analysis that wasn’t ideologically based, ” Atkinson says.

The central question raised by the OTA report is whether people will still live in central cities if they don’t have to. If technology allows both people and industries more freedom to choose where they live, will many choose to live in or near downtown?

The answer is clearly yes – if cities can compete with suburbs as pleasant places to live. National Public Radio recently ran a report about how people are moving back to center cities to get away from the congestion and chaos of the suburbs. The very trends the report speaks of are causing the suburbs and the hinterlands to not be the pastoral oasis that many have in mind when they buy a house in the suburbs.

If older cities can maintain their infrastructure, their neighborhoods and keep crime down, they can compete quite successfully with the land of K-marts and freeways as a pleasant place to live. It’s quite possible that the next century will see an even greater return to the city by the middle and upper classes. New York, Paris and many other major cities have halted their population decline in the last five to 10 years, several studies show.

So maybe that graphic designer, given the choice between a mountain cabin in Idaho and a loft in Soho, might just choose Soho.


Urban Renewal in Norfolk

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What Was Lost: A lot.
What Was Gained: Not Much.

BY ALEX MARSHALL
Tuesday, August 10, 1999

The 1950s was about new stuff, not old stuff. The United States had spent two decades postponing consumption as it fought the Great Depression and then World War II. It was ready for new cars, houses, roads and ways of doing things. With a vengeance.

It was in this spirit that from 1949 into the early 1960s, Norfolk proceeded to tear down most of the buildings and streets built over the previous 275 years. A city founded in 1680 was left with little built before 1900. Cities around the country followed its example.

When the dust had ettled in the early 1960s, old East Main Street, lined with burlesque houses and bars, was gone. Gone was the original Commercial Place, where stevedores and merchants traded drinks in ancient taverns while they waited for ships to unload. Gone were the central city markets, where dozens of produce, dairy, meat and fish merchants sold their wares at small stands under mammoth roofs. Gone was the city’s old Union Station near the Elizabeth River, where travelers stepped off trains into the heart of the city. Gone was the entire neighborhood of Atlantic City. Gone was the city’s oldest core, a tight web of streets dating back to the city’s founding.

But the city didn’t just tear stuff down. In the place of the old, the city built: wide new roads, like St. Pauls Boulevard, Tidewater Drive, Virginia Beach Boulevard extension, Brambleton Avenue and the interstates; housing projects, including Roberts Park, Diggs Park, Young Park, Grandy Village, Bowling Park and others, which now ring downtown; new civic buildings, including a new City Hall, jail and courts complex, which would sit on a plaza nestled by freeway on-ramps; and vast windswept parking lots, where city officials would wait — and wait — for promised new investment to materialize.

How did the city afford all this? With lots and lots of nearly free federal money. Norfolk was first to take advantage of the 1949 Federal Housing Act, which paid 80 percent of urban renewal and gave cities new legal powers to take private property. The country had just finished winning a world war, and was ready to attempt and pay for drastic changes, even if a few eggs were broken to make this particular omelet.

Norfolk’s fervor in urban renewal traces back to its concept of “slums” and the city’s passion to get rid of them.

Even before World War II, city leaders looked out from the old City Hall and saw crumbling buildings with poor residents with few options. Many structures were wooden, and lacked indoor plumbing. A 1936 survey by the WPA showed that of 954 dwellings in on area between Monticello and Church Street (now St. Pauls Boulevard), 900 of them lacked flush toilets. About a third of the homes were in need of “major repair.”

Other buildings were more solid, made of brick and stone. But these were used for things city fathers weren’t proud of, like bar and burlesque shows. Of course, there were also family restaurants, hotels, tailors and offices, but these old-style establishments were not seen as anything special worth saving when a brand new city, one of highways, shopping malls and civic buildings, could be created.

Discussion of creating a housing authority was active in the 1930s. Finally in 1940, the City Council overcame its longtime resistance and created the Norfolk Housing Authority, after the Navy swung behind the effort. Lawrence M. Cox, who would lead the authority for almost three decades, would become its first executive director. This organization, later renamed the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, would lead the way, and still does, in the city’s effort to reinvent itself.

But before the city could do much, World War II intervened. Downtown would deteriorate even further as thousands of sailors and civilian workers flooded its streets and swamped its housing. City leaders greatly disliked the reputation the city earned as one giant honky-tonk.

After the war, Norfolk was the first city in the country to have an urban renewal plan approved under the new Federal Housing Act. The city received $25 million in 1949 to build 3000 units of public housing. In 1951, the city proceeded to clear 127 acres of land between Monticello and Church Street, now St. Paul’s Boulevard. In 1953, another major slum clearance project was announced.

As the decade proceeded, city leaders fell in love with the bulldozer. In projects beginning in 1949, 1951,1953, 1957, 1958, 1961 the City Council, through its creation the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, ripped out dozens of streets, knocked down hundreds of buildings and evicted thousands of families from their homes. At the same time, it built new highways, new civic buildings, and new public housing.

Under then Mayor Duckworth, the city would announce a clearance project or an expansion of a current one almost every year. In 1957, the City Council approved the destruction of Atlantic City, a relatively stable neighborhood, that used to exist around the midtown tunnel entrance and underneath the medical complex. In the same year, the city would commence clearance of the central core of the city, which would lead to the construction of a new City Hall, courts complex and jail. These renewal efforts would also create the famous blank “17 acres,” which would stay empty for 35 years before the MacArthur Center was built.

By the mid 1960s, most of downtown, with the exception of Freemason, Granby Street and part of Main Street, had been cleared.

With almost a half century’s perspective, what can be said about the city’s vast urban renewal effort?

Given the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear the city went too far, too fast. City leaders had envisioned a new city of freeways and plenty of parking that would compete with the suburbs. Instead, the destruction of the older networks of streets and buildings would accelerate the migration of retail activity to the suburbs. The passion to build big highways and freeways made mass transit less workable and made downtown, in comparison to the easy-parking suburbs, less viable.

While initial projects in the early 1950s had focused on crumbling wooden shacks beyond repair, later efforts of that decade would tear down scores of pre Civil War buildings of brick and stone, many dating back to the 1800s. These could have formed a base for tourism and downtown residential living.

Frederick Herman, an architect who served on the city’s design review board during this period, said the city tore down numerous treasures. In retrospect, Herman said, it’s clear the city’s wholesale clearance was the wrong approach.

“Norfolk probably had as many 18th century and early 19th century buildings as Georgetown,” Herman said in an interview in 1996. “And they were basically intact until the early 50s. Some were rundown, but a lot of them could have been rehabilitated.”

True, the city would gain a rebuilt Main Street lined with tax-paying office skyscrapers. But under a different plan, these might have emerged elsewhere while keeping the waterfront intact.

The city also lost less tangible things, like its historical memory. Norfolk not only tore down buildings, but erased ancient streets, dating back to the city’s founding. No longer could someone walk downtown, and remember at a glance where they or their forefathers came from.

But the 1950s were a different time. Norfolk’s old downtown homes, like those that still exist in Freemason, had been abandoned by the upper classes for two generations. The prosperous set had long moved out to fashionable Ghent, Park Place, Colonial Place and other new streetcar suburbs. Historical preservation was a tiny idea. Few people imagined a time when a young lawyer or business person would pay dearly for the privilege of living in a crumbling 18th century house with bad plumbing.

And Norfolk was certainly not alone in its love of destruction. Almost every city in the country pursued urban renewal. Like Norfolk, these cities often erased buildings and streets of great historical and economic value. It’s was a sign of the times that New York, New Orleans and Alexandria considered Greenwich Village, the French Quarter and Alexandria’s Old Town as candidates for urban renewal.

Savannah, whose historic district now attracts six million visitors a year, began tearing it down under urban renewal in the 1950s. This city of Spanish moss hanging over graceful squares has since been made famous in movies like Forrest Gump and books like Midnight in The Garden of Good and Evil. But in the 1950s, like in Norfolk, its leaders envisioned a new city of skyscrapers and freeways. Only a backlash by prominent citizens saved most of the city’s unique structure of homes around squares, although some were lost.

It’s tempting to think what Norfolk and other cities would look like if the federal government had given money to renovate old buildings and improve mass transit, as well as for tearing buildings down and building new highways. What if Norfolk had improved its trolley system, and given grants for landlords to repair and renovate their properties?

But that was not to be.

Only after downtown urban renewal was over, would the city began trying to recreate new things in the style of what it had torn down. The new townhouses on Boush Street being built now, for example, mimic the urban homes that once lined Freemason and other streets downtown.

Historically, urban renewal remains a brief, although consequential, period in the history of American cities. By the mid 1960s, urban planners would start to turn against it. Jane Jacobs would startle planners by praising the traditional city street. Scholars would label urban renewal “Negro removal,” because of the thousands of poor, usually black families removed from their homes. In Norfolk in the 1960s, attorney and later judge Joe Jordan denounced urban renewal as racist. In the 1990s, Milwaukee is following the lead of some other cities in trying to tear down some of the highways built during the urban renewal era and rebuild a city of streets, mass transit and walking.

Norfolk was and is unusual in that it started urban renewal early, and has continued it long after it has lost fashion nationally. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the city tore down and rebuilt virtually all of Ghent east of Colonial Avenue, moving thousands of black families from their homes. In the present day, the city is clearing a section of East Ocean View, and in the process evicting roughly a thousand families, in an attempt to build a new, more prosperous neighborhood.

For better and for worse, Norfolk continues to believe in the power of the bulldozer.

Building New Urbanism: Less Filling, But Not So Tasty

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This Article first appeared in Builder Magazine
NOV. 30, 1999
BY ALEX MARSHALL

The old commercials for Lite beer by Miller which were once so popular gained their fame by having ex-jocks and other assorted celebrities stand at a bar, hold up a glass of amber-colored liquid, and repeat the slogan: “Tastes great, less filling.”

The advertising pitch worked for a while, but as any beer lover could tell you, all the “lite” beers were a pretty thin, tepid brew. The designer beers, which actually did taste great, but were also filling, shoved a lot of them out of the marketplace.

Most of New Urbanism, the new subdivision and home-building style that has been the rage in recent years, is a kind of lite-beer form of urbanism. Urbanism Lite. You take out most of the things that make urbanism urban — density, dependence on mass transit, less space for cars — and you leave some front porches, some reworked street systems, some different facades and a few alleys.

The attempt is to eliminate what people don’t like about small town or city living — less privacy and no place to park — and leave in what they do like about it, which are walking to a cafe, or buying a quart of milk without getting in a car.

But you can’t have one without the other. What you get is a slightly different looking subdivision lying off a main road on the edge of town, which functions pretty much like all the other subdivisions that surround it.

New Urbanism is a big tent philosophy and practice: that is, a lot goes on under that label. It is at various times: a theory or theories of urban design; a marketing campaign; a collection of people who love urban places; and a particular way of buildings suburbs that attempt to imitate older towns and city neighborhoods.

Some of the former has some value. But it is the latter that concerns me here. On a practical level, most of what is physically built under the label New Urban are these newer suburbs out on bare land. These are sometimes called TNDs for Traditional Neighborhood Developments. Are these new-fangled subdivisions a cure for, or part of the disease of, urban sprawl?

Let’s look on the big level of sprawl first, that of the metropolitan area. Atlanta is prime example of this. It spills across hundreds of square miles, with the result that many of its residents spend huge portions of their day stuck in a car. It’s not a very nice place to live. Excessive highway building, rather than making traffic better, has made it worse.

New Urbanism will not help much here. Building places like Kentlands outside Washington D.C., or the nearby Reston Town Center, will do nothing to shrink the size of a metropolitan area. They part of the problem. They are yet more subdivisions and shopping malls being built farther “out”, where they help reduce density and enlarge the metropolitan area.

Really limiting sprawl is pretty simple. It means building fewer big highways on the edge of town and investing a lot more in mass transit. It means growth boundaries. It means dramatically raising the price of gasoline so that the taxes cover the costs of both building roads, maintaining them and the associated costs, like policing and air pollution.

These are tough choices. For builders, any of the above would mean drastic changes in the ways of doing business. In Portland, Oregon, which is one of the few cities and states that have moved in this direction, builders find themselves doing more redevelopment work, from adding a room to an existing house, to “tear-downs” to be replaced with newer structures.

The growth boundary around Portland has had the quite unexpected effect of pushing out large corporate developers. There simply isn’t land available in the 1,000 acre chunks that they prefer. So instead, you see the rise of more locally-owned builders and developers, who will take 20 acres here, and 10 acres there to build some homes. Portland, which has a booming economy, produced a huge number of new housing units in recent years, but roughly a third of them was through redevelopment. The rest were generally not huge new subdivisions that you see outside Las Vegas or Houston.

The problem with the practice of New Urbanism, as opposed to some of its talk, is that it has generally shirked from confronting the tough choices that Portland and Oregon residents have faced to a degree. Instead, New Urbanists generally offer Americans a chance to “buy” their way out of the sprawl dilemma, in the form of cute new subdivisions and town centers.

Like a lot of marketing-driven products, this might work for a decade or so, until people catch on. Then it will go the way of Planned Unit Developments, New Towns, and all the other once new-models of suburban sprawl. And Americans will be left with actual problem unresolved and unfaced.

In general, New Urbanists are selling something they can’t deliver without charging a far higher price, and without making changes far more fundamental than redesigning a few homes. To understand why, it’s necessary to look more carefully at what we today call the suburbs and how they took form.

Cities are products of something. They represent the effect, principally, of transportation systems. The classic 19th and early 20th century neighborhoods that many people love, and which New Urbanism apes, were created by the extension of streetcar lines. Levittown was a product of a new car culture. The mega malls and grab bag of subdivisions that surround most cities are products of the limited access freeways, built at public expense. Developers and builders understand this far better than the general public.

But how about on a more individual level. Even if a neo-traditional neighborhood built on the edge of town won’t counteract metropolitan sprawl, will it deliver a better life for the people who live there?

The answer is no again.

Urbanism is a package deal. Once you weed out the stuff people don’t like about it — no place to park, smaller homes, closer neighbors — you also weed out the stuff they like about urbanism, like walkeable streets and nearby grocery stores.

The Achilles’ heel of New Urbanist developments has been their “downtowns,” the classic “main streets” meant to be at the heart of the developments. If they were built, and successful, it would be a significant improvement on suburban life. But the reasons these mini downtowns fail point to the structural flaws in the whole theory of TNDs.

Retail needs an enormous accessible customer base to succeed. Street-level retail in cities get this from enormous density and the therefore enormous quantity of people that walk by their front doors. Suburban retail get this by locating on a main highway where a high volume of traffic goes by their parking lots.

New Urban developments have generally tried to locate their mini-downtowns in the center of their low-density subdivisions. The result is that they have neither enough pedestrian, nor enough auto, traffic to make retail succeed. The “main streets” of virtually all New Urban developments have failed.

An exception is the Disney-produced Celebration in Florida. But it may be the exception that proves the rules. Disney had the enormous financial muscle to build the downtown first, before any homes were built or sold. It also had the marketing muscle to pull in tourists to its shops, even though the downtown lacks immediate access to a main highway. Tourists are making these shops succeed, not residents.

There are other tradeoffs and inadequacies that become apparent when you look at a neo-traditional development closely.

Peter Calthorpe, one the New Urbanists who is honest about the choices involved, has said the minimum density needed to make mass transit work is a gross density of ten units to an acre, with selective density even higher. Most TNDs hover around four units to an acre. The idea that these places can dovetail eventually with mass transit in some distant year is probably not the case, unless you acknowledge a tremendous amount of infill and expensive redevelopment. To really change how people live, you need mass transit in a development at the beginning, not the end.

The street system is another interesting thing to look at. Neo-traditionalists like to advertise that they have gotten away from the cull-de-sac, which has become the symbol of American bad taste, like tail-fins on that old Chevy. New Urbanists promise a more open and easy going grid.

But the “grids” these developments use are usually just as confusing and intimidating to outsiders as the standard pattern of cul-de-sacs and collector streets. These “grids” are usually a collection of loose skewed streets. They are less urban grids really, than descendents of the wavy street patterns used in 19th century cemeteries and later in early suburbs.

Finally, the treatment of the driveway and the garage in the standard New Urban house say a lot about its tradeoffs. The high priority of neo-traditional development is to get a clear, urban looking façade at the front of the house, usually reminiscent of Cape Cod or Georgetown. To get it, the driveway is put either on the side, or in the back off an alley. The same goes for the garage.

The result is that the residents lose their backyards, the classic spot of backyard barbecues and swing sets. So for the sake of the appearance of urbanism, residents sacrifice one of the prime pleasures of suburbanism.

Older towns, like heralded Charleston, Georgetown or Savannah, worked well with alleys and street facades because their residents didn’t have to worry about where to park the car. When these places were built, people walked everywhere, until they got on a train, a streetcar or a ship. Trying to replicate these building types in the context of a freeway and car-dependent environment is a false equation.

For the builder and developer, New Urbanism represents a dilemma of sorts. It can be profitable. Standard New Urban subdivisions offer smaller homes on less land at higher prices. This means higher profits, even though there is higher risk, because the development costs for streets are more, and the potential market is smaller.

But a developer would have to acknowledge that is not really selling what he is usually advertising: a cure to our sprawl-oriented life style. Instead, he is offering more a change of style than substance. And as with any style, there is the risk that people will tire of it and move on.

New Urban developments do offer some improvement on conventional suburbia. They sometimes offer “granny flats,” which give a mother-in-law or lower-waged worker a place to live. That’s a real improvement. I also favor experimenting, whether it be in the suburbs or the inner-city. But we should be honest about what we are selling.

Time will tell where the New Urban debate and practice goes. In the long run, it may lead to better, more real form of urbanism. It may cost more in its political choices, but it may be more satisfying, and most of all, may taste great.

Trading Places

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The City and the Suburb

[Excerpt From Chapter Four]

“The sloughed-off environment becomes a work of art in the new invisible environment.”
— Marshall McLuhan in a conversation with William Irwin Thompson; quoted in Thompson, Coming into Being

“The bloodthirsty national merchants and the Chamber of Commerce have pretty well gutted the place I remember and taken and hucked the town’s original character into the overall commercial park. The center of town, which when I was a kid hadn’t changed much in the century, and was pleasingly timeworn and functional, has now either been torn down or renovated for artificial preservation as an example of itself.”
— description of Lexington, Kentucky, from Richard Hell’s autobiographical novel, Go Now2

The King William neighborhood in San Antonio is an elegant place of huge turreted Victorians sitting on expansive lots. German immigrants built the homes in the mid–and late nineteenth century, after they had grown rich industrializing the city. In San Antonio then, you were as likely to hear German on the streets as English or Spanish. An old photograph from the 1880s shows a sign on a bridge warning people to walk their horses. The notice is given in three languages–English, German, and Spanish.

Like many beautiful old neighborhoods, King William now mixes entrenched urban homesteaders with tourism. In one count there were more than seventy bed and breakfasts in the neighborhood, and tour buses cruising the streets have been regulated. It’s ironic, because in the 1960s, the neighborhood was nearing abandonment, with the huge old homes falling into disrepair. But a wealthy believer bought and renovated a handful of homes, and suddenly a reverse exodus was on.

The tourism load is heavy in part because the neighborhood sits just a stone’s throw from downtown and the city’s famous River Walk, the winding subterranean path along water’s edge now lined with restaurants, stores, and souvenir stands. Aboveground are the city’s largely turn-of-the-century streets and buildings, which also include the ancient Alamo Mission and the modern shopping mall built a few years back. The mall gives armies of conventioneers another place to spend money.

I stayed in King William in 1997, in one of the ubiquitous bed and breakfasts. I was there on a magazine assignment, and I began my morning around the dining table with two couples who were there on vacation. They were from New Orleans, but the husbands knew San Antonio well because they traveled there frequently on business.

Knew the suburbs, that is. Like most businesspeople in the area, they conducted the bulk of their business out in the peripheries of the metropolitan area, in an environment of sprawling highways, office parks, and shopping centers that was casually called, no kidding, “Loopland.” The name came from the beltway that encircled the metropolitan area and spawned the subsequent sprawl. It was a maddening, unholy place. Glass buildings were shoved right up to the high-speed freeway, and the system of exit ramps seemed like something out of a Mad Max movie. But this was now the true Main Street of San Antonio, the place where the wealth of the metropolitan area was produced, and where the bulk of new businesses and industries were formed.

In fact, so strong was Loopland’s pull that the two businessmen, despite having traveled to the city for years, had never been downtown before or to any of the adjacent picturesque neighborhoods. The entire downtown, which includes the Alamo, the River Walk, and the business district, was a mystery to them. It was only now, on vacation, accompanied by their wives and children, that they were taking the chance to see “the city.”

The couples’ relationship with downtown is a good example of how contemporary center cities and suburbs have traded places. Older center cities–when successful–tend to be small, precious places with a limited function and market. The downtown of San Antonio was a make-believe world suitable for wives and children, who could pretend or believe they were seeing the real San Antonio.

The real San Antonio, of course, was out in Loopland. That’s where the wealth of the region was being produced, that is where new businesses were being formed.

The parts of San Antonio’s downtown that had been unable to convert themselves into tourist centers were dying. That included lovely but abandoned nineteenth-century office buildings and grand old theaters. Why? Because the business and essential living of the city were no longer being conducted in the center, and so the streets and buildings were no longer able to make a go at it by being utilitarian tools. They could only make it, to paraphrase Richard Hell, as artificially preserved examples of themselves.

The suburbs and city have reversed historic roles. The city now represents order, stability, community, and the human scale. The suburbs have become the example of constant change, gigantism, uncontrolled technological forces, and the rule of the marketplace. Whereas once the city symbolized a merciless, soulless world, and the suburbs calmness, family, and nature, the two worlds have almost completely traded places in what they represent.

Marshall McLuhan’s statement “The sloughed-off environment becomes a work of art in the new invisible environment” is an accurate description of why this has occurred. The urban grid of streets grouped around a port or a train station or a streetcar line has ceased to be the central marketplace of society. It has been replaced by a tangle of streets built around freeway exits. And so the older form has gone from something utilitarian, a tool, to something whose aesthetics and value can be seen more clearly and admired because we are now outside it. The urban street is, to quote Joel Garreau, author of Edge City, an antique. And like an antique, it is seen as valuable merely for being, not for what it does. In San Antonio, the downtown plays an important role in the economy by nurturing tourism and the convention trade. But this is a passive, more gentle function than serving as the central arena of industry or the marketplace.

An antique, whether it’s an object or a process, can be studied, perfected, and honed, similar to blues music, basket weaving, or the construction of handmade paper. But the form is not alive in the same way as suburbia. We can love cities because we are no longer in them. From society’s collective new home in the suburbs, we look back on them in wonder. I wonder when this will happen to the suburbs? When will we admire a cloverleaf, an off-ramp, and a gas station with an attached convenience store simply for their form and style?

I am not scoffing at the task of reviving the city. Ultimately it is not just the urban city but the metropolitan area that is, or can be, “a work of art,” perhaps because we are now mentally outside of it in our global marketplace and Internet-enveloped world. If we are to grapple effectively with the artistic challenge before us, then we must understand city and suburb together and how they interact as a whole.

What I seek to do in this chapter is to understand the dynamic between our more traditional urban forms and the newer suburbs, and how this in turn relates to the dynamic of the metropolitan area as a whole. To understand city and suburb–and I use these words more in an iconic sense than a literal one, for I believe the true cities today in a practical sense are entire metropolitan areas–we need to understand how city and suburb have been viewed in history and what goals they have represented. When twelfth-century Italian princes built great urban piazzas, and when nineteenth-century park designers built great suburban subdivisions, what were they striving for? What heaven were they reaching for, and how far did it exceed their grasp?

The Deconstructed City – The Silicon Valley

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[Excerpt From Chapter Three ]

Urbanism and Underwear

Anne (not her real name) had worked at the small used bookstore in Menlo Park since 1967. During this time, she watched the downtown change around her. It used to be a place where the city’s politicians came to meet, a place where the average person came to buy a television, some furniture, or some shampoo. Downtown was the area’s commercial, political, and economic center. Then, hard times hit. The furniture and appliance stores closed or moved out to the malls. McDonald’s out on the highway replaced the everyday restaurants on Main Street.

Then, about a decade ago, things picked up again. New restaurants began to move in. Lots of them. The local supermarket, Draeger’s, opened an enormous upscale supermarket. Fancy boutiques blossomed. Menlo Park had come back. Only, things were different. Downtown had once been a place where you went to have your daily needs met. It was as comfortable as an old shoe. Now, it was fancy. Although she liked the downtown’s success, she wished-.-.-. that there was a place to buy something more ordinary. A smattering of older stores remained–a hardware store, a pet store, a dry cleaner–but their days seemed numbered. And all these restaurants! You could have too much of a good thing. So one day, Anne went and counted all the restaurants in this roughly two-block-long downtown.

There were thirty-seven.

“I just wish there was someplace to buy a bra or some underwear,” she said. “I’d trade a half-dozen of these coffee shops for one place to buy something practical.”

The trajectory of Menlo Park, from up to down to up again, is similar to that of the other downtowns of the Silicon Valley. They include Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and small shopping streets like California Avenue in Palo Alto. They have gone from ordinary building blocks of an economy, to outmoded appendages, to luxury ornaments. These old-fashioned downtown streets, many of them once centers of farming communities, are very alive now. They are also unnecessary. Their luck is that they exist in a suburban territory that can afford to keep them alive. They play a role for their areas, similar to what San Francisco does for the region, as beautiful antiques.

What role do these old downtowns play in this new city? They are the depository of place in the region. They are where you go to experience it. It is their franchise. As such, they punctuate the suburban monotony of the region. Every few miles, you come across another old downtown where you know you can get out, walk around–and of course find something to eat.

Eating out seems to be the main function of these new centers. They are one long dining table. In Palo Alto, the downtown is lacquered over with high-priced Italian restaurants, and more open all the time. On a Thursday night, lines stretch out of every other restaurant. In a world where people are young and work long hours, eating out is one of the main forms of recreation. For some reason, Italian restaurants threaten to suffocate you. Every other doorway offers aruguled this and balsamiced that. San Francisco is known for its French restaurants. In Silicon Valley, they love Italian.

What has happened is not simply the upscaling of an area. Something more structural has happened. The downtown of Menlo Park is now an appendage. Its businesses are able to survive precisely because they are unnecessary. You don’t go to Menlo Park to buy a pack of Fruit of the Loom, a computer, a television, or some shoelaces. You go to the mall down the road, or the warehouse-style power centers. Nor do you go to Menlo Park to see your attorney or take out a loan; those functions have moved to corporate office parks behind well-bermed lawns. The older downtowns instead have become like an art museum, a luxury that gives you a taste of a different time, and a welcome respite from your usual hectic surroundings. And as with an art museum, only the wealthiest and most upscale areas can afford one. They are luxury items, dispensable but nice to have around. They give young people a place to court with more atmosphere than the mall. But they carry no significant economic freight. If they were blown off the map, people’s palates would suffer but not much else. These old downtowns no longer function as cities, under my definition, because they no longer create wealth. Sure, their restaurants and pricey supermarkets have value, but they exist by taking the dollars that have been created elsewhere, and cycling them through. They are a secondary tier of an economy, not the primary one. If the chip plants and computer labs closed tomorrow, the pricey boutiques would go dark in a week.

It is true that some people can meet their daily needs in Menlo Park, but this is an example of the bifurcation of our society. The wealthy can afford to shop at Draeger’s. They can pay for the privilege of a supermarket within walking distance, and for an older, more personalized form of service. They can order steak for $30 a portion at Dal Boffo instead of a hamburger at a mom-and-pop cafe. It’s urbanism for the rich. The masses are left to the car and the Wal-Mart and the Food Lion. Anne may eventually get a place to buy underwear. But it would likely be a boutique lingerie store, with Aubade bras for $100 a pop. Not Hanes.

It’s significant that one place that does not have a downtown is East Palo Alto, home to the poor, who are the people most in need of an environment that functions without cars.

The End of Place

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[Excerpt From Chapter Two]

The Nature of Place

Before the car, or more particularly before the highway, the essential challenge of cities was to keep everything from being in the same place. The city was centripetal. Like a black hole, the nature of a city or town was to suck everything to one point. People needed to be near the railroad, the port, the factory to get to their jobs, and factories needed to be near the people and transportation links. This was why reformers championed public parks. Called the lungs of the cities, they were spots of greenery in the tightly packed clumps of buildings and streets. And it took real community effort to put them there. Valuable and scarce land, which could have been converted into homes and businesses, had to be set aside by the public. The tendency of the pre-automobile city to suck people to specific points only intensified with the transportation advances of the nineteenth century, which drew people, machinery, businesses, and money toward the subway stop, the streetcar stop, the railroad terminal.

Just the opposite conditions prevail today. The city is centrifugal. The city is more akin to a giant salad spinner, spraying growth out over the countryside indiscriminately. Growth still clusters around transportation sources, except that it is now the freeway off-ramp rather than the subway stop or train station. But the growth circle of a streetcar is measured in blocks because people have to walk there. The growth circle of a freeway off-ramp in measured in miles, because people drive there, and need places to put their cars at each end.

Consequently, there is no particular advantage to being right near one’s workplace. In fact, there is considerable advantage to being as far away from work or other necessities as possible. The person who locates himself on the fringes gets the advantage of bigger lots and more peace and quiet, while still being able to “raid” the jobs and commerce of the metropolis as a whole. Thus the city expands ever outward, with each person and developer reaching the short-term gain of being the farthest out.

The drive to establish parks is anachronistic now, because we no longer live packed in a block with no green space nearby. Now, most of us live surrounded by green space, from our backyards to the berms and shrubbery that surround the shopping mall and local gas station. We are enveloped in greenery, because the low-density environment has plenty of spaces for trees, shrubs, and spare land that is left as forest or fields. Now, a park is just about providing recreation, not relief from crowding and congestion.

The essential dynamic of cities and places has changed. The fundamental challenge of cities today is to keep everything from being everywhere at once. The modern push to establish growth boundaries can be compared to the drive in the past to establish parks. Each movement is attempting to check a fundamental tendency of the form in favor of the public good. The public good now concerns containment, whereas before it was the reverse. Kenneth Jackson, a historian of the suburbs, said, “The effect of the auto on the city is analogous to what astronomers call the big bang theory of the universe.”2 In the past, cities sucked inward. With the car, they exploded outward.

This big bang has increased exponentially the rate cities consume land. Urban historian Robert Fishman noted, “The basic unit of the new city is not the street measured in blocks but the ‘growth corridor’ stretching 50 to 100 miles. Where the leading metropolis of the early 20th century–New York, London, or Berlin–covered perhaps 100 square miles, the new city routinely encompasses two to three thousand [square] miles.”3

A news article about contemporary Atlanta, a particularly acute case, gives a glimpse of the dynamic. “Over the past six years, Atlanta has gobbled up more land than any metro area, anywhere. Each year, the region’s suburban boundaries grow by 38 square miles.-.-.-. As a result, commuters-.-.-. pile up more car miles each day, per capita, than residents of any U.S. metropolis, including Los Angeles. They also breathe the worst air of any city in the Southeast.” The fastest-growing county, Gwinnett, has tripled in population in sixteen years to 460,000. “Seen from the air, Gwinnett looks like a vast sea of cul-de-sacs–an estimated 9,000 of which are spread across the county.” The growth of Atlanta, the writer correctly observes, was fueled by three Interstates built in the postwar era that converge on the region.4

Victor Gruen, father of the first enclosed shopping mall, in Minneapolis, precisely describes the centrifugal nature of suburban development in a long piece, which he apparently writes with some regret, about the children he has sired. In a chart entitled “The Vicious Circle,” he shows an arrow from “Sprawl” leading to “Increased Use of Automobiles” leading to “Decreased Use of Public Transportation” leading to “Separation of Urban Functions” leading to “Increased Road Surfaces” leading back to “Sprawl.”5

The End of Place saddens us, I believe. We have had thousands of years living with “walls” around us in the form of streets and buildings. It’s only in the last fifty that most of us have been able to leave them. Now, like a prisoner yearning for his old jail cell, we miss the places that once involuntarily confined us. Although we chafed at our old constraints, we find now that we might need them. The car and the highway have allowed us to leave our old confines, but they also have meant we could not go back.

Is the End of Place an unavoidable consequence of the car? To answer this, we need to understand why one method of transportation is chosen or can be chosen.

A Tale of Two Towns

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Kissimmee versus Celebration and the New Urbanism
[Excerpt From Chapter One]

“When you’re building your own creation,
Nothing’s better than real than a real imitation.”
-Lyrics from the song “Frankenstein,” by Aimee Mann

On the edge of two lakes about twenty miles south of Orlando are two small southern Florida towns. Both have old-fashioned main streets, with stores, restaurants, and a movie theater that open onto their sidewalks. Both have old-fashioned homes with front porches set on streets which lead into their downtowns. Both have parks that wrap around their lakes, where you can stroll and take in a sunrise or the night air. They both lie off a road called U.S. 192, and are just a few miles from each other.

But one of these towns is struggling. Its homes are not selling for much, and its storefronts have trouble staying full. The other town is a wealthy place, with homes that cost up to $1 million. Its downtown has rich boutiques and pricey restaurants.

The struggling town is called Kissimmee. It was founded in the mid-nineteenth century and grew as a shipping port and then a railroad and cattle town. But people stopped using the big lakes for shipping, and railroads became less important as well, and the town suffered.

The successful town is called Celebration. It is a new place, founded in 1994. It is, in reality, not a town, but a subdivision, built by the Disney corporation in conscious imitation of towns like Kissimmee. It sits next to a freeway and an exit ramp. Its homes are being bought by the Orlando upper classes, and its stores are being filled with tourists. It is an example of a much-heralded design philosophy called New Urbanism.

In learning why one town is struggling, and the other prospering, we can learn what people value, compared to what they say they value. We can also learn about what makes towns, and subdivisions, tick. We also learn about the concept and practice of community, which Celebration’s owners say they are reviving. By looking at Kissimmee, we can learn about Celebration, because Kissimmee is the thing Celebration is pretending to be–a small, Florida main-street-style town. What does it say when the imitation of something is worth more than the thing itself?

Comparing Kissimmee to Celebration shows where Disney has chosen to imitate the design of a small town, and where it has not. In some aspects, like front porches, Disney has chosen to exactly copy Kissimmee. In other aspects, like the way the towns govern themselves, it has chosen not to. What we find is that Celebration is a contemporary automobile suburb pretending to be a nineteenth-century town. And that pretense, like most pretenses, has a price.

By looking at Kissimmee and Celebration, we can learn about the general thrust of the design philosophy the latter represents, New Urbanism. It is probably the most heralded design movement of the last half-century. It has been embraced as a way out of the problems of sprawl. Celebration closely resembles other New Urban developments, both in the structure of its streets and the structure of its management, although it does differ in some respects. By looking at Celebration, and the thing it is imitating, Kissimmee, we start to see just where this New Urban path, as it has generally been configured, leads.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Mrs. Mac’s versus Max’s

We can glimpse the distinctive characters of the respective “main streets” of Kissimmee and Celebration by looking at two eatery proprietors offering simple fare there. Kissimmee has a small restaurant on Main Street, called “Mrs. Mac’s,” that serves sandwiches, hamburgers, meat loaf, and pie. Celebration has a restaurant on Market Street, called “Max’s Cafe,” that serves sandwiches, hamburgers, meat loaf, and pie. One is a magical realist version of the other.

Mrs. Mac’s on Main Street in Kissimmee has Formica-topped tables that you might find in your kitchen, a nondescript floor, and a wooden checkout counter with a noncomputerized cash register. The menu is simple. Two grilled pork chops with three vegetables for $5.95. Steak for $6.95. Homemade chili for $1.50. At lunch, I watched a nonpicturesque group of people eat there: a fat woman struggling to control her three children, a businessman here and there. The food was austere but good.

Max’s Cafe in Celebration is to cafes what Celebration is to small towns: a fantasy version of a small Southern cafe. Max’s has venetian blinds with thick louvers in the windows, booths inside with metallic piping, and a long soda fountain. It’s really quite beautiful, although it comes at a price.

A bowl of chili at Max’s costs $5.95, compared to $1.50 at Mrs. Mac’s. A piece of pie costs $4.95 compared to $1.50 at Mrs. Mac’s. A cheeseburger is $7.50 compared to $2.70 at Mrs. Mac’s. And we don’t even want to get into the entrees. But the differences between the two places go deeper than the prices and decor.

The proprietor of Mrs. Mac’s in Kissimmee opens or closes when she pleases. Like the other property owners or lessors in Kissimmee, she is not under the thumb of a common management. The property under Max’s, however, is owned by Disney. Every store in Celebration serves at Disney’s pleasure and was handpicked by it. Celebration’s management is that of a shopping mall, not a town. Disney can adjust “the mix” of the stores to optimize profits, or character, or anything it chooses.

So why do the respective characters, not to mention prices, of these two main streets differ so remarkably?

Kissimmee’s Main Street was once its center, because the town itself was once a business and transportation center. It was natural for people to shop as they went to work, or got off the train, or took a boat down the lake. When the region’s center shifted away from the town, its Main Street dried up.

Celebration’s Market Street is no more of a center than Kissimmee’s Main Street is now. But it does do a better job of fostering that illusion, for reasons I will come to.

The business district of Celebration is a curious animal. To some extent, Celebration has succeeded in overcoming what has been the Achilles heel of New Urbanism, which is establishing a commercial center within a residential subdivision. Retail is an area where fictions are exposed. Successful retail establishments have basic needs, like traffic or pedestrian counts, that cannot be dressed up or swept aside.

New Urbanists blame zoning for the segregated uses embodied in the mall, the subdivision, and the isolated schools no one can walk to. But this puts the cart before the horse. Zoning, like most regulation, usually only tidies up decisions the marketplace and the physical infrastructure dictated. Neighborhood business districts were created by the necessity to have services within walking distance of one’s home. Before the nineteenth century, this was because feet were basically the only transportation for most people. To buy something, you had to walk there.

The advent of the streetcar and other forms of mass transportation changed that dynamic only somewhat. In their effects, streetcars and subways were to cities what guns are to violence: they were force multipliers. They made it possible for even more people to live in one place, and congregated businesses around streetcar lines and subway stops. Once they got home from work, people still walked to shop, visit a friend, or have a drink. They had to.

The car and the highway changed that. While mass transit systems were magnets, gathering people and businesses around central points, cars and highways were antimagnets, spreading things out as much as possible. Businesses that relied on customers with cars needed parking lots, which ate away at the street-based retail around them. Eventually, stores moved to the suburbs, where their parking lots could be as big as their owners liked. Stores got bigger and bigger because people could drive to them. So far, the country has not seen an end to this centrifugal dynamic, where businesses get larger and larger, and more and more isolated and spread out.

New Urban communities attempt to change this by resurrecting the old form of retail which existed prior to the automobile, or which was left over in its first few decades. They try to do this, however, without actually resurrecting the old transportation systems that made the old business districts possible and necessary.

To survive, retail needs an astonishingly large potential customer base, much larger than might be intuitively thought. The huge, 200,000-square-foot warehouse-style stores, like a Wal-Mart Supercenter, can require a customer base of a half million households within a twenty-minute drive.3 But even a small restaurant or pharmacy requires high traffic volumes, whether it be by foot or car. Traffic volumes depend on transportation systems. Wal-Marts are located around key freeway interchanges because it allows them access to a regional population base. A small store can succeed in an urban neighborhood, but it requires a lot of people going by its front door, the same as such a store in a strip shopping center out on the highway. To produce those traffic volumes, an urban storefront seems to need at least 10,000 families within walking distance, which means a gross density of at least ten homes an acre. Ghent, the century-old neighborhood in Norfolk where I live, has a gross density of close to twenty homes to an acre. Some individual blocks in Ghent, with larger apartment buildings, have double and triple this density. And Ghent still has difficulty supporting a retail street. In general, the denser the distribution of stores, the denser the distribution of people. Manhattan can support retail in almost every block because it can pack 10,000 people into one block.

This point has always confused architects. Retail is not their strong point. Le Corbusier, the modernist giant of the twentieth century, imagined that shops could be put into his tall towers and persisted even after it was shown that their population was not nearly enough to support the shops.4 Duany conceives of small shops within his low-density, neotraditional subdivisions even though they also lack the necessary population and density.

Celebration, even at buildout, has a density of less than two per acre. The densest part of Celebration is the Garden District, which has about five homes to an acre. These are the special, lower-priced homes, starting at $150,000, and so are off to themselves so they won’t contaminate the more-common $400,000 and $1 million homes in the rest of the community. The Garden District homes, which are 1,350 to 2,200 square feet, are often only six feet apart.5 At five homes to an acre, the Garden District has a crammed-together feel to it. I wouldn’t want to live there. I bet turning into your driveway at night could be a real operation. Yet the density here is still nowhere near high enough to support a business district.

So how is Celebration able to support a downtown?

In a book about the making of the Macintosh computer, Insanely Great,6 Steven Levy described the “reality distortion field” that workers said Apple founder Steve Jobs was able to create around him by the sheer force of his personality. Disney is able to create a similar reality distortion field around Celebration. Through the force of its marketing muscle, it is able to reverse the normal laws of retailing that demand that retail be placed around principal transportation arteries, be they suburban highways or subway lines. In the suburbs, this means placing retail on a heavily traveled main artery and putting big parking lots there to scoop the traffic off of it.

With Celebration’s downtown, you have to drive a mile on a winding access road off U.S. 192. This should kill any attempt at retail. But Disney is able to surmount this with the sheer force of its name and presence. Tourists and sightseers are being pulled off U.S. 192 by the publicity generated by the press and advertising. Disney has heavily advertised Celebration on local television as a place to go shop. Celebration also has its own exit sign on Interstate 4. It’s already listed on the one-page, low-detail maps that you get from the rental car companies.

All this is enough to bring a steady stream of traffic into Celebration to both look at the homes and walk around this novel creature, a “downtown” inside a subdivision. The tourist traffic is a twofer, for the tourists both support the stores and look at the model homes. (This has obviously caused some tension in the neighborhood. Many homes have small signs on them that say they are occupied, not a model home.)

Celebration’s downtown will only succeed if it is able to be not a neighborhood business district, but a regional shopping center. That is working so far. Most of their customers, store owners tell me, are tourists and home lookers. But because of this, the stores in the downtown are nothing like one would choose for a neighborhood shopping street. There are a fancy dress store, and upscale souvenir shops. There are restaurants, a grocery store, and a movie theater, but all extremely upscale. The Goodings market, a luxury chain in Florida, is a gourmet store. The manager says it originally tried to have a full produce and meat section. But the stuff wouldn’t sell. So it scaled back the produce and eliminated the fresh meat. What you have left is a fancy store that is convenient if you forget the bottle of wine, but is not for everyday grocery shopping.

The point is that the residents of Celebration are still utterly dependent on U.S. 192, and always will be. They drive there to shop for groceries. They drive to the Wal-Mart to buy some lawn furniture. They drive to the mall to buy a computer, a lamp, or almost anything essential.