Density without Disruption [EDRA / Places Awards, 2004 -- Awards Commentary]

Density without Disruption Roberta Brandes Gratz For years the control of density has been one of the most powerful rallying cries of neighborhood activists across the U.S. Yet, ever since the onset of urban-renewal, high- way-building era following World War II, the lowering of residential densities in American cities and towns has been one of the most significant causes for the declining quality of life they offer. Few public officials and citizens recognize this. Fewer still realize how their well-meaning efforts have often created insurmountable obstacles to the very com- munity reinvigoration they profess to support. Density is the most crucial, misunderstood and ignored ingredient of a successful community. If real estate’s mantra is “location, location, location,” urbanism’s should be “density, density, density.” Someone once said: “it doesn’t matter how dense you make it, it is how you make it dense.” That is only half right. It matters both how dense you make it and how you make it dense. Density Wrongly Blamed As a bugaboo of planners and housing theorists since the middle of the twentieth century, density has at one time or another been blamed for nearly every urban difficulty and social problem. Yet if you look at the cities people find fun to visit — New York, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, Savannah, Portland — they all have something in common, lots of people living close together. A dense residential population is their anchor — a magnet for new businesses, cultural and entertainment activity, and overall vitality. Invariably, popular residential neighborhoods in these cities were once connected to commercial areas by street- car and planned and designed for the convenience of the transit-traveling pedestrian, not the urban motorist. These popular neighborhoods also exhibited residential densi- ties higher than any we are building today. And they were composed of an assortment of housing types: multiple- and single-unit buildings, owner-occupied and rental units, high-rise and low-rise. Of course, density in and of itself is not an automatic plus. A series of sterile high-rise towers may provide density but be unaccommodating to the diverse activities that provide the basis for real community life. The key is in the design. Perhaps Jane Jacobs said it best forty-odd years ago when she wrote in her now-classic book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “One reason why low city densities conventionally have a good name, unjustified by the facts, and why high city densities have a bad name, equally unjustified, is that high densities of dwellings and over- crowding of dwellings are often confused. . . . The census definition of overcrowding is 1.5 persons per room or more. It has nothing to do with the number of dwellings on the land, just as in real life high densities have nothing to do with overcrowding.” Many more dense neighborhoods have self-regener- ated against the accepted wisdom of housing and planning experts since Jacobs wrote her first book in 1961. George- town, Back Bay, Park Slope, the Mission District, Pioneer Square, the Pearl District, and historic rowhouse neigh- borhoods around the country stand witness to this trend. Such neighborhoods have been revived despite retaining their pre-war densities and they still do not seem over- crowded. Similarly, many old manufacturing, warehouse, and office districts in dense urban cores are being trans- formed into popular new neighborhoods. Overcrowding and Density Are Not the Same In 1961 Jacobs also pointed out, “Today we are much more apt to find overcrowding at low densities than at high densities. Nor does slum clearance as practiced in our cities usually have anything to do with solving the problem of overcrowding. Instead, slum clearance and renewal typi- cally add to that problem [by lowering the density].” Today federal housing policies continue to buy into this myth that lowered densities will solve the underlying prob- lem of overcrowding. With or without Section 8 vouchers, the poor rarely find accommodations anywhere but in the next marginal neighborhood. Federally funded Hope VI projects purposely exhibit lesser densities than the mistakes they are replacing. Some may be architecturally appealing and of mixed incomes — a laudable combination. But in any architectural format, they are the antithesis of community building. If the essentials of community were truly understood, these places would add density, reuse existing nearby commercial streets or provide new ones, allow for mixed uses (whether a corner store or light manufacturing), and leave open the possibil- ity that unanticipated uses might emerge. Local policies have made present federal policies an even worse mess. A demolition derby seems to be under- way in cities like Philadelphia, Detroit, and New Haven, where the notion is that deteriorated housing should be torn down and the land beneath it left vacant pending the arrival of some private developer on a white horse. Such demolition inevitably leads only to further decay and an accelerated cycle of clearance. The hidden agenda is no better than the days of slum clearance during which Jacobs was writing. Of course, it is impossible to generalize about density. But as Jacobs pointed out: “Proper city dwelling densities are a matter of performance.” By contrast, all over the Gratz / Density without Disruption