Category Archives: Virginia

No Place Called Home

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Community at the Millennium

[Excerpt From Chapter Eight]

“Another question: what is a community at the end of the 20th century? A focus group, a concentration camp, a chat room on the Internet, an address book, a dance club, all those afflicted with a particular incurable disease, a gender, an age bracket, a waiting room, owners of silver BMW’s, organized crime, everyone who swears by a particular brand of painkiller and a two-block stretch of Manhattan on any weekday at lunch hour.”
–Herbert Muschamp, from “The Miracle in Bilbao,” New York Times Magazine, September 7, 1997.

Coming Home

It’s a Saturday night and my house is filling with people. Some carry musical instruments. Some have sheets of poetry or fiction by their sides. Some carry nothing, but are prepared to stand up before a crowd of people and dance, perform theater, or tell a story.

We call it the Coffeehouse. We’ve been doing it now for seven years. The first Saturday of every month, friends and friends of friends come to our house to entertain and be entertained. Usually about fifty people show up. It’s a great time.

This coffeehouse is the highlight of the month, both for me and many of the people who attend. It’s not just the music, poetry, and other acts that bring people back, although these are good. It’s the chance to meet, connect, and talk with other people during the breaks. Through it, my wife and I have met many of our now good friends, and other people have made similar friendships and bonds. In a city where people come and go, it provides us a mechanism to make new friends as older ones leave town.

Why do I mention it? Because our coffeehouse is a replacement for what does not exist in the outer world. And the fact that it does not exist says a lot about our society at this stage in its history. I would prefer that a corner tavern or bar be down the street, where I could magically meet my friends and make new ones. I would prefer to be held up in a naturally emerging web of friends and family, growing out of the physical place where I live and the work that goes on there.

Our situation is ironic, because if anyone should have community “naturally,” it’s my wife and I. We live in Norfolk, Virginia, a port city on the Elizabeth River, the Chesapeake Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean. Huge carriers make their home here, as do huge cargo ships that freight millions of tons of coal all over the world.

It’s been the home of my family on my father’s side for five generations. My great-grandfather came here before the Civil War. He was the first publisher of the newspaper where I started my career in journalism, The Virginian-Pilot. My father grew up one block from where I write this. My wife is a native of the area as well. My newest niece lives down the street.

Looking at my background, one might think that I live a life rich in contacts with the past and the world that molded me, a place where an intricate and perhaps suffocating web of family and friends who have centuries of combined experience support, argue with, and love each other. Which is not the case. I have no close friends from my childhood or high school years that still live in this town, or even the state. Most of my siblings have scattered themselves around the country, as is the wont of professional people these days. Various relatives–second cousins once removed and so forth–do live near me. I know none of them well. As one commentator remarked about Europeans in contrast to Americans, “They still have cousins.” Americans do not.

Various forces operating in the country and world today have pulled apart my “natural” community and scattered it to the winds. My own more cosmopolitan bent figures into this. I lived in Europe for a few years, attended college and graduate school in Pittsburgh and New York City. I am not able, nor do I desire, to sink back into the old-boy culture that does still exist here to a degree. I have a community around me, but it is one that I created or sought out, more than one I was born into. My community is in my coffeehouse, in the arts organizations I belong to, and in the civic work I do.

Community–the network of formal and informal relationships that binds people together–is a thin, tepid brew in this country. It has declined to the point where improving it, saving it, nurturing it have become slogans of a variety of movements in different, seemingly unrelated fields. In urban planning, New Urbanism promises to revive community through building subdivisions more cohesively. In political theory, Amiti Etzioni hopes to reduce crime and improve social health through his philosophy of Communitarianism. In journalism, the philosophy of Public Journalism, sometimes labeled Community Journalism, promises to rebuild community and a newspaper’s circulation base by having the press foster public dialogue and political participation. Our politics, our places, our press–all of these things run across power lines that jolt us with the message that something is missing in too many of our lives, some sense of cohesion and togetherness.

This desire many people have for richer, more connected lives is a valid one. I believe that a society grows out of its social, religious, and political compacts, on which ultimately even market relationships depend. But like the construction of coherent physical places, the construction of coherent communities is not something to be attempted directly. Rather, one has to understand what produces both places and communities, and what weakens them, and address those forces.

Most of what we call community in the past has been produced as a byproduct of other things: making a living, shopping for food, keeping ourselves and our families well, protecting them and our society from physical harm, educating them. We shopped for groceries, served in the military, and went to a doctor and along the way got to know the butcher, the fellow soldier, and the local doctor. All of these actions have become less communal, and so our society has become less community-minded. We buy our food at the warehouse-style supermarket, do not serve in the military unless we volunteer, and go to the impersonal HMO to get our cholesterol checked. If we want to revive community, then we should look at the trade-offs involved in making some of our decisions more communal again.

Place has something to do with all this as well. Walking to a neighborhood cafe for breakfast is a more communal thing than using the drive-through at a McDonald’s for an Egg McMuffin, although relationships can occur at either place. Driving on the freeway is less likely to generate relationships than riding a streetcar. Living in an older neighborhood fashioned around the foot is more communal than living in a contemporary one fashioned around the car. But the physical makeup of our places is just one factor in this trend.

John Perry Barlow, computer sage and former Grateful Dead lyricist, commented once that community is largely generated by shared adversity. This gets at the notion, true I believe, that our social ties, while beneficial, are not necessarily produced by situations we would choose. Although many of us miss community, we don’t miss poverty, disease, and war, things that produce community with some regularity. The problem for contemporary Americans is that enhancing social cohesion may mean giving up some things we really like, like personal mobility, low taxes, and a footloose economic structure. We have not figured out yet that creating wealth is not the same as creating community.

I speak without any sentimentality or nostalgia for the past. I believe, however, that the generally fragmented lives so many of us lead break up marriages, disturb childhoods, isolate people when they most need help, and make life not as much fun. We live, to speak frankly, in one of the loneliest societies on earth. If we are to change that, then we should look more closely at the various relationships in our society–political, social, economic, and others–and attempt to construct them in more communal ways. Deciding how to structure these relationships comes back to what I increasingly believe is our most fundamental relationship–politics.

The Demolition Man

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by Alex Marshall
This article first appeared in Metropolis
MAY 1995

Metropolis writer Alex Marshall spoke to Andres Duany about his role in the controversial plan to bulldoze East Ocean View in Norfolk. At the time of the interview, the city had bought few houses and only a small amount of demolition had taken place. Planning officials gave Duany wide latitude in recommencling whether some homes or areas should be saved from demolition. For now, the bulldozers have been idled by a commission that ruled that the housing authority offered a property owner just half of what his property was worth. The authority is appealing, but if the ruling stands, it will drive up the cost of the project to the point that the development would have to proceed in stages, if at all.

METROPOLIS: You seem to be in the position of Baron Haussmann, who built his grand boulevards through the neighborhoods of nineteenth-century Paris. People are saying, “We love your ideas, but we don’t want our houses torn down.” What responsibility do you have to the people who now live in East Ocean View?

DUANY: I think it’s the ancient [question of the needs of the] individual versus the community. You have to find where to draw that line. And it’s very, very difficult to draw it. In this case, that work has been done. The Norfolk city council has made the decision and everybody is out.

METROPOLIS: The residents aren’t actually out yet.

DUANY: Well, the vote has taken place. Now we can see what the best community plan is and see who can stay and who cannot stay.

METROPOLIS: If your design gets built, are you concerned that your kind of urbanism will be less authentic than what exists there now?

DUANY: The neighborhood will still be mixed in income, but exactly the other way. Now it’s 95 percent rental and five percent owner. Under the new plan, it’s going to flip to be 80 percent owner and 20 percent rental. The scale will be healthier. Remember the statement that poverty does not cause crime. Poverty in concentration causes crime.

METROPOLIS: New Urbanism was founded in part as a reaction against urban renewal. Now you are participating in an urban renewal project.

DUANY: There’s a big difference between the neighborhoods that were wiped out in the 1950s, which were little Georgetowns, with darling houses and first-rate urbanism, and this stuff [the homes in East Ocean View], which is extremely exploitative. Even if I were most benevolent and broad-minded, I could save only 10 percent of the buildings. It’s not like [how it used to be done], where there were great places that were just misunderstood and demolished.

METROPOLIS: Do you ever wake up in a cold sweat at night and say, wait a minute, I’m involved in an urban renewal project?

DUANY: Well, I’ve never been involved in the side that causes demolition. I’ve always been on the repair side. I’ve actually resigned from projects because of not wanting to be involved in demolitions. I’ve been to charrettes in which contracts were signed and I just walked out the first day.

METROPOLIS: Where did this happen?

DUANY: In Houston, in an old black neighborhood. Actually, I quit because there was a very nice apartment building and some very nice 1940s housing. It was a total slum. But it was so beautifully designed that I thought it was of architectural value. Basically, at the end of the first day, I said, “Either you trust me to decide what stays and what goes, or you don’t.” And I walked. I was on the airplane the same night. But I’m in a very privileged position, because I have more work than I can handle. Most planners can’t do that. They have to eat.

METROPOLIS: Is it bad for your practice to be involved in a project that forces people out of their homes, even if you are doing so for the sake of better architectural quality?

DUANY: I suppose it is, yes. But it’s easy for me to say, “I didn’t do it.” The whole thing has been made so easy for me. I’ve been protected from this beautifully. Because [the city council made the decision] before I got here.

METROPOLIS: But you do have some misgivings about it?

DUANY: Well, I’d rather it wasn’t the case, I must say. But on the other hand, affordable housing is not what cities need. Because it doesn’t pay taxes. It bankrupts cities. That’s the problem with Philadelphia right now. The whole trick here is to bring the middle class back to the city. The whole challenge is getting middle-class people to come in and live with lower-income people.

METROPOLIS: Is it possible to do some selective demolition and gradually bring the neighborhood up?

DUANY: I think the political reality was “Where do you draw the line?” Because all the people have terrific rights. Basically, [the planners] decided that if we’re unfair, we’re unfair to everybody. And that’s a form of fairness.

When The New Urbanism Meets An Old Neighborhood

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by Alex Marshall
This article first appeared in Metropolis
May, 1995

East Ocean View in Norfolk, Virginia, is a neighborhood on death row, awaiting execution by bulldozer. Residents are being forced from their homes to make way for a brand-new village designed by Andres Duany. If this sounds like old-fashioned urban renewal, well, that’s what it is. It employs the same logic: cities can be fixed by plowing down neighborhoods and replacing them with better buildings and wealthier folks.

The presence of Duany adds a twist. As a partner of Miami-based Duany/PlaterZyberk Town Planners, he is an acknowledged leader of the New Urbanists, the self styled white hats of contemporary architecture who seek to reform America’s wayward landscape. Their remedy is as much moral as it is aesthetic. They believe that traditional town planning – by which they mean a grid of streets lined with trees and front porches, studded with shops and parks – can heal the nation’s fractured sense of community. In East Ocean View, however, the New Urbanists’ championing of the ideal of community is being put to the test. In essence, Duany is now facing the same charges that smeared the Modernists he so disdains: Is it people he cares about – or buildings?

The drama is being played out in a city of a quarter million, the center of a metropolitan sprawl inhabited by 1.4 million. Over the last few decades, Norfolk has lost a third of its population, while the suburbs have boomed, tripling in size. Although the city has a huge commercial harbor, it’s still basically a Navy town, relying on the massive Norfolk Naval Base and related installations to pump dollars and jobs into the economy. For almost half a century, Norfolk has been looking for ways to stem the tide of white flight and bring the middle class back to the city. Since the early 1950s, huge chunks of the city have been bulldozed; many lots remain empty, awaiting private-sector investment that has never materialized. At the moment, the city is leveraged to the hilt in a variety of downtown renewal schemes, including a suburban-style mall supported with $100 million in loans and free infrastructure.

In East Ocean View, bungalows, duplexes, and brick apartment buildings sit on a grid of streets on a peninsula sandwiched by the Chesapeake Bay and one of its estuaries. For decades, people have speculated that it could be a prime piece of real estate. In late 1993, not without controversy, the Norfolk city council approved a plan concocted by the housing authority to purchase 100 acres. The bulldozers have already bit into a few of the roughly 350 buildings that make up more than 1,500 homes. The city hopes that a new neighborhood, aimed at the middle and upper classes, will both rid the city of social problems and help its tax base. It’s undeniable that the present neighborhood has its troubles. Prostitutes loiter at certain intersections; young men in bulky jackets handle a brisk drug trade with passing motorists. But as residents will tell you, it’s one of the few places in the Norfolk metropolitan area where a working-class family can afford an apartment within a block or two of the beach. It’s also one of the more integrated neighborhoods, about two-thirds white, a third black, mixed pretty evenly. The homes range from neatly tended to boarded-Lip and abandoned.

The locals include people like Barbara Caffee, who with her husband has owned a house there for 30 years and raised a family. Her small home includes a basement they added themselves, plus an addition where her mother lives. Caffee, who is president of the neighborhood’s civic league, says flatly that they won’t leave. “I would understand eminent domain if they were going to put in schools or roads,” she says. “But to take down our house to build a home for someone else? I don’t understand that.”

The Caffees are among the few home owners there. Most residents rent, including Claudette Durclen, a 27-year-old nurse’s assistant who shares an apartment with her eight-year-old daughter. Durden says her biggest concern about leaving is her daughter. “She has friends across the street, friends out back, and friends across the road,” the young mother says, pointing from her balcony. “It would be hard having to start all over.”

Duany’s design for East Ocean View sharply reduces the total population of the neighborhood, a paradoxical path for neotraditionalists, who usually extol the advantages and efficiency of high density. Instead of 1,500 homes, Duany’s village has between 400 and 600, ranging in price from $70,000 to $500,000 or more – beyond the reach of 95 percent of the current residents. The new streets and buildings are meticulously laid out and designed. In classic neotraditional styles, the proposed town houses and fancy homes sit close to the street, side by side. About the only things the plan retains from the existing neighborhood are the trees; they’re needed to lend the new development some character and to provide a windbreak against ocean breezes.

Since the city is not using federal money, it is not required to assist residents in relocation. The housing authority has promised three months of free rent, and will bump any resident who requests it to the top of the public housing waiting list. But the city has been quite explicit in its hopes that some of these people will just go away. When the housing authority first unveiled the project, it included an economic report estimating that roughly a third of the neighborhood’s citizens would leave town, thus saving the city money on social services and police.

The city council approved the project a year before Duany came to town. But partly because of the controversy, city officials looked to Duany for approval of their plans to tear down the neighborhood. One official described Duany as “the doctor” with ultimate authority to decide whether to save or amputate the “diseased leg.” During a week-long charrette held in a senior citizens center, Duany discussed saving a few homes, but decided against any guarantees. A completely clean canvas, Duany opined, was more valuable than saving homes for a few lucky people.

In the course of the charrette, Duany did not duck complaints from those being forced to move. Elderly couples sought him out, and he listened patiently to what they had to say. Then he explained why their homes had to be torn down to build a better, more beautiful neighborhood.

Duany’s argument rests on two main points, one financial, the other architectural. The most important consideration, he says, is that the new neighborhood would raise the city’s tax base. The sacrifice of low-income residents is for the common good of the city.

“I’d rather it wasn’t the case, I must say,” Duany says. “But on the other hand, affordable housing is not what cities need. Because they don’t pay taxes. They bankrupt cities. That’s the problem with Philadelphia right now. The whole trick is to bring the middle class back to the city.”

Of course, cities need stronger tax bases and new ways to stem the tide of middle-class flight. Many of the original urban renewal programs of the 1950s and 1960s were designed for that purpose. But there’s no evidence that such programs work any better now than they did then. Clear-cutting a neighborhood often exacerbates social problems by splitting up supportive relationships and scattering poor residents into new and unfamiliar surroundings. Sometimes, that means the streets. Some of East Ocean View residents are refugees from past urban renewal schemes. Now they face the same thing all over again.

Duany’s support for the project seems to clash with certain core values of the New Urbanists, many of whom are inspired by the philosophy of Jane Jacobs and her methodical critique of urban renewal, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Further, Duany’s New Urban vision for East Ocean View comes at the expense of what is already an urban neighborhood. It’s got a street grid, with a variety of building types and a mix of incomes. One of the city’s best restaurants, and virtually the only building likely to be spared, is in East Ocean View. The buildings are not all situated according to strict neotraditionalist tenets, but the basic parts are there. The neighborhood is urban not only in its buildings, but also in the way the community interacts. This is not some cul-de-sac haven of isolated citizens. It’s the kind of neighborhood where you see a group of friends in T shirts, their young children in tow, heading to the beach with a six-pack of beer to enjoy a summer afternoon.

Outsiders often express surprise that the city is pursuing such an old-fashioned strategy. But Norfolk is something of an anomaly, as David Rice, executive director of the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, freely admits. “Cities lost enthusiasm for redevelopment in the Sixties and Seventies,” says Rice, almost boasting. “Except for Norfolk. We pressed on.”

It’s hard to see what advantage Norfolk has gained by this persistence. Likewise, it’s hard to tell how Duany reconciles his professed faith in urbanism with his actions in East Ocean View. His flip architectural assessment of the homes people are being turned out of seems narrow and ill considered. Cities are not defined by buildings alone; they are made up of an intricate web of relationships- physical, social, economic, cultural- that are rooted to places. The trouble with cities is that there are so many forces tearing these relationships apart. You would think architects would have learned by now to be healers, not wreckers.