When New York Times architecture critic Witold Rybczynski first heard of New Daleville, it was a developer’s dream for 90 acres of cornfield 90 miles west of Philadelphia. Over the next five years, Rybczynski watched it progress through design, entitlement and construction phases.
Along the way, he learned something few critics ever come to understand. Developers may seem like the omnipotent forces behind the suburbanization of America, but they have little in common with that description.
The way Rybczynski describes them in his new book, “Last Harvest: How a Cornfield Became New Daleville” (Scribner, $27), they’re more like dreamers who gamble on a vision and then throw it open to town boards, politicians, neighbors and eventually buyers.
And although he focuses his attention on this small development, Rybczynski describes the process taking place as new housing communities are built throughout the U.S.
He’ll be in Denver on Monday to discuss the phenomenon, appearing at 7:30 p.m. at the Tattered Cover, 2526 E. Colfax Ave. In a phone interview last week, he shared some of the common threads.
ON SPRAWL
It is everything you don’t like. Your favorite country spot that suddenly changes, the field and farms that turn into houses. People don’t hate houses, unless they’re replacing a beautiful landscape. In most cases it’s just change we’re not happy with.
Everybody dislikes sprawl, but we don’t appreciate that it’s the result of people making decisions. When communities zone land for very big lots, that creates it. When a community stops a development, that creates it because the developer just leapfrogs. Developers trying to find land are being pushed farther and farther out.
We also need to look at what is causing sprawl in terms of our appetite for growth.
ON HOUSING PREFERENCES
People want to live in a house rather than in an apartment or a flat. It’s a widely held tradition that has colored the way development takes place. About 70 percent of us live in houses, and four out of five new housing units built in the U.S. are single-family houses.
In America there is a lot of space, so it has been easy to spread out. But the way a city grows is always a function of transportation.
When you depend on walking or riding a horse, you have to live within a certain radius of the city. With a train you can live out about 30 miles. When they were introduced in this country, it changed the face of the city.
Car ownership has done that even more so, and mass transit may be an effective alternative for some people. Even so, it would be very difficult to go back to streetcars. We’ve gotten used to having our own personal transit.
ON GROWTH
The U.S. is a big country, and attitudes vary. Some places are more skeptical of new growth than others. The South is much more open to it, even though it is growing quickly. The Northeast is negatively inclined, like California. Much of the middle of the country is still pro-growth.
The ideal would be to have some slow organic growth all the time, but that has been hard to achieve. Usually it goes from one extreme to the other. You’ve either got Detroit or Denver.
There are different ways of building communities. We’ve made it a business. That has been good for us in some ways. Homebuilders figure out what people want and how to deliver it in an affordable version, and they’ve solved the housing need.
Often the results are not particularly coordinated. Each development is a little island. One of the challenges is to connect them together to become something bigger.
ON NEW URBANISM
New urbanism was a revolution. Developers found a formula that made density attractive and acceptable. People would put up with density, smaller lots and gardens in exchange for the small-town atmosphere.
It’s all about residential density. Once you have it, you can afford mass transit and retail activities. That’s why New York functions the way it does. With density you have to weigh those desirable features versus the desire for houses and gardens.
Stapleton is part of that new urbanism. It was a radical lesson in learning how to market things. It may be taking awhile to develop the density, but development takes time.
ON DEVELOPERS
I spent five years writing the book, and I learned a lot from observing. People normally think that developers have a lot of power and can manipulate things, but I learned how little control they actually have.
The developer has to satisfy the consumer and also the community where the homebuyer is moving. He’s an intermediary, and at the end of the day, not all projects make it. The township has to give its approval. The homebuyers don’t have to move there.
We think that the developer is building just to make money, but really they’re also satisfying a need. People immigrate to a place or jobs have opened, and they need a home. In the classic case, a family has a new baby and needs more space. A few houses fall down or get burned each year and need to be replaced.
Linda Castrone is an assistant business editor. She can be reached at 303-954-1452 or lcastrone@denverpost.com.
IN TOWN
Witold Rybczynski, right, architecture critic for The New York Times and the author of “Last Harvest,” will be in Denver on Monday to discuss his book, appearing at 7:30 p.m. at the Tattered Cover, 2526 E. Colfax Ave.
