Developed Nation

LONDONDERRY, PENNSYLVANIA, a rural suburb about two hours outside Philadelphia, is several hundred miles and worlds apart from the Fort Greene neighborhood in Brooklyn. Yet many residents in both places share a common sentiment: They wish all the new development would just go away. In Fort Greene, planning is nearly complete for Atlantic Yards, a seven-square-block complex that will include an NBA stadium and high-rise condos and apartments. The sleepy district that includes Londonderry has been flooded with development proposals since the Wall Street Journal listed it as one of “America’s 20 Hottest White-Collar Addresses” in 1994. From these extremes in urbanization—the country’s largest city and a remote scattering of subdivisions among cornfields—come Witold Rybczynski’s Last Harvest and Kim Moody’s From Welfare State to Real Estate, two books that ask big, basic questions about how and why development pressures are transforming the places we live.

The story begins with the recent U.S. housing boom, which culminated in a record 1.28 million new home sales in 2005. Low interest rates encouraged many people to buy and sell homes, but equally compelling, a successful real estate investment paid off extraordinarily well. Because undeveloped land in Northeastern urban centers is scarce, developers and potential homebuyers moved to new frontiers, including the former industrial or working-class enclaves of major cities, and exurbs—sparsely settled areas of mostly farmland and forest with only tenuous links to major cities.

Most of the activity in the $50 billion-a-year homebuilding industry occurs in exurbs. Rybczynski, professor of urbanism and real estate at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School, surveys this explosive growth through the lens of New Daleville, a proposed subdivision of 125 single-family houses in Londonderry. Early in the book, a disgruntled developer sells the site where New Daleville will be built, wary of inevitable delays. One of the perverse facts of exurban development is that a builder might take only three months to construct a house, but to navigate the municipal permitting and planning process takes many years. In low-density areas like Londonderry, property tax revenue generated by new development does not cover the cost of municipal services such as schools and police. Existing residents resent the arrival of new neighbors, more traffic, and higher property taxes. As a result, exurban development often resembles a strange dance between unwilling partners. Legally required to allow development, municipalities resort to burying projects in red tape; local residents cry murder at community meetings; and builders churn out undistinguished, placeless subdivisions.

As a solution, Rybczynski advocates more New Urbanist proposals like the one for New Daleville: homes built on small lots, close together, with tree-lined sidewalks, ample open space, and other community facilities. At times, the book reads like a sleek advertisement for his likeminded friends, including Andrés Duany, a cofounder of the Congress for the New Urbanism, and Joe Duckworth, the developer of New Daleville. Rybczynski crafts a finely detailed narrative out of personal observation, brief sketches of urban history, and Thornton Wilder-like profiles of the stakeholders. He likens the County office to “a really big Circuit City,” and captures one national homebuilder’s take on his own fairly generic product: “Our business is like a hamburger stand. We make hamburgers and cheeseburgers. That’s it.” Rybczynski’s charm enriches an endlessly, tiresomely debated topic. Moreover, he remains remarkably even-handed, quietly questioning received wisdom about real estate development. 

Kim Moody also hones a specific vision of community and development in his book, and like the New Urbanists, who compose subdivisions from an image of village communities past, he writes with a touch of nostalgia. As a long-time labor activist and academic, Moody considers 1940 to 1960 New York’s golden age, a period characterized by powerful unions, beneficent city policies such as rent control, and affordable public healthcare and higher education systems. It ended circa 1975, when the one-two punch of an international recession and the depletion of tax revenues from job losses and white flight, worsened by years of over-borrowing, essentially bankrupted the city.
Enter Moody’s villains: the corporate executives and financial sector leaders who had long envisioned a city with very different priorities. He quotes one unnamed executive saying, “If we don’t take action now, we will see our own demise. We will evolve into another social democracy.” Moody argues that politicians and the city’s business elite used the 1975 fiscal crisis to cut public sector jobs and social services while lowering corporate taxes and encouraging new high-end development. These priorities remain relatively unchanged despite a succession of mayors, Moody writes, and developers have taken their cue. Today, more than a dozen mega-development projects are planned or underway, including proposals to remake the waterfronts of Brooklyn and Queens.

Moody’s conclusions hearken back to urban regime theory of the late 1980s, when political scientists and urban theorists posited that every major American city is in effect run by a group of corporate CEOs, politicians, institutional heads, and other elites all promoting a pro-business and development environment. New York is unique among U.S. cities, Moody argues, because of its greater extremes of wealth and poverty, and larger concentration of corporate headquarters and services. But in fact, many cities across the country have shifted from industrial-based to service- and tourist-based economies, with familiar consequences: job losses and lower wages disproportionately affecting the poor and poorly-educated. And in virtually every big American city, the mayor is a CEO-type manager whose primary purpose is to encourage development.

Previous books on New York’s development have more engagingly covered some of Moody’s material, from the planned shrinking of the city’s industrial base to 9/11’s impact on working-class New Yorkers. Moody too often bombards the reader with statistics to cement his points, for instance. In focusing on the big picture, his subjects—both the powerful individuals shaping New York and the working-class residents affected—seem too abstract.

Yet Moody’s analysis successfully links changes in the global economy to city and state policies and ultimately to local issues (such as the explosion of pricey condominium towers in Brooklyn’s industrial waterfront neighborhoods, or the protests at Atlantic Yards). Last Harvest almost completely lacks such a framework. In Rybczynski’s worldview, individual choice (e.g., the personal preference of homeowners) takes center stage. Only occasionally does Rybczynski acknowledge larger, offstage forces. The major homebuilders that dominate the suburban market, for instance, are publicly traded companies on Wall Street, which effectively limits the range of what can be built. And the local developers who are the book’s protagonists live in fear of an economic recession, which is another way of saying New Daleville’s fortunes are tied to New York and the global economy.

Rybczynski insists that the public amenities in New Urbanist developments are “small reminders to the people living there that they are not only private homeowners but also members of a community.” Maybe so. But Rybczynski’s vision of “community” seems too narrow, ignoring pressing social realities. As Rybczynski admits, New Daleville might be considered sprawl, given its auto-dependence, low-density, and lack of stores or businesses. The overwhelming majority of its residents, as in most exurbs, will be affluent, white young families and recent retirees. And in the four and a half years of construction spent on a handful of homes in New Daleville, Londonderry and nearby municipalities approved dozens of conventional subdivisions. For all its good intentions, Last Harvest—like New Daleville itself—remains isolated from the cities, region, and world around it. Perhaps Rybczynski has more to learn from the Congress for New Urbanism, which for many years has engaged political leaders and residents at a metropolitan scale to envision and coordinate growth across regions. This requires bringing cities and exurbs into one conversation, something that only state and federal policy—and books with a large enough social vision—can accomplish.