When I was a kid, I was awfully fond of a nearby shopping center built like a European village, with winding streets, quaint shops and restaurants on the ground floor, and apartments upstairs. It's an enduring disappointment that it didn't catch on, replaced instead by a lot of interchangeable air-conditioned malls with interchangeable chain stores.
I think these are the apartments I lived in part-time a few years ago, when I was spending so much time working in Houston that it was worthwhile renting a small space to spend most weeknights. If not, they're much the same, and in the same area: just southwest of Houston's business district. No bigger than a hotel room, but much less depressing, and cheaper in the long run.
Back in the early 2000s, a friend of mine from Maryland took me to see a subdivision structured along similar lines to the ones you're talking about. It had apartments, and on the ground floor it had retail, especially 'quaint shops and restaurants,' but also some other kinds of commercial businesses that might even employ a lot of the residents. The idea was that you could eliminate the need to commute for many suburban residents, so that like residents of traditional cities you wouldn't need to own a car.
ReplyDeleteAt the time, this sort of purpose-designed suburbanity was thought to be a hot new trend, and this neighborhood was one of the first of its trend. It was supposed to cut down on emissions, and increase the pleasure of life by eliminating hateful, boring commutes.
My friend, a devout liberal, was excited to show it to me when I came to visit. She made a point of driving me over there to see it.
"I want to show you something you don't have down South," she told me. "It's called an 'integrated community.'"
"I want to show you something you don't have down South," she told me. "It's called an 'integrated community.'"
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For those who wish to argue residential integration, have at it.
"I want to show you something you don't have down South," she told me. "It's called an 'integrated community.'"
ReplyDeleteA Brown University study ranked Black-White Segregation in 50 Metro Areas with Largest Black Populations in 2010. Nine of the ten Metro Areas with the highest amount of Black-White segregation were in the North. The only southern Metro Area in the "top 10" was Miami-Miami Beach.
For a long time, mixed use developments were out of fashion, and so you saw almost none developed. In the last decade or so, it's become the ideal, and in Los Angeles, at least, they're everywhere now, and it's brought a good deal of life back to parts of the city that had been rather run down (although, tax incentives and the development of light rail/subway lines are also involved in that revitalization). I think it's great for young single people and couples, and older people, but it's lacking when it comes to family life, in my opinion. For a family, the single family dwelling is still preferable, in my opinion.
ReplyDeleteBack in the early 2000's my wife and I attended a Christmas concert in one of those "integrated communities". It was exactly as you describe, shops in walking distance from your front door, all manner of stores. So your acquaintance in Maryland clearly was letting her regional bias show through. Because if South Carolina isn't considered the South, I'll eat this keyboard.
ReplyDeleteIt's true that the apartments are aimed at adults, not children. Kids do grow up in urban areas, though, don't they?--with shops and cafes all around? I'd have loved it when I was a kid. We spent a summer in Berkeley when I was 12 (1968!), which was a formative experience: an urban scene that was nothing at all like suburban or even downtown Houston. Back then, there was little or no sense of hazard, so I was allowed to run wild. There must have been drugs around, but I never saw any, nor did anyone ever hassle me on the street. It was the first time I'd ever seen men sporting long hair. There were food co-ops, "People's Park" signs, head shops, the whole nine yards.
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