And in 20 or 30 or 50 or 100 year, some of our descendants will walk/drive/fly/float through it all and wonder why we never built anything to last, or anything beautiful.
Beautiful and comfortable neighborhoods ARE additional resources for ourselves, our families and our communities.
We might, we just dont know that we are building them. Assuming today's nice neighborhoods are the old ones, I would argue that they escaped a period of modernization. I think we look back at our recent creations and always think about how we can tear them down and rebuild. The neighborhoods that escape this cycle of "tear down and rebuild" and luckily slip into the status of "vintage charm" suddenly hold more caché and may even get protected status by their city or municipality.
The post-war expansion was terribly inefficient. And a lot of what was defined as an increase in quality of life two generations ago (pave everything!) turns out to look like a decrease in quality of life to our generation (suburban sprawl).
If you analyze the ongoing costs of maintaining our urban environment, vs paving everything in the first place, you see that it's easy to pave more than you can afford to maintain. That's us, and it's not just pavement, it's a whole lot of things.
I like this blog / podcast for talking about how we can avoid making decisions like the ones that got us here: http://www.strongtowns.org/
“These older places (the homes being built today) will then be populated by lower class people with fewer resources and less status thereby reinforcing the perception that it’s best to move on if at all possible. These are fungible, forgettable, disposable places that rapidly age and are then left to quietly decay.“
I disagree: Many of the most attractive neighborhoods to me were built recently.
I used to love walking around the area in Palo Alto around University Ave, on the residential side of Middlefield. Many of those buildings are new.
When I could buy, and then build, a house in Massachusetts, I chose recently-built, upscale neighborhoods. The difference, compared to most neighborhoods, is that the houses are more expensive, and built to a higher quality. (I also favored neighborhoods with restaurants in walking distance. This is possible, even in suburbia.)
I suspect that the older neighborhoods the article favors are just the upscale ones. The cheaper neighborhoods built centuries ago didn't last.
This is a pretty direct result of the atomization of the family and the lack of meaningful community in my opinion (both of which are pretty strongly tied to lack of walkability).
If you're a depressed 30 something, why the heck would you want to inherit a roof tiling business in Suburbia, South Carolina over going to live in a real city where you might actually meet people your own age who are well adjusted.
This is just us seeing the collapse of small car-centric towns in real time, but from the first moment, we always knew these places weren't sustainable.
Nice neighborhoods are not built but grown, pruned and grown in cycles of fortune that seem good in retrospect but aren’t within human capability to foresee predictably.
It's sad, because America is so large even in each city, it wouldn't be hard to have one suburb or neighborhood dedicated to "family friendly slow streets" and another elsewhere to "walking retirement community", etc.
Instead we get nearly identical developments repeated over and over and over again.
The town I live in now, Bend, Oregon is barely over 100 years old, which is pretty new even for the US. And yet the downtown is still fairly walkable, if perhaps not quite as much as an Italian town.
The really bad stuff only really started coming out after we got zoning and then accelerated with post WWII development.
Can we make something just as walkable and nice as those Italian cities? Maybe not, but we can certainly walk back some of the worst excesses of the late 20th century.
That's the current situation, but what about the past several decades? The article claims that very few attractive neighborhoods were built in the US post WWII.
This is _it_. There are so many good examples of dense but verdant urbanism in the US. But they all predate cars.
Funny thing is, people still will pay top dollar to either live in these neighborhoods, or visit them on vacation (Savanah, Charleston, New Orleans, Ashville, ...).
It's a complete tragedy, the answer is right there. Just do the same thing they did then, but today.
That is ultimately a problem of scarcity. No one is building walkable communities, so the only remaining walkable communities are the "historic" ones that, surprise, everyone wants to live in because the alternative sucks. Elastic demand, inelastic supply.
All those old nice neighborhoods were also built by and for the wealthy. The lower classes lived in squalid tenements and slums that are now mostly gone.
Funny. My grandparents moved into one of those neighborhoods (Peoplestown) ~1920. I remember eating figs and pecans from the trees they planted and nurtured.
It’s amazing when you walk those streets — abandoned train tracks, memorials to Black churches burned during the Jim
Crow era, artwork long abandoned. For all it’s lack of design at least the city still has immense green space.
> i then lived in a 1st generation walkable semi-suburb w/ small plots/old (1910s) houses
If the houses were that era, it was a "residential neighborhood." It likely originally had some amenities like corner grocery stores that were gone by the time you lived there that made it even more walkable.
Depending on where this is, you can think of it as generations of people have already picked out and settled in the naturally safe spots. What's left then are the less desirable, potentially riskier locations.
When the next demographic buys their first homes, they, too, are likely to want to live in the neighborhood into which they bought, and not into one with an increasing population density.
Beautiful and comfortable neighborhoods ARE additional resources for ourselves, our families and our communities.
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