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parts of America. In some parts of California,
for example, the average cost of a new home is
$500 000 (!) and only 27 percent of Californians
can afford a median-priced home (O’Connell and
Johnson: p. 32).
Studies of housing affordability across the USA
have shown how market-rate housing stimulates
commercial and service sector employment as retail,
offices and other urban services follow rooftops, and
these new commercial enterprises offer jobs which, in
part, are filled by workers from low and moderate
income households. In other words, the wealthier
middle classes need working-class people to service
their needs. Ensuring adequate workforce housing in
the right place – to avoid long trips between home
and workplace – requires special effort, and close
cooperation between communities and specialized
developers. It’s one of our bedrock principles that a
complete community encompasses a variety of
household types at various levels of income. Planning
new development to include such less expensive
housing from the outset will enhance the ability of
public and non-profit agencies to provide such hous-
ing at an orderly and necessary pace, and decent
affordable housing can enhance the livability and
profitability of market-rate housing in the commu-
nity (see Figure 6.35). We recommend that between
10 and 15 percent of all new housing in neighbor-
hoods should be affordable under the criteria of
the US Department of Housing and Urban
Development, that is, it’s accessible to people earning
80 percent of the national median income. As incen-
tives to developers to construct this housing, we fur-
ther recommend that the ‘affordable’ units not be
counted in the density calculations for the project,
DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES
148
Figure 6.35
Affordable housing, Davidson,
NC, John Burgess, architect, 2000. All
affordable housing should utilize the same
architectural styles and attention to detail as
typical market-rate housing in the same
neighborhood.
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effectively providing the developer with a substantial
density bonus.
In the USA there is often pressure from existing
communities to lower densities and include a greater
proportion of larger lot single-family homes, on the
mistaken belief that higher densities bring crime and
other problems. However, if one accedes to this pres-
sure, the critical advantage of having enough people
in a walkable area to support local services like small
businesses and public transit is lost, and social equity
is sacrificed on the altar of prejudice. Pursuing lower
densities at the expense of community services and
diversity of housing opportunities quickly ends up
with developments that are simply another version
of sprawl. No structural environmental or socio-
economic problems are solved. One of the advantages
of the charrette process is that several of these doubts
and fears about density can be quelled by illustrating
the design detail of such new developments.
Developments larger than 125 acres (50 hectares)
should be divided into separate, walkable neighbor-
hoods interconnected by a street network that bal-
ances the needs of the automobile, the transit rider,
the bicyclist and the pedestrian. This connectivity is
essential for improved access, and neighborhoods
should eventually form contiguous development
rather than separated pods. In this way facilities can
be more easily shared, spreading value among adja-
cent neighborhoods, reducing traffic on arterial
roads, and lessening the pressure for continual widen-
ing. As these neighborhoods cohere, they create the
new structure of towns and villages (see Figure 6.36).
Natural landscapes should also be extended through
adjacent developments, creating linear habitats for
wildlife, and protecting scenic features and views for
the benefit of many people.
To this end, each neighborhood should contain a
minimum of 10 percent open space and possibly as
much as 50 percent if circumstances permit. This
latter figure is particularly appropriate in areas of
landscape beauty or environmental sensitivity, where
open land can be permanently preserved by means of
conservation easements (with potential tax advan-
tages) or dedicated public open space as shown in
Figure 2.16. Some additional details about neighbor-
hood design are included in the first case study
illustrated in Chapter 7.
Mixed-Use Centers
Mixed-Use Centers are areas of concentrated activity
involving multiple uses – living, working, learning,
playing, eating, shopping and so on. – designed to
accommodate pedestrians and transit use in addition
to auto travel. Centers can be of several different
scales from high urban in the central city to rural in
outlying areas, but the three most usual scales outside
the urban core are: urban village center, neighborhood
center and rural village center. (It seems nearly every
development type has to have the term ‘village’
appended to it in the early years of the twenty-first
century. In America the word is often used to attach a
romantic gloss to urban development and to amelio-
rate consumer concerns about the density and urban-
ity of high-intensity mixed-use development. There
are few precedents for using the more European term
of ‘quarter.’ ‘Urban village’ is something of an oxy-
moron, but it’s become the accepted term in develop-
ment parlance, so we’ll accept it and move on!)
Urban Village Centers
Urban Village Centers are
mixed-use activity centers scaled to serve a trade area
with a radius between five to fifteen miles. This
area comprises 50–75 residential neighborhoods, or
40 000–60 000 homes using a slightly lower average
density figure of 800 homes per neighborhood for
conventional suburbia rather than the figure of 
1000 for New Urbanist traditional neighborhoods.
CHAPTER SIX
●
URBAN DESIGN IN THE REAL WORLD