Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  ONE HUNDRED PERCENT LOCATION: A prime site; a locale thought to have all the desirable attributes for development, from image to accessibility, and none of the negatives. In practice, a phrase used to describe the geography of all development schemes for which financing is still up in the air.

  ON-GRADE PARKING: Your basic, flat, parking lot. As opposed to, and see also, Structured Parking.

  ON-TIME-AND-UNDER-BUDGET: Utterly devoid of imagination. A slur used by architects. In use: “Oh yeah, him, yeah, he’s just full of On-Time-and-Under-Budget.”

  OOH-AH: An unusual Amenity inserted into a development specifically to elicit an animated reaction from a client. No Tract Mansion is thought to be salable for over $800,000, for example, unless it includes a bidet as an Ooh-Ah. This, although bidets serve in America as nothing but cat waterers. Commercial Ooh-Ahs include built-in hair dryers in the men’s rooms.

  OVERHANG: The developer’s equivalent of a hangover. After a binge of building in which vastly more space is erected than the market can “absorb,” the “inventory” left over, vacant, is referred to as the Overhang. It is that which must be worked off before another binge can be contemplated.

  PARATRANSIT: Supplemental forms of transportation, especially those small in scale. While sometimes as prosaic as vans, they also can be as much a form of entertainment as a method of mass transit. E.g., San Francisco’s cable cars, and the Disney-style railroads that move people through the Atlanta and Tampa airports. Also, People-movers. Also, Horizontal Elevators.

  PASSIVE LEISURE ENVIRONMENT: A park. Although, more generally, any quasi-public place to sit down and rest, including such a place indoors. See also Unstructured Open-space Environment.

  PASSIVE WATER FEATURE: Any man-made body of still water in which you are not supposed to swim. E.g., a reflecting pool.

  PAVEMENT DEFICIENCY: A pothole.

  PEDESTRIAN WALKWAY: A sidewalk.

  PLOP ART: Abstract sculptures placed about a development for reasons that are an utter mystery. See also Quality Statement.

  PRODUCT: Everything in a development that was put there by the hand of man. Whether it be a parking lot, a curbing, a planting of flowers, or a high-rise, somebody views it as Product, and can go into astounding detail about whether it is good or bad, cheap or expensive.

  PROFFERS: The system of legalized extortion by which governments convince developers “voluntarily” to build such socially desirable facilities as ball fields, day-care centers, schools, and intersections, in exchange for the governmental unit being kind enough to give the developer permission to build at higher density than usual or, sometimes, to give him approval to build at all. Proffers can be in addition to, or instead of, and see also, Impact Fees.

  PRO FORMA: The document meant to demonstrate the financial logic of a development. It is a target, a yardstick, a budget, a bible, a profound hope, and frequently a lie. It is supposed to reveal all a developer’s underlying assumptions—his costs, for example, and what he thinks he will be able to get in rents. It is the financial analysis developers take to investors and the bank to justify being given money. No matter how carefully and honestly a Pro Forma is drawn up, reality will rarely match it. Hence the chilling question: “Are you achieving the rents in your Pro Forma?”

  PROGRAMMED SPACE: A place where a spontaneous expression of Community is thought to be so unlikely that a consultant has to be paid to hire a street musician to play. Similarly, a place where people have to be paid to march in a Fourth of July parade. Psychologically similar to, and see also, Animated Space.

  PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP: A method by which developers and governments engage in a cooperative rather than confrontational exercise in getting a development built in a fashion that mollifies the neighbors. This is seen by its advocates as the height of developer enlightenment, a Zen in which the builder works “with” the Community, recognizing that he does not really “own” the land he is paying the bank for. It is seen by its detractors as either communist horse pucky or the system by which foxes and chickens are brought together to achieve common goals.

  QUALITY OF LIFE: That attribute which a development is said to be sensitive to when attention is being drawn to intangibles that do not directly contribute to the bottom line. See Amenities.

  QUALITY STATEMENT: Very large, heavy, expensive, neutral sculpture. Ideally, brushed steel or aluminum. Totally plain geometry a plus. Moving parts, and/or integration into an Active Water Feature, daring. Located at the entrance of an office park or complex, a Quality Statement is supposed to suggest absolutely nothing to the viewer except somewhat understated wealth, to which, it is hoped, a customer’s aspirations will be stimulated sufficient unto the rental of office space. Also used to induce government officials to grant higher zoning than otherwise probable. See also Beauty Contest and Plop Art.

  RESTRUCTURING, A: The system by which the terms of a loan are renegotiated to decrease the immediate cost to the developer rather than have the loan go into default. The developer’s art of sensing when a lender can’t afford to let him go under. What a developer does in a down market while he’s got a lot of time on his hands since nothing is selling. A particularly vigor ous version of Restructuring is known as, and see also, a Workout.

  RETROFIT: To gut beyond recognition, or bulldoze. That which is done to an Edge City building when, in as short a time as, say, twelve years after original construction, it is viewed as obsolete either because the decor has aged hideously or the mechanical systems—air conditioning or telecommunications—are seen as massively inefficient relative to new technologies. In use: “You want to lease it up, you’re gonna hafta Retrofit the hell out of that sucker.”

  SIGNAGE: Signs. Especially those which are products of the expenditure of vastly more money on design review than would seem plausible, given the appearance and function of the result, which is to announce “No Left Turn” and the like. Etymology: The guardians of urban esthetics have for decades decried the proliferation of shopping center beacons that makes each nonlimited-access highway resemble the Las Vegas Strip. Thus, developers of large tracks of land who aspire to the label “megadeveloper” indicate their seriousness of purpose, attention to detail, and desire for social acceptance by hiring designers to create signs of a style that are not merely informative, but are distinct to the development. Hence, Signage—probably a contraction of “signs” and “signature.” Note: Signage, being an expression of high taste, never radiates light from within, in the fashion of a Gulf or Holiday Inn sign. Its highest expression was once thought to be in the form of sand-blasted, hence three-dimensional, wood. But etched glass and engraved stone have begun to make a strong showing. See Kit of Parts.

  SITUATION: A problem of unimaginable, much less soluble, proportions. (The worst thing a boss can hear from an underling: “I wonder if I could have a minute to talk to you about a Situation.”) Etymology: In a macho business environment, it is utterly unacceptable to say one has a “problem.” That implies negative thinking, which at best equals high wussieness, and at worst raises serious questions about one’s ability to function competitively. At the very least, it indicates an individual who is pathetically behind in reading the latest best-selling motivational literature. Calling a problem a Situation, by contrast, allows for the possibility that enough analysis may reveal a germ of opportunity.

  SOFT COSTS: The fees charged to obtain the services of architects, government registrars, and the like. The costs of whatever goes into a building that does not represent a tangible object such as a brick. The location where developers have the highest danger of losing their shirts.

  SOFTSCAPE: Plants. Trees. The work of nature, as opposed to the work of man. See Hardscape.

  STICKS AND BRICKS: The materials with which Residential is usually built, as opposed to the steel and concrete of Commercial. Also, Stick-Built.

  STREET FURNITURE: Everything exposed to the weather put there by the hand of man, not counting roads, buildings, and plants. This
“everything else” is far more considerable than most people recognize, because it is usually so plain or so ugly—and thus ignored as a feature of the landscape—as to render it virtually invisible. It includes newspaper vending boxes, stoplights, no-parking signs, and those circular iron grills sometimes put around the bases of trees when they are embedded in a sidewalk. Not to mention, of course, furniture. Like benches.

  STREETSCAPE: A road on which sufficient design review has been expended such that the Street Furniture, Signage, and Luminaires all match and/or are festooned with flags.

  STRUCTURED PARKING: An aboveground, multilevel parking garage. Considerably more expensive to build than, and see also, On-Grade Parking. It is economically feasible only if the land under it is very expensive, and thus must be conserved.

  SUPERCOMMUTER: A person whose round trip to work exceeds a hundred miles each day.

  TRACT MANSION: The ultimate subdivision house. A residence of extraordinary size (four thousand square feet and up) and expense (approaching a million dollars or more) built amid homes that are very similar, if not identical. Tract Mansions are distinct from estates in that they are located on relatively tiny plots of land, sometimes as little as a sixth of an acre.

  TRANSFER-PAYMENT POPULATION THE: Poor people. Especially those who live in ghettos surrounding the old downtowns. The class below, and see also, Nonexempts.

  TREE SHIT: Such byproducts of the life cycle of trees as fall to the ground. E.g., leaves, fruit, seed pods, bird excrement. The cleaning up of such detritus is seen as the primary argument, other than cost, for not putting trees in parking lots. In use: If a mulberry tree were to leave a purple stain on a Mercedes, or a roosting jay to leave a white stain on a 300 ZX, the complaint would be “The trees are shitting all over my clients’ cars.”

  UNSTRUCTURED OPEN-SPACE ENVIRONMENTS: Parks. See also Passive Leisure Environments.

  VALUE ENGINEERING: The process of designing structures so that they can be built as cheaply as possible, usually by systematically eliminating such frivolities as esthetics.

  WORKOUT: Financial aerobics. A developer’s last stand before bankruptcy. If a developer cannot repay a loan in the midst of a recession, he may try to construct a Workout with the bank in which the bank does not foreclose but allows him to retain ownership for several more years while paying almost nothing on the loan, on the theory that the arrangement will be more lucrative for all sides than either forcing a bankruptcy that will eat up millions in attorneys’ fees, or forcing a sale of assets at the bottom of a market.

  13

  THE LAWS

  How We Live

  THE NORTH STAR of moral certitudes, or at least prayerful assumptions, for developers is that human nature, and hence the marketplace, is rational. Hence, predictable.

  Therefore, they believe, all they have to do is figure out what the rules of human behavior are, and they will be rewarded greatly.

  There are two things they find most perplexing:

  • Government bureaucrats and planners. These people, developers believe—to the extent that they are not familiar with the market principles that yield these Laws—have self-evidently preposterous ideas about how human nature works in the real world.

  • Human nature itself. Which, developers acknowledge, has an unsettling habit of appearing rational only in hindsight.

  As E. Wayne Angle of Homart Corporation ruefully put it, “The market has laws, although they do not grind as fine as the laws of physics.”

  The following are some of what developers believe to be the Laws. Note how many of them boil down to one of two tyrannies: (1) time; or (2) because that’s the only way anybody could figure out to park the cars.

  Note also how many of the Laws are formulaic. They are rules of thumb about human behavior expressed as equations. They have been found to produce reliable results under circumstances that are disparate or that sometimes seem to be utterly alien. In other words, they reveal an underlying order in what appears to the uninitiated to be chaos.

  In fact, while some developers may bring unusual insights or instincts to their work, as a breed they usually have only the one skill not typically found in other people, that of doing high-order mental arithmetic while talking about a completely different subject. Sources are in the Notes.

  THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: No matter what your plan is, the result will always be a surprise.

  THE FARTHEST DISTANCE AN AMERICAN WILL WILLINGLY WALK BEFORE GETTING INTO A CAR: Six hundred feet. The length of two football fields.

  FIRST COROLLARY TO THE SIX-HUNDRED-FOOT LAW: In a mall, thou shalt never let a shopper see how far it is to the next anchor store. Thou shalt break her line of sight. If you make her aware of how much walking she is really doing inside a mall, she will leave the building and take her car to the far end rather than walk. And once you’ve let her out of the building and into her car, there is a significant chance that she will say forget the whole thing and go home.

  SECOND COROLLARY TO THE SIX-HUNDRED-FOOT LAW: The most remote parking space in Edge City is rarely more than three hundred feet from its building’s entrance.

  THIRD COROLLARY TO THE SIX-HUNDRED-FOOT LAW: In either a downtown or an Edge City, if you do everything you can to make casual use of the automobile inconvenient at the same time that you make walking pleasant and attractive, you maybe, just maybe, can up the distance an American will willingly walk to fifteen-hundred feet. A quarter of a mile. And this at the substantial risk of everybody saying forget it and choosing not to patronize your highly contrived environment at all. See also Friction Factor in chapter 12, “The Words.”

  WHYTE’S LAW OF THE NUMBER OF BLOCKS AN AMERICAN WILL WALK IN MOST DOWNTOWNS: Three, maybe four.

  THE NUMBER OF BLOCKS AN AMERICAN WILL WALK IN NEW YORK CITY: Five.

  THE SPEED AN AMERICAN MAN WILL WALK IN A BIG-CITY DOWNTOWN: A little under three hundred feet per minute.

  STROLLING SPEED PAST A SHOP WINDOW OR MERCHANDISE DISPLAY: Two hundred feet per minute.

  THE NUMBER OF PEDESTRIANS PER HOUR AT MIDDAY REQUIRED TO MAKE AN URBAN CENTER WORK AND BE LIVELY: One thousand.

  WHY ELECTED OFFICIALS FEEL THEY MUST ENCOURAGE COMMERCIAL DEVELOPMENT OR DIE: For every $1.00 of tax revenue that comes in from a residential subdivision, as much as $1.22 goes out to provide services, especially schools. By contrast, for every $1.00 of tax revenue that comes in from commercial development, at most thirty-two cents is required in expenditures, usually for roads. (By the same calculation, if you really want your jurisdiction to remain solvent, you could leave it as farmland. Agriculture requires almost no expenditures of public funds—a maximum of seven cents for every $1.00 it brings in.)

  THE TRACT MANSION HYPOTHESIS: There is some speculation that the one exception to the above law is homes over $350,000. Some calculations seem to demonstrate that they may bring in more in tax revenue than they consume.

  THE FIRST MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR STRUCTURE USUALLY BUILT IN EDGE CITY: A mall.

  HOW MANY CUSTOMERS MUST LIVE WITHIN A FIFTEEN-MINUTE DRIVE OF A MALL FOR IT TO BE SUCCESSFUL: A quarter of a million. Roughly the population of Las Vegas.

  HOW BIG A MALL MUST BE BEFORE ITS DEVELOPER IS VIEWED BY HIS PEERS AS HAVING HAIR ON HIS CHEST: One million square feet (twenty-five acres under roof) and/or three levels.

  WHY ONE-STORY MALLS ARE OBSOLETE IN POPULAR LOCATIONS: If the mall had enough shops to meet demand put upon it, it would be viewed by customers as too sprawling to walk. (Also, the land would be too expensive to build on at that low a density.)

  THE AMOUNT OF GROWTH IN AN ESTABLISHED EDGE CITY THAT IS GENERATED BY COMPANIES ALREADY LOCATED THERE: Eighty-five percent.

  HOW MANY STORIES UP OR DOWN AN AMERICAN WILL USE THE STAIRS: One. Frequently zero.

  FIRST COROLLARY TO THE ONE-STORY-CLIMB LAW: In a three-level mall, the main entrance should be at the second level, from which it will only be one story up or down to get to the other levels. Otherwise, people may never go to the farthest le
vel.

  SECOND COROLLARY TO THE ONE-STORY-CLIMB LAW: In a three-story town house, the garage entrance, and hence the kitchen, where one unloads the groceries from the car, should be at the second level, for the same reason as in the First Corollary.

  THIRD COROLLARY TO THE ONE-STORY-CLIMB LAW: In an office environment, even if a building is only two stories tall, it must have an elevator.

  FOURTH COROLLARY TO THE ONE-STORY-CLIMB LAW: Multiple-family housing—apartments and condominiums—that are three stories or taller must have an elevator.

  FIFTH COROLLARY TO THE ONE-STORY-CLIMB LAW: Since elevators and escalators demand rigid and heavy support structures, buildings that require them are more easily built of concrete and steel than Sticks and Bricks, thereby substantially increasing the cost, and increasing the likelihood that the structure will be viewed as Hardscape.

  SIXTH COROLLARY TO THE ONE-STORY-CLIMB LAW: The world moves, in residential construction, at three stories. Residential structures either have to be less than three stories above the main entrance, in order for you to build them without elevators, or they have to be high-rise. Once you start building a residential structure of concrete and steel to accommodate an elevator, your costs kick into so much higher an orbit that you have to build vastly more dwelling units per acre in order to make any money.

  HOW MUCH TOTAL SPACE IS REQUIRED TO MEET THE NEEDS OF AN OFFICE WORKER: Two hundred and fifty square feet. (Actually, this can vary from 175 to 350 square feet depending on market conditions. But the rule of thumb is four workers per thousand square feet.)

  HOW MUCH TOTAL SPACE IS REQUIRED TO PARK THE CAR OF THE OFFICE WORKER: Four hundred square feet.

  HOW MUCH SPACE A HUMAN TAKES UP, RELATIVE TO HOW MUCH SPACE HIS CAR TAKES UP: Five-eighths.

  THE RULE OF THUMB FOR CALCULATING HOW MUCH TRAFFIC EDGE CITY WILL PRODUCE: Ten million square feet of office and retail space equals forty thousand trips per day.