Vital Little Plans

by Jane Jacobs

  Now for the related problem of commercial or institutional facilities intruding into inappropriate places. From time to time I glance at plans and artists’ renderings for charmingly designed residences with their yards, and I wonder where future overflow of commerce can be pleasantly accommodated. Perhaps this consideration doesn’t matter in a village which is destined to remain a village. But it matters very much in a city neighborhood or in a town or village which becomes engulfed by a city. In cities, successful hearts attract users from outside the neighborhood, and they also attract entrepreneurs who want to be where the action is. These things happen. In fact, if these things didn’t happen cities would be little more advantageous economically and socially than villages; they wouldn’t generate urban surprise, pizzazz and diversity.

  So with time and change, originally unforeseen commercial and institutional overflows can occur in city neighborhoods. Where do they go? They may have to find and convert makeshift quarters. Occasionally the makeshifts are delightful, but most commonly they register as ugly, jarring, intrusive smears into residential streets where they were never meant to intrude. Watching this happen, people think, “The neighborhood is going to the dogs.” So it is visually—and soon, as a sequel, perhaps socially; in the end, perhaps economically as well. So much is this form of deterioration disliked and feared, that one of the chief purposes of zoning regulations is to prevent it. Even if the regulations succeed at holding time and change at bay, as enemies, any success they have comes at the cost of squelching city potentialities, meaning convenience and innovations.

  Here is where the anatomy of natural neighborhood hearts can come to the rescue. One important adaptive advantage of open-ended main pedestrian streets forming intersections is that these streets are logical places to locate convertible buildings before there is a need to convert them. They can be a designed form of neighborhood insurance, so to speak. For example, row houses can be designed to convert easily and pleasantly to shops, small offices, studios, restaurants, all kinds of things. Several joined together even convert well to small schools and other institutions. And of course many buildings originally put up for work, especially loft buildings, convert pleasantly to apartments or living-and-working combinations. In sum, I am suggesting that urban designers and municipalities should not think about the street anatomy without also providing or encouraging easily convertible buildings on those streets as opportunity to do that arises. This is a practical strategy for dealing with time and change as allies, not enemies.

  My third suggestion concerns gentrification of low-cost neighborhoods to which time has not been kind but which have valuable assets. Typically, the first outsiders to notice those assets are artists and artisans. They are joined by young professionals or other middle-class people whose eyes have been opened by the artists’ discoveries. For a time, gentrification brings heartening renovations and other physical improvements into a neighborhood that needs improvements, along with new people whose connections, life-skills and spending money can be socially useful to the neighborhood’s existing inhabitants, and often are. As long as gentrification proceeds gently, with moderation, it tends to continue to be beneficial, and diversifying.*5Nowadays especially, a neighborhood’s period of what might be called its golden age of gentrification can be surprisingly short….It explodes into a feeding frenzy of real-estate speculation and evictions.

  But nowadays especially, a neighborhood’s period of what might be called its golden age of gentrification can be surprisingly short. Suddenly, so many, many new people want in on a place now generally perceived as interesting and fashionable that gentrification turns socially and economically vicious. It explodes into a feeding frenzy of real-estate speculation and evictions. Former inhabitants are evicted wholesale, priced out by what Chester Hartman, urban planner and author, aptly calls “the financial bulldozer.”*6 Even the artists, who began the process, are priced out.

  The eventual ironic result is that even the rich, the people being priced in, are cheated by this turn of events. They were attracted by what they perceived as a lively, interesting, diverse and urbane city neighborhood—in short, by the results of gentle and moderate gentrification. This kind of urbanity is killed as the place becomes an exclusive preserve for high-income people.

  Time is not kind to high-income preserves in cities, unless they are small and cheek-by-jowl with livelier and more diverse neighborhoods. One need only notice that many a poor and dilapidated neighborhood contains once-beautiful, proud and ambitious dwellings to see evidence that exclusive preserves of the rich do not necessarily hold up well in cities. The rich, it seems, grow bored with undiverse, dull city neighborhoods, or their children or heirs do. This is not surprising because such places are boring.

  When gentrification turns vicious and excessive, it tells us, first, that demand for moderately gentrified neighborhoods has outrun supply. By now, experience has revealed the basic attributes of such places—attributes artists discover: the streets have human scale, buildings are various and interesting, streets are safe for pedestrian use and many ordinary conveniences are within pedestrian reach and neighbors are tolerant of differing lifestyles. It is pitiful that so many city neighborhoods with these excellent basic attributes have been destroyed for highway construction, slum clearance, urban renewal and housing projects. Nevertheless, some currently bypassed civic treasures do remain, and where they do, moderate gentrification—I emphasize moderate—could be deliberately encouraged to help take the heat off other places being excessively gentrified. Another way of adding to supply could be by encouraging judicious infilling of housing in neighborhoods with human scale but not excessive compactness or density.

  However, more than increased supply of desirable city neighborhoods is needed to combat socially vicious evictions of existing inhabitants. Artscape, a Toronto organization concerned specifically with protecting and promoting the interests of artists, has come to the conclusion that the only sure way of preventing artists from being priced out of their quarters is ownership—in this case, ownership by nonprofit organizations. The same is probably true for many other existing inhabitants—ownership by cooperatives, community development corporations, land trusts, nonprofit organizations—whatever ingenuities can be directed to the aim of retaining neighborhood diversity of population.As diversity diminishes, into its place comes a kind of monoculture: incredible repetitions of whatever happens to be most profitable on that street at that time.

  My final suggestion concerns the hazards of a somewhat different form of popularity. As I mentioned earlier, some community hearts and their associated street anatomies attract many outsiders and are widely enjoyed. This is not a bad thing; on the contrary. The hazard is this: as leases for commercial or institutional spaces expire, tenants are apt to be faced with shockingly increased rents. Property taxes on the popular premises can soar too, instigating even further increases. If zoning prevents commercial overflow, so much the worse. The upshot is that many facilities are priced out of the mix. The hardware store goes, the bookstore closes, the place that repairs small appliances moves away, the butcher shops and bakeries disappear.

  As diversity diminishes, into its place comes a kind of monoculture: incredible repetitions of whatever happens to be most profitable on that street at that time. Of course these optimists don’t all succeed. Six of the seventeen new restaurants, say, die off rather rapidly, and five of the seven gift shops don’t make it through the next Christmas. Into their places come other optimists who hope something will be left in the till after the debt costs on renovations and the incredible rents are paid. But starting gradually while times are good, and rapidly when they aren’t, the street becomes dotted with vacancies. The old conveniences don’t return to fill them. They can’t afford to. All this is not owing to competition from malls or big boxes—but because success has priced out diversity.

  A popular main pedestrian street running through my own neighborhood is now afflicted by this dynamic. Ho
wever, fortunately the hardware store remains, so does the bookstore, one butcher shop with its associated European grocery, and a large general bargain and outlet store.*7 Not only do these remain, they flourish; one—the hardware—has doubled its space. The secret of their stability is that they own the buildings where they do business, so were not vulnerable to being priced out by soaring rents. The banks also remain; they own their buildings.

  This has caused me to think about home ownership. When it became public policy in the United States to encourage home ownership, financial devices such as long-term mortgages, small down payments, and mortgage acceptance agencies, primarily the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), proved successful at promoting the policy. Tract housing sold to homeowners under these arrangements was sprawling and otherwise ill-conceived for fostering much sense of community, but that is another matter. At least, fostering ownership worked. Today some 65 percent of American households own their own houses or apartments, the highest percentage in the world.

  This has made me wonder whether similar techniques would enable or encourage small businesses—especially those whose success depends heavily on location—to own their own premises. Of course not all would want to, and among those that did, all would not be able to; but that is also true of households. Why shouldn’t it become public policy to foster business stability, and stability of city streets and neighborhoods, by enabling enterprises to protect themselves, through ownership, against abruptly rising rents? In other words, I’ve arrived at much the same conclusion as Artscape: that ownership is the surest protection against being priced out of a place of work.

  These four suggestions may seem trivial compared with other municipal concerns such as racism, poor schools, traffic, unemployment, illegal drugs, inadequate tax revenues, crime, persistent poverty, what to do with garbage, how to lure tourists, whether to build another stadium or a convention center, and so on. Nevertheless, neighborhoods that decline are pretty serious too. Two steps forward, followed by three steps back, is no way for a city to progress, and it doesn’t help solve other municipal problems either; the pattern makes them more intractable.

  The pattern isn’t new. It has practical causes and unless these forms of civic ineptitude are faced and overcome, North American city neighborhoods are as unlikely to deal well with time and change in the future as they have been in the past. The suggestions I’ve made may not be politically possible. There may be better, or at any rate different, means of accomplishing similar aims. My purpose is to help stir up some creative thinking, now lacking, about effects of time and change on city neighborhoods; above all to stir up thinking about how to enlist time and change as practical allies—not enemies that must be regulated out and fended off on the one hand, or messily surrendered to on the other. We might as well learn how to make constructive alliances with the workings of time because time is going to continue happening; that’s for sure.

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  *1 The Vincent Scully Prize is awarded by the National Building Museum to recognize excellence in scholarship, criticism, and practice in architecture, preservation, and urban design. Scully (1920– ) is a famed historian of architecture who taught at Yale University from 1947 to 2009. Jacobs was the first recipient of the Vincent Scully Prize after Scully himself.

  *2 The National Building Museum is housed in the 1887 headquarters of the U.S. Pension Bureau designed by architect Montgomery Meigs.

  *3 See chapter 15 of Death and Life, “Slumming and Unslumming,” where Jacobs describes how neighborhood revitalization is best achieved by the retention of residents as they improve their lot in life. Jacobs’s thoughts about steadily “unslumming” neighborhoods dated back to her earliest experiences in New York. She considered Greenwich Village between the 1930s and ’50s a great example of the phenomenon.

  *4 In a 2001 interview with Bill Steigerwald in Reason magazine, Jacobs specifically calls out the New Urbanist architects and planners on this mistake: “The New Urbanists want to have lively centers in the places that they develop, where people run into each other doing errands and that sort of thing. And yet, from what I’ve seen of their plans and the places they have built, they don’t seem to have a sense of the anatomy of these hearts, these centers.”

  *5 This distinction can be found in Death and Life as well. As we’ve seen, Jacobs calls such gentle, diversifying, internally driven gentrification “unslumming,” while in chapter 13, “The Self-Destruction of Diversity,” she describes the more common contemporary understanding of gentrification: rapid upscaling, homogenization, and displacement.

  *6 Chester Hartman (1936– ) is a planner, writer, and activist. Jacobs wrote the introduction to his collection of writings, Between Eminence and Notoriety: Four Decades of Radical Urban Planning (2002).

  *7 The street Jacobs describes here is Bloor Street in Toronto’s Annex neighborhood, down the street from her house at 69 Albany Avenue. The businesses she lists are likely Wiener’s Home Hardware, Book City or BMV Books, the Elizabeth Deli, and Honest Ed’s, respectively. As of 2015, one bookstore and the deli have closed, and Honest Ed’s plans to close by the end of 2016, to be replaced by a new mixed-use development.

  Canada’s Hub Cities

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  SPEECH AT THE C5 CONFERENCE, WINNIPEG, MAY 24, 2001

  Five cities and their adjoining city regions are by far Canada’s major economic assets. Without Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal, Canada would be so poor that it would qualify as part of the Third World.

  Income and consumption taxes from businesses and residents in these cities and their regions are what make the programs of provincial and federal government financially possible.

  Foreign immigrants and their children rely overwhelmingly on these five cities and their regions for work, income and educational and other opportunities. So do domestic migrants from rural Canada.

  Many a little city or company town throughout the country depends on transplanted industries or offices that were generated in these five cities. Many also depend heavily or entirely on sales in these five cities and their regions.

  Our host, Mayor Glen Murray, calls them “hub cities.” It’s a good description, more succinct than “economically diverse,” “economically creative,” “economically innovative,” or “economically synergistic.” Those labels speak of underlying causes for the extraordinary economic and social power of those cities. The label “hub cities” speaks of results of those causes, more suggestively than simply saying “big cities.” In today’s world, these are Canada’s primary economic engines.

  But in spite of the fact that these five cities exist, many other facts inform us that Canada is a poor environment for hub cities.

  For one thing, large regions of the country have no hub cities to pull them out of relative poverty. The Atlantic provinces, for instance, have none. Saskatchewan has none. Neither do large but relatively poor regions of Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba, Alberta and British Columbia. It isn’t that they lack cities per se. Like the Atlantic provinces, most do have cities, including promising ones with many admirable and interesting attributes. But these remain arrested in a sort of economic adolescence. With luck, one in half a century might grow up and take off, as Calgary has done.

  That isn’t enough, considering the need. For a country the geographical size of Canada, and for a population as striving and capable as Canada’s, five hub cities are few.

  Even the five can’t be taken for granted. Suppose, hypothetically, that Winnipeg were to stagnate and gradually thin out and dwindle, leaving the vast geographical gap between Toronto and Calgary as an economic gap. Actually, this is not so hypothetical. Winnipeg has come perilously close to stagnating.

  The well-being of the other four can’t be taken for granted either. I suspect that all of you mayors have wish lists of services and infrastructures your cities need—in some cases urgently need. Perhaps you have ideas about how some of these could be filled in new or better ways than are now conve
ntional. But possibilities must be postponed or even abandoned because you lack resources to invest in them. So Canada is already falling behind in fields such as waste recycling, public transportation, sewage treatment, energy conservation, assisted housing, products and methods for preventing toxic pollution. Social nets are becoming so fragile.

  Another thing: to flourish, a hub city needs strong and many-faceted trading, information and other relationships with other hub cities. These everyday, working relationships among hub cities within Canada are not strengthening as time passes. On the contrary. If this slackening continues, Canada will become a country only in name, if that.

  All these are symptoms that Canada provides a poor environment for the emergence of vigorous hub cities, and inadequate environments for maintaining those it does have.

  Although the symptoms show up locally, they occur country-wide. They are not temporary, either. Changes of government don’t correct them. In other words, Canada’s poor environment for cities is clearly systemic, by which I mean that it is embedded in the country’s political and financial arrangements. The damaging effects run wide and run deep.

  At their roots is a systemic flaw. It’s such a silly flaw, really. Its origins go back to the time when most of the country’s population lived and worked in small market towns, narrowly based company towns, and agricultural, fishing, mining, logging or other rural-resource villages and hamlets. Even the largest, even those that included garrisons or seats of administration, were economically and socially simple with limited ranges of expertise.