Late last year, I traveled to a conference to meet one of my favorite writers, Matthew Crawford. Crawford has a PhD in Political Philosophy and is best known for Shop Class as Soulcraft, his meditation on the dignity of manual work, and how trade work—the act of building or fixing something—is inherently character building.

Spending a few days around Crawford put me in the mood to dig back into political classics writers I studied in college, like de Tocqueville and Nietzsche, who wrestled with a question that still shapes our cities today:

There are a lot of people who hate homebuilders. Or, more specifically, there are a lot of terminally online people who seem obsessed with hating homebuilders.

You see it in every internet comment thread about development, every neighborhood listserv, every “concerned citizens” meeting. Case after case, where builders take risks, their critics frantically engulf civic conversations, moralizing about the heinousness of the act of homebuilding itself.

Read more

Written By Bruzenskey Bois

This piece was originally printed in Issue 2 of Southern Urbanism Quarterly.

In 1887, the tiny town of Eatonville, Florida, was incorporated as one of the first all-Black municipalities in the United States. Over time, it grew in importance if not size. It gave its residents power, dignity, and community. It was the home of famed Harlem Renaissance author Zora Neale Hurston. It contained a preparatory school for Black children founded with the help of Booker T. Washington. Today, an interstate runs through the middle of its 1.6-square-mile footprint. That school no longer exists, its plot of land now slated for a development that local citizens feel disconnected from. The history of Eatonville is storied, but its fate is uncertain. And it isn’t alone—countless Black towns have suffered similar or worse fates. Still, there are steps we can take to preserve both our history and the cities that reflect it.

More than ever, it’s essential that we ensure the existence of communities, institutions, and programming that will educate our youth about Black history. Between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, more than a thousand Black towns were established across the country. Few have survived, though. Most have been forgotten or are mere ashes of their former selves. Just look at Manhattan. Don’t get me wrong—I love Central Park—I just wish that Seneca Village, the largely Black town that once existed beneath it, would have been integrated into the site.

To our dear governor, I would say: Our history deserves to be remembered.

And that’s not all. To add insult to injury, places like my great state of Florida are taking steps to delete the history of Black towns from textbooks. To our dear governor, I would say: Our history deserves to be remembered. Think of Fort Mose, which in 1738 became the site of the first legally sanctioned free Black settlement in what’s now the US. Or John Horse, a Seminole freedom fighter of African descent who in 1849 helped found a Black Seminole community in Oklahoma where small groups built homes and cultivated the land.

These stories abound. But are they heard? Are they known by heart? Another Black History Month has come and gone, and I don’t know.

Recently, I had a conversation with my nephew, a fifth-grader, regarding Black History Month and what he learns in school. He told me about routine, about hearing the names Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks over and over. “But what do you know about Black history?” His response came with an eye roll, because he could predict his uncle would be asking him that question. “In school, I learned that we were slaves and then fought for civil rights in this country,” he said. When I pressed him, he added that he hears me talk about Black history at home too—“all the time.” I was eager to ask what he retains from what I say, but I was interrupted. “When I’m in class,” he said, “the kids make remarks about me being a monkey and laugh at the fact that my people were slaves.” My nephew said all this with a sense of annoyance. “I just ignore them like you said.”

We have to take it upon ourselves to educate our youth. If we don’t, we continue to lose our greatest asset: our towns.

In the face of stories like my nephew’s, there can be no more waiting around for someone else to give Black history its due. We have to take it upon ourselves to educate our youth. If we don’t, we continue to lose our greatest asset: our towns. In thriving Black neighborhoods, dollars can be circulated back into the community. Many of our cities were taken away from us in the name of urban renewal or plain old white supremacy. Today, they continue to get taken, just by a different name. Even after the advent of Black Lives Matter, our trauma continues thanks to everything from bad policing to vigilantism to colonization—I mean, gentrification.

Some Black towns have been able to defend themselves and conserve their legacy, at least to one extent or another. Back in Eatonville, you find one of the success stories. In 1987, N.Y. Nathiri—Executive Director of the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community—fought a planned highway widening that would have turned a two-lane road into a five-lane concrete expanse. The change would have bisected the town once again, and coupled with the addition of I-4, it arguably would have spelled the end. Stopping it was a victory, but the challenges keep coming. For community leaders like Nathiri who are skeptical of the planned development, the project threatens “the erasure of Eatonville’s ability to create its own future.”

We can take action. But first, we have to understand what we’re up against. As far as I can tell, three tactics deserve much of the blame for ruining Black towns. They’re the oldest tricks in the book, and their damage must be undone:

1) Building highways directly through neighborhoods and towns. We hardly need to cite examples here. They are everywhere. Take Hayti in Durham, North Carolina, for just one.

2) Failing to provide adequate infrastructure and sustainability. Look at Jackson, Mississippi, which as a city was without clean water in the year 2022.

3) Taking away the right to rebuild. Areas like Eatonville that were destroyed in the name of progress were effectively sterilized when they were stripped of their ability to heal.

But there are also solutions that would help us reclaim our towns:

1) Government agencies can offer an infinite right to rebuild. Reparations or no reparations, these rights must come first.

2) Black towns can also grow through annexation. As Town Manager of Tullahassee, Oklahoma, Cymone Davis was able to increase the land boundaries for the town—the first all-black district in the state.

3) Missing Middle codes and the removal of exclusionary zoning must become standard reforms.

Through all this, the more we can do to understand the placemaking process that will help bolster and revive Black towns, the more we can participate in that process, and the more we can connect with other like minds in this space, the closer we can get to combating systemic racism. The Congressional Black Caucus for New Urbanism (CBCNU) aims to do just that. For example, in Tullahassee, CBCNU has launched the Rebuild Tullahassee campaign. The effort will be used to plan and implement several projects throughout the town, including but not limited to: public art (namely, the Lincoln Street mural); creative use of existing buildings (such as town gym façade improvements and site rehabilitation); and historic preservation (like renaming streets for five Black women who had some influence in Tullahassee). Alongside us, other individuals who are placing an emphasis on Black towns include the Historic Black Towns and Settlements Alliance (HBTSA). Part of their work involves partnering with historically black colleges and universities to engage in various community development projects.

The conversation on Black towns is only beginning. As we collectively keep educating, more people will see that this cause is real, that progress can happen. You too can join the conversation and help ensure Black history lives on not just in memory but also all around.

Bruzenskey Bois is a real estate developer, property manager, speaker, and advocate based in Tampa, Florida. He is the co-founder of People Places Management, LLC, and manages over $12 million in real estate assets. Additionally, he is the co-founder of the Congressional Black Caucus for New Urbanism and of Bois & Peters, LLC, a real estate development and consulting firm.

Southern Urbanism has partnered with Building Optimism and Building Culture to bring you the best stories from the people who build our cities. In his most recent essay, Coby Lefkowitz explains what we must do to bring back inspiring development.

Much of our contemporary built environment suffers from being overly utilitarian. For a select few places, there’s an embarrassment of cultural riches, amenities, and exciting things to see and do. But this isn’t the case in most of our cities and towns.

In most communities, we have a box that we sleep in, a box we drive to the office or school in, and then, once we’re there, a box to work or study in. At lunch, we often go to a generic box that can be found in one of several dozen cities, and repeat the same thing every day. Occasionally, but less and less frequently, there may be some other box that we go to the movies in, see a show in, or go out to eat in. These places are often devoid of any ornamentation, idiosyncratic details, or contextual elements that would ground them in a specific community. They’re hastily thrown up structures made of cheap materials, with sometimes cheap detailing, that allow for the bare minimum exterior experience, concentrating efforts on insular spaces (if they even do that). These places do not elevate our collective experience, and threaten our psychological well-being.

This doesn't mean that the homes, offices, restaurants, or third spaces (to the extent that they even exist) in our cities and towns aren’t nice, but just that most places in America neglect a communal and street level experience altogether. Our private spaces are valued much more highly than our public ones, and it shows. As most communities have been redesigned, or designed from the ground up to be driven through at fast speeds on cars, there isn’t much detail considered to what the structures look like. A plain box with faux architectural design elements looks the same as an intricately designed structure of the same shape when driving by at 60 miles an hour. Of course, when one is moving by at walking or biking speed, the details of a structure are more apparent.

Instead of reinvesting into the quality and character of our communities, we’ve value engineered them down to the lowest possible viable design, thinking that design itself is superfluous. “Who cares about higher quality materials, considered massing, good urban fabric, or ornamentation?” the average participant in the built environment might ask, continuing, “Life seems to be working perfectly fine now without all of that. We don’t do that here, and based on my subjective quality of life, we get it right.” We travel around the world to experience these exact places, but for some reason sneer at the possibility of creating them in our own backyard. Those places we seek out have spirit, personality, grandeur, and excitement sufficiently high enough for us to spend thousands of dollars just to get a few scarce days in their presence. Surely this is a more outrageous proposition than making the building that is already going to be constructed next door a little bit better.

There was a level of craftsmanship that transcended mere ornament. Buildings were adorned with art of the highest quality, including statuary, frizes, mosaics, paintings (The Sistene Chapel in the Vatican, famously), for few reasons other than the pride of the benefactors and artisans who worked on them. While there were certainly other motivations beyond pride, like advertising one’s wealth, power, or piety, the public—and posterity—have been able to enjoy these treasures. While garish by today’s standards, regular places have effectively become museums in situ for many to enjoy that have compounded advantage over much time (centuries, not mere seconds or hours in our culture of incessant instant gratification), as opposed to 0s and 1s in trust accounts managed in Switzerland, New York, or online.

While highly ambitious buildings and environs may cost more money than the utilitarian alternative (though not always, especially when the infrastructural and taxation consequences of a sprawling car dependent society are factored in), they play a critical role in communities. Our buildings and places symbolize what we value. They tell the story of who we are. A city of richly adorned churches or mosques may be pious, where funds are constantly reinvested into those structures to create ever more aspirational halls of worship. A city home to many theaters and galleries is one that welcomes the arts with open arms. And somewhere that pushes the bar on design can be seen as valuing innovation, dynamism, and embracing a more optimistic future.

What story do our prevailing development patterns of homogenous strip malls with the same chain stores, mega highways, and acres of tract homes say about us? That we worship cars? That our communities could easily be replicated with identical structures that are equally as placeless? That we’re cheap? That we hate the environment? That we value corporations over the idiosyncrasies of local businesses within a unique neighborhood fabric? Few people would say these things about their rich networks of social relationships and intimate connections in their community. But that’s precisely the story their built environment is telling. We no longer translate our intangible ambitions, successes, and stories into the broader built environment. It’s as though we’ve severed the very soul of our communities.

It’s true that we don’t need anything more substantial than a simple box to live in. Everything that doesn’t directly contribute to survival is, strictly speaking, superfluous. But what kind of life is one that accepts the bare minimum? Certainly not one that has any relation to the long march of prosperity humanity has made over millennia. With this march, we’ve mobilized out of bare subsistence, and demanded more of our world. Even the most ascetic worship at the feet of grand monuments. Since the Great Pyramids of Giza, to the Ziggurats of Ur, and through skyscraping medieval churches, we’ve always sought to reach higher, express ourselves more completely, and give to posterity that which may be limited in our own day. These buildings and places come to define us for generations, and represent a power greater than us as singular individuals.

We might call these magical, or fantastical structures. They push so far beyond the quotidian norm, and have the capacity to inspire us so deeply, that they feel in some way separate realms from our own. When defining the word fantastical (strange and wonderful, like something out of a story), The Cambridge Dictionary adds an example for further context; “Fantastical Buddhist temples and medieval castles cling to Bhutan's misty valleys.”

You can feel yourself in this setting, and understand the narrative of the place.

Would our lives not be improved if we had more of this sort of enchantment? Is life not more fun when what’s around the next corner is not only unexpected, but full of wonder? Whether a fleeting moment that gives us a temporary reprieve from our day, or an immersive experience that transforms our perception, our built environment has a unique ability to influence how we interact with the world.

While changing this isn’t an overnight process, it’s something we can kick start today, even at the smallest scales. It doesn’t take much. Indeed, this is how many of our most magical places evolved. They weren’t built to a finished state on day one, but evolved over time—and were sometimes rebuilt completely—to include more details, better materials, and art, where the patina of age has worked its way to confer a romantic charm only earned through an arduous journey of countless histories imbued into a structure, that only then reveals its beauty. But any small step along that path can be wonderful—whether it’s a few string lights, a mosaic, or some small facade pattern that bucks the status quo. We revere the stories that are carried in the bricks and glass of these places. We strive to learn their mysteries, inevitably failing, but still compelled to push forward. There’s a thread that ties us to this past, and continues onto the future. A linkage of humanity that’s forged in a common bond, where we may be able to add some small piece to this great tapestry. To turn a fantasy ever closer to a reality. A power to a small wooden hut being turned into a grand monument to progress, faith, or pride over much time. And, for those transactionally minded, pay a significant premium to live in or near them. This can’t be said of the mundane.

There are many places that have been created in the past that inspire this type of magic–winding medieval streets with imperfect but enchanting background buildings come to mind. One of the greatest magicians of the built environment was Antoni Gaudi, Barcelona’s master designer.

Gaudi’s buildings are Sui generis, in a class of their own artistic quality that goes well beyond normal convention. Through mosaics, local materials, and motifs, his projects are steeped in Catalan context. But they extend so much further from this foundation. Places like La Sagrada Familia, Park Guell, Casa Batlló and Casa Milà–among many others–demand attention when one walks by. Through their amorphous shapes, vivid shocks of color, whimsical reimagination of traditional architectural elements like balconies and columns, and high degrees of ornamentation, they defy all normal convention. And yet, they’re among the world’s greatest structures, perhaps because of their defiance. While none of these buildings needed to be anything more than a box for living, worship, or work, they elevate the everyday experience to something that’s difficult to put into words. These buildings are simply magical.

Contemporary architects have relearned these old lessons in recent years, and have begun imbuing more magic in their work. Though some critics may initially wave them off as vanity projects, they tend to be massively popular among the general public, and work their way into the hearts of even the most cynical nonbeliever over time. This has manifested in a few different ways. From starchitects carrying out fantasies dreamed up by the super rich, super powerful, or both, to historically marginalized communities embodying remarkable stories from their community in more modest, but no less enchanting, ways.

Let a few pictures below expand your capacity to dream for a better world and inspire you, as they’ve been built once before, and can be built again, in new and exciting ways. Some may be familiar. Some may not. But all condemn the quotidian, the mundane, the utilitarian. They don’t need to be as spectacular, or whimsical, or quirky as they are. And yet they are! This is their simple, yet remarkable power. They could as simple as a box. And yet they’re not! There’s some great excitement to this, and something deeply moving. While a high quality urban fabric is essential towards the creation of better communities, it’s the extraordinary, and sometimes nonsensical, buildings that lend identity and imbue character to a place. They punctuate the skyline, penetrate our hearts, and occupy outsize space in our minds. They are the fantastical, but they are not fantasy.

And millions more magical moments!

Coby Lefkowitz is a real estate developer, writer, and thought leader in the world of urban planning and development. He recently published the book Building Optimism, explaining why our world looks the way it does, and how to make it better. Purchase your copy, via the link.

Southern Urbanism has partnered with Building Optimism and Building Culture to bring you the best stories from the people who build our cities. In his most recent essay, Coby Lefkowitz explains why modern development is so monotonous and what we must do to reestablish inspirational localism.

Walk down the Main Street of any city or town today and you might notice something off. It’s not that the roads are too wide (though they are), or that the sidewalks are too narrow (though they are, too), or even that there’s not much to walk towards (though this is usually true, as well). These are all known elements that North Americans have gotten used to in their streetscapes for nearly a century. It’s not even that what would be considered the Main Street for most communities isn’t actually a Main Street at all, but rather a stroad amidst sprawl — those highways masquerading as “commercial corridors”. None of these things would strike the casual observer as deviations from the status quo.

No. Look into the storefronts, or at their signs, and you’ll notice something else. Something that contributes to the sense of sameness, dullness, and overall lack of character that seems to be a near constant critique of contemporary places. They render our communities as spaces where we don’t particularly want to spend much time in, despite them being all that we have.

From neighborhood to neighborhood, city to city, Main Street to Main Stroad, these stores are all the same. The set of incentives that drives this sameness is prevalent in every community in America. It’s the story of how our basic needs have become corporatized through scale & credit, zoned to transactionalism, and rendered profoundly anti-human at the expense of the small businesses and idiosyncratic development patterns that lend character, diversity, community, and meaning to our places.

Scale Wins

Historically, the composition of a town’s Main Street was fairly consistent; All communities had a grocery store, a bank, a barber shop or salon, a few restaurants, and perhaps a dry goods store or boutique. But nearly every one of these stores was locally owned, so even if two towns had the same type of stores on paper, the character, personality, history, and complex interpersonal dynamics imbued into those places would have such a radically different impact that one could hardly say that either town was very much like the other at all.

This was essential to the cultivation of the imagined spirit of Main Street. The romanticized notion of a store clerk waving you down from along the way, a waitress knowing your order by heart (that just so happens to be the town’s specialty), or the counter worker at an ice cream parlor giving you an extra scoop just because you always come in. This, as the romanticism follows, is really only possible in the type of community that has the composition unique of a proper Main Street. Regardless of how true this notion was, it’s easy to imagine it being so in a place where the business owners and employees have a vested interest in the success of their own community.

these elements continue to exist through select small businesses & charming towns, they occupy a much diluted, and vastly different place in our society today than they once did. Same with our imagined spirits. No longer is our country one of small businesses and vibrant places, but insipid chains & dreary power centers. Our psyche has transformed from one of coming together as a community (regardless of its historical veracity), to a series of individualized, transactional relationships within placeless places, devoid of any personality. Scenarios like the one illustrated below are commonplace:

After work, one may drive a car from an isolated office park 15 minutes to the hypermarket for some batteries. Then, another 10 minutes to a fast-food drive-thru window, before finally ending the day fueling up at an international oil corporation’s pumps that have been been indiscriminately plopped down along a quasi-highway, only to do the same thing again the next day.

In all likelihood, in none of these stopovers would this person have had a meaningful interaction with another. They would’ve been wholly dependent upon a car, and their dollars would be sucked out of their community to some far off office tower, corporate campus, or McMansion. Indeed, when one shops at a national chain instead of a local business, less than 40% of those dollars stay in the communities where they were spent, roughly half of what would be the case if the business were locally owned. Instead of the small business owner using profits to stimulate the local economy, those dollars are corporatized and sent out into the caprices of the global winds of capital. There’s no vested interest in the success of a community for a given chain that has 1,000 other locations, just an extraction of as much value as possible.

This isn’t to say all chains are bad, or that they don’t provide any value at all. Hardly. But they’ve so ubiquitously taken over the American landscape that there’s no balance. We live in Chainland. How did we arrive at this pervasive pattern of development, and all of the dissatisfaction that has come with it?

Scale.

All things equal, those with more resources have more power than those with fewer resources. This isn’t revelatory — you already knew that. Most people also intuitively grasp how chain stores beat out local businesses; more selection, better prices, and brand loyalty that compounds each time one visits a new location for a given chain. Not only does this fuel revenue for one specific chain, but it primes a consumer to look for, say, Subway when in want of a sandwich, and not a local deli. This solidifies into a chain of demand from devotees new and old. Cynicism aside, there’s much to be said for the psychology of reliability when one is on the road, or visiting somewhere they’re not familiar with. To see McDonald’s Golden Arches along the way, or Chick-fil-A’s red letters, is to instantly feel comfort that you’ll find a meal you can trust, wherever you may be. The importance of this shouldn’t be understated. Demand side growth can only go so far, though. At a certain point, if the only thing you’re being served is a limited series of choices, you can’t quite say your true preference is any one of those limited things if there isn’t more expansive choice. You simply don’t have many other options.

When a company like Walmart offers its price match guarantee, it doesn’t do so out of benevolence, or a sacred covenant to customers, but ruthless competition. Chains leverage their economies of scale to drive down prices. They make money on lower margins, but higher volumes. Smaller businesses can’t compete because their relatively low volumes don’t allow for lower margins. While many folks may love their local grocer or hardware store, if the prices are more expensive than they can justify, those stores will go out of business. We arrive at a situation where one community may have had a grocer, a hardware store, an electronics shop, and a bike repair center that all get subsumed into one large big box, somewhere on the edge of town (or the middle of nowhere), mandating one must drive to have access to these services they may have previously walked to. The scale of chains doesn’t fit nicely into walkable Main Street USA, but demands anonymity & parking. This is anathema to quality places.

Our Development Patterns Favor Scale

So if Chainland’s imperatives are crushing small businesses, how many are there left? Surprisingly, perhaps shockingly, more than 98% of all retail companies are small businesses. These are classified as employing less than 50 people. At first blush, this doesn’t seem to make much sense. We see chains everywhere, how are they less than 2% of all businesses?

If we dig a bit deeper (using the best data available, which may have some reporting holes in it), the picture becomes clearer. As of 2020, there were 1.04 million brick & mortar retail locations in the US. Currently, more than 700,000 of these establishments are chains, with restaurants comprising the most of any category at more than 220,000 locations. While less than 2% of discrete businesses may be chains, if the data is to be believed, 70% of physical retail locations are chains. This is a staggering number. All of our commercial streets look the same because 70% of our stores are chains!

It’s worth remembering that this doesn’t mean 70% of the stores are Targets, Chipotles, Exxon Mobiles, McDonalds or NAPA auto part dealers, as a chain can be any store with more than 1 location (and more than 50 employees, per the definition used above), but the vast majority are. If scale enables you to expand to 2 locations, chances are you’ll grow beyond that. Subway, the largest chain in the US, had 21,147 locations as of the end of 2021. Currently, Dollar General has 18,190 locations. Other prominent chains like Starbucks and McDonald’s have 15,444 and 13,862 locations, respectively.

To put these numbers into perspective, let’s look to the past. In 1929, there were nearly 1.5 million retail stores in the country, with 11% being chains. By 1948, brick & mortar locations grew to 1.77 million, with the proportion of chains shrinking to just below 6% of total stores. How has this trajectory reverse so forcefully? The answer lies in development patterns and scale enabled by economic expansion.

In the latter half of the 19th century, a maturing economy enabled a burgeoning upper middle class of residents to move from crowded cities starved of open space out into the country side. These proto-suburbs developed around regional rail & streetcar lines. They allowed more of the urban population to enjoy the privilege of open land. Though the Census refined how it classified suburban areas in the 1950 census to bring the definition in line with how we think of them today, by 1910, rough estimates pointed to 7% of the country living in suburban areas. Economies developed around this new and growing class of commuters. A strip of shops, services, restaurants, and other essentials required to facilitate this new development pattern sprouted up. Relationships became romanticized because they transcended the transactional nature of commerce. Even the most utilitarian offerings became service based as the coterie of commuters & shop owners had a mutual dependency far more intimate than within the city. Or so the imagine spirit of Main Street would have us think.

While the number of people living in the suburbs was growing, much of the economic expansion was still occurring in cities. As the economy boomed through the 1920’s, opportunity rose significantly. In boom times, there’s more money to fuel growth, which leads to more chains that aggregate and compound economies of scale. This can be seen in some of the earliest corporate skyscrapers, like the Woolworth building, which rose thanks to the success of a chain of five-and-ten-cent stores not unlike the earliest Walmarts.

When economies contract, chains are hit particularly hard as optimistic expansion strategies are forced to deal with more somber realities. This explains why chains contracted as percentage of total stores from 1929 to 1948, as the Great Depression and World War II crushed domestic retail sales. It’s partly why chains contracted in the post 2008-recessionary period (more on that below). But with the period of economic expansion after World War II, our development patterns changed. Scale was able to capitalize on this.

Instead of population concentrating in walkable cities, or communities accessible by public transportation, the post-war development pattern sprawled outwards in a rigidly zoned amorphous ooze, enabled by highway expansion and doomed to car-dependency. The pace of growth was rapid. By the end of the century, a majority of Americans were living in these places.

This had a profound impact on Main Street, and the state of American retail writ large. Instead of commercial activity downtown or mixed in among housing in smaller, more affordable spaces suitable to the organic growth of a local business, retail was relegated to specific zones along highways on new greenfield sites between communities. This presented a massive barrier to entry for would-be small business retailers. Not only would they have to build out new spaces at considerable expense (only partly subsidized by landlords), but they would have to create entirely new marketing, management, and organizational strategies too. While well capitalized companies were able to thrive in such an environment that privileged this scale, upstarts were not. This was problematic as retail had effectively been made illegal everywhere else in the suburbs, especially the kind of places where small businesses thrived, namely, the domain of people, not the car.

Those businesses that remained downtown struggled considerably as their customers fled to new subdivisions out on the edge. Downtown entered into a vicious cycle where it became less desirable to visit as there were fewer shops around, which hurt the existing shops, which led to more closures. The reasons for visiting grew slimmer and slimmer, until sadly, many downtowns effectively died.

In this vacuum, instead of the romanticized community of Main Street, our retail spaces transformed into highly controlled, segregated, and car dependent realms. Malls, strip malls, power centers, pad sites and more devolved to a lowest common denominator of design. All that mattered in this paradigm was getting what one needed, and driving home. If retail cannot be integrated within a community it takes on a distinctly austere form. If you’re driving past an area at 50, 60, 80 miles an hour, you won’t notice design flourishes, so a box will do nicely. Quite nicely. Gone was the tradition of imbuing one’s storefront with the pride of one’s business. Those finishes were antiquated, vestiges of pre-modern ideology. These things don’t scale, they simply cost too much.

The growth and profit imperatives of publicly traded companies, which many chains were increasingly opting to become in order to leverage their ability to scale, kicked into hyperdrive. In 1948, profits from chain stores were around $310 million dollars (adjusted for inflation), representing 23% of total retail sales. By 2021, US retail sales are projected to have exceeded $4.4 trillion.

With some rough (note, very rough, due to difficulty in sourcing information) estimates, after backing out e-commerce sales ($871 billion, the majority of which comes from chains), non-chain food & beverage ($659B–$239B = $420B), and specialty retail ($44.6B), brick & mortar chain stores likely were responsible for $3.06 trillion in sales, or 70% of total retail revenue. If we solely look at brick & mortar retail, chains comprise more than 86% of all retail sales. This is total and complete domination. We’ve arrived at a place where we have far fewer retail establishments than in the past due to consolidation by large chains, spread across far larger floor areas. It is the precise opposite of whatever Main Street USA is meant to be.

Our Financing System Favors Scale

This domination is reflected starkly in our built landscape, reinforced not just by zoning codes, car dependency, and our underlying development patterns, but a system of carefully constructed financial incentives & imperatives. A considerable amount of money is required to construct any building. As developers seldom raise the full amount of equity for any one project (mostly because using all of one’s own equity dilutes returns when cheaper money can be borrowed), they go to banks to fill in financing gaps. For any development, but specifically ones that have large components of retail, lenders look to mitigate as much of their risk as they possibly can. This is because they don’t want to have to finish a half-way complete project, or take over management of a vacant one. They’re not in the development or management business.

In order to mitigate this risk, lenders look for people who have experience creating shopping centers. In a catch-22, this nearly guarantee that the only people who can develop retail are those who have already developed retail. This privileges large developers who have done it before, and puts would-be small businesses who want to own their own stores at a fatal disadvantage. Those well-capitalized developers, similar to large chains, leverage their economies of scale and relationships to compound their advantages, beating all smaller parties into submission. Bigger buildings in sprawling landscapes are rubber stamped, while smaller ones in walkable fabrics can barely even pass a preliminary review.

What’s the best way to leverage economies of scale? Copy and paste a design used from a previous project to prove to the bank that you can do it again, on the same terms. What better way to provide maximum comfort to your lender than building the same exact project? You can use the same architects (you already paid for the boilerplate plans, after all), the same engineers, the same bank, and even the same tenants. The zoning codes are likely the same between two communities, but if they’re not, that’s no insurmountable hurdle.

The previous project presumably was successful if you’re attempting to build another one, and prevailing development patterns all but guarantee success as non-chain retail can’t compete. This process removes inefficiencies, reduces friction, and most importantly raises the bottom line without having to deal with the headaches brought on by smaller tenants. That it’s devoid of local charm matters little, as the Walmart or Starbucks franchise are more than happy to sponsor a local little league team, because they’re a part of the community, too!

It doesn’t matter if your project is in New Brunswick, or New Braunfels, San Jose or Saint Louis, it can be successful because chains have national relevance and loyalty. The teams of mega-developers and mega-chains are two sides of the same coin, reaping and sowing the benefits of soullessness across the country while communities are left without any identity, significant tax burdens, the evils of car-dependency, and no way out. Copy & paste this strategy across the country, on a foundation expressly zoned for this outcome, and we arrive at why everywhere feels the same — it is all the same!

These same dynamics come into play with existing properties, too. Just as lenders want security from those they’re extending a loan to, they want security from those who will be occupying the building. This is reflected in a tenant’s credit, or a measure of trustworthiness that signals how sure a prospective tenant might be able to pay their rent, or honor the terms of their lease. The higher the credit, the less risky a tenant appears on paper. The lower the credit, the higher the risk. If a property has higher credit tenants, it will be valued higher, and receive lower interest rates and more favorable financing terms because the cash flows are more secure.

Chains are high credit tenants. They have well known trusted corporate structures that stand behind them, are generally very reliable payers of rent, and are no-fuss entities who know what they’re doing. Small businesses, on the other hand, are unknown commodities. The owners cannot match the financial prowess of multi-national chains, and worse yet, might not have a tested business model (the horror!). This means their cash flows are very uncertain. Despite the fact that community-based small businesses are the foundation of great, highly desirable neighborhoods, most landlords and lenders would rather take the sure bet of sterility than the uncertainty of dynamism. Some would also describe this as being lazy, or uncaring, over a landlord’s obligation as a steward of the build environment. This conservative tilt is ubiquitous, but not without a cold logic of common sense. If you’ll allow, a brief example:

A landlord owns one commercial building along the Main Street of a community she invests in. Within 3 months, she’s approached by a couple who want to open a coffee shop and gallery that supports local artists. As they’re just starting out, the maximum they can afford is $4,000 per month. After expenses, but before debt payments, the property would generate $36,000 a year in net income. A broker tells the landlord that with this tenant, the property would likely be valued at a 7% capitalization rate. Though the landlord would love to partner with a coffee shop as there isn’t one in the entire downtown, she would lose money based off of the valuation of the property at $480,000 with this prospective lease as her total loan outstanding is $600,000. So, she waits for another tenant.

Months go by. Even years. Finally, a multi-national bank agrees to sign an LOI to open a branch in her storefront, with plans to move forward on a lease. The landlord is thrilled. While missing out on two years of rent hurt, the $96,000 she would have received from the Coffee shop pales in comparison with the new valuation of the property. Though the rent paid by the bank would only be twice as much as the coffee shop, the valuation of the property is more than 3 times as high at $1.6 million. This is because banks are among the highest credit tenants in the industry. Not only do they offer great terms —they usually pay far more in rent than almost any other prospective tenant — they offer great security and are not very management intensive at all. This results in lower operating expenses (if it’s not a triple net lease), compressed cap rates, and a higher valuation.

With this math, the landlord could have waited more than a decade without renting the space and still come out ahead after lost operating income and holding costs. Every vacant space in America is waiting for a white knight to save them and the valuation of their property. Often times these businesses are banks, national fast food chains, or other high credit tenants. That’s why one Main Street may have 5 banks along three blocks. The financial incentives mandate America devolving into a sea high credit well paying chains.

An Opportunity For A Better Built Retail Environment

The last decade has marked a departure from more than a half century of chain store dominance. In the wake of the Great Recession, many national chains have shuttered locations, formally ending a period of near continuous expansion since 1950. While reporters have breathlessly remarked that this is a retail apocalypse brought about by e-commerce, that’s not exactly true. In 2017, when the notion of a retail apocalypse gained popular momentum, less than 9% of retail was coming from e-commerce ($453B). Though this is a meaningful amount, it’s apocalyptic. While every closure of a Payless or a Sears was reported with near religious zeal, more brick and mortar retail stores opened than closed from 2017–2019.

The story is more than e-commerce. Legacy retailers have struggled to adapt, doing little to change their antiquated businesses models or user experiences. To walk through a Kmart at any point in the last 5 years was to become intimately aware of how unsatisfactory the big box brick & mortar experience had become. But the downfall of struggling retailers was also hastened by other factors, like marauding private equity firms who levered up companies only strip them for parts — while leaving tens of thousands of hard working people in the lurch, a demographic shift towards consciously supporting small businesses and walkable communities, and an oversupply of retail space generally. The US has more than 23 square feet of retail per capita, more than any other country on Earth. We have nearly 10 times the retail square feet per capita than Germany, and 5 times the United Kingdom’s. It doesn’t feel like an apocalypse, but a correction.

I hate to call it an overreaction, as the judgement has been swift and brutal for many a famed firm, but perhaps that’s just it. Sears, J.C. Penny, and Brooks Brothers, among others, were significant cultural touchstones, and the innovators of their day. Entire generations grew up with malls as the heart of their communities, finding their identities in the built environment of food courts, covered promenades, and department store giants. Their cultural importance has for some time extended beyond their diminished economic impacts, leading to media distortions of the true nature of the retail landscape. And who can blame them? One day the same feverish reporting might cast its focus on the last remaining Apple stores, the most culturally significant brick & mortar shops of this generation.

Let’s dispel the myth that retail is dying. It’s not. Bad retail is dying after decades of overbuilding woeful places. While the move away from malls surrounded by seas of parking is good for our communities, the vast majority of our retail is still firmly within the domain of car dependent Chainland.

But there is a window of opportunity to reverse this, if only a sliver. Despite all of the challenges, small businesses as a whole have proven resilient, with the total number of retail stores growing generally, & smaller specialty retail specifically. This growth is proving there’s demand for more brick & mortar businesses, where 85% of shopping is still done in person. After all, you can’t cut your hair online. There’s a grassroots movement towards more local, organic retail. People are valuing it more, and more landlords are willing to put in the effort to partner with tenants and help them grow. We need more of this. These tenants may very well be the next great companies of tomorrow, but they can’t get there unless they have an opportunity. We must provide for that. This is great for a landlord’s bottom line, and her community.

For communities who want to cure themselves of the curse of homogenous sprawl-induced chains, to find community identity and meaning through small businesses, there are a few steps they can take to get started.

1. We can’t support our small businesses if the landscape is designed to support big boxes. We need to make it easier for small businesses to thrive. This requires extensive zoning reform. But it also requires a rethinking of historical modes of American commercial development. We must go beyond the romanticized linear Main Street of our collective imagination, such that retail becomes less like a parade one transacts along, and more like a comprehensive place one can be integrated within. In other words, we should make downtown a place to be, not just pass through. Mid block retail should enabled (there are few things more charming than a cafe nestled unexpectedly in a residential row), and corner commercial spaces should be allowed as of right in most places. This goes beyond core retail, though, and should include many ground floor uses like offices, civic functions, or novel spaces like ping pong bars and social clubs. The goal should be to give life to the street all hours of the day, with many varied and diverse uses that forge a unique character one can identify with.

2. Think small! Minimum lot and unit sizes should be scrapped so that smaller retail shops can be developed. These are the type of fine grained places people want to come to, explore, and stick around. They’re the same type of places that help small business owners get on their feet, as they may find difficulty managing larger white boxed spaces.

3. Housing is essential. In order for commercial areas to be successful, they have to be of a mixed use nature so that there is a built in support network of neighbors to patronize shops and businesses. There are two fundamental flaws of Chainland & sprawling retail centers. First, they’re disconnected from complementary uses. This means every trip must be a dedicated one where a car is (usually) required. There’s no chance of serendipity, and no chance of popping one’s head into a store and picking something up. This leads to capricious consumption patterns, where one can just as easily go to the shopping center 3 miles away as 5 miles away, as there aren’t tethering mechanisms. When housing is a part of a commercial development program, intimate patterns are developed that become a part of one’s daily life. Second, this segregation of uses forces commercial tenants to have seas of parking allocated out front, depersonalizing space, spreading out distances, and commodifying the experience. Every place becomes a drive thru, not somewhere to stay and linger. This has many consequences ranging from heightened heat island effects, stormwater runoff, increased occurrences of traffic accidents, more expensive infrastructural maintenance, diminished health outcomes, and a lack of connection to one’s community. Interweave housing, commercial, and civic space together, allowing people to live a majority of their lives car free, and watch what magic ensues.

It’s not by chance that the places we love the most are those that have the most local businesses. Part of this is because in America, these areas have historically been older, with more vernacular forms of building. These places get a lot of traditional urban form right, and are the last vestiges from a pre-Chainland society. But successful areas need not be old to be loved. We can create great places today, so long as we’re thoughtful and get the foundation right. What’s more important than the age of a place is the sacred relationship between a local business and a human scaled building, such that direct connections to a place can be forged. One can learn more about somewhere from how the buildings look, what type of stores operate in them, and how their streets function, than just about anything else. It’s profoundly important to get this balance right.

When we treat our main streets and outlying retail districts as the only places where commercial value can pass through, they will necessarily be viewed as transactional spaces. Owners will respond as such. But if we were to reimagine them as networks of interwoven, intimate streets that one goes to experience, and live in, not merely transact, a whole new world opens up.

It’s high time to take the narrative of commercial places back from Chainland. We’ve sacrificed community, complex interpersonal relationships, our health, our environment, and the primacy of humans all for a few dollars off our fast food receipts, which end up being offset by prices at the pump anyway, de rigueur. This has been a pennywise, pound foolish bargain. Sure, we may be getting cheaper milk, fruits, lawn chairs and TVs, but we’ve lost something more profound: the spirit of our places. This is priceless. Once it’s gone, it’s very difficult to bring back.

Our perception of place matters intimately in our understanding of who we are as people. The built environment is a direct reflection of our values. Do we want to continue in the transactional, anti-human, car-dependent, placeless Chainland of today, or aspire to some enlightened notion of what our world could be? For my part, I choose the latter. I’m hopeful, and encouraged, that more and more people are turning to this romanticism by the day. It’s time for a new imagined reality of our world, and go after it. After all, Main Street USA is almost entirely an imagined ideal.

Coby Lefkowitz is a real estate developer, writer, and thought leader in the world of urban planning and development. He recently published the book Building Optimism, explaining why our world looks the way it does, and how to make it better. Purchase your copy, via the link.

Share Southern Urbanism

Southern Urbanism has partnered with Building Optimism and Building Culture to bring you the best stories from the people who build our cities. In this guest essay, mass wall masonry expert Austin Tunnell explains how he found meaning and purpose on his path to development.

I’m writing a multi-part series about finding happiness, in work and in life, and how that shapes the way I think about architecture and the built world.

PART ONE

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

America is amazing. I have great regard for our Founding Fathers, and the extraordinary courage, sacrifice, and hard work it took to build our country. I am deeply grateful to live here.

But at 35, I’m now wondering whether they made a serious mistake in the Declaration to include “the pursuit of happiness” into our vision statement as a country.

No One Deserves Happiness

Most of my life I've spent believing that it's true: life is about happiness. That I have a right to it. That I deserve happiness.

I live in America, the wealthiest and most powerful country in the history of the world, after all. Our founding documents say as much. I'm entitled to it as a citizen of this country.

What a disappointment to find out it's not true.

How do I know it’s not true? Because there have been many times in my life that I have not been happy. In fact, most of my life has not been happy.

Austin, You’re Like the Happiest Guy I Know?!

Most people would describe me as a happy-go-lucky guy. It’s not a show. My smiles and laughs are genuine. But those are moments, they’re not life.

When I worked at KPMG, back in 2012, I was so depressed I couldn’t get off the couch most Sundays. I don’t just mean emotionally, I mean physically. My whole body felt like it was in a perpetual panic attack.

I had friends, went on dates, didn’t have debt, went to church, had hobbies, ate relatively healthy for a twenty-year-old, and had enough money to go out and have fun. And I did have fun, sometimes. But I was not happy. Fun is a moment, an activity. There is a difference.

Misery Was My Best Friend

Everything about my life looked great on paper – except the 80 hour weeks I suppose. But no one could understand why I was so profoundly unhappy. No amount of counseling or meditation or dates or church could fix it.

But the good thing about being so utterly miserable is that it didn’t matter what anyone else thought. Hell, it didn’t matter what I thought! It was my lived experience.

I became convinced I had to make a change, or I wasn’t going to make it.

This is why I’m so grateful I wasn’t just unhappy, I was miserable. It lowered my defenses. It reduced the stakes. The fear of the unknown became less scary than the reality of my miserable, but known existence.

The problem? I had NO idea what I wanted to do!

Know Thyself

Who knows themselves at 23 years old??! I certainly didn’t.

I had no freaking idea what I wanted to do! What was I even good at? Who was I?! Ahhh!! Those are existential questions.

At first that was terrifying. But when I began to allow myself to really explore it? To start asking my heart, and not just my head, what I wanted? It was also exhilarating.

The problem is I didn’t know what I wanted to do. All I knew is that I wanted an adventure. Something…exciting, that stirred my soul, awakened me, made me feel alive. Something meaningful.

But I had no idea what that was! So I had to go exploring. Not because I knew myself, or even knew what I wanted, but because I needed to find myself.

Find Thyself

This is the part where I quit, sold my car, and with $20k to my name, moved to Panama for an unpaid internship with a company trying to build a sustainable town in the jungle

I’m going to skip the details here except to say in those three months I 1) met Clay Chapman, the man who would teach me brick masonry years later and 2) was introduced to New Urbanism and traditional design.

These are two pillars of Building Culture today, though I didn’t know it at the time. I hadn’t even conceived in the loosest forms the concept of Building Culture yet. That would come years later.

From there I went to Uganda with the Peace Corps for two years.

Among being a transformational experience in many ways, the first fellow volunteer I met in the airport? A very pretty girl who, years later, would become my amazing wife.

That’s a lot of serendipity. My first two adventures and all that happened??!

Yes. I’m finding that’s what happens when you take the risk to explore. I hear things like this from other people, too, who have stepped off the well-trodden path to find their own.

Things….happen.

Back at KPMG, I often dreamed of some random thing happening that would change my life. A phone call, a random person, a girl, an idea, that would irrevocably change the trajectory of my life and infuse it with meaning. Like in the movies, you know?

Normal life is happening, sitting bored at the office desk, and then aliens invade and bam! My life would be turned upside down and I’d have something to fight for, to care about, to live for.

The problem with waiting for meaning and adventure to fall on your doorstep is that in all likelihood, as I experienced, it never will. Life doesn’t happen to you. You are the agent that sets things in motion. Meaning is found in movement.

Lose Thyself

I don’t mean it was easy. I didn’t quit KPMG and ride off into the sunset, heart full and happily ever after. Not even freaking close. That’s the scary part about adventures: you can get lost.

Panama was tough in its own way. While certain things were better, most of that misery and unhappiness followed me. I still felt that constant stress and lack of peace. What the hell?

And while I was discovering new things about myself and the world, and there were exhilarating moments, I was also just as confused about what I wanted to do with my life as I was at KPMG. Though at least I had crossed some things off the list. Namely, accounting.

Uganda was really tough for two years. That’s a long time in difficult living conditions. It’s physically demanding, lonely and isolating, mentally exhausting. There’s no real structure either – you have to…create the experience you want. One third of our cohort dropped out within the first year, and I don’t blame a single one of them.

Not to mention my illusions about things like the UN, international aid and the Foreign Service crumbling before my eyes while I was over there.

At the time, I was fairly convinced that’s what I wanted to do. And when that started going up in smoke, realizing I didn’t want that life or vocation? I felt totally lost. Again.

My now-wife and I even went our separate ways after Uganda for a time. I went back to Panama, and she went to Kenya to work with refugees. I was worried we were only dating because of the difficult conditions we found ourselves in, and the convenience of being near each other.

None of it was easy, or clear. It’s like wading through a fog – you can’t see the path ten feet ahead, let alone where it’s heading, the destination.

Find a Partner & Commit

Distance quickly made me realize I was wrong about Sarah, and I asked if she’d move back to the States with me.

We rented a car and went on a road trip across the country to meet parents and family. While staying in Pennsylvania with her parents, in another moment of terror and lack of clarity, I came so close to leaving in the middle of the night and driving away. I mean so close. How can I know if she’s the one?!

Thank God I didn’t. And the truth, I’ve found, is that you can’t know. Feelings can’t tell you what life will be like in 10 years with someone, let alone next month. That’s why it’s a commitment.

I proposed in the Grand Canyon on the way back to my parents in Houston, looking like a Pixar character. I’d taken eye drops from the dryness that morning, and turns out I’m highly allergic. I looked like an idiot, eyes as puffy as marshmallows. I had no house, no car, no money and no plan. But she said yes. She said yes!

We ordered a ring off Etsy (that she still wears), and after a five week engagement, we were married.

How do you plan a wedding in five weeks, you might ask? Necessity is the mother of invention – and uncomplicated plans. We hired a food truck for $1200 to show up and cater, ordered pies from a local shop instead of cake, used a Spotify playlist for music, and sent a simple email for invites, along with a few phone calls. Seventy amazing people still showed up, and it was genuinely a beautiful wedding. I wouldn’t trade it for a $100,000 wedding and the stress and complications that go with that.

One of the biggest fights we’ve ever been in was me being very upset that I had to wait five stupid weeks to marry her after proposing. I still remember the arguments. The courthouse was right there!!! How could she not see this??

But in my magnanimity I agreed to wait five weeks. At the time I thought I was being exceedingly generous. I now realize I had that completely backwards. As I said, I have an amazing wife.

And to be fair, we were both right. We both think very fondly of our short engagement. I’m glad we had a wedding, and she’s glad the engagement was short. It’s a great way to save money, take the stress off, be a little unconventional, and have fun. The stakes are way lower for those few hours, too, when you don’t take a year to plan and spend tens of thousands.

Adventure Together

During those few months of the road trip and engagement, we were trying to figure out what to do after the wedding. You know…with our lives.

We had no money, except a generous $20k donation from parents for the wedding, which we only spent half, and another $10k as a wedding gift. We had no ties to a place, and were up for anywhere. Sarah was really uncertain about her future and what she wanted to do. I was starting to hone in on something to do with urban design or development.

While we still felt lost, we had each other, and that makes a huge difference. But it doesn’t fix everything, or make it not stressful. I hate in the movies when people proclaim “all I need is your love and I’ll be forever happy.” Really? For how long? A month? Three?

You need way more than “each other” to have a successful and fulfilling marriage. A partner doesn’t make for a meaningful and happy life – it’s living a meaningful life together where the magic happens. Having a partner to adventure with.

I highly recommend it.

Honing In

It’s crazy to think about now, but we almost moved to San Francisco so that I could go to work for Facebook. Facebook!

Right??!

I was debating going to apprentice as a mason with Clay, but an opportunity at Facebook came up from some connections I’d made in Panama. The role was some urban neighborhood development position that I was profoundly unqualified for, and the glamor of moving to San Francisco back then, before Facebook became an evil empire in the eyes of the public, was tempting.

I made it through the interview process. I think I was the only one they were considering, that I know of. And then…the job disappeared.

Poof. It was frankly bizarre how it happened, and I’m still not totally sure what happened.

I’m just so, so thankful it did! Though it felt really disappointing at the time as I’d boasted to some of my friends I was probably going to go work for them.

Time for plan B. Or more like…plan Q if I were counting since KPMG.

That master mason I’d met in Panama years earlier, Clay Chapman?

I called him.

Austin Tunnell is the Founder, CEO, and Head of Product at Building Culture, a holistic real estate development company dedicated to creating beautiful, resilient, and thriving places.

Share Southern Urbanism

Southern Urbanism has partnered with Building Optimism and Building Culture to bring you the best stories from the people who build our cities. In his most recent essay, Coby Lefkowitz shares an excerpt from his new book.

This is an excerpt from the first chapter of my book, Building Optimism. Building Optimism is the culmination of several years of research into the state of the North American built environment. My aim in writing it was to demystify how the process of city building works, and provide an inspirational guide for a better tomorrow.

Through an exploration of how we arrived at where we are today, a series of concrete reforms, and examples of recently completed projects, I hope Building Optimism can call on the imaginations of builders, architects, developers, planners, city officials, and everyday people interested in making their neighborhoods just a little bit better. That not only is such a pursuit possible, but that it is exactly what our world needs today. Our best efforts are not behind us. All it takes is a little bit of Optimism to get started, and an honest confrontation of the status quo to drive towards the outcomes so many are clamoring for.

My many thanks to all who have supported this adventure so far, and my warm welcomes to those who are joining today. With deep appreciation and affection, Coby.

Buy the book here!

Chapter 1: On Building Optimism: A Brief History of How We Got Here

Most new places in North America aren’t very good. From sprawling tracts of homogenous homes and strip malls full of chain stores, to anonymous five-over-one apartment buildings and offices located in the most grotesque usage of the word “park” in the English language. For nearly a century, we’ve extracted beauty and joy from our towns and cities, only to replace them with boxes of varying sizes along ever-widening roads, damning the environment, our cities, and ourselves in the process.

When looking at the landscape of recent development, it’s easy to lose faith in our ability to do good things. It feels as though we’ve forgotten how to do it, or moved past a time where creating such places was desirable. As profit imperatives weigh ever more heavily on the development process from both large institutional groups and smaller speculators—who care little for lasting quality—value engineering and spreadsheet architecture have proliferated, pushing the dream of a better world ever further from our grasp.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve accepted this as the status quo, acquiescing to a world with many serious challenges, deficiencies, and high levels of undesirability. In order to cope with it, it seems, many of us have simply become numb to the world around us. Instead of enjoying a walkable, dynamic, salubrious, sustainable, and lovable community as the place where we live full time, those fortunate enough to travel internationally have settled for a few days in some city halfway across the world, at considerable expense, to satisfy these conditions. Those less fortunate are left with little to do but accept the fate cast unto them, sometimes questioning, but rarely being provided for.

We’ve come up with all manner of excuses for why we live this way, from the cost it takes to develop good places and our inability to create them, to a favored scapegoat or conspiracy that places blame on some faceless evil actor as a further coping mechanism. These excuses do little more than shirk the responsibility and render many to believe ours is a world incapable of reform.

I know what you might be thinking. North Americans want a big yard, picket fence, and highways to ferry them everywhere seamlessly. This is just how we do things here. We don’t build walkable, beautiful communities here. And even if we did want to create more of these places, nothing will ever change, because that’s not how our societies are structured. This is the world we’ve been given, might as well accept it.

Not the most positive start for a book about optimism, admittedly. But hear me out! If we’re to embark on a mission to create a better world for tomorrow, we have to know what we’re up against, and accept some foundational truths. Except to illustrate what a more optimistic, common sense foundation might look like, negativity will be minimized in these pages. Promise. It’d be far too easy to criticize the state of contemporary development patterns, or lament the decisions that have put us in this position, without offering an antidote to them. That’s just complaining.

Moreover, the prevailing cynicism of how many view our world is not acceptable. Not when the built environment has such a profound impact on us. Not when much of this cynicism is unfounded. And certainly not when we’re in a position to do something about it.

We spend the vast majority of our lives in places shaped by other people—what urbanists and architects call the built environment, a term I’ll be using so much you’ll either find a familiar comfort in it or never want to come across again. Be forewarned. This goes well beyond skyscrapers and highways; except for those fleeting moments in untouched wilderness, virtually all of the interactions we have with the world are in the built environment.

As humans, we have a funny habit of not being able to leave any patch of Earth we come across untouched. These interventions might be as subtle as a path stamped down in an overgrown forest, or stone walls meant to delineate boundaries—so masterfully done that they feel as though nature put them there herself. Even fields that seem as pure as the highest mountain peaks are often the result of land intentionally cleared of trees, where nothing has grown in their stead.

There are other places we might not traditionally associate with “the built environment” that have been nursed by people and whose natural beauty has been augmented as a result of it, such as gardens, hiking trails, or parks. So even when one thinks they’re outside the grasp of human reach, chances are they’re still well within it.

Why does this matter? It matters because where we spend our time significantly impacts our mental and physical health, and cognitive function. Economies hinge on good or bad development patterns. Communities rise or disintegrate based on the spaces they’re provided. Natural and built environments are either destroyed or rendered more prosperous through the result of our actions. While I could draw dichotomies ad infinitum, simply put, every aspect of one’s life is influenced by the quality of the places they’re surrounded by. If we’re surrounded almost exclusively by settings of our own making, few things could be more important than making these places right.

The cynic might despair reading this information, as it seems that for much of the last century we’ve only been capable of creating places that are extractive, utilitarian, and destructive. Why create anything, they might ask, if it’s just going to be bad? What’s the use in surrounding our bad places with even more bad places? We’d be better off doing nothing.

This way of thinking might make sense at surface level, but when we dig a bit deeper it doesn’t pass muster. There are countless examples of extraordinary places created by people around the world. Rome famously wasn’t built in a day, but took centuries of incremental growth to form itself into the city so many of us admire today. The same is true for thousands of other villages, towns, and cities we dream of visiting or living in. If these settings were created once, there’s no reason why we can’t create them again. It’s not as though some immutable laws of the universe prohibit us from doing this. Every place you interact with in the built environment is the result of a series of decisions—the dreamy, the dreadful, and everything in between. A line can be drawn from everything you see in the built world to a single decision made in a planning meeting, a back office, a section of zoning / building code, a construction document, or the sporadic choices individual people make outside the bounds of formal municipal approvals.

It’s true that we’ve made many bad decisions in the recent past. But that doesn’t mean we can’t reverse our course and draw new lines to chart a better future. Our inaction is the only limiting force preventing us from redirection. It may be difficult, but history shows us a better way is possible.

⁕ ⁕ ⁕

The only reason we have a framework for knowing which places are lovely, and which places are less so, is because there are both exceptional and poor examples all around us. If we didn’t have good references, we’d have no basis for understanding the bad, and no ability to compare the two. So, at the very least, we know that we’ve created some lovely places in the past. Point to the good guys! While this may seem trivial, it’s not only worth noting, but deserves celebration. So strong is our fatalism that we forget how much good there is around us, especially in our own backyards.

While even the most ardent pessimist would have to concede that the world has many wonderful places that are worthy of our dreams and praise (who can dispute the magnificence of Florence, Amsterdam, Havana, or Marrakech?), they might counter that in North America, we just don’t have that heritage. This isn’t true.

We have in our close reach an abundance of extraordinary cities and towns. From Old Quebec, to pockets of Philadelphia, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Charleston, D.C., New Orleans, Montreal, Chicago, and Santa Barbara, hundreds of such locations exist. It must be true, then, that at one point we possessed the skills for creating great cities and towns. We are no cultural exception to the creation of great built environments.

This doesn’t mean that everything we built in the past was inherently good. We may well suffer from a survivorship bias that overrates prior ages of building because only the best homes, warehouses, offices, and monuments made it through to the present day. Many structures of the past, if not most, were not of sufficient quality to last. Conditions of the industrialized powerhouses of Great Britain and America in the 19th and early 20th centuries were infamously bad. In the wake of Chicago’s devastating 1871 fire, wooden tenements were hastily erected to house all those affected by the disaster. These slums soon became overcrowded as the city struggled to house its rapidly growing population. From 1870 to 1880, Chicago grew by nearly 70%, from just under 300,000 people to just over 500,000. By 1930, nearly 3 million more people would move to the city in the hopes of securing economic and personal liberation that was largely unattainable on the surrounding farms and in the distant lands they arrived from. If overcrowding was an issue in 1871, it was an epidemic just a few decades later. People crushed together in quantities that would be inconceivable today. Quite a bit tighter than splitting a bed with your brother and sister on a family road trip. Families were much bigger than they are today, and several families might live in the same apartment, with five, six, or seven or more people sharing one small room. Very little light got into these homes as the buildings covered almost 100% of the lot area.¹ Air quality was abhorrent. Homes crowded around factories that belched soot and God-knows-what-else into the precious little circulating air within them. These places couldn’t be described as habitable, not by industrial standards, and certainly not by modern judgements, barely rising to even a utilitarian level.

“Penury and poverty are wedded everywhere to dirt and disease,” wrote Jacob Riis in his pioneering 1890 work, which documented the conditions of slums in New York City in the 1880s.² Continuing, Riis noted, “Neatness, order, cleanliness, were never dreamed of in connection with the tenant-house system . . . while reckless slovenliness, discontent, privation, and ignorance were left to work out their invariable results, until the entire premises reached the level of tenant-house dilapidation, containing, but sheltering not, the miserable hordes that crowded beneath smouldering, water-rotted roofs or burrowed among the rats of clammy cellars.”

Elsewhere in New York, shacks and shanties that bore some resemblance to pre-industrialized logging camps were widespread. Where just a quarter century later these sites were occupied by grand pre-war apartment buildings that have since come to be revered around the globe, in the 1890s they hardly rose to the title of informal settlement.

How did the penury and poverty that Riis observed give way to distinguished structures and enviable addresses? In order to answer this, we must take a quick diversion across the Atlantic. Though this book is (primarily) focused on North America, it’s worth taking a look at London, as many American projects took inspiration from the progress made in the British capital.

The first “Model Dwelling” schemes arose in London in the 1840s, uniting the need for higher-quality housing for the working poor with subjective moral imperatives. These interventions aimed to improve the overall station of life for the most impoverished, not just where they lived.³ Model Dwellings were erected for all different types of people—single men, single women, families, the elderly, and the infirm. Their scope ranged from small dorms consisting of individual rooms with shared common bathrooms and lounging spaces, up to several-room apartments that families could comfortably occupy. Philanthropists and activists who wanted to move beyond simply campaigning for improved living conditions to putting their principles into practice were the progenitors of these schemes. Social reformers, as they became known since their work sought to reform society, refused to accept the intolerable conditions faced by the many vulnerable who were subjected to them.

Octavia Hill was one of the key figures of this movement, and among its most prodigious. At the peak of her work, she cared for the homes and lives of 4,000 East Londoners, relying on strict rules to uphold order.⁴ In working with the Kyrle Society, whose slogan was “Bring Beauty Home”, she focused on delivering high-quality housing with access to open space, fresh air, and constructive entertainment like literature, art, and music.⁵ For Hill, simply providing better living conditions wasn’t enough. She sought to offer an example of what a more honorable, robust, and enlightened life might look like. She believed in the importance of cultivating communities that transcended the utilitarian mode of charity that prevailed at the time, with a maternalism that demanded her residents mold themselves into upstanding members of society.

These themes were consistent with the work of other reformers in the London scene, though redevelopment through slum clearance was often favored to Hill’s insistence of renovation in place. Sir Sydney H. Waterlow founded the Improved Industrial Dwellings Co. in 1863, which aimed to instill pride in the lives of the 30,000 residents who lived in one of his more than 6,000 buildings.⁶ Plans for IIDC’s Langbourne Buildings in Finsbury Square noted that it was “advisable to give to each dwelling an individuality of appearance; and also dissipate the feeling, unfortunately but too general, that the occupants of the ‘model dwellings’ are the recipients of charity”, lamenting that it was “unquestionable that in most of the buildings of this class the long rows of windows have a dreary monotonous effect, and impress on the mind the idea of a workhouse or of a penitentiary.”⁷ Matthew Allen, who authored the Langbourne plan on behalf of Waterlow, continued, “I am not alone in believing that the homes of workmen cannot by any possibility be rendered too attractive, complete, and comfortable; and that while they will often meet with stolid indifference anything of a ‘missionising’ tendency, the working classes gladly welcome and warmly appreciate the efforts made to obviate the evils and improve the condition of their dwellings.”

The Boundary Estate, perhaps the most successful social housing scheme of the time, was a redevelopment of the Old Nichol, one of London’s most infamous slums and inspiration for popular books of the time depicting the squalor of industrial life, like the polemical A Child of the Jago. Unlike other projects that were carried out by social reformers, charitable trusts or religious institutions, the Boundary Estate was spearheaded by a local government agency, the London County Council. It was one of the earliest government-led social housing schemes in the world. Homes for 5,500 were planned. Although officials desired everyone who had lived in the Old Nichol to have a home in the Boundary Estate, many were not rehoused due to the difficulty in tracking down those who had lived there previously. Others who could be found but were not rehoused had secured accommodation somewhere else during construction and didn’t want to go through the trouble of moving again. Unlike many Public Housing projects that have been built since, the Boundary Estate was mixed use, functioning as a proper community, with 18 shops, 77 workshops (to encourage entrepreneurship and more socially acceptable hobbies than gambling, drinking, and general debauchery), and two schools.⁸ Not only did the Boundary Estate dramatically improve the conditions of the old slum notorious for crime and insalubrity— and provide opportunities for jobs and more respectable leisure—it did so in style. Architect Owen Flemming’s plan, with aid from his colleague Rowland Plumbe, saw 1,069 dwellings of extraordinary aesthetic value erected across 23 blocks. The redevelopment was of such high quality that many of the original buildings have been preserved under Grade II listing status, signifying their importance as cultural landmarks.

Fall at the Boundary estate (top). Rochelle School at the Boundary estate (bottom).

Back on this side of the Atlantic, social reformers like Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr of Chicago’s Hull House, and Stanton Coit and Jacob Riis in New York, drew inspiration from the British to cure the destitution faced by residents in America’s worst slums.⁹ The ills of neighborhoods like New York’s Five Points and the Lower East Side (including modern-day Little Italy, NoLiTa, and Chinatown), Chicago’s Near North Side and Old Town, and Philadelphia’s Society Hill and Queen Village were confronted head on. Hannah Fox and Helen Parrish of the Octavia Hill Association of Philadelphia (which, as you may have guessed, took direct inspiration from Octavia Hill’s work in London), were noteworthy for the incrementalism of their transformations.¹⁰ Workman Place along South Front Street in Queen Village endures as a proud, and attractive reminder of the possibility of positive reform. The homes remain among the highest-quality stock in the neighborhood, with ample outdoor space, much greenery, and considered detailing. Few would recognize them as the deeply affordable housing of their day.

At the larger scale of the intervention spectrum was Alfred Tredway White. A 19th-century engineer, White was also a devoted philanthropist, educator, and social reformer. He abhorred the conditions the working classes were forced to live in, believing that the quality of where one lived directly impacted who they became. He wrote: “The badly constructed, unventilated, dark and foul tenement houses of New York, in which our laboring classes are forced to live, are the nurseries of the epidemics which spread with certain destructiveness into the fairest homes; they are the hiding-places of the local banditti . . . in fact they produce these noxious and unhappy elements of society as surely as the harvest follows the sowing, and by these, punish the carelessness of those who own no responsibility as keepers of their brethren.”¹¹

Convinced that salubrious housing was critical to improve the quality of life of the immigrants he taught and interacted with in his native Brooklyn, White traveled to England to learn from figures like Waterlow. The influence this had is easy to see. The IIDC’s emphasis on providing handsome dwellings for the working class is masterfully reflected in White’s Home, Tower, and Riverside Buildings, all designed by William Field & Son. Located in Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights, these 6 story blocks featured outdoor staircases (reminiscent of many of Waterlow’s structures), wrought iron balconies, large common courtyards, and richly detailed facades. They were cross ventilated, which was transformative in an era where few buildings inhabited by the working class enjoyed any fresh air. Units were spacious, brightly lit, had running water, and were tailored for the needs of families. White’s buildings never occupied much more than half of the lot, leaving ample space for playgrounds, gardens, and common amenities in the courtyards.

He experimented with other forms of housing as well, believing people at different stations of life required different living accommodations. At Warren Place Mews, 34 small row houses were built for working class families at low incomes. They rented for just $18 a month when they were completed in 1878, the equivalent of around $600 today.¹² Spanning just 11 and a half feet wide, 32 feet deep, and little more than 1,000 square feet in total, the Romanesque Revival style Workingman’s Cottages are modest but proud structures. Red-orange brick adorns the masonry structures, tactically used in select locations to draw one’s eyes upwards to window lines, pilasters, and entrances framing doorways. A lush and expertly manicured garden runs down the narrow lane which separates the two rows of homes. Each cottage has a dedicated yard in the back. Walking through the mews on its slate pathways, it’s easy to see how living in such a dignified, beautiful place would draw the best out of someone. Lush, intimate, and bountifully adorned, these homes would be a feat most luxury developers today would dream of achieving. Indeed, they regularly sell for well over a million dollars, no small feat for such humble dwellings.

In an 1885 publication for the National Conference on Charities and Correction, White detailed how he was able to deliver the cottages for just $1,150 per home ($35,000 in today’s dollars), or rent out units in his apartment buildings (5th floor walk ups with two rooms and scullery), for as low as $1.60 a week.¹³ Diligently accounting for every expense, he economized on space, bought materials in bulk, and most importantly, employed a “philanthropy and five percent” strategy. Five per cent philanthropists offered their investors an annual dividend capped at 5%, putting a ceiling on profit margins, and by extension, rent. This strategy accomplished a few things. First, it allowed White to keep home prices affordable to the lowest earning members of society, the simple laborers, home cleaners, seamstresses, artisans, and boatmen who made up the majority of his tenants, but who couldn’t pay more than $2 per week in rent. This strategy departed considerably from the speculators of the time who would throw homes up as cheaply as they could in order to chase annualized returns upwards of 40%. It mattered little to these investors when their properties inevitably began to deteriorate just a few years later—they were already long gone. Second, it allowed White to dramatically expand his impact. Real estate was and remains a highly capital intensive industry. As funds for public housing were non-existent at the time, capital had to come from somewhere else. Without investors, no low-income housing would be built, and 5% was a reasonable return on investment for those enlightened benefactors.

After returning ~5% in distributions to investors, all excess cash was either reinvested into the property, spent on events (a six-piece brass band performed every two weeks throughout the summer at his properties), or was given back to the tenants themselves. Surveying his corporation’s financial performance for 1885, $1,177 out of $34,500 in gross revenue (3.4%) was paid back to the tenants in the spirit of “practical co-operation”.¹⁴ These distributions were a “visible recompense to those who by promptness, nearness, and good order contribute the most to the success of the enterprise. These dividends form a great incentive to the tenants to cultivate habits of neatness and promptness.” Aligning incentives in such a way is a win-win. The benefits to real estate managers were obvious. And for tenants, if they treated their properties with respect, they would in turn have better living conditions and receive a portion of the returns (nearly comparable to what private investors received).

Reading through White’s essays and papers, it’s easy to understand how he was able to improve the lives of so many: he cared deeply for the cause. This would not have been possible if he wasn’t fastidious in his management, nor worked hard enough to understand all of the intricacies of how buildings are actually created and maintained.

White’s efforts earned praise from all corners, but perhaps his greatest champion was Jacob Riis, who frequently wrote glowingly of these buildings and their positive impact on the many working families they housed.¹⁵ So inspired was Riis by White’s work that he attributed the philanthropist as his inspiration for How The Other Half Lives.

Through a goal of building “the most advanced tenement houses in the world”, White not only improved the lives of his neighbors, but also inspired builders nationwide to construct a higher standard of housing for the poor.¹⁶ Though he only built homes for a few thousand families, White’s influence extended to many millions, both directly via the creation of The New York State Tenement House Act of 1901 (in which he was instrumental in crafting), and indirectly from those who took influence from his projects and speeches. He is but one cog—albeit a very important one—in a virtuous cycle of profound implications for our built environment.

Remarkably, we now vie to live in areas that were once the most odious slums. Countless buildings developed by social housing organizations are now quite fashionable to live in. That’s sustained Optimism in action. Th is history is not meant, however, to imply that the neighborhoods where these activists plied their trade have not known struggle since, nor that development via social reform is an entirely desirable form of building. Th e paternalism (and in some cases materialism) exhibited by these organizations would not only seem antiquated by today’s standards, but ruthlessly controlling. Many social reformers attached strong doses of subjective morality to their projects, whether via religion, temperance, or strict living standards where tenants had to earn the right to access certain privileges.

Warren Place Mews in Cobble Hill, designed by William Field & Son.

However, just because some of the practices the reformers employed may not be directly relevant to us today doesn’t mean we should disregard the lessons their work has for us. Most notably, we suffer from a lack of the sort of comprehensive vision that can both solve the issues of our times, and propel us forward into collective prosperity. Though there have been some worthy interventions in the last several decades, most of all, there’s been indifference. Instead of a nation driven forward by a distinct “American Dream” for a better world (whether that dream was ever real is a different story for another time), we exist rudderless, paralyzed by the challenges we face. Somewhere along the way, we lost our way.

⁕ ⁕ ⁕

In the years between America’s involvement in World War II and now (though some cracks began to show in the 1920s), the standard of our built environment has regressed considerably. This isn’t to say that the aggregate state of society was better before this regression (it wasn’t) or that things are all bad now (they’re not), but that there’s been an undeniable shift in the state of our cities, towns, and communities generally.

I’ve selected pre-World War II as the general time period for this diversion for a few reasons. Though it’s not a perfect marker, rarely is there ever a single moment in a single place that can be pointed to definitively as the start of something, especially something as nebulous as the quality of community. The key qualification for this inflection point, in my mind, is that before World War II there was a general belief that we could build great things—that our cities could be the envy of the world. Even in the depths of the Great Depression, some of the continent’s most famous structures were completed: New York’s Empire State Building (1931), Nevada’s Hoover Dam (1936), San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge (1937), and Vancouver’s Lion’s Gate Bridge (1938). Across every building and infrastructural typology, in the depths of a moment where hope was in short supply, places of exceptional quality were designed to inspire just that. They were created not only to facilitate their utilitarian raisons d’etre, like allowing cars to drive from one place to another where they previously couldn’t, but to elevate people while they did these tasks. Rockefeller Center, effectively an office park, has no business being as elegant as it is. And yet that is precisely the business it’s in, where magnificence functions as its calling card and has made the development one of the world’s most iconic locations. The same goes for the Chrysler Building.

Regrettably, this hope largely gave way to codified individualism, prejudice, and hyper rationality. Gracelessly, we moved from an age of building grand projects meant to evoke pride, wonder and ambition in the general populace, to a tedious planning and regulation of society for which we cared little for the broader consequences of, and understood even less.

Zoning codes were first crafted in the U.S. in the beginning of the 20th century in an attempt to manage the exponential growth of cities due to mass immigration and the maturation of industrialization. “Manage” is the key word. Los Angeles adopted Ordinance 9774 in 1904, codifying one of the country’s first land use restrictions into law, before expanding on it to form the nation’s first formal zoning codes in 1908.¹⁷ At surface level, the ordinance was aimed at establishing residential districts where industrial uses wouldn’t be allowed. Makes sense; living next to the noxious fumes and loud noises that belched out of factories, with who knows whatever else was released, doesn’ seem desirable. Below surface level, however, the regulation was designed to manage a different, more insidious outcome: racial segregation. Ordinance 9774 was a thinly veiled provision to separate Chinese families and the laundry facilities they ran from their White neighbors. This veil was pretty easy to see through as most of the intensive industrial development in Los Angeles at the time was confined to Downtown, San Pedro, and some other outlying neighborhoods, away from the speculative tract housing developments that were in their first stages of an ultimately successful conquest over the region. If the city had really cared about protecting residential areas from deleterious impact, it would have restricted the extraction of oil, which was far more pervasive than other industrial uses, and in some ways more damaging. Yet drilling continued within neighborhoods without municipal intervention. In some cases, it was encouraged as a form of civic boosterism to flout the economic prosperity of the region. Miraculously, this practice remained for more than a century. If one wanted to, a homeowner could still construct an oil well in their residential neighborhood in the city of Los Angeles as recently as 2021. The county was even later to the game, banning the construction of new wells in 2023, with plans to phase out existing drilling over 20 years.¹⁸

Other early codes didn’t attempt to mask their intentions at all. In Baltimore, the City Council adopted block-by-block segregation in 1910 prohibiting Blacks from living next to Whites. Inspiration quickly spread throughout the South. Atlanta copied Baltimore’s provision nearly word for word (a precedent we’ll see with other zoning codes).¹⁹ Richmond enacted racial segregation via zoning in 1911. Louisville, St. Louis, New Orleans and hundreds of other smaller cities and towns adopted similar laws in the following years.

Opposition to these codes was strong, with formal protests and judicial challenges. In the 1917 case of Buchanan v. Warley, the Supreme Court ruled against racial segregation of residential areas, unanimously holding that prohibiting the sale of real property from one party to another based on race was unconstitutional.

But this didn’t stop land use regulations from being wielded towards exclusionary ends. The racial segregationists of the South found common cause with Berkeley’s 1916 zoning code—the first to regulate residential neighborhoods by their intensity of use. Or, said another way, the first to designate that only single family homes could be built on certain plots of land. While this was not explicitly race based zoning, it effectively was, as only wealthier families (who were nearly exclusively White for other historic reasons) could afford single family homes. Supporters of the ordinance bragged that this would keep neighborhoods reliably free of “Asiatics or Negroes”.²⁰ When combined with private mechanisms like restrictive covenants on the sale of private property that forbade the transfer of deeds to predefined groups, a dark era of segregation in North America was codified, propped up by theoretically pragmatic regulations like Ordinance 9774.

As these seeds germinated, one of the most significant precedents for the next century of development patterns was sowed via the Supreme Court case of Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. in 1926. In response to industry moving south from Cleveland, Euclid, which borders the city to the Northeast, adopted a zoning ordinance to prevent industrial uses within its borders. Ambler Realty wasn’t happy about this, as they bought land within the village with the explicit intent of developing factories. Euclid’s ordinance, they claimed, amounted to an unconstitutional taking and violation of due process. The Supreme Court did not agree. The majority ruled that using zoning (a relatively new concept) to prohibit certain uses was a valid exercise of a municipality’s police power.

Though presumably more innocuous than other laws that preceded it, the precedent of Euclid v Ambler allowed municipalities to arbitrarily regulate their land to a degree of prescriptiveness without any historic equivalent. Up until the decision, nearly every locale in the world had the right to situate different uses next to, on top of, or below each other. A cafe could comfortably (and legally) exist underneath an office, which might itself be underneath a third-floor apartment. Nothing prohibited a school or a grocer from being located next to any of these uses. If people really wanted to get crazy, they could throw all of these things into the same building, or series of buildings neighboring one another, in any combination they liked. After Euclidean zoning, it became possible to segregate all of these uses away from one another, turning the historic city inside out. And segregate we did.

As satisfying as it might be to lay blame at the feet of one decision, the devolvement of our built environment can’t solely be attributed to Euclidean zoning. While it shaped our society in some meaningful(ly bad) ways, its impact has been dramatically augmented by the scaling up of our communities facilitated by cars and highways. A qualifier before we delve into this topic: in some circles, it’s become popular to view cars as inherently bad for our cities, but this isn’t really true. Motor vehicles only go where roads lead them. They can be phenomenally useful tools if managed correctly. if someone can’t walk well, or needs to urgently see a doctor, quick and efficient door-to-door access is important. Being able to get groceries in the middle of a snowstorm in winter, or visit far-flung family members many hundreds of miles away, are extraordinary benefits.

Cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen have (in many ways) figured out how different forms of transport can peaceably coexist by balancing allocations of road space to ensure one mode doesn’t overpower the others. Driving a car is just one of several options someone has at their disposal for how to get around (it’s usually not the most efficient or affordable way), so cars can still be used where needed without dominating a city. Not so in North America, where we’ve reoriented our entire infrastructure to become “car dependent” where many of us can’t go anywhere without a car. It didn’t start this way, though.

Prior to World War II, American cities looked much the same as their European and Asian counterparts, just with more grids and a few hundred years less of history. Looking at pictures of Cincinnati or Baltimore, one would be excused for confusing them with Manchester or Liverpool. When first introduced, the advent of cars didn’t really change the fabric of cities all that much. This was evident in Manheim, the German gridded city where the gas-powered automobile was invented by Karl Benz (eponymously of Mercedes-Benz fame). Compositionally, these first cars were little different from the carriages which preceded them, where horses were swapped out for engines. Private cars quickly made their way to the United States, with the first vehicles produced before the turn of the century. But they didn’t truly take off until Henry Ford introduced the Model T in 1908. Prices started around $850 ($29,000 in 2024 dollars) before dropping to the equivalent of $4,600 by 1924 thanks to the efficiencies of the assembly line.²¹ Sales skyrocketed. Where prior models only had production runs of a few thousand cars, 15 million Model Ts were sold from 1908 to 1927. In 1906, there were only 100,000 cars on American streets. By 1927, there were more than 20 million.²²

Model Ts, and other cars, needed roads to drive on. Champions of this new technology in federal and local government were only too happy to accommodate this need. Beginning in 1916 with the Federal Aid Road Act, and continuing through the 1920s with the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921, the foundation for a network of roads crisscrossing the country was laid down. Over the next two decades, spurned on by generous federal funding, roads were paved around the country, including the famous Route 66. Rural communities, previously difficult to traverse, or completely inaccessible, gained new connections. Uneven, dusty (and when it rained, impossibly muddy) streets in cities and towns were paved over. While this made getting around easier for people bicycling and walking, it also made doing so more dangerous. Bumpily moving along a road at the pace of a horse’s trot requires some degree of concentration. But when streets are easier to drive on, people drive faster, and lose their focus. This leads to deaths. In 1913, the first year of recorded data, motor-vehicle deaths occurred at a rate of 4.4 per 100,000 people, or 4,200 total casualties. In 1937, this peaked at a rate of 30.8, nearly 40,000 people in total.²³

Many of these deaths can be attributed to putting too much power in the hands of those ill-equipped to wield it. With no driver’s education, or even established norms of how one should drive, streets were chaotic. Stop signs, lane lines, and driver’s licenses didn’t exist. Practically anyone could try their hand behind the wheel, with little oversight. Cars had no brake lights, so if drivers stopped short (which happens every minute on the roads), there was no way of anticipating it. For some, this wasn’t an issue, as they breezed through all intersections without a moment’s hesitation, seldom slowing down to see if traffic might be coming from the other direction. There was no reason why they should’ve been so confident—there weren’t even traffic signals to let them know they could go through a green light. Left turns were treated like right turns, with offenders earning the name “corner cutters” for making quick movements against the flow of traffic, hitting unsuspecting pedestrians crossing the other side of the street.²⁴ Pileups were common. Drunk driving, pervasive.

Driving got safer after its Great Depression depths. Things we hardly spend a moment thinking about, like seat belts or reliable brakes, were introduced. Roads began to resemble those we drive on today. Just like zoning, public thoroughfares began to be divided strictly by use. Most frequently, they were dedicated exclusively to cars. Trams, pedestrians, and bicyclists had to find other ways around. This had its benefits, however. Kids were barred from literally playing in traffic. Trains became separated by grade so they didn’t have to compete for road space with other modes of transportation, and railroad crossing signals were implemented. Where streets once faintly resembled the imagined glories of toddlers, with trucks, trains, and unsuspecting action figures smashing together (with attendant whooshing and crashing sound effects), they became more rational, and safer. Thankfully, these scenes now rarely make it past playroom reenactments.

Aside from donning new paved surfaces, the streets themselves were little different than in the pre-automobile era. Gradually, that began to change. Detroit completed the first urban highway, Davison Freeway, in 1942.²⁵ Dozens of homes and businesses were demolished (or picked up and moved) to make way for the road. Davison Avenue was transformed from a tree-lined boulevard to an open-air sewer for cars, splitting the Highland Park neighborhood into two. Subsequent expansions (it currently spans 8 lanes wide) have ensured Highland Park hasn’t recovered since.

Compared to what was to come, the engineers responsible for constructing the first highways were little more than raptors testing the fences, perhaps aware of their power, but not empowered to see it to its conclusion. This changed in 1956, where America’s infatuation with cars and roads was blown open. The creation of the Interstate Highway System unleashed a scale of infrastructure development that was historically unprecedented up to that point, paradigmatically shifting development patterns towards private car ownership. Conceived as a project for national defense by President Eisenhower (the full name of the law was the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act), the bill authorized 47,000 miles of highways that were constructed at a cost of more than $500 billion (inflation adjusted). It took 35 years to complete.²⁶ Conquering farm lands, complex natural ecosystems, and dense urban communities with equal parts deftness and indifference (sometimes bordering on hostility), the Act expanded the previous interstate system by more than 20 times its pre-1956 mile count.²⁷

Though this system was, and continues to be, lauded by supporters as essential to the mid century growth that launched America into superpower status, it was also successful in a different, less celebrated way. The interstate highway system and the broader network of 1,000,000 miles of federally supported roads (out of 4.2 million road miles nationally) ushered America into an era of unique individualism and expanded segregation.²⁸

Yes, the development of a national network of roads allowed for increased logistical interconnectivity and economic productivity, which are both good things as far as I’m concerned. But this prosperity wasn’t shared equally. It was a kind of scattered adventure: connectivity for some, and severance for others. What Eisenhower’s highway system most uniformly accomplished was to stretch us out and pull us apart. These were, after all, key components of the program’s stated goals. As much as the Interstate Highway System was an infrastructure initiative, it was equally a de-densification project to diffuse potential targets in the Cold War, where dense cities could be attacked for concentrated destructive impact.

This stretching and pulling had many adverse impacts. Strong communities were destroyed to facilitate the movement of private vehicles to new communities segregated by class, use, and almost always at the beginning, race. More than 13,500 miles tore through cities, displacing hundreds of thousands and damning those who remained to grim conditions. Enabled by the highways, millions across the country moved out of cities. Most of these emigres were middle class white families, earning the movement the name “White Flight”. They drove along elevated highways, never quite interacting with the city they lived closest to, merely using it transactionally as a place to work from 9:00 in the morning to 5:00 in the evening, before driving back home, ignorant of the destruction that enabled them to live in separate communities many miles outside of the city’s limits. Could there be anything more individualistic than this?

Hardly, but such was the zeitgeist. This was the cultural peak of Modernism, a philosophy that viewed itself as fundamentally scientific, espousing hyper rationalism, individualism, and an embrace of technology to further human progress. You may know some of its exports, like the Scandinavian mid-century furniture favored by anointed tastemakers (and maybe by you as well!), to abstract art that no one really understands when looking at on their own, but are convinced it must be good because those same tastemakers told them so. But Modernism was, and is, so much more influential than this.

By the time World War II ended, Modernism was no longer the avant-garde movement it had once been at the beginning of the 20th century, pushing art, design, and thought to places previously inconceivable. It was now mainstream. Modernism was a philosophy that explicitly rejected the past in an embrace of the future, seductive at a time where much of the world was rebuilding after two devastating wars and a crippling depression. The past had wrought such profound destruction and iniquity on a scale so vast, it was enough to think “pre-Modern” humanity was beyond redemption. One could understand the motivation to move beyond all that was associated with those times. For our cities and towns, this worldview demanded that any traditional place, structure, or way of building become verboten, at least to any sufficiently modern, thoughtful person of the day.

Modern urban planning practices and the private automobile were the perfect tools to rebuild this broken world. They embodied a scientific, rational, and hopeful future predicated on technology, which would allow the world to rise triumphantly beyond its darkest moments. Where the human condition was untenable and messy in the pre-Modern period, a cure for its effective management had seemingly been found.

Modernism penetrated all realms of thinking and creation. In architecture and city building, there was perhaps no figure of greater consequence than Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, the Swiss-French architect and theorist better known by the name he selected for himself, Le Corbusier. Modernism’s abstractions were made tangible in the built environment through his plans. In denigrating pre-Modern communities as laid out along the “Pack-Donkey’s way”, Le Corbusier viewed the traditional city as anachronistic, an overcrowded vestige of habitation from the time before reason and industrial capability prevailed. In this way, Corbu set himself directly against one of the most prominent architectural theorists of the prior generation, Camillo Sitte. Sitte lamented the development of industrialized cities for stripping beauty and the arts out of everyday life. He heralded traditional cities for their intimate plazas, perpendicular streets that met to form terminating vistas that provided enclosure where one’s sighteline down the street was drawn towards a building or monument, and irregularly curving lanes, which he considered vital to successful city-building.²⁹ Le Corbusier did not.

Writing in his 1929 manifesto, The City of To-Morrow and Its Planning, Le Corbusier criticized Sitte’s City Planning According to Artistic Principles as “a most wilful piece of work” describing its advocacy for artistic and organic cities as “an appalling paradoxical misconception in an age of motor-cars”.³⁰ He felt that “a modern city lives by the straight line, inevitably for the construction of buildings, sewers and tunnels, highways, pavements. The circulation of traffic demands the straight line; it is the proper thing for the heart of a city.”

These ideas materialized in Ville Contemporaine, a 1922 plan for a hypothetical city of three million people. Le Corbusier took heavy inspiration from machines, famously stating “A house is a machine for living in” and that, “Machines will lead to a new order both of work and of leisure”.³¹ Revering the mechanized processes of mass production for its hyper-efficient creation of goods, Le Corbusier set about designing his city much in the way a refrigerator or a truck might be produced. If these products could be churned out with precision, consistency, and good taste, he observed, why should a city be any different?

With a rigid orthogonality, he envisioned the city as a collection of strictly segregated zones, where long and wide highways dedicated to private automobiles were the principal arteries of moving from one zone to the next. Corbu worshiped the car and oriented his entire plan around it, similar to the way a church unfolds around a nave. As far as the buildings were concerned, there could be no detailing. Citing the architect Adolph Loos’ seminal Ornament and Crime: “The more a people are cultivated, the more decor disappears.”³² As Modernism was the height of humanity’s intellectual journey, its adherents reasoned, they were too sophisticated to be fooled by the simple tricks of cheap ornamentation, favoring the intellectually honest structures whose form followed their functions. Minimalism would rule the day. When combined with machine processes, Ville Contemporaine’s buildings took the form of stark identically reproduced skyscrapers situated in parks, gradually tapering off in height from the central district outwards to a shorter, but still identical, composition. These buildings were to be evenly distributed around the city as pews to witness the car driving down the aisles of the church of Modernity.

By providing everything with a clearly defined space, separating all uses cured the chaotic competition over scarce land that historic cities struggled with. Building things on top of one another, without so much as a few square feet of relief from the screaming salesman or rabid preacher, was barbaric. Looking down from a bird’s eye view onto the city—a view only possible thanks to the technological progress of the airplane—everything would be perceived as perfectly symmetrical, and entirely rational, befitting the triumph of the Modern man.

Ville Contemporaine was a totalitarian masterpiece. There was to be no derivation from the exacting lines. Everything succumbed to the plan—and by extension, the car. People included. This was the only way to overcome the conditions of the past. Humanity had to be put in place, and internalize that fact.

Despite his self-perceived brilliance, Le Corbusier saw little traction at first. He needed something bolder to bring attention to his ideas. What better way to show the superiority of the Modern world over the traditional one than by planning a direct claim over it? Then people would understand. Fed up with the squalor, overcrowding, and perceived anachronistic nature of his adopted city, Paris, Le Corbusier proposed the Plan Voisin. It would cover around one square mile of land in the center of the city, demolishing relics of the past for marvels of the future. Building off of the principles of Ville Contemporaine, Plan Voisin would have provided homes for 78,000 people, in identical four-winged towers. 90% of the land would have been preserved for open space and circulation. Naturally, the proposal was sponsored by a car company (Avions Voisin).

Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin for Paris.

This was a very different kind of vision for the future than previous optimists had espoused, and it marked a turning point in the history of our built environment. Instead of improving the slums or building new cities with the daily routines and emotions of people in mind, as the social reformers and Sitte valued, Le Corbusier’s Modernist plans rejected human experience for technocratic optimization. He put ideology, technology, and rationalism above humans—though admittedly, we aren’t known to be the most rational beings. Of course, Modernism wasn’t an incontrovertible science (no science is), but rather an aesthetic movement that expressed itself through a very particular vision of the future, prone to the fallibilities and shortsightedness of any ideology that condescends to know all, as philosopher Alain de Botton convincingly argues in his riveting The Architecture of Happiness.³³ Aesthetic or scientific, for the first time in history, cities were no longer planned around the needs of people, but rather, the demands of the car. The consequences would be profound.

Paris was saved from destruction, but other cities were not so lucky. Le Corbusier’s plans were exported around the world. For our purposes, we’ll focus on their landfall on the American side of the Atlantic from the French capital.

American cities had been tinkering with piecemeal elements of Modernist planning for decades, like ordered Euclidean zoning, the mass production of cars, and the creation of highways and modern towers. But it wasn’t until a general philosophy that encompassed all of these elements was put together that their ultimate impact on society would be felt. While there wasn’t ample opportunity to implement this philosophy during the Great Depression or World War II, due to a lack of resources and focus being directed on other fronts, as soon as stability was reached in the postwar period, Modernism presented something of an easy roadmap to guide cities and towns into the future of the 20th century.

This materialized in two distinct ways, which I call the twin swords: one to cut down, the other to cut through. The first sword cleaved highways through dense thickets. Following Le Corbusier’s dictat that normative traffic circulation must take the form of a straight line through the heart of a city, entire neighborhoods were demolished to make way for urban freeways, subsidized generously from the federal government. Gashes often discriminately severed neighborhoods whose land was the cheapest and held little political power such that they couldn’t put up much of a fight. Not only were homes destroyed, but for those that remained, connections to those on the other side became unsupportable. Where two families might have gotten together every Sunday for dinner before the highways were built, afterwards they now had to go around, which could be a significant detour. Without these connections, beloved local businesses closed, community centers emptied, and economic productivity declined meaningfully. Scars from these decisions still exist in many neighborhoods today, segregating and subjugating.

Much like a machete, this first sword hacked vertically through neighborhoods for roads and highways. The second cut horizontally, in service of demolishing blighted slums. Broadly, these were not slums that the 19th-century social reformers would recognize. While it’s true that conditions were quite bad in some of these areas, many were simply gritty working-class neighborhoods, far from the supposed squalor that inflicted them. With caprice and discrimination against minority racial and religious groups, entire neighborhoods were cleared, leveraging federal subsidies from Title I of the 1949 Housing Act, better known as Urban Renewal. Neighborhoods that may have otherwise been perfectly fine if, in the minds of certain planners, not for the color of their residents’ skin or their religious beliefs, were designated as “blighted” and in need of reform.

Wrecking balls crashed through urban fabric, replacing finely networked communities with austere towers that turned their backs on the streets and offered little in the way of geniality. Greenery and open space were abundant, but it was superficial, and not really usable. Patches of grass without programming, seats, or enclosure did not welcome people to spend time in them. They were dead spaces. At night, without lights or protection from security, these became dangerous areas that were best to be avoided. Sadly, those who lived there could not. While good in theory, without effective management or an understanding of the intimacies of what makes for successful design (which none of these developments benefited from), they fell on hard times, and were ultimately neglected by those who erected them Infamous examples include New York’s Public Housing developments (NYCHA projects) and St. Louis’ Pruitt-Igoe complex, which was so poorly executed that it was demolished before it could even turn 20. Pruitt-Igoe remains a vacant, overgrown lot 50 years later, hardly a 10-minute bike ride from the city’s iconic Arch. Other neighborhoods that were cleared for redevelopment as in Norfolk were never built in the first place, displacing former residents and ultimately eviscerating civic life for no reason.

The Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments complex in St Louis. Completed in 1955. Demolished in 1972.

These policies cut beyond our cities, with highways moving outwards from core areas to raze our countryside and form new suburbs. The cause for this may look similar to the challenges we face today; A housing crisis gripped the country following the war. Very few homes were built in the 15 years from the beginning of the Great Depression to V-J Day. This problem was compounded by the fact that GIs returning from Europe and the Pacific were eager to start families but there weren’t enough family appropriate homes. Furthermore, despite strict quotas on who could enter the country (through legislation like the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924), nearly a million immigrants entered the U.S. between 1930 and 1945.³⁴ And this number only includes those who were officially recorded.³⁵ Homes were needed, desperately. The National Housing Agency, a temporary wartime entity, estimated in 1944 that the U.S. would need 12,600,000 new dwelling units during the first decade after the war to meet demand.³⁶

The federal government recognized the dramatic need and got to work. Prohibitive mortgage terms, like high down payments and one year interest payback periods, were revised to allow prospective home buyers to put as little as 5% of the purchase price down, and spread interest payments over 30 years. Lenders might not have done this on their own, given how risky debt could be, so the loans became federally insured, meaning the government would protect against losses from borrowers who didn’t pay back their loans. This gave banks far more confidence in extending mortgages which by extension, enabled developers to secure financing to build the housing the country desperately needed.

Inspiration for these new suburbs was provided, if indirectly, by Le Corbusier. Though they didn’t look like Ville Contemporaine at first glance, compositionally, they were nearly identical. Accessed via straight, orthogonal road systems, these new suburbs were hyper rational. Everything had its place, and nothing could be outside of its own place. Houses here. Strip malls there. Apartments nowhere (less Corbuserian, admittedly). Under the guise of individualism, and abiding to a structure that would make Corbu proud, the unadorned homes were homogeneously mass produced like washing machines or sheet metal, sat in the middle of their own parks surrounded by ample green space, and were subservient to fleets of equally mass produced cars.

With funding at the ready, and a plan cemented for idealized communities, all that was needed was a system that could adequately scale upwards to satisfy the demand. Building 12 million homes requires some level of coordination, after all. Re-enter zoning.

Euclidean zoning is similar to a coloring book. The lines are already there, you just need to fill them in. I should mention it’s not a very good coloring book, as most of the areas are all the same color, which makes for a rather drab artistic exercise and commensurately insipid communities, but I digress. In the post-war period, a page in the Euclidean book would mostly be the color of single family homes (let’s say green), with some pockets of red and blue for retail and office strips. Though boring, this coloring book was very useful for communities who wanted to plan for a future of growth but didn’t have the internal capabilities to do so.

There are nearly 20,000 incorporated places in the United States. For clarity, an incorporated place is defined by the census as “any governmental unit incorporated under state law as a city, town, borough, or village legally prescribed limits, powers, and functions”.³⁷ The vast majority of these units are home to fewer than 10,000 people, making it infeasible for each one to support a planning department. There are only so many planners to go around, and that’s before the churn which sees many trained experts leave the profession in search of more inspired or lucrative disciplines. After the war, most towns didn’t (and still don’t) have the time nor the resources to develop their own plans and codes. It was simply easier to copy what neighboring towns did. And so, standard codes were transcribed from one municipality to the next, straight across the country. No town wanted to be left behind the march of Modernity. For unincorporated areas that had no pretensions about progress, they needed mechanisms to manage the rapid growth which was consuming farmland, and similarly adopted the codes of incorporated areas. This is the genesis of why everywhere in the U.S. now looks the same. Whether you’re in Boise, Tampa, Omaha, or anywhere in between, the coloring book (and the people who color in those lines) is very similar, if not the same. More on this later in Chapter 5.

These new suburban homes weren’t built for all who needed them. Programs were selectively subsidized for populations that public officials deemed worthy. The Underwriting Manual of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), the framework which laid out who would be insured by federally backed loans and who would not, explicitly excluded certain groups. As Richard Rothstein detailed in his influential, Color of Law, the FHA and the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) created maps that designated a gradient of “safe” to “hazardous” neighborhoods where mortgages could be insured.³⁸ If a neighborhood was deemed safe, a mortgage could be issued with minimal concern. But if a neighborhood were labeled hazardous, no loans were to be issued. No loan, no home. No ability to build equity and wealth. This process became known as redlining, because “hazardous” neighborhoods were colored red on the maps, and all who lived in them were deemed too risky to extend a mortgage to.

With the Federal Government’s commitment to building a network of highways crisscrossing the country (de-densifying cities in the process) and the backstopping of loans to support mass construction to solve the housing crisis, funds were near limitless for those who were able to build at scale according to FHA standards. Levittown, Long Island, is the early case study for this pattern of growth. Originally planned for 2,000 homes, so abundant were the funds, so generous were the subsidies, and so strong was the demand, that by 1951 the Levitt family had constructed more than 17,000. Home models varied slightly in later phases, but at the outset they were functionally identical in order to economize costs through efficient production of component materials to deliver as much housing as possible. Through a mass production process not unlike Ford’s assembly line, 26 specialized teams of contractors could build one of Levitt’s 750 square foot cottages in under a day, with each of the 26 steps of the process optimized for maximum efficiency. To further reduce costs, workers were not paid by the hour, but by the number of homes they completed, incentivizing speed. Attics that had room for two extra bedrooms were left unfinished. For those who were allowed to buy a home in Levittown, the deal was almost too good to be believed by today’s standards. GIs returning from war could buy a home for just $7,000, with no money down, and $65 monthly payments.⁴⁰ Purchasers of the homes signed clauses which forbade “the premises to be used or occupied by any other persons than members of the Caucasian race”.⁴¹

Aerial of one of the early phases of Levittown, Long Island.

Suburban Modernism guided American development patterns as a philosophy throughout the mid-century period. So powerful was this vision, and so strong the belief in it, that hundreds of billions of public dollars were leveraged in service of it. Some still believe in the promises of this post-war paradigm today, which have become embodied in the idealized American dream of a generously sized single family home, several car garage, and large lawn separated from all other uses by long and straight roadways. This, many reason, is what rational individualism looks like, the highest state any sufficiently modern person can aspire to be. That it’s effectively a socialized housing and highway program seems to matter little, because people believe so strongly in the original promises of the program and the orthodoxy of individualism.

But gradually the direct connection to this philosophy receded. Divorced from the earliest theorists who were deeply concerned about solving the most pressing challenges of their day, we’ve been left with the vestiges of realized plans that never quite succeeded in translating the enlightened values of Modern theory into place. The result has been an overwhelmingly disorienting, segregated, inefficient, and unsustainable built environment. One that, while temporarily addressing a housing shortage, sowed the seeds for a future one. It is my belief, as we’ll explore in the next chapter, that the negative outcomes this way of building have delivered far outweigh the positives.

It’s been some time since the results of this philosophy were rejected, but there hasn’t quite been another worldview to replace it. We’re simply copying and pasting simulacra of the earliest post-war suburban developments (and institutional urban derivatives like blocky apartment buildings) without thinking about why we’re doing it. Though the earliest subdivisions are no better than the new ones today (they’re probably, on balance, worse), there was an excitement around their creation because they represented a belief in the possibility of a better world that was fresh, innovative, and upwardly mobile. Difficult though it may be to see today, these subdivisions were, in many essential ways, remarkable improvements over the conditions of the past. We haven’t, however, continued the upwards trajectory of our built environment in recent decades. We are copying and pasting the results of policies that are no longer relevant, without questioning the outcomes. Few viable alternatives to bring us into a new era have materialized.

I don’t mean to be dismissive of the work attempted to rectify mid-century development patterns or their vestiges. Groups like the Postmodernists tried to offer another path. Few ideologies, however, can achieve sustained success if they orient themselves around the opposition to something else. Once their opponent vanishes, so too, will they. PoMo rejected the severity, austerity, and rigid formality of Modernism, but did so in such a playful way that arguably it didn’t take itself seriously enough. So how could the rest of the country adopt such a philosophy? While this is a gross underaccounting of the labors of this period, it’s not unfair to say—and indeed it has proven true— that this philosophy was not sufficient to chart a sustained course of progress in the built environment.

After decades lacking a general direction following the dissolution of Modernism, we’ve become untethered from place and untethered from meaning of place as no substantive worldview has taken its position. Modernism, for all its flaws, at least offered some structure for building. We’ve become numb to a world where there is no operating guide for moving forward. The scale of our planning and infrastructure apparatus is so vast and incomprehensible, and our needs so extraordinary, that it seems like we can’t do anything. So instead of believing in something, we find ourselves agnostic towards just about anything. Instead of working tirelessly to solve our problems as earlier reformers did, or dreaming of a better world as the Modernists did, we’ve become prisoners to the codes that have damned us. It is a national Stockholm syndrome. We’ve fallen for our oppressors because we don’t know where else to turn. We feel as though we no longer have any agency.

But we do. It just starts with a bit of belief.

Le Corbusier espoused his Modern belief set for the world in a 1923 collection of essays entitled Toward a New Architecture. A century later, we find ourselves in need of a new general philosophy on how to structure and interact with our built environment. Our surroundings impact us too much to acquiesce to our unacceptable status quo.

And so, on the pages that follow, I propose a new general philosophy for our world. It’s one predicated on a unity of the pragmatic and romantic. There are very many serious challenges facing North America: climate change, lack of affordability, economic stagnation, segregation, prejudice, structural fragility, declining physical and mental health. The list goes on. None of these challenges, however, are insurmountable. There are no immutable laws of the universe which say we cannot address them head on. To let these challenges continue out of some laziness or cynicism towards embracing change is deeply harmful. Optimism is the required course of action to take.

In our pursuit of Optimism through pragmatism, we must take caution that the achievement of our goals does not come at the expense of the people they’re meant to serve. We could theoretically solve our housing crisis by building 10 million concrete cottages measuring 500 square feet at a distance no closer than 60 miles to the core of a dozen major cities, but many other challenges, perhaps more severe, would accompany this proposed solution. The places that are the most utilitarian, in their courtship of lowest common denominator answers, often find themselves the most poorly equipped in the march towards longevity, privileging myopic solutions such as they do. That the most marginalized must accept a cruel spartanism is an iniquity not often discussed. We must seek to do more.

We must create a better world. One that is beautiful, aspirational, dynamic, diverse, sustainable, walkable, affordable, opportune—but not utopian, as utopias have no place in reality. They’re purely fictional. The definition of utopia is “no place”. We very much want to build real places. And what’s more, we know what these real places could look like. All of the listed Optimistic elements have been made manifest in our world before to great effect. A select few places have been able to harness these elements together at the same time. Even fewer have made these conditions last, at scale, for the many. Ours is a mission of abundance such that these kinds of places may become available to as much of the population as possible, without subsidy (familial or governmental, as these are subject to the caprices of varying administrations, or the winds of time), tradeoff, or coercion. Leveraging an Optimistic mentality, we can solve the problems plaguing our world today effectively and wonderfully.

Optimism is inherently a positive force. But lose it, or adopt a worldview that rejects humanity in favor of something else, and we quickly regress. Where the East End of London was, for a time, one of the worst patches of land one could stumble across in the world, it’s now one of the most desirable. In and around the areas redeveloped by social reformers, and sometimes in the buildings created by the reformers themselves, rents are among the most expensive in the United Kingdom. These places, optimistic though their genesis was, have arguably become too successful. Alfred Tredway White’s Workman’s cottages now sell for millions of dollars, on the rare occasions they do come up for sale.

It would be wrong to forget the context of why the remnants from this era were created in the first place, and disregard the conditions that have (mercifully) been left to the past. It would be equally wrong, however to ignore the triumph of these interventions, and the lessons their creation has for us. Regretfully, we are guilty of this transgression. Caught in between an ardent preservation that’s content to maintain the past, and a lapse in the collective memory of the conditions that led to the creation of the places we so revere today, we are lost. Untethered from our history, we cling frantically at those few shreds of good that we enjoy lest they meet the same fate as their perished siblings. If we love these places so much, pragmatism would demand we simply create more of them. It’s inconceivable that housing once developed for the most marginalized is now out of grasp for all but the wealthiest simply because we stopped creating these sorts of places. An artificial scarcity has divorced context and common sense, and the least advantaged groups pay the cost. We cannot look back at a job well done and rest on those laurels forever. Without sufficient watering and replenishment, those laurels will die.

If architecture is an honest reflection of a society’s values—and what could be more telling than the structures we erect that we labor our whole lives to acquire and then reside among—what does it say about ours? Are we a people devoid of ambition, morality, and meaning? If we don’t respect the project of building cities, or societies, that’s one thing, but I don’t believe that to be true. So the question becomes: what do we want our buildings to say about us? What do we value? Do we worship at the feet of Gods, or commerce? Do we withdraw into ourselves, or do we hold sacred communion with our neighbors? Do we seek a higher plane of living, or are we content with whatever scraps we’re provided? Our values can be read in wood and stone, and the stories they tell are incorruptible. What tales will we tell?

Working towards crafting new stories about who we are will doubtless be challenging. Much of the last century has proven how difficult the right sort of storytelling is. And yet, I’m hopeful. I’m hopeful because we know how to create places that are fundamentally good for our well being, physical health, mental disposition, economy, safety, social structure, and a host of other metrics. We know how to create joyous realms that are worthy of our affections. We’ve done it before. Ambition alone, or clutching to an idealized past, is not enough, however. We cannot simply want to do good. We have to acknowledge, and then respond, to the operating realities that we’re constrained by today. Even the smallest of projects requires buy-in from many dozens of people, from public officials, bankers, and neighborhood groups, to architects, graphic designers, code enforcers, and construction trades. Getting all of these people to believe they’re on the same team is no simple thing.

So, how do we go about doing this? How do we progress the built environment forward in the next century when it has regressed so far in the last? It starts with the belief that we can create great places anew—a belief that a better world is not only possible, but essential to cultivate. We can accomplish this by looking at examples of great places that have been built recently and within our context, not 200 years ago in a place opposite the world from us. Inspiration then leads to realization. When people see that something can be done, they’ll be more inclined to do more things like it in the future. When they think it’s impossible—or don’t see anything like it at all—there’s little hope of creating something better. One cannot very well move forward with something they have no knowledge of, or do not think has any reasonable chance of success. How could you think about doing something if you’ve never seen it done before? Creating something without a reference to existing precedents is very hard. Thankfully, we have references.

The first precedents for this contemporary strain of Optimism can be traced back to the pioneering work of the first New Urbanists. Driven by a desire to rectify the ills of midcentury planning and sprawling development patterns, a small group of architects and planners (Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth Moule, Stefanos Polyzoides, Peter Calthorpe, Hank Dittmar, and Daniel Solomon, among others) formed the Congress for the New Urbanism in 1993. According to the founding charter, “The Congress for the New Urbanism views disinvestment in central cities, the spread of placeless sprawl, increasing separation by race and income, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness, and the erosion of society’s built heritage as one interrelated community-building challenge”.⁴¹

These principles have informed a generation of practitioners of the built environment, both directly and indirectly. They form part of an Optimistic philosophy, but more is needed. Where the Modernist planners espoused hyper rationality, individualism, an embrace of technology, minimalism, and orthogonality, the Optimist privileges the pursuit of walkable, sustainable, organic (spontaneously occurring), affordable, beautiful, malleable, contextual, stylistically agnostic, diverse, and common sense communities that adhere to the needs of people first. Optimism is a perspective that welcomes technology and innovation, but only when they complement humanity, not usurp it. Importantly, the Optimist embraces an abundance agenda that advocates for building as many high-quality places as possible that adhere to these underlying principles such that as many as possible may access fundamentally good communities, without scarcity, bad faith regulation, or hostility inhibiting them. Optimism may prefer the construction of infill projects on lots in existing urban areas, but it also provides the framework for town extensions in greenfields such as they may be required.

Much is wrong with our current built environment and the underlying regulations, incentives, and imperatives that drive our development patterns. There’s much to be indignant about, and righteously oppose. There’s a lot to shake our fists at, grimly mock, or blink absently at. It’s so easy to fall prey to fatalism for all of these reasons. But we must triumph over this cynicism. There’s so much worth celebrating. Let me modify that: there’s so much that needs celebrating.

Optimism is a movement that provides application-free membership to all. Without people who embody the ideals of this movement, there would be no cities, towns, neighborhoods, nor communities worth spending time in. Doing away with unapproachable, high-brow rhetoric that presumes to tell others what they ought to do and what they ought to like, we must emphasize that ours is a welcoming, joyous mission, that encourages many different voices and perspectives. That we’re working on creating a better future where all of us get to enjoy the benefits of our collective work. That we’re not afraid to be excited about the future we’re building and have a little fun! If we don’t derive joy from the things we surround our lives with, what’s the point? For too long, our communities have been greatly deprived because of their rejection of these very ideas.

You may not be sympathetic to the need for this new philosophy. It may sound utopian, superfluous, and perhaps not even that desirable. As the next chapter attempts to argue, however, nothing could be further from the truth. The many challenges our modern society presents require a vigilant and urgent response. Optimism is both the most pragmatic solution, and the most aspirational.

Share Southern Urbanism

Coby Lefkowitz is a real estate developer, writer, and thought leader in the world of urban planning and development. He recently published the book Building Optimism, explaining why our world looks the way it does, and how to make it better. Purchase your copy, via the link.

Written By Adeleine Geitner

Driving down US Highway 321 between Lenoir and Lincolnton, North Carolina, the stretch of freeway that cuts through the City of Hickory doesn’t exactly stand out from the typical American “stroad”-scape. The road’s scenery consists of a handful of used car lots, single-story strip malls, and a Waffle House. Except for the brief reprieve offered by a bridge crossing over Lake Hickory, you could mistake this length of pavement for any other expanse in the South similarly dominated by cars. This past month, however, the nondescript thoroughfare received a landmark that signals more clearly what goes on in Hickory.

Namely, a pedestrian bridge displaying the city’s name in bright white letters was installed across 321, calling attention to a critical (and literal) stepping stone in Hickory’s forthcoming Aviation Walk. With a target completion date of October 2023, the bridge will soon offer pedestrians and cyclists an easy path to destinations like the Crawdads stadium, which hosts Hickory’s Minor League Baseball team, and, beyond that, the recently finished Hickory Aviation Museum.

But Hickory’s efforts to connect residents doesn’t end with the Aviation Walk. Thanks to a 2018 federal grant, the small city of 41,000 is building out an impressive series of accessible walkways, collectively named the Hickory Trail. The central piece of the project, the City Walk, is already in place. Following the railroad tracks, the City Walk currently connects Lenoir-Rhyne University to downtown Hickory’s Union Square. From there, the walkway will extend through a former industrial area of the city, which is working with local artists to establish a bona fide arts district, before continuing down and connecting to the lakeside River Walk. Branching out from the downtown stem of the City Walk, the Historic Ridgeview Walk will create vital connective tissue between the city’s historic Ridgeview community and nearby amenities.

According to the City, the aims of the Hickory Trail and accompanying bond program are to “increase quality of life for residents and spur economic revitalization” by “providing pedestrian and bicycle connectivity throughout the City.” Anyone with a background in urban planning will not find this mission unique or surprising. But it’s notable because Hickory is a far cry from the Portlands and Denvers that are often seen as examples of so-called “progressive” walkability initiatives. A southern furniture city that took a big hit when manufacturing moved overseas, Hickory has spent the past few decades seeking a new spark.

Through building for walkability, Hickory has found just that. And they’ve done so not by looking outside for answers but by connecting and strengthening the communities within. New local businesses are popping up along the Trail, including a music venue and a coffee shop, with more to come. In a move based not in progressivism but practicality, Hickory is demonstrating to former manufacturing cities throughout the South that walkability works.

Get 50% off a group subscription

Adeleine Geitner is the Duke Initiative for Urban Studies Fellow on Sprawl Repair and Nodal Development.

Written By Adeleine Geitner

The street names in Hickory, North Carolina, are a running joke among locals. As Maine Avenue NE turns toward Lenoir-Rhyne University, the signs suddenly start reading 8th Street NE. 5th Street NW dead-ends into 7th Avenue NW and then picks up a mile later under the same name. In one neighborhood, 4th Street Circle, Place, and Lane NE all run parallel to each other. How did this happen? And what does it say about the way we do or don’t design our cities to grow and expand?

A little context: The city’s street layout is based on a numbered grid divided into four quadrants. The railroad tracks form the north/south divide and Center Street splits the city east/west, creating NW, NE, SW, and SE quadrants. Streets run north to south and avenues run west to east. Easy, no? As the city writes in its publicly available document “Helpful hints to navigate Hickory, NC [sic] streets,” the roads are “Actually…not that difficult to locate.” One only needs to “take a few moments to find the key to the pattern.”

Grids naturally accommodate density. According to officials in Hickory, the numbered quadrant layout was implemented for its simplicity, logistic sense, and uniformity and for being “flexible enough to accommodate growth.”

Knowing the key to the pattern, however, does not guarantee that a person hoping to visit a friend at 2nd Street Place SE will first think to drive to the end of 11th Avenue Drive. But is that such a crime? For all the grumbling, locals share good-natured laughs lamenting the complicated setup, and like the quirks of many Southern cities, the strangeness can be written off as “charm.” 

Joking aside, Hickory’s grid is a rather beautiful thing. According to The Economist, “a mix of idealism and practicality” drove America’s adoption of the grid. In planning Philadelphia, William Penn, a Quaker, believed that if all streets were equal, the people among them would be as well. From a practical standpoint, the grid can’t be beat. “Roads are expensive to build. Laying them out in grids allows more buildings to sit alongside them, which can more easily be linked to sewage lines, electricity connections, and gas pipes.”

And grids naturally accommodate density. According to officials in Hickory, the numbered quadrant layout was implemented for its simplicity, logistic sense, and uniformity, and for being “flexible enough to accommodate growth.”   

Anyone taking a brief glance at Hickory would not laud it for its density. The city is not without sprawl, as planned suburban developments have cropped up along the city’s outer edge in the last fifty years. But Hickory is a small city of only 43,000 folks. If it were planned as densely as, say, New York City, it would only be one and a half square miles (1.49, to be precise), as opposed to 30.7. That said, it’s likely that small, affordable cities like Hickory that are close to major metropolitan hubs will keep growing in popularity. And as that happens, the grid will continue to be a wonderful layout to use.

Hickory’s newest developments have popped up right in the heart of downtown, replacing a block-sized lot of often vacant parking, the unoccupied former courthouse, and an empty dirt plot. In total, the three new apartment complexes add roughly 250 units and two blocks of ground-level retail. All this growth has occurred within a block of Hickory’s walkable downtown hub, Union Square, and within Hickory’s earliest, most compact network of roads. With a clever grid already in place, Hickory is well-positioned to grow efficiently and incrementally.

Adeleine Geitner is the Duke Initiative for Urban Studies Fellow on Sprawl Repair and Nodal Development.

As a college student with a sweet spot for my school’s town, I have lamented how difficult it can be to spend time in the city despite the proximity and desire.  I run through the city and take in the sights, I stop at the farmer’s market when I can, but I rarely (a handful of times in my two years there), go downtown in the evening for a meal. The problem is clear, and while elements of it might be unique to Duke, I believe the lesson holds for several schools with underwhelming student-city relationships.  Duke’s meal plan is restricted to campus dining.

Well duh, you might think, isn’t that the point of a meal plan? Yes and no. The point of a school’s meal plan is to feed its students, presumably via a school’s dining hall. But that does not mean that a meal plan can’t be used for greater goals. If students come to college and find themselves in more of a bubble than before they started, the college is failing to meet one of its obligations to mentor students for their life post-schooling.  If learning is restricted to reading and writing within the school day and does not incentivize understanding and enjoying the world beyond the campus walls, something is missing.

Not all of the blame can be put on the school. Students could make a better effort on their own to get off campus. Still, the way the Duke meal plan is designed, every incentive to eat elsewhere is stacked against a student. The food is very good. And the meal plan is a pre-paid certificate to eat very good food every day. It is harder, then, to rationalize leaving campus and spending additional money elsewhere.

For these reasons, Duke and other schools that experience a disconnect between their student body and the surrounding community could benefit from following in the footsteps of schools like Vanderbilt and their “Taste of Nashville” program. Using their meal card like a debit card, students can eat at more than forty local restaurants (and a few franchises) within walking distance of campus.  

Programs like these solve all the issues posed previously by eliminating the disincentives—existing access to good food, hefty advance deposit on said food—to leave campus. All, that is, except one.  Transportation is still an issue, as Duke, especially Duke’s West campus, is well-secluded from Durham’s downtown.  The walk—about a mile and a half—is just outside the range of what feels doable.  

Currently, only one bus connects Duke’s west campus to downtown Durham.  One bus.  Home to the largest population of living, breathing, and buying adults who don’t own cars, college towns are arguably one of the best types of cities for reliable bus systems.  Yet in the past few years, the options for bussing between Duke and downtown have dwindled to a singular bus once every hour.  Small voices on campus have asked that the bus routes of the past return, but the momentum isn’t there.

Expanding the dining options of students to include the many restaurants Durham’s downtown boasts would create the necessary momentum to reinstitute public transportation routes and reinstate Durham as one of the integral pieces of the Duke education. Encouraged to spend more time in Durham, Duke students could take better advantage of all Durham has to offer and become real neighbors in their community.

Share Southern Urbanism

Adeleine Geitner is a rising senior at Duke University studying public policy and economics. She is the Duke Urban Studies Initiative Fellow on Sprawl Repair and Nodal Development.

Resting on hefty endowments, private universities can be a beneficial partner to struggling downtowns. However, the best interests of schools and cities do not always align. With these difficulties in mind, what role should universities play in their city or town’s development? Twenty years ago, downtown Durham was struggling and substantially vacated, but today the city’s center houses dozens of biotech companies, a suite of Google offices (with Meta on the way), and a growing skyline. What happened?

Scott Selig has served as Duke University’s Associate Vice President for Capital Assets and Real Estate for the past twenty-two years. At that time, Selig drafted and executed an answer to this question for Duke’s hometown. “Durham needed to get better if Duke was going to get better,” Selig remembered, “and we needed to help Durham get better.” This perspective fits with the symbiotic nature of Duke and Durham’s relationship. Throughout the past century, the two have leaned on each other for support, the head and shoulder roles switching as times changed. Duke was not always the benefactor in this relationship—the university’s infamous role in the failure of the Durham-Orange Light Rail is one example—but like a true friendship, Durham and Duke’s greatest accomplishments occur when they work in unison. 

Likewise, Duke’s success in the early 2000s could not occur independently of Durham’s. When Selig took his position in 2001, Duke could have focused its real estate strategy on expanding on-campus office space and university centers. This approach, however, would not have served this dual purpose. Like many universities before it, Duke set its sights on the city.

In many ways, such an approach can come across as paternalistic at best and detrimental at worst. What does a private university know about the needs of a diverse city operating on behalf of more than 200,000 residents? Why should a resident trust an institution that answers to a distant board of directors, not to Durham voters? Given the city’s history of redevelopment projects that dramatically and disproportionately harmed its thriving Black community, how would an entity like Duke ensure their approach didn’t exacerbate past injuries? Not every question has a straightforward answer, but Duke’s partnership in Durham did its best to learn from others’ failures and act in Durham’s best interest.

Compared to other universities, Selig’s approach in Durham was new. In the short term, it would have been less expensive for Duke to buy up buildings in the downtown and redevelop them themselves, but Selig did not trust this strategy to serve Duke and Durham’s best interest. Other schools have tried this strategy, with poor results. In the case of Yale and New Haven, university input downtown resulted in the replacement of dozens of small businesses by national chains. “My main hope for Durham is that they stay authentic,” Selig says. “You go downtown and there isn’t a single chain. It won’t stay this way forever, but I hope downtown continues to be locally-owned.”

Duke’s current strategy leaves such decisions to the local community and market. Selig comes from a private real estate background. In his experience, the market is smarter than any university in deciding what businesses a downtown needs. A school that buys a lot of commercial property will have its good years, but it will be slow to respond to changing market forces and will experience drastic lulls in the off years. To work, a university can’t just be in downtown, it needs to become of downtown, putting the needs of the city first.

Selig’s strategy made Duke of downtown. When Duke began its plan to contribute to downtown Durham’s revitalization, the city was experiencing a lull. The blocks of grand old tobacco and textile mills—relics from decades of industrious prosperity in the city center—stood vacant and neglected. The weathered brick bones held immense potential, but their size and centrality made them massive endeavors for the wary developer. Someone needed to take the initial charge.

Duke’s strategy was to catalyze redevelopment, not monopolize it. Instead of buying a building, they offered to lease space in it, contingent on another tenant leasing a space as well. “Duke was the anchor tenant,” Selig explained. In the case of the American Tobacco Campus (ATC), for example, Duke agreed to lease 150 thousand square feet, after another tenant committed to do the same. This relatively small commitment catalyzed the redevelopment of the ATC’s more than one million square feet of commercial and office space. With the anchor in place, the ATC was reenvisioned as a local attraction and business hub, complete with a public park, venue space, eateries, shops, and upper-story housing. 

Another example of Duke’s anchor tenant strategy is the redevelopment of West End. Bordered by some of Durham’s most compact residential neighborhoods (Burch Avenue to the north and Morehead Hill to the south), the similarly dense “West End” neighborhood has historically contained a short commercial strip of stores and services catering to the surrounding homes. Like many neighborhoods near downtown, West End experienced a decline in the latter half of the twentieth century and lost its eastern portion to freeway construction. 

West End’s commercial strip sits squarely within a three-cornered system of streets that connects Duke’s West Campus, East Campus, and downtown Durham. It likewise held the potential to serve all three areas in addition to those immediately around it. To restore its commercial vibrancy, Duke signed a lease to an office building planned for the district’s westernmost corner. 

The project, dubbed Kent Corner, was carried out by Self Help, a local credit union that works to expand low-income home ownership. Duke contributed funds to the redevelopment and signed on to occupy part of the office space once it was built. With Duke’s support, Self Help built a grocery co-operative, Durham Co-Op, on the lot adjacent to the office building. With an employment hub in place, vacant buildings around the office began to receive new life. Grub Durham, a locally owned and operated biscuits-and-more restaurant, now occupies a former gas station across the street. 

Other examples of Duke’s strategy downtown include One City Center (5 stories of office and retail space under a luxury apartment tower), The Carmichael Building (a state-of-the-art research hub in a former tobacco mill), and Brightleaf Square (another tobacco renovation—this one into a mixed-use courtyard mall). Duke’s strategy is largely regarded as a success, and many attribute the rebirth of Durham directly to Duke and Selig. 

But the approach is not without its critics. Ten years after the creation of Kent Corner, Selig receives backlash for a project that was originally well-received. The new brick against the old brick seems to many like a harbinger of gentrification, and the surrounding neighborhoods have experienced pricing pressures in the years since the project’s opening, as has the rest of the city. In reality, redevelopment tends to worsen neighborhood affordability, in the absence of protections. One such protection, the Durham Community Land Trustees, owns more than 130 rental units in West End and has ensured their sustained affordability. 

Economic development will always be a game of tradeoffs. Though preservation and progress need not be at odds with each other, every decision will prioritize one over the other. As residents understandably lament what Duke could have done differently, the strategy remains one of the most successful case studies yet for university-initiated downtown revitalization. As campuses across the country–and the globe—look to Duke as a model for town-and-gown partnerships, the university’s next big test will be its response to the boom it helped build. 

Share Southern Urbanism

Adeleine Geitner is a rising senior at Duke University studying public policy and economics. She is the Duke Urban Studies Initiative Fellow on Sprawl Repair and Nodal Development.

This past May, student fellows at Southern Urbanism attended the thirty-second national gathering of the Congress of New Urbanism (CNU) in downtown Cincinnati. While there, the fellows caught up with urbanists from all over the United States and beyond to chat about their work. Each interviewee was asked three questions about what they do and the goals that their work advances. The conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

Paddy Steinschneider is a longtime placemaker from Dobbs Ferry, NY. He is the owner of Gotham Design, Planning, and Community Development, and describes himself as a designer, builder, and advocate. Drawing from his personal experiences, Paddy explains difficulties with the approval and entitlement process, the challenges this process poses to the principles of New Urbanism, and opportunities for reform.

MS: Could you take a second to just introduce yourself and tell us about your professional experiences? 

PS: My name is Paddy Steinschneider. I'm located in Dobbs Ferry, New York. I have a small firm that does kind of full spectrum. We are Gotham Design, Planning, and Development. It's a little different because we often get involved in building the things that we're designing. That was always my intent. Even before I got into architecture school, I would be doing the construction side of it. It's given me the opportunity to transform some places because so often when you've got a separation between the developer and the designer, there's a little bit of tension. I don't get that there's any tension that's within myself. And I'm really good at being creative. I'm really bad at being responsible economically. So I tend to build things that are much nicer than they really justify for economics, but I've found that could be magical and transform places.

MS: So through that experience, I imagine you've had to work with communities and municipalities a lot to get things approved. Can you tell us about that experience? 

PS Sure. It's kind of what it's become all about. When I first started doing this, I opened my firm in ‘78, and my proposals for projects would mention that we'll handle the approvals process. The approvals process back in ‘78 was often you'd go in and meet with the building inspector. The building inspector would have fairly clear instructions from the mayor and trustees about what they wanted to see happen in the community. If you were bringing something in that you knew was consistent and code-compliant, it really was a very simple process. They would have a public meeting. The mayor and the trustees would have already decided before that meeting happened what they were doing, you'd know it. So it was a very simple process, not a very fair process, and not a process that engaged the people who live in the community. And some of this might be partially my fault. 

I didn't think that was a good way of doing things, so a lot of us, starting in the ‘80s, started talking about having a different process of creating charrettes. Bringing people in, getting the whole community to participate. What that did is it helped people understand the importance of using their voice. So now I'd say forty percent of what we do in time is the approval process. It'll actually take us longer. I've had projects that took me eight years to get entitled, when we did the construction in two. One of my favorite moments is after eight years, one of the guys who was on the board approving came up to me, shook my hand, and he said, “Are you glad to be done with this?” And I said, “All you've enabled me to do is get started. I haven't gotten done with anything. I need to build it.” So it's really changed, and the community, it has a tremendous effect now, in positives and in some negatives. 

MS: Could you elaborate more on the negatives? I know a lot of these projects help with affordability, sustainability, density, and walkability in communities, and I think a lot of times the approval process can delay that or get in the way of that. 

PS: It totally interferes with many of the goals that we have. If we are committed to affordable housing, just housing, just communities, and fair communities, there's an economics issue. And anything that is put in the way of the developer that requires more time, time is money in this. It interferes with how much you can justify doing with the project. If I have to go through a multi-year process, where my bottom line recognizes the costs of the approval process, I can't sell things for as inexpensive. I often can't provide some of the amenities that would have made really good sense. It's just there's no extra space for that. 

So I think that's made things more difficult, and of course, the real problem is municipal leaders. The mayors and the trustees often have a misunderstanding of the significance and the following that people coming to the mic have. So somebody will walk up to the mic and say, “I represent my community, I represent my neighborhood, I represent my neighbors.” And we'll talk about how they oppose something. This is going to be terrible. It's going to ruin life as we know it in the Western Hemisphere. So they will talk and the mayor and trustees are often fearful that they're carrying votes, they're carrying weight, and that if they don't listen to these people, they're going to have a challenge. 

And it was funny because I gave a talk several years ago on this where I talked about how ten percent of the community was so opposed to what I was doing with incremental development within the downtown: revitalizing the downtown, increasing the tax base, providing them better restaurants, better shops, better stores and a lot of smaller apartments in the downtown. They were totally walkable, two blocks from the train station. It's kind of like it checked all the right boxes, but still there was this group of people who organized [against the project]. They were so organized they created a Facebook page called SOS Dobbs Ferry, and they put a thing out that said if you are concerned and interested in the future of Dobbs Ferry and its character, join this thing. So I tried to sign up, and I was told no, I'm sorry. We're not going to let you be a member because it was directly against what [I was] trying to do. 

So ten percent of the community is aggressively opposed, balanced by ten percent of the community who really understood how important what I was doing was and how beneficial it was for everything. So it's these ten and these ten, and you got the 80 percent in between who just want to make sure that they can get to the train on time. So they're not really participating. And at the end, there was a Q&A, and the guy said, “How many people do you think really, I mean, honestly, how many people really meet and talk about you in a negative way? How many people really are committed to be against you?” 

Trying to be a little dramatic, I said, “at least a hundred.” You know that to me sounded like a lot of people that hate, you know, one hundred people, a hundred of my neighbors hate me. 

And he said, “What's the population of Dobbs Ferry?”

I said, “11,000.”

 He said, “That's not even one percent.” 

And I said, “OK, granted I have less than one percent is against me. But you know that statistic on the other end is the same too? I got one percent supporting me, so 98 percent of the people just want to get to the train on time.”

MS: So across the country, there have been efforts of reform. What suggestions would you have to get that 98 percent of people involved in the process? 

PS: This is something we're constantly trying to do. You and I meet here at the Congress for the New Urbanism. Obviously, a tremendous amount of this effort has been exactly that. How do we integrate with the process? Integrate the processes that actually get people to participate in a way that's meaningful because they can understand what's actually going on? 

So what we try to do, and often when I say we do a lot of our own development, to make that happen we bring in developer people with us. They're the money side of it, and I do things that make them incredibly nervous. I’ll say, “Well look, I'm gonna organize the thing. We're gonna meet at the diner at 10 o’clock on Saturday morning. Anybody who wants to come can come. You know, I'm gonna be there. You can come in. You can talk. You can tell me what your issues are.” The opportunity there is to get them to have the facts. If they come in front of you with facts, and they say, I have a problem with this project because I think it's going to do this, now we've got something that can be calibrated, that can have quantities assigned to it. Maybe we need to make an adjustment. Maybe we have to change this to be that, and we can solve those problems. 

So, we were doing this project that was an eighteen-acre office complex that had been owned by Akzo Noble. It took us a year, which for that size was kind of streamlined, but we had the support of the mayor and the trustees, so we were going through all this stuff. 

And a woman stood up, and she was almost in tears, explaining that if this is built, it will result in the death of her children. And you have to be a little careful about how you respond to something like that because you don't want to make that sound like “Well, I don't know, they're your kids, not mine.” That doesn't really work. So I said, “What is it specifically that you're afraid is gonna happen?” 

She said, “Well, the traffic. My kids right now get to school because they're close enough they can walk, but it's about a quarter-mile walk, and they're walking on the street cause there are no sidewalks. And now you're going to significantly increase the traffic on that street, and my kids are gonna get hit by cars.”

I said, “Well, wouldn't it be better if there were sidewalks?” 

She said, “Well, we've been trying to get sidewalks for fifteen years in the village. The village doesn’t have enough money.” I said, “Well, what if we built sidewalks?” 

This is going to be a mixed-use place where people live. They're gonna want to walk into town. Their kids are going to walk to school. And so we'll put sidewalks into our program. And we built sidewalks that went from our location for half a mile on two main roads. It was not inexpensive, but it was a really effective way to address a real problem that the municipality couldn't fix. 

When a developer comes to town, the important thing is to get them to understand what your real needs are if you’re a municipality. They are interested in getting approval, and if they feel you know this is not a pay off, this is a justification for us cooperating with you because you're providing us with things that are needed. So it's a fair exchange, and if it gets you the approvals, that sounds terrific. 

Share Southern Urbanism

Michael Schwartz is a Public Policy student at Duke University. He is on the executive team of the Duke Initiative for Urban Studies and an Affordable Housing Intern for the Duke Office of Durham and Community Affairs.

This past May, student fellows at Southern Urbanism attended the thirty-second national gathering of the Congress of New Urbanism (CNU) in downtown Cincinnati. While there, the fellows caught up with urbanists from all over the United States and beyond to chat about their work. Each interviewee was asked three questions about what they do and the goals that their work advances. The conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

Rick Cole is the Chief Deputy Controller for the City of LA and the former Executive Director of the Congress for New Urbanism. In this interview, he gives insight into involving community members in policymaking, laying out the challenges facing the public participation process and offering pathways to reform.

MS: Would you mind just introducing yourself and telling everyone about your experience? 

RC: Sure, Rick Cole, former executive director of the Congress for New Urbanism, also deeply involved throughout my career in local government. I was the mayor of my hometown of Pasadena. I currently serve as the Chief Deputy Controller for the City of Los Angeles, and I was recently elected again to the Pasadena City Council, taking office in December. 

MS: Through those roles, in what role do you see local citizens getting involved with planning and in the planning process? 

RC: Typically we define democracy as voting, and I think that's both a shallow and a self-limiting foundation for genuine civic engagement in communities. And the default is the public hearing, where people who are angry about something show up to protest. The former mayor of Missoula, Montana said that public hearings were that place in American society where no one listens. So the challenge of building democracy from the grassroots up is to engage people, not when they're angry, but to appeal to their values, to their principles, and to look for common ground, particularly at the planning stage, but not just at planning. I think what tactical new urbanism and Strong Towns have taught us is that people can take an active role in and help spark immediate changes for the better in their community.

MS: Along those lines, what reform do you think can be made to the community participation process to maybe get more voices involved? I know we talk a lot about NIMBYism and to kind of counteract that.

RC: Again, I think it's important to start with principles and values because most people agree that communities should be inclusive. Most people agree that streets should be safe. Most people agree that folks should have opportunities to start a business or to pursue their dreams. 

And it's when you start with those things that people agree on, that it's easier to build and find common ground on the things that become much more divisive down the line. Like, do I want a bike lane on the street I commute on? Do I want mixed-income housing in my neighborhood? So, I think it's important to pull back and look not at what is in the direct interest of people as individuals, but rather what is in their common interest as citizens. And I think starting with that may sound abstract, but In fact, if you get diverse groups of people around tables in informal settings where you're not faced with an immediate decision to approve or not approve a project, people are much more rational, much more open-minded, and much more likely to adapt their opinions. 

I used to make a distinction between input and participation. Input is when we provide our opinion of what the government ought to do, and as Americans, we have a sacred right of free speech to express what we think ought to be done. Participation is when you have to solve a problem with people who don't agree with you and find out what makes sense. It isn't necessarily the lowest common denominator compromise. It often can be a win-win. And so the biggest reform is to emphasize participation. Rather than you come and tell us in three minutes that you love or hate something, come sit down and spend two hours with people of differing backgrounds and opinions and see if we can figure this thing out. 

MS: Through your experience, have you seen any good examples that really put those principles into practice? 

RC: Yeah, there are lots of examples all across the country. One of the most imaginative practitioners in this area is a guy named James Rojas who actually uses physical blocks and toys to help people who are not as verbal or for whom English is a second language to express their ideas and to bring out the playful imagination of people and make these planning efforts a little less toxic.

MS: One final question. For young people, whether that be students, young citizens, or young professionals working in architecture or planning, what advice would you give to them as they're the future of taking this movement forward? 

RC: Don't be bashful. The leaders of the New Urbanist movement started when they were very young, and while now they are distinguished iconic experts with amazing accomplishments behind them, they didn't start that way. And so while we can all learn from the past, as I did as I was growing up, people should be confident that the world you are growing up in is one that you know well, and don't be afraid to step forward. Don't wait to be asked. 

Researchers and medical professionals can provide only good things to say about walking. The New York Times seems to release an article about another newfound benefit every month. In the words of former mayor of Bogatá, Enrique Peñalosa, “As a fish needs to swim, a bird to fly, a deer to run, we need to walk, not in order to survive, but to be happy." Making the personal benefits of walking accessible to more people is one of the many goals of building walkable cities. But just because a place is made to be more walkable does not mean everyone will take advantage of the shift. Adaptation takes time, and sometimes people need a nudge to change behavior. Businesses should take small actions to promote walking and increase the gains to their customers and neighbors in the process.

One idea for increasing walking (or rolling) within a local customer base stems from an idea I saw in Asheville, N.C. when I was about twelve. I was at my favorite donut shop, Hole, and they had a stack of trading cards at the checkout with a history of the street we were standing on. We asked the woman at the register about the cards and she explained that they were a part of a scavenger hunt around the western part of the city. Over the course of their shopping and sight-seeing, residents and tourists could come across the other cards in other businesses until they had collected all of them. As a child who loved local history, I was totally charmed by this idea, and had we not been heading home that afternoon, I would have insisted we try to find more.

It is easy to see how this idea can be expanded and maintained. The “West Asheville History Moment Collector Cards Scavenger Hunt” only ran once, but it could easily be taken back up by other organizations who want to promote a place in addition to their organization’s work (this hunt was set up by a local library). Restaurants can work with shops and city parks to create a day-trip’s-worth of cards, and new sets can come out quarterly. Though the collectors card design may read as a bit trite, scavenger hunts are fun. You can’t beat fun.

Another idea especially geared toward the simple activity of “going for a walk”---no shopping, no destination, just a relaxing stroll—would most likely begin at a coffee shop. Instead of a stack of cards sitting at the checkout ready to be claimed, there would be a tray of maps. Each map would outline a different route through the local neighborhood, with the time and distance of each route noted, around which customers could walk with their coffee. In the scalable version of this idea, the maps would be compiled in an app (similar to RunGo), so that across different locations, one would only need to have the app and scan that store QR code for location-based loops. (I am providing as much detail as I can in the hope that someone will go ahead and make this app.)

After a customer made their purchase, they would deposit a quarter or two in exchange for receiving their drink in a returnable, refundable tumbler. They could then take their tumbler and a map on a tour through the neighborhood, taking in the dual rush of fresh air and caffeine.  Upon completing their loop, they would return the tumbler and pick up their quarters, refreshed and ready for the day ahead of them, whether that be sitting behind a desk or standing behind a counter.

The benefits of making a coffee walk easy, exploratory, and accessible extend beyond the long-term physical bonuses. Some of the best meetings and catch-ups occur on the move.  Researchers have found evidence that a mid-day walking break can promote creativity and attention, and in the long term, walking can lessen age-related mental deterioration and preserve memory. Thoreau summarized the benefits of a stroll best in a long-ago journal entry, writing “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” 

But walking also serves a very urbanist purpose.  By going on walks, a city’s residents become aware of where the sidewalk gets too thin and where the cars drive too fast.  They notice the empty lot that evaded their consciousness and they ask their friends if they know anything about its prospects. They see their neighbors, both those close-by and those out-of-the-way. Walking puts people on the street, in the community, among their neighbors, in a way driving cannot.

Anyone who really wants to go for a walk will do so on their own accord, but there are plenty of folks who might not have considered taking their coffee on the go until they receive the suggestion. Coffee shops can do their business and surrounding community a favor by encouraging their customers to take their joe on the go.

Share Southern Urbanism

Adeleine Geitner is a rising senior at Duke University studying public policy and economics. She is the Duke Urban Studies Initiative Fellow on Sprawl Repair and Nodal Development.

Written By Gwen McCarter Nagle

It’s an exciting moment in the trajectory of zoning reform. All around the South, not to mention the rest of the country, change is happening. Places that just a few years ago felt caught in the web of bad codes now feel empowered by what they have achieved and inspired by the energy they see spreading near and far.

Several shining examples of the bold actions being taken to improve our cities are included in the articles that lie ahead. The second issue our print magazine is dedicated to the topic of reform, and our team is proud to feature a roster of practitioners and policymakers who have put themselves on the front lines of efforts from Arkansas to Georgia to North Carolina and beyond.

Whether they are talking about code reform or urbanism more generally, in the Spring issue of Southern Urbanism Quarterly’s print edition, you’ll find writers hitting on a few key themes:

• the importance of small, incremental shifts on the path toward systemic change

• the need for persistence in the face of opposition

• the potential for momentum from unexpected yet potent sources

• the role of creative, open-minded lines of thinking

• the value of remembering key knowledge from the past as we work to create the future

• the power of imbuing this work with human stories and connection

On seeing this issue go to print, a sense of optimism hangs in the air. That makes sense: It wouldn’t be possible for so many people to be so dedicated to this cause if hope were absent. And that hope comes through in the writing. Each through their own lens, the essays here illustrate just how bright the prospects are for the zoning code reform movement to flourish.

At the same time, a question demands our attention: What’s next?

For reform to reach a true tipping point, it will have to become a topic that matters to people outside of the core audience reading this publication. In other words, it has to be a kitchen-table issue.

So how do we make that happen? The short answer is by making technical conversations more personal. Have an academic discussion about why Missing Middle Housing is vital, and it’s possible (or even likely) that nothing will shift. But show how such reforms can improve quality of life for people, and they will have an easier time seeing themselves and others they know in the cause. When everyday citizens think about reform in terms that feel real to them, then the project stands a chance of becoming the tidal wave we want to see.

But there is also a long answer, one that involves tactics. What’s the best way to make a topic feel more human? For one example, we can look to the world of branding. Specifically: brand ambassadors.

As Tesho Akindele has written in this issue’s main feature, what if the right celebrity stood up for reform? Brands of all shapes and sizes know that connecting with their target audience is only possible if their message resonates. In many cases, for that to happen, all people really need is someone they respect and admire to nudge them in the right direction. A believable pitch from a trusted figure can turn an abstract concept into something relevant.

Zoning reform has come a long way. Achieving truly seismic shifts will not be easy, but we can bring widespread change within reach by taking a page from other movements that have benefited from charismatic leadership. By pulling these kinds of levers, the path to building better cities in the South will become that much more crossable.

This piece was originally printed as the introduction to Issue 2 of Southern Urbanism Quarterly. Gwen McCarter Nagle is editor-chief of Southern Urbanism Quarterly.

Leave a comment

Written By Aaron Lubeck

Washington Square Park, 1961. It was here that Jane Jacobs came to brawl with Robert Moses, the larger-than-life planner of housing and transportation for a rapidly modernizing postwar New York City, and effectively ended the era of authoritarian planning.

Their specific conflict was over two of Moses’s many master plans: The first proposed to raze sections of Jacobs’s chaotic, vibrant, and old Greenwich Village to construct Corbusian “towers in the park,” a Bauhaus-inspired modernist style in vogue with the planners of the time. The second plan promised construction of the Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX), intended to connect the West Side of Manhattan to Brooklyn, also by taking out entire blocks of historic Village fabric.

Washington Square Village was ultimately built under the rationale of “slum clearance” and displaced thousands of small businesses. But for Moses, the victory would prove pyrrhic. Thanks to Jacobs’s relentless pen as well as her grassroots organizing, she ultimately stopped the freeway and saved the park. The scale of this fight established long-overdue boundaries for Moses’s unprecedented, ever-expanding powers. As a result, she forced a major turning point in the fields of urbanism and urban planning.

That fight served as an inflection point because Moses’s power grew to where he was no longer accountable to anyone—a critical characteristic of the leviathan-like scale he, and only he, operated at. The planning movement that he led had turned into the most pervasive and damaging tentacle of the early twentieth century’s Progressive Movement was effectively ended by Jacobs’s work. What came next is of mixed consequence.

Read more

Written By Ryan Hurley

This piece was originally printed as the inaugural Storefront Column in Issue 1 of Southern Urbanism Quarterly.

Southern urbanites, like most Americans, are spending more time at home than ever. We’re distracted by Netflix, TikTok, and YouTube; entranced by politics and the national media; and enabled to bank, see our doctor, work, and even date—all without leaving the house. Nearly everything else is delivered by e-tailers like Amazon. The remainder is likely just beyond our doorstep at big-box and fast-casual spots that have collectively made our landscapes look much the same. Add the demise of local journalism, and life today can feel wholly nationalized and monotonous. In 2001, the seminal book Bowling Alone argued that Americans have become disconnected from the people, places, and institutions that used to hold our communities together. Today, its thesis seems almost quaint.

But amid the powerful forces ensnaring us home alone, there is also one drawing us out—a dynamic, twenty-first century band of homegrown storefront operators sustaining the urban spirit that makes our cities worth living in. Whether offering their own concepts in food and beverage or goods and services, these locals engage and delight us with new experiences. Less appreciated, their spaces are also hubs of conversation and connection. Together, they are the modern soul of our cities. They are our ambassadors to the outside. They are our brand.

Our bar, restaurant, and retail businesses are vital, and they need our support. Today, they are being bombarded by astronomical expenses and the work-from-home revolution. In Durham, for example, there was 27 percent less 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. foot traffic this October compared to the same month in 2019. People are simply not getting out. That’s an existential threat to our storefront entrepreneurs and their people, which should be treated as an existential threat to us. We must strategically and tactically support these businesses so that our cities continue to rise. If we fail to do so, the tremendous personal, financial, cultural, and intellectual capital they’ve drawn and created will vanish. When you wipe out a rainforest, it takes forever to return, or it may simply never come back.

A city’s storefronts offer more than sustenance, goods, and services—they give us a sense of place and arrival. They set the tone. As curators of the city, like their food and beverage peers, retailers light up our sidewalks with all sorts of intrigue.

To appreciate this capital-creation, let’s recall the early aughts, when most Southern cities were stagnant. And many of their downtowns were empty, but they possessed historical fabric and were built to a desirable human scale, and their dormant storefronts and factory buildings began to attract a scrappy (if foolhardy), new breed of mom-and-pops. Manhattan’s SoHo shows that the first movers are often the artists and little-to-lose, misfit entrepreneurs. Similarly, in Durham, restaurants, bars, breweries, and coffee shops led the way as our culinary culture grew. Many holed up in inexpensive, isolated, inconvenient locales. To get people out and to get us to come back, they had to tantalize our taste buds and pursue excellence in their craft. They had to be memorable. They had to be creative. It was a matter of survival.

As our cities grew and diversified, food trucks, shacks, and farm-to-fork dining transported us with flavor and authenticity. Local breweries concocted every imaginable IPA. Coffee roasters and chocolatiers fragranced our streets. Southern comfort food expanded not just to new twists on biscuits and gravy but also to Argentinian empanadas, Chinese bao buns, and Tibetan momos. Halal and Hispanic markets opened along with French cafés and German bakeries. These changes reminded us that the South, at its best, has characteristics of both the melting pot and lettuce bowl: We celebrate crossover innovations while also offering deep studies of clearly definable identities.

This incredible variety of culture and experience multiplied and began to characterize streets all over our region. Within each city, storefronts were rarely dense, but they were available if we were willing to seek them out. And today, when we do, we are rewarded. Owners and staff intrigue us with their knowledge about their products and processes. Around bar tops, dining tables, and espresso machines, they engage us in friendly debate about our towns, why we love them, where they are headed, and how we see ourselves within them.

But they don’t just spark conversation; they also build trust. Through retailers, visitors get tips on the best of what to see and do. In thriving cities, start-up purveyors of niche products and novel collections spring up and spur these conversations further. Often with more time to talk, they load up new emigres with information on everything from schools and everyday services to our best hair salons, tattoo artists, and yoga studios.

A city’s storefronts offer more than sustenance, goods, and services—they give us a sense of place and arrival. They set the tone. As curators of the city, like their food and beverage peers, retailers light up our sidewalks with all sorts of intrigue. Looking around, we see vintage thrift and kitsch, street- wear and skateboards, succulents and gardening gifts, and African art and clothing. They animate our historic squares with hand-crafted fine jewelry and ethically sourced gems, independent designer clothing and slow fashion, mid-century modern furniture, comic books, collectibles, and more.

Patrons relish perusing these shops to find new inspiration and ideas. This is especially true as many become allergic to mechanistic, algorithm-fueled online shopping and the dismal service experience overtaking department stores and the mall. Our local shops offer a refuge. They feed a hunger for exploration, for expertise, for surprise.

Our storefronts are something else as well: They’re builders of community. They host game nights, run clubs, drink-making and crafting classes, book talks, salon series, and even marry-your-city contests. These events get us out of the house, inviting us to move, play, and learn. They introduce us to new friends, partners, and collaborators, providing vital social and economic lubrication. Our local retailers hold fundraisers for other locals too—nonprofits they know deliver essential services and tailor-made solutions firsthand to those in our area.

While the storefront footprint in our cities is a fraction of what it once was, our curatorial, community-centric talent is firmly rooted in place. In contrast, the chains we find at the mall are everywhere and nowhere. We dig in here, while they transport us to Anywhere, USA.

But make no mistake—our locals are ailing. A storm has hit nearly every line item of our storefront businesses’ financials. Along with declining sales, they are seeing skyrocketing costs around salary, rent, inventory, food, advertising, and gas. Fold in the generational shift to remote work and a tight labor market, and our ambassadors are being deluged indeed. Pre-COVID, business may have been tough. Now, though, it’s a high-wire act of the highest order.

For Southern cities to flourish, Southern retail, food, and beverage enterprises have to succeed too. This Storefront column is an effort to further that mission. In the installments that follow, we’ll use this space to explore and celebrate different facets of our local storefront landscape—the challenges it faces and the promise it holds. These ambassadors of our cities need our backing. Stay tuned for a lively conversation about the ideas, opportunities, and imperatives that lie ahead.

Ryan Hurley is the co-founder of Vert & Vogue, a boutique clothing retailer based in downtown Durham, North Carolina, since 2008. Follow Ryan’s business at Vert and Vogue.

Written By Satchel Walton

This is the first of a three-part series on Southern entrepreneurs catalyzing place through restaurants, retail, and rejuvenation.

Graham, North Carolina, and its once sleepy Main Street might not be where you’d expect to see innovation in placemaking and community-building. Formerly a small town in an area focused on textiles and manufacturing, its population has grown rapidly as suburbs have sprouted up around Alamance County, about halfway between Durham and Greensboro. Recently, though, one coffee shop has served as a model for how small Southern business owners can help transform their area.

A block down Main Street from the courthouse is PRESS Coffee+Crepes+Cocktails, a shop that has helped to breathe new life into Downtown Graham and bring some foot traffic to the stretch. In a former newspaper building (hence the name), the shop serves up more than just food inspired by European and Southern traditions.

“PRESS was a downtown revitalization project disguised as a business. When people saw this strange navy blue building with a weird coffee shop-creperie finding success, it made their crazy idea seem a lot less crazy,” co-founder Jason Cox wrote in an email.

He and his partner Brett DeVries opened Press in the summer of 2016. Since then, the main drag in the seat of Alamance County has experienced a mini-boom. Around 20 new businesses have opened in Downtown Graham, including restaurants, retail, and office space.

Cox says that his business’s success has also led the community to change its perceptions of the possible, catalyzing a citizen-led movement to reform parking requirements, building codes, and housing policies.

Graham is a town still rife with Americana, including a twenty-five-foot statue reminiscent of the famous photo of a woman and sailor kissing in Times Square at the end of World War II, which the town displayed for three years. While appealing to a distinctly twenty-first-century crowd of young professionals, Press reminds of a time when America’s small-town Main Streets were bustling with small shops.

Both food and small, local retail play crucial roles in placemaking, defined as giving an area a distinctive, memorable character different from every other neighborhood. On the surface, having local restaurants is good for an area’s tax revenues. It also appeals to tourists. But this is a goal to aspire to for more general reasons, too. After all, the point of a thriving community is at least partially to bring people together in third places and have a particular local charm beyond simply being another place to live. It is telling that small businesses are one of the few institutions that a majority of Americans have confidence in.

Still, opening a restaurant is a notoriously difficult endeavor, with low profit margins and high volatility. But for those who can succeed, small, local eateries are a crucial part in building a unique sense of place. DeVries and Cox have been so successful that they opened another location in Durham and have been asked to anchor other developments in places like Raleigh.

“Every place’s story of revitalization begins with beans (coffee), beer, and bakery. So we figured we would add the beans and an interesting food option to attract the next ones,” Cox wrote.

It’s hard enough to be a small-scale entrepreneur. It’s even more difficult to build something that consciously tries to be an asset to a community rather than just a profit-making machine—and still make enough to keep the lights on. Kudos to those like Cox and DeVries who can do it.

Subscribe now

Satchel Walton is the Mencken Publishing Fellow on Urban Development. Follow him at @SatchelWalton

Written By Satchel Walton

This is the second installment of a three-part series on Southern entrepreneurs catalyzing place through restaurants, retail, and rejuvenation.

Marsh Collective of Opelika, Alabama, defies easy categorization. Are they developers? Investors? Entrepreneurs? They don’t fit in a box because they have many functions and priorities: They are locally focused, faith-driven community builders, and they’re effective in accomplishing their goals because each focus supports the other.

The company, founded by John and Ashely Marsh, consults on projects involving the redevelopment of historic buildings, and they have a particular passion for the 10 square blocks of Opelika that they call home. Their work has been credited with helping to revitalize the city’s Downtown.

“Love of place is a powerful force in a person's life,” John wrote in an email. “We are lifetime lovers and committed to this place. If you keep thinking someone should ‘do’ something, you may be the someone.”

The Marshes are open about past difficulties in their lives and in their marriage, including addiction. However, they were able to overcome those struggles and started renovating dilapidated homes and businesses in their area. As John wrote, they both “fell in love with Ash's hometown of Opelika. We learned that love of place is a powerful force.”

The Marsh Collective now advises other community-builders on the virtues and how-tos of placemaking and intentional design. They seek to imbue their projects with a feeling that they were thought out and designed for people to become part of something. 

Describing these catalyzed places, John wrote, “they have a true social, spiritual, and economic capital model. We ask ourselves what could we do for the good of our city that would last 50 years, and no one be able to undo it.”

Urbanists think a lot about metro areas, but we might do well to consider small towns more often. The vast majority of urban streets in the South are in these towns, or in neighborhood centers that act like them. As the Marshes’ efforts have shown, the oft-abandoned Main Streets of America absolutely have the potential to thrive. The Marsh Collective now helps towns from Momence, Illinois, to Hogansville, Georgia, realize their potential. 

Grassroots placemaking can provide inspiration for those of us who spend too much time on the agency-free negativity of national politics and news. Far from the futile pursuit of getting mad at things that you will never change lie the Marshes. Their world is driven by an abiding passion for the places around them alongside the people whom they know and love. It is encouraging to see local leaders invested on this level—both emotionally and financially—in their communities.

Satchel Walton is the Mencken Publishing Fellow on Urban Development. Follow him at @SatchelWalton

Written By Satchel Walton

This is the third installment of a three-part series on Southern entrepreneurs catalyzing place through restaurants, retail, and rejuvenation.

After emerging as bikeCOFFEE, a sort of a truckless food truck, the duo behind Cocoa Cinnamon ran a Kickstarter to help move it into a brick-and-mortar location. For customers who had supported bikeCOFFEE, the fundraiser provided a real sense of being invested in the budding company’s success. It was a fitting way for Cocoa Cinnamon to start, because from the beginning, it has always been more than just a business.

“Building relationships, whether it is with vendors, team members, guests and the wider community is about working hard, dignifying people, being honest, and doing it day in and out to build trust,” Leon Grodski Barrera wrote in an email. “If your heart and work is in the right place, people will gravitate to you and support you.”

Today, he and Areli Barrera de Grodski operate three locations across Durham, North Carolina. They’ve also started roasting coffee in-house, with their award-winning Little Waves Coffee Roasters. 

Despite the global connections necessary to the roasting business, Cocoa Cinnamon just doesn’t have the same feel as coffee shops that could be plopped down anywhere in the world—or at least anywhere in decently affluent urban American neighborhoods. It’s a staple of the place it’s rooted in, and that’s by design. 

“The word ‘community’ can be used lightly and in a coded way. We are interested in it in a way that is complex, nuanced, imperfect, one that takes work and is about building trust and connecting with folks through time,” Grodski Barrera wrote.

Its first location came to life in a former garage on West Geer Street. At the time, it was one of the only businesses in the area, and it offered people a place to gather and connect. Over time, that same neighborhood has become increasingly well off—some would say gentrified. As a result, some tensions in Cocoa Cinnamon’s model of being part of a community were inevitable. Which “community” does a coffee shop serve? But persistence in building ties and Areli’s Latina heritage allowed the couple to move toward the goal of serving everyone. 

“The core values, the enactment of them, and ongoing work to bring the real closer to the idea aren’t separate from the business plan. They drive it and are key to success,” according to Grodski Barrera. 

Leon and Areli’s commitment to people can be seen across different facets of their business. For instance, their deep connections in Durham helped them keep their whole workforce employed throughout the pandemic. Their relationships with coffee growers also let them build a sustainable and humane supply chain: They’ve recently worked with farmers they buy from to help them with loans.

We have seen it throughout this series, including in profiles of PRESS Coffee+Crepes+Cocktails in Graham and Durham, North Carolina, and Marsh Collective in Opelika, Alabama: The best people to build up these things we call “communities” are regular citizens who are connected to the places where they live and work. This is not to say that policy decisions are unimportant or that one individual can easily change the entire world. No mere mortal can alone take up the Herculean task of making the South a walkable and inclusive and just urbanist utopia. But normal folk can become small business owners and builders who actively and deliberately construct the world they want to see around them. As individuals, we can learn from them, and policymakers would do well to encourage them. Cheers to the hard but meaningful work that goes on at Cocoa Cinnamon—and at similar ventures across the South.

Satchel Walton is the Southern Urbanism Mencken Publishing Fellow on Urban Development.

Written By Gwen McCarter Nagle

This piece was originally printed as the first installment of Citizen Built in Issue 1 of Southern Urbanism Quarterly. The reoccurring series highlights the non-professional citizens who are building their cities.

When Topher Thomas began building an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) in his Durham backyard, he wasn’t exactly planning ahead. It was something he just did. He did it with his own hands, using discarded materials from a nearby dumpster. The fact that he did it at all is astonishing enough. Even more interesting, though, is why he did it.

At first, the motivation behind the ADU was something akin to curiosity. In 2019, Topher had been building furniture out of abandoned materials, and eventually, the question presented itself: “What if I built a whole house out of this stuff—out there in the backyard by the pecan tree?”

His wife was skeptical. Specifically, according to Topher, “My wife said, ‘Hell no.’ But I pestered her about it.”

On the one hand, the project made no sense for the couple and their family. He was earning a teacher’s salary. She was taking care of their two young kids. But on the other hand, the idea that Topher might be able to create a livable structure that could then be rented out for extra income—that made perfect sense. And over time, the case for the ADU practically built itself.

Topher surmised that an ADU could bring in a few hundred extra dollars each month. But what drove him to pick up a hammer and start building wasn’t just necessity. He and his wife had also been noticing what was happening outside their home. “Houses from the 1920s were getting torn down for McMansions,” Topher said in an interview with SUQ. As a result, people in and around Downtown Durham were being shut out, made to believe they no longer belonged in their community.

This marginalization bothered Topher and his wife on a deep level. “I care about how people feel,” he explained. And that outlook led to action.

The calling that animates Topher’s work is about making radical change.

Once completed and functional, between December of 2019 and March of 2020, the ADU housed a tenant. It provided the family with $500 more each month than they had been earning before.

This first iteration of the Thomas family ADU was a structure of slightly more than 12 x 12 feet, which exceeded a critical North Carolina building code threshold. According to the text: “Accessory buildings with any dimension greater than 12 feet shall meet provision of [the] code.” By that standard, Topher’s ADU should have gone through a permitting process, though city rules and regulations weren’t on his radar at the time. At the same time, a neighbor complained. Topher was forced to take the building down.

Of course, timing really is everything. Just as the City of Durham was declaring the ADU to be illegal, the pandemic was taking hold. And once COVID began to derail normal life, Topher found himself home from teaching. He took the opportunity to research how to build a proper structure. Not merely a box, but a residence—and a properly permitted one at that. He thought about the smallest thing he could build that someone could live in. And by August of 2020, he had created something new. It was still a rectangle, and there were only 120 square feet. But it was nicer. There was a loft.

In the summer of 2020, Topher wasn’t just busy rebuilding the added source of income for his family. He was also witnessing the housing market continuing to heat up. What he and his wife had observed in 2019 seemed to be getting worse. More people were having a hard time. And that’s when he began to see the bigger potential of where his focus on small homes could lead.

“I had a strong belief that people really want to help but just don’t know how.”

“People were asking me how to do this,” Topher said. The appeal of his model was becoming clear: Homeowners could have an ADU in their own backyard that could supplement their other earnings, whether they chose to rent it out to strangers or friends. Either way, they would be helping both themselves and others struggling to find a place to live in the area where they wanted or needed to be. It was a win-win. The problem was, most people didn’t know where to start.

Before long, Topher knew he wanted to form a company, and Coram Houses was incorporated in February of 2021. With his new venture, Topher was creating a system for people to duplicate what he did—creating housing without significant building knowledge or access to capital.

“I had a strong belief that people really want to help but just don’t know how,” he said. With Coram, he set out to enhance people’s knowledge of their city as well as their financial literacy. The company helps them get the kind of funding that works for them, and then it builds an ADU with whatever money they secure. Coram started by building four homes, and at the time of writing, it has eight more ADUs in progress.

Looking at why Topher builds, there are layers. Around the edges of his work, those layers look more pragmatic. Yet at the core of what he does, something different emerges: a calling. What he does involves money, and it involves building wealth. But it’s about more than that. The Coram Houses website describes his business as “a community organization committed to breaking cycles of racial and economic injustice through creative and affordable housing.” Seen from that angle, it’s fair to say the calling that animates Topher’s work is about making radical change. He builds to make a difference in his life, in the lives of others, and in the lives of people he’ll probably never even meet. He builds because he wants to help his neighbors, his community, his city, his world.

If you ask Topher what’s next, he’ll tell you about his plan. By 2024, he means to secure about $2 million to build out Coram’s teaching efforts and expand the company’s geographic reach. But he’ll also tell you about his vision. The future Topher wants to see—the one he wants to help build—involves ADUs in every backyard. That future won’t just push back against an untenable housing market and an environment where people are fighting to belong. It will “maximize hope, mutuality, solidarity, and community.” The very existence of the ADUs will promote stability and possibility. But they will also take on a life that’s bigger than the sum of their materials alone. Some of these homes will be integrated into existing neighborhoods. Others will form micro-neighborhoods of their own, taking shape as tiny communities on lots that were previously deemed unbuildable. Such locations will require zoning variances, and Topher isn’t afraid of working to get them. Hearing his story, it seems he isn’t afraid of much. And that’s where Topher’s work is truly inspiring. He was called to build and to help, and in doing so, he’s spread- ing that seed of change as far as he can reach.

Gwen McCarter Nagle is Editor In Chief of Southern Urbanism Quarterly.