New hope for the American city

Press, 12 May 1981, Page 23

New hope for the American city

Reprinted from the ‘‘Economist,” London For many years America’s older cities have been pictured as doughnuts with their centres empty of life and investment. The earliest returns from the 1980 census even suggest that they may be like sieves, with more prosperous families leaving the inner suburbs as well as • the centres. Yet there is a contrary trend going on too, in which the inner cities are made attractive and lively again. One of the newest and most ambitious projects helping this trend is Harborplace in Baltimore, a complex of more than 100 shops and eating places set in two glass pavilions on the waterfront. Not so long ago the dockland area, like many others in older cities, was a collection of rotting warehouses haunted by tramps and drunks; now it is expected to add some $3O million to Baltimore’s tax base and may, perhaps, even draw people to live in the city rather than down the interstate highway in Washington, D.C. Baltimore has long been a pioneer of urban renewal: not only building from scratch, as at Harborplace, but preserving and restoring buildings in the centre of town. Few cities show this much care for ■ their old residential areas, but most are coming round to the view that central districts ought to be smart, entertaining, lively, and full of people who are not merely t transient commuters but live there. Several other cities built round water are following the lead set by Baltimore and, even earlier, by San Francisco in its Ghirardelli Square project, an old chocolate factory at the edge of the bay converted in the mid-1960s into a labyrinth of boutiques. St Louis, Savannah, Louisville and Portland all have “riverside malls” in progress, while Boston’s Quincy Market —-also on the waterfront —should bring in SI.SM in city taxes this year. It was the racial tensions of the 1960 s that left most cities in the east and mid-west with centres empty of people who could afford to maintain ■the buildings. In the south and west a different phenomenon, the relentless impetus of cities such as Tucson, Houston, or Phoenix to sprawl out across the desert, has had much the same effect: cen-

tres full of skyscrapers but, after 5 p.m., scarcely a cat on the streets. For some years there was little prospect that the trend would reverse itself. It seemed that the Aerican dream would always include a house in the sub’ urbs, quiet, spacious, and surrounded by grass and trees. Only recently has this idea begun to change. The rise in petrol prices has made a long journey to work by car far less tolerable, yet trips of 70 to 80 kilometres are not uncommon in the biggest cities. Suburban property taxes have risen sharply as sewage pipes and other facilities have had to be taken further and further out. The rise in house prices, too, has increased the differential between inner-city and surburban property to the point where ft is generally much cheaper to buy an older, more central house.

Young couples, usually without children, middleclass, and white, tend to be responsible for the is-' lands of gentrification inside the cities. Alongside these small private efforts are huge projects for hotels, apartments, offices, and shops, all embrac' g the policy that people should be able to live, work, and shop with as little travelling as possible.

Most such schemes are in the earliest stages of development. Those that are still gleams in the planner’s eye (the latest stage of Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle, Chicago’s North Loop project, or, most surprising of all, the attempt to give downtown Los Angeles a heart centred on Bunker Hill, from which cars would be banned) face certain common problems. One is that the areas scheduled for redevelopment, far from being empty space, are in fact often neighbourhoods with their own community life, shops and entertainment, seedy as these may be. And" even where they are not, there is a tendency — because the cities most want to attract free-spend-ing, high-taxpaying suburbanites — for the new projects to cater almost exclusively for the wealthier classes. In East Dallas, a redevlopment district 4 km the business centre of the city, the average price of the new houses is about $120,000; it was meant to be $70,000. That is the cost of new town houses •in the centre of Baltimore,

which tries to keep prices within a reasonable range. Even there, however, blacks are complaining that they have been forced out by development. Some newer projects, accordingly, try to provide at least some housing which is easier to afford. The Dearborn Park development in central Chicago, just south of the Chicago River, is meant to cover a wide spectrum of customers; Chicago already has a central residential section that is both smart and rich, based on North Michigan Avenue and Lake Shore Drive. In Los Angeles, those responsible for the Bunker Hill project are already looking for employers who will help to subsidise the new houses for their workers.

A different approach to the same problem is to fill up the gaps left in cities when they grow outwards. There is plenty of room in most cities for blocks of flats at intervals among the suburban houses.

However, residents dislike it, and businssmen, especially in the sunbelt, often object to the idea of a citv that limits growth. Thus those cities which would like to make a priority of “infilling,” such as Houston, Phoenix and San Diego, are having to proceed cautiously and slowly. There is sometimes little alternative, however. In Phoenix, the sewage system cannot be extended any further into the desert.

These attempts to make cities more unified, and to provide them with lively focal points, have had the effect so far of creating islands of development mainly in isolation from each other.- The policy of “infilling” even expects this result. Instead of looking to a single hub, the downtown area, suburban communities may, it is hoped, metamorphose into “urban villages,” with workplaces, shops, and houses all in the same place. Downtown itself would then become another village, but a more sophisticated one, offering the sort of entertainment or facilities which would be worth the long drive from the suburbs. As for the inner-city developments, these too are, as yet, small globules in big areas of neglect. Their existence has not yet affected the income gap between the cities and the suburbs, nor has it stopped people leaving the centres. Yet their very presence is a sign of optimism that the inner cities can live again.