Zoning

Federico sent me an old article about sprawl, from the Atlantic. I’m not entirely sure how to respond to it. The article is a few years out of date, and the beginning of it has some major logical flaws (ignore the parts about how the old building methods were best– they often sucked, and there’s a good reason that many old buildings have not survived).

On the other hand, I basically agree with a lot of what the author has to say: a community is more than a group of houses, it needs human scale and mixed use and so forth. And I agree with his overriding, mostly taste-based assertion, “Sprawl bad,” despite the fact that it totally fails to take into account the fact that lots of people like having big houses on big lawns, like the separation and privacy that subdivisions create, and dammit they like their cars.

Anyway, it all comes back to me with the family farm. All that new-urbanism kind of development takes more than just a developer. It takes a broad-based commitment on the part of public leaders, and a willingness on the part of individuals to take risks that are not entirely known or predictable.

When it comes to one family, and one farm, being developed, it’s not going to be a “real community,” whatever that means. It’s going to be a twisty-roaded subdivision. We’re not going to come close to any of the ideals of new urbanism or intentional communities, we’re talking what does grandma do with 200 acres and a zoning law that insists on a minimum lot size of 20 acres. In that case you get 10 lots, 20 acres each, which is too small to farm and too big for a neighborhood. You get big houses on the big lots and it’s a bedroom community.

So, given that you can’t farm 200 acres, what can you do with it? I’m not trying to change the world here, I’m trying to figure out what combination of individual action and community policy could create something other than sprawl. It’s easy enough to say “I want new urbanism” but how do you get there in the medium-sized chunks of most peri-urban development these days?