Review by Ed Quillen
Small towns – January 1997 – Colorado Central Magazine
Home from Nowhere – Remaking our Everyday World for the 21st Century
by James Howard Kunstler
Published in 1996 by Simon & Schuster
ISBN 0-684-81196-0
If this book mentions Colorado, let alone our region, I missed it; the examples all come from urban development along the Eastern Seaboard from New England to Florida.
But since the great machine of generic American development cuts a continental swath, and because I fear that Salida will succumb, I found this book more than informative.
For one thing, it’s refreshing to read a true conservative — that is, someone who values and defends traditional arrangements. Most “conservatives” these days don’t want to “conserve” anything; they’re corporate shills touting the alleged virtues of whatever form of progress they can profit by imposing.
For another, after the controversies over the proposed Salida Master Plan last summer, when critics were accused by the mayor of harboring “some agendas out there that perhaps aren’t entirely community-oriented,” it’s a pleasure to read this advice from a respectable, community-oriented authority:
If you want to make your communities better, begin at once by throwing out your zoning laws. Get rid of them. Throw them away. Don’t revise them. Set them on fire if possible and make a public ceremony of it — public ceremony is a great way to announce the birth of a new consensus. While you’re at it, throw out your “master plans” too. They’re invariably just as bad. Replace these things with a new traditional town-planning ordinance, which prescribes a more desirable everyday environment.
Modern zoning, Kunstler argues, came from an understandable desire to cope with industry — that is, who wants to live next door to a smelter or tannery?
But it evolved to segregate uses that had abided together harmoniously. Modern zoning says that residences must be kept separate from commerce, so no more apartments over stores downtown, and everybody has to drive to work or shop. They have to drive a long way on account of the required big lots and setbacks.
The school, the library, churches, and other community institutions get shoved into their own zones, again making the car a necessity.
Retailers are required to furnish acres of parking, thus the big-box Wal-Marts so remote from the street that they need big gaudy signs to announce their presence.
No apartments over stores, and no mother-in-law rentals along the alleys, so none of the traditional sources of affordable housing is allowed to thrive.
That, in essence, is what’s wrong with zoning. Left to themselves, people build mixed-use areas and enjoy them. When the planners get their hands on a town, they start promoting idiocy like two-acre lots as “preservation of open space.”
Unlike some urban idealists, Kunstler is not an anti-auto fanatic. He recognizes the car is here to stay, but it can be kept from dominating. Keep the streets narrow, maintain a grid lay-out, and allow parallel parking. People won’t be able to drive too fast with the relatively sharp corners, and those entering and leaving parking spaces will further slow traffic.
Maintain wide tree-lined sidewalks, and people will still be able to drive if they must, but many will prefer to walk to convenient stores, schools, parks, churches, etc.
A simple plan, and one that the older parts of Salida still follow. Over the years, Salida did a lot of things right, perhaps because it was too poor to do much at all when the rest of America was getting overhauled after World War II:
Main Street USA is America’s obsolete model for development — we stopped assembling towns this way after 1945. The patter of Main Street is pretty simple: mixed use, mixed income, apartments and offices over the stores, moderate density, scaled to pedestrians, vehicles permitted but not allowed to dominate, buildings detailed with care, and built to last (though we still trashed it). Altogether it was a pretty good development pattern. It produced places people loved deeply. That is the reason Main Street persists in our cultural memory…. Physical remnants of the pattern still stand in parts of the country for people to see, though the majority of Americans have moved into the new model habitat called Suburban Sprawl.
For all its apparent success, Suburban Sprawl sorely lacks many things that make life worth living…. Americans attempt to cure their homesickness with costly visits to Disney World.
Salida still has a main street, and Salidans have somehow maintained it as a vital place, despite the growth of the highway strip. Salida still operates institutions that people can walk to — one reason, I think, that proposals for a middle school inevitably fail at the ballot box. The school district insists on building a school on a relatively isolated tract (in accordance with post-WWII zoning theory) where kids couldn’t walk to it.
Many of Kunstler’s arguments have been taken into an urban design philosophy called “the New Urbanism,” and it sounds terribly trendy.
But it’s nothing more than building towns the way they were built until 50 years ago, and he points out the terrible irony that those who advocate this traditional approach are labeled “liberals,” while those who rip out urban cores, build expensive freeways, erect franchise strips, and destroy landscape for scattered suburbs can somehow claim they are “conservatives.” Just what are they conserving?
The things so many of us cherish about Salida are worth saving. Zoning and master plans, like those proposed last summer, would destroy what remains of an urban design that has functioned for more than a century. Kunstler makes that case clearly and well, although I would have liked a chapter about the economic and political forces that imposed an expensive and sprawling new order on the American landscape.
Home from Nowhere should be required reading for everyone concerned with town planning, and it even looks into the countryside for ways to sustain agricultural open space outside of town.
If you don’t have time to read the book, at least find the September edition of Atlantic Monthly, which has a condensation, along with a wonderful two-page illustration of a charming town, similar to Salida, and a long list of its violations of modern zoning principles.
Saving a functional and convenient town in the face of money and mainstream American devastation will not be an easy task — but Kunstler’s work provides some useful and potent ammunition in what promises to be a long and exhausting struggle against the forces of blight removal.
— Ed Quillen