by Joel Garreau
CARRY, THE: The cost of a loan. Therefore, the most feared cause of bankruptcy. It is a unit of time as well as money. It’s how much money a developer has to come up with out of his pocket periodically, off the top, to keep right with his most important constituent, the bank. It is the prime unit of negative cash flow, and a noun. As in, “The board still hasn’t re-zoned him, and he’s getting killed by the Carry.” See also Soft Costs.
CC&RS: Pronounced cee-cee-en-ares, and short for Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions, these are the legal ridings embedded in the deeds to homes in most new housing developments. They allow community associations—the most ubiquitous form of shadow government—to do just about anything they want.
CHALLENGE: What you call a Situation after careful study reveals no possible way out.
CHI-CHI FROU-FROU: Shops inside an office building that cater to a high-end clientele. E.g., a gourmet take-out, a tasteful lingerie boutique. Pronounced shi-shi fru-fru. In use: “If you’re gonna try to get $24 a foot for this sucker, the lobby’s really gonna need some Chi-Chi Frou-Frou.” See also Animated Space.
CLASS A SPACE: Premiere office space, appropriate for a corporate headquarters. How much of this there is in an Edge City is the key means of determining its market quality. Since it always comes measured precisely in square feet, it would be nice if there were a uniform definition of what it is. Like the Supreme Court and pornography, the definition is—we know it when we see it. Generally, it means the newest buildings, charging the highest rents, but that in turn is determined by and influenced by intangibles. See Amenity Package, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon Parking Garage, One Hundred Percent Corner, Great Big Oak Trees Right up Against the Windows, and Quality of Life.
CLASS B SPACE: Office space for the grunts. Places in the medium-price range in an Edge City market where you put the wage slaves and the computer key punchers. Susceptible to the same definitional problem of what means “middle” as Class A is to “top.”
CLASS C SPACE: The pits.
CLUSTER: An attempt to encourage open space in a development—without altering the development’s overall density, and hence economics—by allowing or insisting on a dramatic increase in the amount of building on that land which is disturbed.
COMANCHES COMING OVER THE BRAZOS: A Texas formulation of the ultimate Situation. The Comanches were the most savage, brutal, and feared Indians on the Texas frontier. The Brazos River flows just to the west of both Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston. In use: “That Situation was no biggie. It wasn’t the Comanches Coming Over the Brazos.” Federal regulators shutting down a developer’s proprietary S & L, however, is a prime example of the Comanches Coming Over the Brazos. See also Five Thousand Mexicans Knocking On the Door of the Alamo.
COMMERCIAL: Office space. As opposed to Residential and Retail. This is the usage in an urban, Edge City context. In markets with little office space, such as the traditional suburb, Commercial sometimes is used to lump office and shopping space together, as in a strip shopping center. In Edge City, Commercial is used to mean office space.
COMMUNITY: What every new residential development is described as being. E.g., a “master-planned, low-maintenance, Campuslike Community.” In this usage, it is irrelevant whether anybody in this Community knows or cares about anybody else in it. See Neighborhood.
CORPORATE CAMPUS: A bucolic setting on which are located the office buildings of a number of different corporations. A Corporate Campus location is equivalent to, in residential terms, a “farmette”—more land than is logical to mow but not enough to plow.
CORPORATE ESTATE: A vast sylvan location for a single corporate headquarters. The possible number of Corporate Estates in any Edge City is thought to be identical with the number of available hilltops. The ultimate Corporate Estate is the Two Wind-Sock Model. Two wind socks indicate that the Estate is so large that helicopter pilots fear the weather on one side of headquarters is significantly different from the weather on the other side.
CORPORATE OFFICE PARK: The equivalent of a subdivision.
COVERAGE: The built environment that replaces all life forms susceptible to being removed by a bulldozer. In use: “When you mix it up at .25 gross, look at the coverage you got. The trees and things. That’s very low-density office.”
CRAMDOWN, A: The bankers’ nightmare in which, in a devastated market where property values have dropped below the amount of the mortgage, a bankruptcy court takes pity on the owner and orders that his obligation to the bank be reduced from the original amount borrowed to one that can be covered by the sale of the property. The derivation obviously is based on the relationship of the practice to the bankers’ throats.
DEAL, THE: The fundamental Edge City conceptual unit.
DELICATE DETAIL: An expensive architectural flourish meant to distinguish a development from its competition. The structural element that skateboarders invariably discover makes a great ramp.
DIRT LOAN: That which a developer gets to acquire land. As distinct from the construction loan, which allows him to build, or the permanent loan, which secures the property once it is completed.
DOWNZONE: The battle cry of a population sick of growth and its negative attributes. Downzoning is that method by which the amount of development in an area is reduced, by decreasing the legally allowable density. By spreading development farther apart, Downzoning often has ironic effects—such as increasing the need for automobiles, hence creating traffic congestion, which decreases the Quality of Life that Downzoning was originally meant to advance. But for the purposes of the groups advocating this remedy, that is generally beside the point. Since there are few other effective legal methods currently available to fight growth, they go with what they’ve got. And Downzoning does increase developers’ costs—thereby having a genuine effect on growth.
DU, A: A home. Short for Dwelling Unit. Pronounced dee-you, but written “du,” like a French preposition. Not to be confused with a “dua,” which is the fundamental measure of residential density: Dwelling Units per Acre. A standard subdivision of quarter-acre lots, for example, would by its arithmetic have a dua of 4. A town-house development may have a dua of 7 to 10. In the midst of an Edge City, dua’s as high as 30 or more may be encouraged. That is because the land is so ex pensive that such densities are the only ones economically feasible. But also, a large residential component in the midst of an Edge City is thought to increase the possibility of a true sense of community and urbanity being formed.
DUMB GARAGE: And you thought there was no other kind. A Dumb Garage is one that makes no effort to inform the driver where and whether there are any empty parking spaces. As opposed to an Intelligent Garage, which does. A Passive Intelligent Garage is one designed to allow the eye easily and quickly to sweep all parking spaces and rapidly collect information about their availability. An Active Intelligent Garage achieves the same end through electronics; e.g., a sign that reads “500 Spaces on Level 4.”
EPAULETS: Horizontal stripes of a contrasting color at the corner, or “shoulder” of a building.
EYEBROWS: Same as Epaulets, only higher.
EXECUTIVE HOUSING: Housing of a high enough quality that a corporation’s top officials would consider it desirable. Proximity of it is thought to be essential to the growth of an Edge City, inasmuch as fancy executives will not put up with long commutes. In context, it does not simply mean an expensive house. It means an expensive house with easy access to clubs, health facilities, shopping, excellent schools, and, frequently, horses.
FAR: Short for Floor-to-Area Ratio. Pronounced eff-eh-are. The fundamental unit of density, from which all calculations spring—parking, hence profitability, hence human behavior, hence civilization. It is the ratio of the amount of building to the amount of land. If you’ve got 100,000 square feet of office space on 100,000 square feet of land, you’ve got an FAR of 1.0—a one-to-one relationship. Interestingly, from the point of view of predicting how functional an Edge City will be, particularly in terms of transportation, it does
not make much difference whether this 100,000 square feet of office space is configured as a ten-story building, each story ten thousand square feet, surrounded by ninety thousand feet of open land; or a two-story building, each story fifty thousand square feet, surrounded by fifty thousand square feet of open space, or a one-story building utterly covering the available land. The amount of building is still 100,000 square feet, the FAR is still 1.0, and that ratio works magically to predict automotive use and traffic crunch, without regard to what the Edge City looks like.
FAST COMMUTE: One that is painless. Of California origin, the idea is that the absolute amount of time or distance involved in a commute is not as important as the level of stress it invokes. Thus, a Fast Commute of twenty miles, on an unclogged freeway, during which a person’s mind can freely wander, can be thought of as preferable to a Slow Commute of half that distance or time, if the Slow Commute involves teeth-grinding exposure to stop-and-go traffic.
FIVE THOUSAND MEXICANS KNOCKING ON THE DOOR OF THE ALAMO: A Texas definition of the ultimate Situation. In use: “That was no big deal. That wasn’t Five Thousand Mexicans Knocking on the Door of the Alamo.” See also Comanches Coming Over the Brazos.
FLOORPLATE: The shape and size of any given floor of a building. The floorplate that touches the ground is called the footprint, after the shape it leaves on the land. An ideal Floorplate size in an Edge City is thought to be roughly half a football field—on the order of twenty thousand square feet—for reasons enumerated in Chapter 13, “The Laws.”
FRICTION FACTOR: The path of most resistance. The notion is that the degree of difficulty of getting from one place to another, by whatever means, can be calculated and used to predict the paths people will take. One grocery store may be twice as far as another from a consumer. But if the path to the far store has minimum friction, and the path to the near store involves hassles, the store with the longer but easier path may be the one picked. In a downtown setting, getting a car out of an underground garage has a high enough friction factor that people are inclined to walk moderate distances. In Edge City, however, the Friction Factor in walking from one place to another may be so high that people will choose to drive trivial distances. The significance is that friction can be both good and bad. When a high friction factor discourages long-distance travel, it can contribute to the rise of civilization in Edge City by forcing goods and services to be provided locally. And to the extent that it makes a downtown difficult to get to, or move around in, it can lead to the center’s decline. See also Fast Commute. See also chapter Thirteen, “The Laws,” regarding foot traffic.
GOLDEN TRIANGLE, THE: A place claimed to be especially development-worthy because of its location at the confluence of three roads. At extreme levels, reference is made to the Platinum Triangle. See also One Hundred Percent Location.
GOOD DIRT: An investment-worthy location. In use: “Even at $115 a foot, that’s good dirt.”
GREAT BIG OAK TREES RIGHT UP AGAINST THE WINDOWS: Currently the most ambitious and fashionable stunt in the repertoire of the developers of Class A Office Space, it is the creation of Softscape by the locating of extremely large buildings right in the middle of a forest, without disturbing the trees. No small trick. It involves cutting the hole for the foundation without knocking over the surrounding tall vegetation, stabilizing the hole until the roots heal, and then building the building, again without knocking over the trees. This frequently involves great big equipment to lift everything in that building up and over the six- or seven-story height of the vegetation. But the biggest hassle is the endless threats required to convince the cracker equipment operators—who view trees as weeds—not to “accidentally” knock over a beech with their backswing. Great Big Oak Trees Right Up Against the Windows is the successor stunt to the hitherto most fashionable similar effort, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon Parking Garage.
GROUND COVER: An automobile dealership, or a ministorage facility, or any other easily bulldozed land-intensive use in Edge City that provides an income stream and keeps the whole place from blowing away while its owners figure out what they want to do with the land, really.
HANGING GARDENS OF BABYLON PARKING GARAGE: This is Structured Parking, the Hardscape ugliness of which has been struggled with, through the planting of Softscape hanging vines cascading over every edge, in an attempt to make it look like a terraced garden. When built-in irrigation is included all the way around each level, inside the planters, it is thought to be a prime component of Class A Office Space, particularly in quasi-tropical environments epitomized by the Perimeter Center-Georgia 400 Edge City north of downtown Atlanta. Similar efforts are being made on the outside of the actual office buildings, and inside their atria. The ultimate Class A Hanging Gardens Parking Garage is one in which the entire top deck is also covered with dirt and then planted and even decorated with fountains and sculpture, so that denizens of high office suites looking down have a view of gardens, not of parked cars.
HARDSCAPE: A landscape consisting of man-made building materials such as asphalt, precast concrete, and the like, that developers feel customers perceive as forbidding. Hardscape especially refers to objects that are machinelike or machine-made. See Softscape.
HEADACHE BARS: The horizontal pipes over the entrance to parking garages meant to prevent large vehicles from entering.
IDENTITY POINTS: Landmarks. Since knowing where an Edge City begins or ends is problematic, planners and developers encourage Identity Points to announce that you have indeed entered the grounds of your destination.
I’M NOT GOING TO BE NAMED IN A PATERNITY SUIT: Explanation of mall operator as to why his guards break up teenagers who dare use the benches in the atrium to neck.
IMPACT FEE: The increasingly popular method by which governments assign to developers the social costs brought about by their building. The developers are made to pay for some of the new roads, sewers, water taps, and the like that have traditionally been provided by the taxpayers, but that would not be required were it not for the development. This has a fairness benefit in that it does not assign to existing residents the costs of providing new services to future residents. But to the extent that growth is less subsidized, it drives up the cost, which contributes to issues of affordability. See Proffers.
KIT OF PARTS: A limited number of design elements repeated endlessly throughout a development in the hope that such recapitulation will give the project an identity.
LAND BAY: The Edge City equivalent of a city block. It is that portion of a commercial development on which nothing has yet been built, but that has been surrounded by major secondary roads, and thus marked off as one unit. The curious word here is “bay.” Possible etymologies: this is the land equivalent of a bay of water, waiting for its ship to come in. Or perhaps it is the equivalent of a loading bay, waiting for something to be dumped.
LANDSCAPE UPGRADE: Bushes. Especially when offered as an option at additional cost in a development that otherwise would not have any.
LEARNING EXPERIENCE: A screw-up of such monumental proportions that its memory has been seared into the brains of the participants for life. In use: “Oh yeah, owning that sucker was a real learning experience.”
LEECHES: Journalists, politicians, attorneys, regulators, government planners, environmental lobbyists, bureaucrats, and the perpetrators of all other sniveling, caviling occupations seen as producing nothing of value, at great expense to those who do, i.e., the developers, who coined the word.
LULU: Locally Unacceptable Land Use. E.g., nuclear waste dump, AIDS hospice. Any societally important facility for which it is impossible to find a location because of the massive resistance by property holders near its proposed location. In some areas, even a day-care center is viewed as a LULU. See also NIMBY.
LUMINAIRES: Lights. Especially those thought to be complementary to, and see also, Signage.
MASTER PLANNING: In theory, that enterprise which all design professionals and a great number of citizens believe an Edge Ci
ty never has enough of. In practice, that attribute of a development in which so many rigid controls are put in place, to defeat every imaginable future problem, that any possibility of life, spontaneity, or flexible response to unanticipated events is eliminated.
MEMORY POINT: An element of a development meant to be regarded as so spectacular as to stick in the client’s mind long after he or she has gotten home that night. Lavish use of real gold in the bathroom, for example. Or marble. See Ooh-Ahs.
MOON, TO: To situate a building so that its back side is presented to another building in a distasteful fashion.
NEGATIVE ABSORPTION: That dreaded condition in which more people are moving out of Edge City’s offices than are moving in. Not only is the overall market not filling up (new space is not being “absorbed”), but the market is actually shrinking. Especially when additional new space is completed and added to the market at the same time, this is the Situation immediately prior to, and see also, Restructurings and Workouts.
NEIGHBORHOOD: Any collection of hitherto unacquainted individuals with physically proximate homes who find themselves suddenly united in vigorous opposition to unpalatable change, especially a rezoning, development, or highway. See also NIMBY, LULU, and Community.
NIMBY: Not In My Back Yard. Same as, and see also, LULU.
NONCOMPETING LOW-DENSITY USE: A church. As seen, positively, by the owner of an adjacent mall.
NONEXEMPT, A: A working-class person. Specifically, someone who is not exempt from laws requiring overtime pay for overtime work. In use: “You don’t want a mix of shops in your mall so high that the Nonexempts won’t come.” One class up from, and see also, the Transfer-Payment Population.
NORC: Short for Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities. Golden-age ghettos. Neighborhoods that spontaneously attract unusually large numbers of the elderly.
OFFICE, TO: The verb form used to describe where a person spends his productive hours. In use: “Where is he officing now?” “He offices over by the Galleria.” Parallel in all uses to the verbs “to live” and “to work.”