The 20th century’s leading urbanist was not against development. So what was she for?
This year, the “abundance” message has been heard loud and clear. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s “Abundance,” Yoni Appelbaum’s “Stuck” and Mark Dunkelman’s “Why Nothing Works” all make the case that America has been way too fussy about the built environment, putting up barriers to all kinds of development, particularly housing.
And with the accompanying call to loosen up and build more stuff — more multifamily housing, more density, more mixed-use, more infrastructure — one woman long considered a saint of urban living has been blamed, somewhat counterintuitively, for contributing to the problem: Jane Jacobs.
The argument goes that while she stopped many bad things from happening — slum clearance to make way for soulless towers in the park and neighborhood-destroying urban freeways — her legacy has left places like her beloved Greenwich Village essentially frozen in amber. The people who live there are quite content to be in four-story brownstones with high-class boutiques on the ground floor. No added density is tolerated. True to the laws of supply and demand, not just enclaves but long stretches of city blocks have become staggeringly expensive. There might as well be a velvet rope at 14th Street.
What started as earnest protest against top-down planning has morphed into a framework for defending these neighborhoods from any incursion. The local community board is fully in control, and what they invariably do is say no.
The real Jane Jacobs
I first noticed the co-opting of the Jane Jacobs legacy soon after publishing “Wrestling with Moses,” the story of her battles with Robert Moses in New York City in the ’50s and ’60s. It was 2009, the book had just come out, and James Gandolfini was considering playing Robert Moses in a movie adaptation. I was all in on the fight-the-power narrative and was struck by how many current city residents were channeling Jane Jacobs and her power-to-the-people energy from 50 years ago. One such instance was out at Coney Island, where several women had donned white wigs and black-rim glasses reminiscent of Jacobs’s classic look to protest against redevelopment plans. Perfect, I thought: Davids against the Goliath of greedy developers and a Moses-nostalgic City Hall.
On further review, however, I saw that the new development they derided wasn’t really much of a monstrosity at all. In fact, it was a badly needed increase in the supply of multifamily housing, on underutilized urban land. It was clear these folks just didn’t want anything to change in their backyard. They were energetic in their Jacobs-caliber activism but had strayed from her guiding principles for how cities grow.
While some of what Jacobs wrote can indeed seem antidevelopment, only a narrow reading of her work would classify her as a NIMBY given the current challenges cities face. It’s important to remember what she actually said about urban development, which, in large part, was that cities must change and evolve. Yes, she was against Le Corbusier-inspired high-rise apartment buildings; she favored what she believed was more human-scaled development, like the West Village Houses. Yes, she was all for historic preservation, another trend that is at odds with the abundance agenda, yet Jacobs urged new uses for old buildings in an approach in line with today’s widely accepted ethos of retrofit and adaptive reuse.
At the same time, she was increasingly aghast at how expensive the Village had become, what she called “oversuccess.” Her answer was to make it so these gentrifying urban neighborhoods weren’t so rare, but rather ubiquitous. Her solution was more supply — ideally, mostly low-rise attached town houses, but just lots and lots of them. She is best known for all the ingredients to make new development successful, like shorter blocks, a mix of uses and a variety of building types. But the inherent value of more housing options was a given.
Jacobs, understood in full, wasn’t antidevelopment, nor was she exactly a YIMBY. What she was really seeking was Goldilocks density — not too much, not hulking and inhospitable, but also not too little, so as to be a drop in the bucket in terms of supply. That kind of development is the key, most experts now say, to affordability. Though contrarians like Patrick Condon at the University of British Columbia say prices don’t actually come down when cities let developers build, baby, build, breaking down regulatory barriers and increasing the total number of housing units in a metropolitan region is seen as an optimal market-based solution.
How to get there
Of course, along the way to this balanced density, there’s room for further conversation about the concern about redevelopment and any unearned profits that builders make. Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, has espoused more direct subsidies for affordable housing, aligned with the European concept of social housing.
But either way — whether market-based or government-funded — new housing is going to be more dense, and everyone, whether established residents or first-time homebuyers or renters seeking reasonably affordable shelter, would do well to share that reality.
How density plays out on the ground has been a central occupation of architects, builders, planners and policymakers for a long while now. Stantec’s David Dixon, an elder statesman of the topic of density, says it’s not that complicated: About 30 units per acre is what it takes to support mixed-use retail, workplaces and transit. Put another way, he recommends envisioning a 200-unit condo building, perhaps six or seven stories high, integrated into a well-designed public realm.
Speaking at the Congress for the New Urbanism in Providence, Rhode Island, in June, Dixon referred to demographic trends anticipating that a net 80% of new households will be singles and childless couples, at odds with 62% of current housing options being single-family homes designed for traditional larger families of two parents, three kids and a dog.
Accordingly, multifamily development will be very much in demand, Dixon said, to accommodate the surging demand from these smaller households. Indeed, it’s a matter of economic development for cities, he said, as they compete for higher-income knowledge economy workers in amenity-rich urban settings — ergo, density.
In Massachusetts, the MBTA Communities Act tells cities and towns to allow 15 units per acre by right in catchment areas near T stations. This level of density is seen as scary and onerous by some communities that have balked at the program, though 15 units per acre is a relatively unobtrusive threshold, especially for land that now stands as vacant parcels or parking lots. It’s just plain old infill.
Neighborhood character and the way forward
Many of those who purport to channel Jacobs mourn how development threatens the “character” of neighborhoods. Again, the idea is misappropriated. Jacobs understood that the character of a neighborhood is partly about the way it looks and feels and partly about the people who inhabit it and otherwise make use of it.
When a lack of development drives prices through the roof and makes a swath of the city a playground for the wealthy, that creates conditions for a monoculture, which she opposed. Economic homogeneity can take hold even if the cosmetic character of blocks and buildings hasn’t changed.
Faithfully following through on her ideas means understanding that the key to making density acceptable requires making new development fit in with the surrounding fabric. Which is to say, preserving neighborhood character is a design challenge above all else.
It’s a bit of a gauntlet. Guides like Northeastern University’s Equitable Zoning by Design help government officials and public stakeholders understand the physical and spatial implications of zoning regulations in transit-oriented and walkable mixed-use hubs. The idea is to make infill density more acceptable to wary established residents, with the goal of illustrating how the new building fits in with the fabric of a neighborhood. The now-ubiquitous facades of 5-over-1 developments, five stories of wood-frame residential on top of a concrete foundation, have triggered complaints that all new multifamily housing looks the same — a legitimate critique, though the reaction was much the same 100 years ago when now-beloved brick and brownstone streetscapes were conjured in Boston or Philadelphia.
Another important factor in terms of public understanding is making it clear what different levels of density actually look and feel like. Over the past few months, I’ve been helping curate an online tool kit called Visualizing Density at the Lincoln Institute, which debuted this month. The resource offers image galleries of different densities via compelling aerial photographs by Alex MacLean. Users are able to see what San Francisco density looks like compared to transit-oriented development outside Dallas. The spoiler alert is that they’re both pretty pleasant.
Ultimately, attitudes toward density may require a shift in mindset similar to the corollary narrative of ’70s-era environmentalists who pushed for laws that stopped bad things from happening, similar to the legendary crusades of Jane Jacobs.
That dynamic has been equally excruciating: Advocates were virtuous in seeking to stop damaging projects, but now those rules are being used as a cudgel blocking things the planet desperately needs, like solar farms and wind turbines and transmission lines to facilitate the clean energy transition.
The irony is searing. A movement that started out well justified has now become mindlessly obstructionist — preventing progress on the ultimate environmental objective, combating climate change.
In the same way, zoning, codes and land-use regulations, as well as grassroots community control over planning and development, served a purpose that is no longer quite so relevant. Like climate change, housing affordability is a 21st century crisis that warrants thoughtful new approaches that aren’t tied so literally to the battles of 50 years ago. “A living culture is forever changing, without losing itself as a framework and context of change. The reconstruction of a culture is not the same as its restoration,” she wrote in her last book, “Dark Age Ahead.” Being nimble and not so black-and-white in our understanding of density will be critical in accommodating the new housing cities need. It’s a mindset she would applaud.