by Joel Garreau
People who are consistently successful as developers, by contrast, surviving both boom and bust, have special gifts of character. Not the least of these is their ability routinely to roll the dice with millions of dollars on the table and then sleep at night.
But by and large, developers as a breed have only one specialized skill not generally available in the population: they have the ability to do fairly high-level arithmetic, in their heads, while talking about a completely different topic. What developers do, fundamentally, is run the numbers. And the most impressive number they run is the one in which they manage to divide extremely large dollar figures by 43,560, which is the number of square feet in an acre. By so doing they can and do reduce much of human experience—quite accurately, as it turns out—to the Deal.
I’ll never forget David Hunter, one of the first developers I ever interviewed back in Virginia. He was bulldozing hundreds of acres of forest around a lovely stream called Little Rocky Run for a subdivision. I had found the forest delightful in its erect state, so I was keenly interested in his reasoning. Especially because he was touting his massive subdivision as a “planned community.”
How was it “planned”? I asked him.
I still find Hunter’s answer memorable because it so thoroughly blew away any liberal-arts preconceptions I may have had about how things get built in our world. Hunter basically said: Planners? Architects? Say what? Here’s what happened. And he started running the numbers. It was like a mantra. Like a Gregorian chant:
“Anybody knowledgeable about the sewer system knew that there was only one place growth could go, and that was west, and there were only two roads heading west, Route 50 and Interstate 66. There was this triangle of roads that the county plan said was supposed to be a mall, but there was a zoning battle between DeBartolo and Taubman, and Taubman won, and so the mall went two exits east. The area could not support both. That’s when I saw the possibilities for this watershed. There were four thousand acres in the shed, okay, and there were eight or ten major owners holding twenty-two hundred acres. They had held the land for ten or fifteen years.
“That land at the time was investor land. Not farmland. Just investor land. It’s in that holding period where it’s too expensive to farm and not yet matured to the point where it’s developable. It was all wooded, yeah. All of it was wooded.
“The first obstacle to overcome was the sewering of the watershed, which took some $3 million in funding from the consortium of eight owners, especially from one guy who had four or five syndicates that owned probably 30 percent of the land. So I came in and bought about four or five hundred acres from him at $10,000 or $12,000 an acre with no sewer.
“These areas are already zoned, but 75 to 80 percent of the density was all within one half of the watershed. So if you took this four thousand acres, the density here is one to two on two thousand acres and down here it’s like probably four to five. Dwelling units per acre, yeah. Okay. This P.S. is a pumping station. The county gave us that approval. The second line of approval was a matter of formality.
“Now up here was where the county was having problems. This is where the court suit was; this is where the septic fields were failing. A long ways from here to here, two or three miles. The county had budgeted like $800,000 with some kind of an escalator in it and later on the amount of it was like a million-four. And they were going to avoid sewering all this area and do a forced main here and go over into a sewage treatment plant over here. And then let’s say a million dollars of expenditure would serve this little area right here. Well, they got a little bit of flak on that.
“Then the Housing Authority got involved and over here was a little underprivileged area called the Louis-Lincoln-Vannoy area. So they got the Redevelopment Housing Authority in there with some matching federal funds, they came up with a dynamite program. Two million-eight, okay, and they bought eighty acres over here and this was a spray system. And they were going to go down here and spend this $2.8 million to serve forty-six houses, which meant that it was somewhere in the area of $40,000 to $50,000 a house and they were worth about $20,000, okay. So they had a fight on that.
“Well, I proved to them that I didn’t have to go there and there was a gap, but I also knew they had this million-four, okay. So with the million-four I did a civic duty here of simply at cost I extended the line from here to here which was virtually no benefit to me and I fumbled around with getting reimbursed for $850,000. Okay.
“That was done on the basis that this would be reimbursed by the county, coupled with these two people right here agreeing to run the line from here over to here, and the Housing Authority to go from here down to here and then to give back or do whatever they wanted with about $2.3 million in money, okay, because it only cost them $500,000 so they had all that money left and they still owned eighty acres down there.
“So that’s really how the whole thing came about.”
I was breathless. I scarcely knew where to start.
“The controlling thing was sewers?” I cautiously generalized about his “planned community.”
“Yeah. Not traffic, no, no. This was, let’s say it started in 1979 and was in operation 1983 over a four-year period. And I started buying the land in 1978. Really what I had was eleven hundred units, and Little Rocky Run now is about twenty-five hundred units. So I had purchased eleven hundred units and of those, seven hundred were town houses. What it’s zoned for, yes.”
I was still struggling to catch up. “You don’t think in terms of acres; you think in terms of units?”
“Yes. Zoned units. There was a couple of hundred acres and this equated to X number of units. So Little Rocky Run started out as eleven hundred units of housing, seven hundred town houses, three hundred single family. And, you know, a couple of curious things started occurring. These people who had participated in bringing in the sewer did not want to be in a development mode whereas it would change their tax situation. They kept saying, ‘Won’t you buy the property? Won’t you buy the property?’ Finally what happens I end up taking them over. Then a lady owned this and then I bought that and then a Mr. Jenkin owned this and I bought that, okay, so it just kept going right on down.”
I was reeling. As it happened, a contractor had ruptured a transcontinental natural-gas transmission pipeline nearby only the previous week.
“Thank God it wasn’t your bulldozer that hit the pipeline,” I said fervently.
“That’s exactly right. That’s right,” agreed Hunter. “That pipeline runs right through here and right over here is where it was hit. Right there. I don’t think it’s even a thousand yards, I think we’re talking a thousand feet. I’ll tell you what, it’s awful close. That is Sunset Ridge that they evacuated. Here’s the elementary school over here.”
Weak-kneed, I responded, “I see.”
Years later, David Hunter’s recitation of the facts of life remains a classic vignette of the way our world is shaped, really.
It also shows why the Law of Unintended Consequences governs our built world. Both the developers and the planners are plagued by the same problem: they repeatedly face disconnects between their actions and their consequences. Edge Cities that are devoted to automobility end up traffic-choked. Places that tout their “amenities” and “quality of life” end up so contrived that the mine canaries of urbanity struggle to survive.
The big problem with the developers is that they follow the numbers. Yet there are few market mechanisms that make the connection between what they build and all the social consequences. The game is not set up that way. The developers tend to their own projects and hope that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” will clean up the consequences, rewarding good and bankrupting evil. If the net result of all their actions is perceived as chaotic, the response is, well, any market in full-blown operation—whether it be a souk in North Africa or a real estate play in east Texas—can be mistaken for anarchy.
And they are not wrong. Historian Robert Fishman claims that all urba
n forms when new—whether they are the streetcar suburbs of a hundred years ago or the Levittowns of forty years ago or the Edge Cities of today—evolve this way:
• First, planners of genius comprehend what makes them tick.
• Then, speculative builders of less candlepower get the general idea and try, approximately, to replicate it, slowly and incompletely.
• Finally, individual property owners continually upgrade their places. They look around at what other people are doing, decide what is good or bad, eliminate discordant elements, and bring their community closer to what is perceived to be the ideal. “We might hope that a similar process is now at work in the postsuburban outer city,” Fishman writes.
Yet the time scale of developers is unnerving.
“Developer” is an interesting word for these people. The dictionary says it means one who causes something to become fuller, who causes it to unfold or evolve, who makes it stronger or more effective, who causes it to progress. Yet developers are rarely rewarded for taking the long view and looking at the big picture. They all know the histories of the “new towns” of the 1960s and 1970s: they almost all went broke. Some, like Reston, Virginia, ran through several corporate owners. The one in the Houston area, The Woodlands, signals to developers only a perverse lesson. For all its charms, they say, the only reason planning on that scale did not go bankrupt is that The Woodlands was backed by an oil company, an outfit with deep enough pockets to wait ten or twenty years for a payout.
It is this short horizon that is at the root of that frequently heard call: what Edge Cities really need is more planning. But the role that planners have played in the development of these places is, if anything, even more disturbing than that of the developers. At least the developers’ claims for their social worth are modest. At bottom, they attempt only to create wealth. The planners, by contrast and by definition, proclaim much more. After all, they call themselves planners. This suggests at least some larger vision of human affairs. That is why people hire them. It also suggests that their plans will reliably produce social good; that there will be a general relationship between their intentions and the cold, hard results.
An examination of the real world, however, suggests that the facts are far more troubling. Precisely because planners believe their goals are lofty, when their crystal ball shatters, the crash can be heard for decades. The world moved on July 15, 1972, for example. That was the day the city fathers of St. Louis blew up with dynamite the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects. The design, which followed the foremost architectural theories of its day and had won an award from the American Institute of Architects, was so utterly unlivable, even by the standards of the wretched of the earth, that Class A explosives were the only solution.
Take for a more grand example Las Colinas, west of downtown Dallas. It is one of the most planned, long-horizon Edge Cities in the world. It will be half a century before this place is built out.
In the central plaza of Las Colinas, there are nine bronze mustangs, forever wild and free. Each seems to be balanced on, at most, one foot, in water calculatedly splashed by jets to appear, for the rest of time, as if cast up by the ponies at a dead run. A plaque nearby, entitled “The Mustangs of Las Colinas,” memorializes them. In part, it reads:
These horses bore Spanish explorers across two continents. They brought to the plains indians the age of horse culture. Texas cowboys rode them to extend the ranching occupation clear to the plains of Alberta. Spanish horse, Texas cowpony, and mustang were all one in those times, when as sayings went, a man was no better than his horse, and a man on foot was no man at all.
Like the longhorn, the mustang has been virtually bred out of existence, but mustang horses will always symbolize Western frontier, long trails of longhorn herds, seas of pristine grass, and men riding free on a free land.
These sculptures—they have tremendously ridged veins and a nice deep hollow ring to them when rapped—are huge. Each is one and a half times life size. The most endearing are the two colts, one of which appears to be leaping into the water as if off a tall bank.
And they are much loved. One warm Mother’s Day, a daddy could be seen standing his daughter on his shoulders so that the child could pet a big bronze nose eight feet off the ground. The number two colt has a mane that seems to be turning colors. All the other animals have a patina of dark green. This pony, which is just short enough for its top to be easily reached by human hands, has been rubbed so often, affectionately, that its mane has turned to gold.
But behind the mustangs, the high-rise office towers of Williams Square loom. The surfaces are hard and cold. The plain across which the horses seem to gallop is made of corporate marble. Not a sliver of grass is to be seen.
This is far and away the most inviting landscape in Las Colinas. Yet it is full of ironies. For in Las Colinas, the freedom and individualism the mustangs represent appear as extinct as the horses themselves.
In few urban landscapes in America has planning been so lavishly funded. “What they did, planners in old cities look at trying to do and despair,” one academic critic observed. “It’s rare to see something executed at that scale with that degree of meticulousness and expense. Nothing was done on the cheap out there.”
Yet the dominant feature of this place, in which twenty thousand of the affluent live and sixty thousand work, is walls. The walls separate the people on the inside from the people on the outside. They separate people within Las Colinas who can afford a $500,000 home from those within Las Colinas who can afford only a $200,000 home. Chain-link fences topped by two stretches of triple-strand barbed wire, meeting in a V, separate children from the waterways around which they might think to hunt for frogs.
Las Colinas is a landscape in which spontaneity has been utterly tamed. Every master-planned one of its twelve thousand acres seems to gleam, in an eerie sort of way. Its not just the office towers, although they are featured in the opening credits of Dallas. The golf courses gleam. The endless gold fixtures in the bathrooms gleam. The robot monorails gleam. So does the polished mahogany of the Venetian water taxis, the geometry of the BMWs and the Mercedeses, the uniform trim on the shoulders of the Mexican fishing minute cigarette specks out of the water features, and the heavily carved cathedral-weight doors that false-front the parking garages. They all gleam. This is not so much a community as a simulation of a community. When a raucous grackle starts chattering in a tree, you look up in honest wonder to see whether it is really a bird, or whether they’ve wired the trees with speakers and are running a tape. In front of the Four Seasons hotel, there is a jogger whose hair will be bouncy and moussed, forever. Her earphone headset keeps her entranced, permanently. She is the ideal athlete; she never sweats. She is a statue. In every detail, right down to the trademark on her Nikes, she is absolutely perfect. Because what has been subtracted is life. Gary Cartwright, in Texas Monthly, wrote of Las Colinas:
“There is no hint of the tawdry, the profane, no residue of grit or squalor or sweating masses. It is Disney World for the affluent. In fact, when executives from Disney World visited the development a few years ago, one of them commented that it was a shame ol’ Walt couldn’t have lived to see the real thing.”
Indeed, in its determination to conquer the unexpected, Las Colinas is as deliberate and premeditated as an interstate interchange. Its vistas resemble nothing so much as its neighbor, the Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport.
This is not urbanity. Molly Ivins, the Dallas Times Herald’s premier Texas observer, noted of this monument to planning, “There is something inorganic about Las Colinas, something utterly unspontaneous. I get the feeling there is nowhere you can get a bowl of banana pudding.” It no more matched her vision of civilization than did the Blade Runner Landscape match the standards of humanity of the Harvard dean.
How did this happen? How did urbanity fall between these cracks—between chaos and the control junkies? How did we end up missing most of the benefits of design?
The mark
etplace is the place to start rounding up the usual suspects, since that is where the developers worship. There is no question that in an Edge City, the introduction of any institution that might be equated with civilization is totally and at root dependent on the Deal.
The issue, then, that is central to Edge City is whether the market is an efficient way for people to communicate what they really want, or whether it is a debased and degrading caricature of humanity that leaves out everything that is valuable about the human condition.
This is a stimulating subject for debate. But here is what I found striking about so many planners, architects, and other design professionals. They were not much interested in the question. They did not much understand the marketplace. Nor did they care to. Often they dismissed it as wearisome. I found this curious. Someday, someone will write an intellectual history explaining why so many highly educated building professionals ever thought it was a good idea to neglect the landscapes in which the vast majority of Americans lived, worked, and played. Especially at a time when that’s where most of the construction was being done. But it is undeniable that its effect has been perverse. This shunning by the designers has not caused Americans to change their habits, nor has it imbued the world with charm, nor has it gained these professions much in the way of lucrative work. If the mine canaries of civilization were having a rough time in Edge City, I couldn’t help wondering to what extent that was a function of anything inherent in Edge City, and to what extent it had something to do with the intellectual absence of so many people I had always viewed as the guardians of our built environment.