![]() That long pre-WWII era still offers important lessons for us today. We often forget that we have a rich tradition of city-making in North America, and before WWII we had walkable, thriving urban communities across the continent. ![]() I began to encourage my clients to look at regional precedents for how their cities and towns urbanized originally. After consulting with a few developers and communities struggling to have success with that approach, I began to question some of the premises. Back in those heady days of the 00’s, most everyone in the planning and development field was proposing mixed-use projects of at least three stories, and cities were gung-ho to require it to happen. It was about in that same window of time when I became interested in what is now often called the Lean Urbanism approach to development. Weren’t all of the really successful parts of the city also composed of parcels that were similar? What about other cities that I’d visited that were thriving with small parcel sizes? Getting Lean What does it really mean? It struck me as treating a piece of available land as if it’s a house without indoor plumbing, or a building that’s about to collapse. It’s been burned in my brain all these years. Still, I couldn’t help but think about that phrase “substandard,” for urban parcels. Status quo bias is very difficult to overcome. “That just won’t work in this corridor/neighborhood/city/market” etc etc. We had developer clients that were building homes and small mixed-use buildings on greenfield parcels of that size (so we knew what was possible) but those types of projects were often dismissed as irrelevant by planners and economic developers working in larger cities or inner-city locations. We thought this was more than a little bit crazy, but at that point in our careers and practice we didn’t always have a good way of articulating why, or how another model could be successful. The design and development professions still largely cling to this approach. Frankly, most planners and economic developers didn’t know of or trust a different model. Even in an urban location, the bias toward suburban-style solutions was still very strong, but when urban buildings were desired the thought process was still only a large, single master developer could accomplish transformation. ![]() What is typical? Often that means several acres of land in one parcel, so the site can be developed with the necessary large, singular building, sufficient parking, room for storm water improvements, landscaping and lighting. If any developer was ever to be serious about investing, he or she would need something more like what is typical with modern real estate development products. The notion baked into this was the original lots, many of which were 50 feet wide and around 100–150 feet deep (some narrower, some wider), were too small to attract modern, big-boy development. I had to read it a few times before it became clear the message was that any serious redevelopment would require purchase and combination of many lots into larger development parcels. One thing in particular struck me at the time: the economist’s report bemoaning the “substandard” lot sizes in the area.
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