Category Archives: Places

Disney building luxury community of Golden Oak

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The Disney community of Celebration is well known (see earlier posts here and here) but the company is developing a more luxurious community called Golden Oak three miles from the theme parks.

At prices ranging from $1.5 million to upwards of $8 million, the developer promises a house and neighborhood with the hallmarks it has carefully cultivated for decades: meticulous attention to detail; extensive personal service; and, if you’re so inclined, a daily dose of Mickey, Minnie and the crew…

Although Florida abounds in upscale communities that promote a “lifestyle” of one kind or another, Golden Oak’s planners think the Disney brand is the not-so-secret weapon that sets it apart: Buy here, goes part of the sales pitch, and get years of virtually unlimited access to Disney properties in the surrounding area.

“We’ve never done this for anybody else,” explained Stacey Thomson, public relations manager for Golden Oak, who said that buyers in the current sales phase will get three years’ worth of unlimited VIP-access passes to the parks for the homeowner and four guests, in addition to such services as door-to-park van service, access to special events, and numerous other Disney-esque benefits that don’t accrue to the typical visitor…

Where Celebration was conceived as a full-fledged town with a large contingent of full-time residents and a share of units at a much lower price point, Golden Oak is a sprawling, 980-acre subdivision that will function more as a gilt-edged resort…

This is a great example of branding. If your company can be associated with ideas like quality, fun, vacation, and magic, consumers will go to great lengths to be a part of this. The reach of Disney is so broad that they can build communities and people are drawn to them because of the Disney name even though they could find comparable homes or amenities elsewhere.

While we know there are enough buyers to make this work, it would be helpful to hear more from Disney in what they are trying to do with Golden Oak. Here is “the story of Golden Oak“:

The story of Golden Oak begins in true once-upon-a time fashion. As a youth in Missouri, Walt Disney would lie beneath the spreading branches of his “dreaming tree” and let his imagination run free. It was here that Walt’s talents for storytelling and fantasy began to take shape into some of the world’s most beloved characters.

Years later, a scenic ranch in California’s Placerita Canyon proved an equally inspiring location for filming segments of The Mickey Mouse Club TV show. Walt Disney Productions purchased portions of the property in 1959 and, over the years, acquired more than 900 acres to reserve its quiet vistas for TV and movie productions and protect its harmony with nature. In fact, Walt and his family spent time relaxing and playing on the ranch.

The name of this ranch? Golden Oak, in honor of a storied tree there, under which some say gold nuggets had been found in 1842. From these illustrious origins, the legacy continues with Golden Oak at Walt Disney World® Resort.

The website for Golden Oak emphasizes a blend of neighborhood plus resort living. Will there really be a neighborhood here or is this more of a resort that can be called a “neighborhood” because it consists of single-family homes? Or does Disney think that without calling it a neighborhood, the development won’t be as attractive? If only you have the money necessary, you too can purchase this unique Disney blend.

I wonder if we can read anything into this development in terms of how it relates to Celebration. This wealthier development could be a marker of several things:

1. Disney has gone as far as it wants to go with Celebration type developments which are more geared toward “average” suburbanites. Disney now wants to take advantage of wealthier people who are willing to buy larger and more expensive homes these days.

1a. Does Disney consider Celebration a success or would they do a lot differently if they were starting a new community?

2. Disney finds these housing projects to be profitable and will pursue more of these in the future as conditions allow. It would be interesting to know how profitable the developments are.

 

Questioning the value of an outsider’s perspective in MoMA’s “Foreclosed”

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MoMA’s exhibit Foreclosed certainly seems to be provoking a lot of strong reactions (see Brian’s previous commentary here).  Diana Lind, editor in chief of Next American City, questions both the motives and the practicality underlying MoMA’s re-imagining of the American suburbs:

Foreclosed seethes with disdain for the suburbs, and the lack of an empathetic understanding of how the suburbs function and are changing, ultimately makes the exhibit look less visionary than ignorant. As an urban dweller who is deeply frustrated by the social, economic and environmental consequences of sprawl and car-centered communities, I too want to see clever ways of retrofitting these parts of the country. But saying that, I wish the exhibit had improved upon the suburbs rather than suggest transforming them beyond recognition.

It was critically apparent that none of the architects participating in the exhibit actually live in the suburbs (a fact confirmed by the exhibit’s curator). To Bergdoll, the last great American architect to live and work in the burbs was Frank Lloyd Wright, who was based in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park at the turn of the 20th century. This outsider perspective on the suburbs is the exhibit’s crucial flaw and inevitably influenced the architects to propose interventions in suburbia that have all the grace of a superblock in the middle of the city grid. Despite their good intentions, their efforts at sustainability and their smart alternatives to homeownership, the architects’ wrath for the suburbs has caused them to create projects that annihilate the suburbs rather than improve them. [emphasis added]

For all their problems, suburbs clearly “work” on some levels.  (If they didn’t, suburbs would hold little attraction for to the millions happily residing in them.)  Lind’s specific examples of cultural clueless-ness on the part of the MoMA-commissioned architects are well worth pondering.  She suggests that failing to consider what aspects of suburbs work (and how) results the same sort of ham-fisted, bureaucratic approach that destroyed thriving urban neighborhoods in the mid-twentieth century:

[MoMA’s] radical visions that are so insensitive to the suburbs remind me of the Modernist public housing projects that were once foisted on inner cities. Created by well-intentioned but essentially ignorant architects and planners, those buildings made sense in theory but not in practice. They didn’t respond to the rhythms and needs of the people who would be housed there, because the architects didn’t really respect or understand the lives of poor people. MoMA should have found some architects who could love and live in the suburbs, showing us the way to make the most of suburban housing instead of wishing it didn’t exist.

Sociology of gambling laboratory in Las Vegas

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While Chicago might still be the urban laboratory of choice for some sociologists, a sociologist at UNLV talks about Las Vegas as a fantastic laboratory for studying human motivations and gambling:

We live in the largest gambling laboratory in the world. A sociologist who studies gambling in Las Vegas is probably like being a physicist and living in a vacuum. I tell all my students to sit on a bench and watch all the humanity. That’s why market research firms like to come to Las Vegas. In an hour and a half, they can meet 40 people from 40 countries and states. Humanity comes here…

You’re struck by the similarities and differences in various markets. Las Vegas is a sea of slot machines with a smattering of table games. Macau is a sea of table games with a smattering of slot machines. As a social scientist, you watch the different behaviors. In Macau, no one is consuming alcohol. There is always a calculus going on, where gamblers are demonstrating math skills while hoping to be smiled upon by the gods of chance. What’s fascinating is to contrast the Chinese gambler against the American or European gambler.Question: You recently authored a report that said Las Vegas could learn much from Houston. How?

Answer: Houston suffered a downturn when its main economy, oil production, moved overseas and became a global industry. The slump ended when Houston began exporting its intellectual capital.

Las Vegas could do the same thing as gaming becomes more international. In some ways, our companies are already doing that. Las Vegas can become the global command center of the international gaming industry. One way you do that is education. Of course, I’m completely biased but the gaming institute can play a leading role in this transformation.

I bet you could use gambling research in a lot of examples within a research methods class.

I’m intrigued by a couple of ideas mentioned above:

1. There are different cultural approaches to gambling. I should have known this but I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it before. It would be interesting to hear if Americans live up to typical stereotypes (confident, brash, etc.).

2. I wonder if social scientists would be allowed by casinos to conduct academic studies with gamblers/customers. I’m guessing this is likely off-limits unless the work could be beneficial to the casinos. If there are a lot of people already in Las Vegas who want to engage in gambling, why not let them do it in the context of monitored academic research?

3. What holds Las Vegas back from becoming a finance center? Gaming requires large flows of capital from both companies and visitors. To truly become a world-class city, this would seem to be a way the city could go by working with the money in innovative ways.

This reminds me of comments from sociologists after the American Sociological Association meetings were held there last August. Do most sociologists think the city is simply an oddity or are there real things that could be learned from the city (Sun Belt city, center of the gaming industry, ecological concerns, many foreclosures) and applied elsewhere?

Still using Chicago as “urban laboratory”

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Following in the tradition of the Chicago School which saw the city as an “urban laboratory,” sociologist Robert Sampson explains how the findings from studying Chicago apply to the entire country:

Many cities were considered as a possible launching pad for the study, but Chicago got the nod for its composition of whites, blacks, and Latinos — the three largest groups in the United States — and for the access to the city’s extensive statistics on health, police, and more. “Chicago offered us a picture of American life that we thought was broadly representative,” Sampson said.

According to Sampson, a vast array of social activity is concentrated in place. “We studied crime, health, altruism, cynicism, disorder, collective efficacy, civic engagement, leadership networks — all of which are influenced and shaped by neighborhood effects.”…

Even as the world is increasingly globalized, neighborhood structures remain local and important. “Neighborhoods have legacies,” he said. “Crime and poverty are durable over long periods of time. From the 1960s onwards, cities went through amazing social change — riots, crime — to one of the largest decreases in violence from the late 1990s to the present. Yet communities are persistent in rank ordering. People are moving in and out of neighborhoods, but the perceptions of neighborhoods stay largely the same.”

What’s more, he found, no community in Chicago transitioned from black to white, a pattern he shows is similar to the United States as a whole.

To sum up: place matters.

I’ve thought several times over the years that I would like to see more work about whether Chicago is really representative of America as is often suggested or if other cities are better options. To put it another way, is Chicago studied more often because there is a legacy of studying Chicago well at the University of Chicago and other schools or because Chicago is truly unique? Others have argued that other places are more emblematic of more recent patterns – check out the Los Angeles School for a differing opinion. Chicago might represent Rust Belt cities but what about Sun Belt cities?

When looking at American cities that seem to get most research attention or are covered in “classic works”, having an established research school with an interest in urban sociology seems to matter. Chicago gets a lot of attention as does Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City. This makes sense: these cities have great universities and it is logical that researchers and graduate students would look at some of the surrounding areas and be able to justify this study beyond simply saying it is more convenient or cheaper. In contrast, other major cities don’t seem to get the same level of scrutiny, places like Washington, D.C., Detroit, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and a number of other ascendent Sun Belt cities.

Perhaps my thoughts are too impressionistic and one could try to quantify just how much each city actually does get studied. But even then, there are cities with histories that matter, research legacies that have inertia and are likely to continue for some time. Someday we might have a Houston school or an Atlanta school but that requires resources, effort, and research that is recognized as being relevant and innovative.

New MoMA exhibit “Foreclosed” reimagines suburban life

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Perhaps a side effect of the downturn in the housing market in recent years is a willingness to think boldly about a new future for American suburbs. “Foreclosed,” a new exhibit at MoMA, proposes several solutions:

Foreclosed had its origins in a research project initiated by Reinhold Martin in 2009. Martin, who directs the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, wondered whether the foreclosure crisis could have a silver lining, by giving Americans reason to rethink one of the most impractical (and wasteful) aspects of the American dream. That, he argued, could lead to the proliferation of new housing types that blur lines between public and private spaces. With Anna Kenoff and Leah Meisterlin, he produced a book, the Buell Hypothesis, last year…

That proposal is by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood of WORKac, for a section of Keizer, Oregon that would be five times as dense as neighboring suburbs, but with three times as much open space. A gorgeous, dome-shaped structure contains a community composting plant. Around it are buildings that recall the best work of Steven Holl, Bjarke Ingels, and MVRDV. One imagines a developer seeing Andraos and Wood’s elaborate 1:250 model, depicting a gently futuristic suburb, and wanting to break ground tomorrow.

The other star of the exhibition is Jeanne Gang, the Chicago architect. She and her teammates tackled the problems of Cicero, an older Chicago suburb that is filled with rotting industrial facilities but not the kind of housing needed by its large immigrant population. They decided to play to Cicero’s strengths, as what Gang calls an “arrival city,” by creating modular housing that can go up or down in size as families evolve. They also reclaimed industrial facilities as gardens and, like most of the teams, came up with an unconventional financing scheme. Like the very different WORKac proposal, Gang’s Cicero proposal seems practically shovel-ready, even though, as she pointed out in a New York Times op-ed, it remains illegal under Chicago’s zoning code.

The most provocative idea in the show may belong to MOS—the firm headed by Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample—which focuses on East Orange, New Jersey. The plan acknowledges the lack of pedestrian life in today’s suburbs and reclaims the streets themselves as building sites. That allows increased density without the need to demolish existing housing. But if the idea is strong, details, of what the “ribbon” buildings” would look like and how they would function, are sparse…

Inner-ring suburbs are in need of some solutions as they often face big-city problems without the resources or attention they need to truly innovate.

Now the trick is to try to implement one of these options. (See some images here.) While it is interesting to consider what might be done, it would be useful to ask the architects about how they would go about putting these plans into action in particular suburbs. What would suburban governments and residents approve? Where would the funding come from? A prominent composting plant? Gang’s plan requires changing a lot of zoning laws? Looking at some of the comments to this story, there is some skepticism. If these designs are in a museum, is the exhibit intended to be more art or practical design?

Also, I always wonder about the assumption that better design will automatically lead to population, cultural, and economic revival. In other words, if you adopt these new methods, your suburb will improve. Alas, these things don’t come with money-back guarantees.

Why the Washington Metro doesn’t yet reach Tysons Corner

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As part of an argument that seems to really be about the difficulties of large-scale bureaucracies in responding to change, Michael Barone explore why the Washington Metro has had difficulty in reaching suburban destinations like Tysons Corner, the prototypical edge city.

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Escape the McMansion invasion in New Jersey by moving to Bloomington, Indiana

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This is a story you likely don’t hear everyday: in order to escape the sprawl and McMansions of New Jersey, one couple decided to leave their weekend home at the Jersey shore and buy a second house in Bloomington, Indiana.

But that was before McMansions began rising from the sand, and growing numbers of visitors descended as the narrow Atlantic spit solidified its reputation as a destination for families. The Kiefers found their neighborhood inundated by tourists, their property encroached upon by development, and their easy weekend commute become a traffic-snarled crawl.

So after a number of years of coping with sharp change, the Kiefers decided to search for a less suffocating second-home spot.

The hunt led them to Bloomington, a lively college town tucked in the rolling, forested hills of south-central Indiana. Taking full advantage of the huge run-up in property values on the Jersey Shore, they sold their beach house for “a nice profit” and bought a six-bedroom, 3,500-square-foot early-20th-century charmer in Bloomington’s historic Elm Heights neighborhood in 2010 for $321,000. “It feels like a real old-time community instead of a tourist town,” said Fred Kiefer.

Bloomington may not be touristy, but it is very much a destination. Indiana University draws intellectuals from around the country and abroad (mostly China, India and Saudi Arabia), giving the city of 74,000 healthy doses of youthful and international energy. And as a well-run city that consistently makes the lists of America’s best places to live, its status as a quality-of-life capital has lured retirees in growing numbers.

Some interesting points about this story:

1. The “McMansion invasion” theme comes up a lot in the Northeast, particularly in coastal towns. Are there also McMansions in Bloomington (I assume there are)?

2. This couple does have family in Louisville and Cincinnati so they didn’t exactly pick Bloomington out of the blue.

3. The biggest swipe at the area or Indiana comes in this benign phrase: “Drawbacks – Bloomington may not have enough urbane distractions for some.” This could be quite a change from New Jersey and either the New York City or Philadelphia areas.

4. Bloomington is a “creative class” city anchored by Indiana University.This would be appealing to a lot of people.

5. One of the bonuses of this move is the cheaper cost of living in Indiana. Does this outweigh the lack of “urbane distinctions”?

6. This makes me wonder how many people from either the East or West Coasts retire to the Midwest or purchase second homes there.

7. I’m tempted to ask: what happens when this couple wanders outside the relatively cosmopolitan Bloomington into non-creative class Indiana?

Naperville downtown like “Rush street west”?

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In response to the stabbing death that happened in downtown Naperville this past weekend, one city councilman suggests the city needs to enforce liquor regulations more closely:

Councilman Doug Krause pointed out that the city has only shut down one bar for one day in the past five years due to a liquor license infraction, and that an ordinance passed last month will allow bars to stop serving food at 9 p.m.

“It’s becoming more of a Rush Street after 10 o’clock at night — it’s like Rush Street west,” Krause said Sunday night. “It’s been increasing over the last eight to 10 years. There are mobs out there.”…

“We had over 6,000 calls for police service in downtown Naperville last year. The problem is an enforcement problem,” Krause said referring to liquor law enforcement.

Councilman Grant Wehrli disagreed with Krause, calling his response a “knee jerk reaction to an event that is still under investigation.”

This sort of reaction is something I was expecting even though Naperville is a relatively safe place.

At the same time, this does lead to a larger issue that I hinted at on Sunday: how Naperville wants to balance being a cultural and entertainment center while also remaining family-friendly. On one side, having a lot of bars in a suburban downtown is not usually considered family-friendly. Particularly on warm summer nights, there are a lot of people who congregate in downtown Naperville late into the evening, including many teenagers and families, to partake of music, shopping, the Riverwalk, and family restaurants and eateries. This sort of violence is not clearly not helpful to maintaining this environment but even public drunkenness is not terribly conducive to this.

On the other hand, having a thriving restaurant and bar district can bring in a lot of tax revenue. Instead of residents going elsewhere (perhaps downtown Chicago even?), they spend their money out in downtown Naperville. Lots of suburban communities would love to have the problem that Naperville has had of not having enough parking spaces for all of the downtown visitors or having the kind of restaurants that exist in most suburbs only in shopping centers. The restaurants and bars help attract other businesses.

So how does a well-respected suburb balance these two interests? One of the worst things that could happen to the downtown is that it is branded “unsafe” and people turn away. At the same time, when there are plenty of people around and there is alcohol involved, it is really hard to stop everything bad from happening.

“Farewell to the suburban age”?

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One strategist argues that the “suburban age” is over in America:

Note how this process is self-reinforcing. As people moved out, municipal revenues stagnated in the old urban core. This meant that deteriorating urban services in downtown areas pushed out more people. Meanwhile, the expanding suburban population could use its growing political clout to demand more public spending on highways and other urban infrastructure for the suburbs. The expansion of urban infrastructure was fiscally very expensive, but America’s powerful mid-century economy could afford it. By the end of the 20th century, some suburbs had spread so far from any urban core that they were given a new name: “exurbs”.

Today, however, these very dynamics, both financial and sociological, have gone into reverse. Concerns about the state of US federal, state and municipal finances have grown sharply. In August 2011, ratings agency Standard & Poor’s downgraded the credit rating of 11,000 municipal issues following the downgrade of the federal government. In November 2011, Jefferson County, Alabama, filed for bankruptcy, the largest such filing in US history. At the very least, this means that the United States will not be able to afford further expansion of urban infrastructure for many years. Indeed, American city managers will be forced to recognise that urban services are much cheaper to supply in a concentrated urban form…

Meanwhile, the structure of American society is also changing rapidly. In 1950, households based on married couples accounted for 78 per cent of all households. Single-person households accounted for less than 10 per cent. Over the following 60 years, however, the institution of marriage went into steep decline in America. The latest census data shows that married couples accounted for only 48 per cent of households in 2010 and that their share is rapidly falling. In contrast, the single person household now accounts for 27 per cent of households.

The residential requirements of this new social structure are drastically different from those of the traditional family. The single individual, for instance, is likely to prefer an easily managed apartment and close proximity to bars, restaurants, hospitals, shops and friends. The implication of the above sociological and fiscal dynamics is that the future trajectory of American cities is towards increased density. Some old city-centres will revive even as new hubs will emerge.

There are two major arguments here against the suburbs:

1. They are too expensive to maintain in the long-run.

2. Family structures have changed and the new forms of social arrangement, such as living alone, would be best done in the city.

Both of these are problems though I’m not sure they necessarily mean that Americans will revert to city living and promoting urban policies over suburban policies. I wonder if the shift toward the densification of the suburbs, often built around New Urbanist developments or retrofitting, would adequately solve both of these issues.

The overall premise of this piece is echoed by others (see a similar argument from The Atlantic last year) and I wonder how much of this is simply the same suburban critique that we have heard now for decades: suburbs are unsustainable and their design does not cater to everyone (teenagers, singles, the elderly, etc.). Is this era of economic crisis going to be the period where these critiques actually move residents and policymakers toward other options?

There is another intriguing part about this analysis: how American policies about suburbs influence other country’s policies. This writer suggests that India is aspiring in some ways to follow the American model when the country would be better served to promote denser cities. If the American suburban model does decline (and we would have to think about how exactly you would measure this decline), would other countries abandon their smaller suburban plans?