home:
table of contents:
******
the writing
on the wall:
what happened to public art? the people are reclaiming it from the state.
******
who's the wise guy?
creeping suburbanization!
Around the mid-90’s, urban observers began to notice a very encouraging trend, the ‘return of retail’ to the inner city. Back then, many residents, especialy in minorty neighborhoods, had to travel miles for even basic services, such as supermarkets. The riots of the 60’s had scared businessmen away from those places, and despite government redevlopment efforts, no incentive seemed enough to make either chains or independent operators want to return.
The mindset of an entire generation wrote off the inner city, and we had to wait a couple of decades for new people to come along and look at it in a different way—not as an insoluble problem, but an opportunity. That, in fact, is what it was all the time: the biggest underserved market in America, and the biggest unexploited retail opportunity on earth. Inner-city Americans had untold billions a year available for local shopping and services, and no place to spend it.
Eventually, the market figured that out. Inner-city retail came roaring back in the 90’s. Among the first to pick up on it were the drug chains, Walgreen’s, Rite-Aid, CVS and the rest. Sears started building small hardware stores, Blockbuster video came in big, finally some supermarket chains and even banks arrived on the scene. With some financial assistance from government, cities and local development corporations built inner-city strip malls in surprising locations: Model T Plaza in Detroit’s slum-suburb of Highland Park, on the site of the original Ford plant, Church Square along the shabbiest stretch of Euclid Avenue in Cleveland.
Eventually the big dinosaurs showed up. K-Mart, Wal-Mart, all the Marts. All the big boxes and category killers and power centers. Within a decade, mostly private initiative had done much to redress the balance in inner-city commerce. Unfortunately, that’s not all there is to the story. Is it possible to redevelop the inner city and leave it worse off than it was before you began? American ingenuity is certainly making a go of it.
This is the current phenomenon of 'suburbanization' in the inner city, the reduction of downtown fringes and neighborhood business strips to cheap suburban auto-scale hells. You’ve seen it happen in your own town. The drug chain grabs a corner location where an elegant but underutilized building had stood. Blockbuster video appears nearby, or a franchise muffler man, then maybe a small strip mall unit. In heavy traffic locations, big boxes may start to cluster. Before long, only a few of the old, street-front buildings remain, and the neighborhood main street is almost indistinguishable from an auto strip in the suburbs. If it’s a strip mall or big boxes, they’ll rip a hole in the urban fabric so wide that neighborhoods who were once, well, neighbors, can no longer even see each other. It discourages walking, when we should be encouraging it.
We can learn a lot about what’s wrong about our cities, and why, from examining this sorry story. The first lesson is that modern retailers and developers think in formulas. For them, there’s only one way of doing it: the most profitable, tried and tested way, the way everyone else does it. These people couldn't conceive of locating in an existing building, even when the city or neighborhood groups can offer grants and assistance towards getting it fixed up. Explain that they can pick up rental income from apartments or offices above, and they’re not interested. Throwing up another of their cookie-cutter sheds, surrounded by asphalt parking lots, is the only way they know.
But we cannot hold developers and store owners to a civilized standard of design if the general public itself doesn’t complain. As this site insists over and over, good city-building depends on a common vision; it depends on everyone. Smarter cities, such as Boston and Chicago, have been working against the trend with new design guidelines, but too many others are either so dumb, or so desperate for any kind of development that they’re prepared to allow the old commercial districts that should be the hearts of reviving neighborhoods to be turned into no-man's land.
So much has been accomplished over the last twenty years. Americans are learning once again what good city-building means, and the New Urbanism movement is giving them examples to contemplate from coast to coast. Still, somehow, it doesn’t seem to be sinking in everywhere. Have a look at how they build in St. Louis:
New development on Martin Luther King Blvd at Grand Avenue. Photos from an excellent website devoted to local affairs, Urban Review STL.
Any mayor who tolerates redevelopment like this has rocks in his head.
The solution to this kind of urban desecration may be simpler and less painful than anyone suspects. Planners and scholars have proposed ornate new schemes of zoning and other land-use regulation to discourage big boxes and strip malls in traditional urban areas. It could be easier. Zoning reform is certainly cities’ number one task, but we want to make it smaller, less onerous and less corrupting, not just pile another layer of regulation on the unholy mess that's already there. In a design-based system of regulation, we could do away with most of it. We could inform developers that their lives have suddenly become much easier, with the caveat that the commons maintains just a few iron-clad rights: forcing them to place their facades on the building line, to avoid blank walls facing streets, and telling them where thay might make 'curb cuts' (auto entrances).
So any new building would be required to have its main access on the sidewalk, in the traditional-style. Parking would have to be pushed to the rear. Could it all really be this simple? Hell, maybe!
There is in fact a mountain of public perception to climb. Bad building is welcome everywhere. In the back of our minds, trash like this is the image of something suburban, modern and safe. Customers feel much better about coming to such a place than they would walking the sidewalks to an equally inviting shop in an old building on the street line, with the parking in the rear.
That is an artifact of our times, and the right response is to fight it, not give in to it. Here, city authority is going to have to take the lead, and enforce good city-building practices even when many of the citizens, and many of the politicians, will be wondering why.
Here's an idea of what the rest of the MLK Blvd commercial district looks like, again from Urban Review STL. Two or three of the abandoned buildings in the center of the photo could equal the floor space of a modern store. They would have to be gutted, re-roofed and completely refitted. A private -public partnership would be required to save these buildings, and the store would have to be convinced that it could coexist with tenants (residents or offices) upstairs. The store would need an ironclad assurance that the building owner would keep up the place, create safe parking and delivery areas, and provide building services to the highest professional standards.
Who said it would be easy? But this is the kind of hard nut that scores of local development corporations try to crack every day. Now and then they succeed, and if they had more help, their job would be easier.
The suburbanizing model, to the contrary, assumes that all these buildings will soon disappear, to be replaced by more strip mall developments, with the spaces in between filled in by public-sector lower-income housing projects, or maybe suburban-style single-family homes. The inner city's job is to thwart the suburbanizing model, and show retailers and developers a way to do it better—to make a real, walking-scale, traditional St. Louis business strip out of it. Perhaps these buildings cannot be saved. They may not be as solid as they look (the brick is probably only veneer), and their architectural and historical value is relatively small; they do stand, however, as examples of how a commercial ensemble in North Side St. Louis should look. Try to imagine them as they looked in their days of prosperity, fronting a clean, tree-lined sidewalk. At the very least, they can be an inspiration to the new buildings that come to replace them.
