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Old Urbanism: Why Not Break Up New-Town Development?

Exhibit B: Artist’s rendering of the proposed Wesmont Station TOD, Wood-Ridge, N.J. Source: WSJ.com

The WSJ has the story of Wesmont Station, a new mixed-use, transit-oriented development in Wood-Ridge, New Jersey.  It looks nice, and I’m glad to see that it’s going ahead.

But, a rant: The more I watch, the more I see the ambition of projects on these kinds of tabula rasa sites as an indictment of the maddening American land use regime that governs neighborhoods.  Consider three alternatives: Exhibit A is the assortment of ideas and practices that have become calcified in the Byzantine processes of local government.  Some work, others don’t, but we go with them as a package because they look right on the official map.  Exhibit B is Wesmont Station, and similar developments: what’s possible when the standard sixteen layers of local-government approval can be reduced to the blessing of a single, politically-supported superblock.  The Wood-Ridge project is planned for the sprawling grounds of a former factory.  In Edgewater, NJ, a new city has appeared since the mid-1990s on a strip of disused industrial sites along the Hudson River.  A generation ago, Battery Park City rose a few miles south, where piers had once extended into the same waterway.  On a small scale, projects like these are America’s new towns.

The Exhibit B examples are well and good, but there’s also a potential Exhibit C: an artful zoning approach to building a new neighborhood that has a similarly planned and efficient layout, but which could at once be more individualized, and yield a higher quality product.  More individualized, because it would not require large developers to purchase multimillion-dollar sites, and to develop those all at once.  Instead, a third approach could establish the legal framework of an authentic neighborhood, and allow individuals and small businesses to incrementally fill in their respective pieces of a grand puzzle.  While controlling for nuisances and incompatibilities, it could provide those myriad participants enough flexibility to customize their land uses to their own individual needs.  Thus, the end result could attain a higher quality, and more value, because it would yield a physical town that was at once richer in variety and more reflective of its people than any large, one-shot deal.  In short, an artful zoning approach to new towns could re-create the actual process by which towns and cities were traditionally built, but with the protective elements conferred by the legal authority of comprehensive zoning.

For the time being, it’s good that AvalonBay and other developers are moving projects like Wesmont Station.  It’s progress.  It’s just that I’d also like to see the organic town-building process rediscovered.  It could yield much more than its inevitably boring imitations.  Right now, most local zoning laws could still be described as Exhibit A, while exceptions are made for Exhibit-B proposals when the right political muscle is exercised.  What we need, though, is for more communities to embrace a more visionary and democratic approach to town planning, and to move toward the artful zoning approach of Exhibit C.

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NYC Zoning Specs Web Site

An example from the site. Source: NYC.gov

The NYC Planning Department has a web site with a very thorough presentation of the city’s zoning specifications.  I like how its drop-down menu allows you to select any of the city’s 53 zoning categories, or any of its special use districts, and get its basic information.  The layout is clean and straightforward, and the specs tables are concise, illustrated with form-based graphics (to the extent possible), and supplemented with neighborhood photos.

NYC zoning is still deeply, unrepentantly Euclidean.  But this method of presenting separated uses helps to cut through some of the legalistic cobwebs that often accompany an empirical approach to urban land use law.  (Think: a lawyer or planner burning the midnight oil; an unfurled map on a library table; and a heavy binder of obtuse statutory language.)  Proper respect to the NYC Planning Department for using its resources to shed light on what is often an arcane and inaccessible area of the law.

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Spotlight: Tralee, Ireland

This is another amazing town.  The curved facades, the streets that trace the contours of the land, the stone walls, the variety of paint colors: a lot of these design elements are similar to the ones in Ouro Preto; and both are also upland towns, rather than ports.  (Tralee does have a basin with access to the sea in its far southwest.)  One important difference: unlike Ouro, whose continental roots have its streets converging on a paved plaza, Tralee is laid out more in the English style (apologies to Uncle Don and other Irish patriots), with smaller green squares worked into its grid, and a large park set aside on its outskirts.

Most of the attached buildings in Tralee appear to be built on the standard 20′-25′ (7m) wide lots– the same as in New York City or anywhere else.  (On a random note, the forward-pitched roofs on these buildings, which seem so classically Irish, are also common on a certain period of the houses in Newark and Philadelphia.)  Meanwhile, the setbacks of the detached houses are modest, the gardens are often bounded by stone walls, and the lot coverages are substantial, all contributing to a sense of enclosure on the greener blocks leading away from the town center.

Photos remain the copyright of Google, and are used in accordance with the principles of Fair Use.  Explore the streets of Tralee, yourself, here.

The Mall.

Spa Road.

Russel and Rock Streets.

Rock Street.

Lower Castle Street.

Ivy Terrace, and the Kerry Co. Museum

Denny Street.

Ashe Street.

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New Jersey Courts: Land Use Decision

A notable unreported land use decision came down from the New Jersey Courts this week.  In Signature Communities v. Red Bank ZBA, the Appellate Division rejected an appeal by the owners of Red Bank’s Colony House, who had sued in response to the Board’s refusal to grant a variance for their property, pursuant to N.J.S.A. 40:55D-70(d).  The 1960s apartment building at issue was nonconforming to a number of Red Bank’s current requirements for the site, and when the owners sought approval for a plan to renovate the building, and to shuffle around its bedroom arrangements, they hit a snag with their pre-existing shortage of parking spaces per unit.  The Appellate Division affirmed the Board’s decision:

In our judgment, the Board’s rejection of plaintiff’s assertions was not arbitrary, capricious or unreasonable.  The record shows that the renovated structure will have nineteen one-bedroom units and forty-nine two-bedroom units.  As we have explained, the [Residential Site Improvement Standards] requires 132 parking spaces for such a building.  The Board reasonably found that the number of parking spaces proposed by plaintiff was substantially deficient when measured against the number required by RSIS.

It’s interesting that neither the Red Bank ZBA nor the Appellate Division appears to have given much weight to Signature Communities’ arguments that (1) the neighborhood’s inherent walkability and (2) its access to public transportation should mitigate against the state’s generic parking-space criteria.  I’m not familiar with the specifics of this case, or with the Red Bank waterfront, but this concerns me.  In the effort to push back against sprawl, these are important caveats, and the rigid application of parking-space requirements can kill important development projects that could otherwise be the building blocks of good urban communities.

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The Romance of Public Space

Picture this iconic moment in a five-acre Bed, Bath, and Beyond parking lot, somewhere in Central New Jersey.

For Valentine’s Day, Leonard Lopate interviewed the author, Ariel Sabar, about his research on the role of public space in chance meetings between strangers.  The audio is here.  From WNYC.org:

Ariel Sabar, whose own parents met in Washington Square Park, tells the true stories of nine ordinary couples—from the 1940s to the present—who married after first meeting in one of New York City’s iconic public spaces. He tells those stories in Heart of the City: Nine Stories of Love and Serendipity on the Streets of New York.

It’s interesting to think about how much value we could add to our suburban communities with land use codes that emphasized the importance of real, shared public spaces.  The interview discussion hints at this a little bit toward the end.

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The Streets of New York in 1766

New York in 1766-67.

A 1770 map of New York City, including the waterfronts of Brooklyn and New Jersey, turned up at the Brooklyn Historical Society.  The Times has the story, with a viewable scan of the restoration.

Given that they’re pushing the visuals, the zoom could be a lot better.  But even at this resolution, one can easily make out that the street pattern below Chambers Street remains virtually unchanged after more than 240 years; and that much of the grid of the Lower East Side was already laid out before 1776.  Note also the historic route of Fulton Street in Brooklyn, connecting Fulton Ferry (immortalized by Whitman) with today’s east-west Fulton Street via the current north-south route of Cadman Plaza West.

Here’s a Google pinpoint map of the same area, today.  Update: here‘s a much higher resolution scan of Ratzer’s depiction of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights.

Another update: while the article tells us that the map dates to 1770, the legend indicates that the land was actually surveyed in 1766-67, placing its snapshot about a decade before the Declaration of Independence– and in the same year as the first classes at Rutgers.