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| Not the suburbs. Really. |
Ten years ago, when this blog and Cedar Rapids' post-flood rebuilding were both still young, I was surprised to see infill housing on 9th Avenue SE in a style more typical of suburban developments, with garages in front. My uncharacteristically short post--200 words!--caught the attention of Cedar Rapids Gazette reporter B.J. Morelli, and his piece caught the attention of the Linn County Republican Party, who responded with derision. If there's no such thing as bad publicity, I had hit the jackpot.
The argument against garage-front houses is partly aesthetic--windows are more pleasant to see than garage doors--but the strongest argument is functional. When houses greet the street with windows, they represent a human presence that is at once comforting, interesting, and sociable. David Sucher (City Comforts: How to Build an Urban Village [City Comforts Inc, 2016]) discusses the look of houses in his chapter on "Feeling Safe," alongside a picture of the Kentlands development in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
Place the entrance to a residence so that the visitor knows where to enter and neighbors can see what's going on.... "Eyes on the street" provide security. Thugs know this and, as you may notice, avoid breaking into homes while neighbors watch. But hide the door and you give them an opportunity for crime. It is the continual and casual surveillance of the street outside by the people inside that provides security. (2016: 129)
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| Same block. A garage in front might actually be preferable to this barricade |
Putting a wall in front of the house, even in the form of a garage door, emphasizes privacy over sociability, and removes the "eyes" and all other signs of human life from the street. Andres Duany and his coauthors (Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream [North Point, 10th anniversary edition, 2010], who I cited in the original piece, discusses garage-front houses as part of the typical suburban design.
Conventional suburbia fails to provide adequate street supervision, Most collector roads aren't fronted by buildings at all Houses tend to be located far from the street, sometimes behind walls. And, within typical subdivisions, houses often present little to the street but their wide garage doors. With such unsafe conditions, it is no surprise that so many suburban developers feel the need to surround their subdivisions with high walls and hire full-time security.... It is a vicious circle: the less safe streets feel, the fewer people walk, and the less safe they become. (2010: 74)
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| suburban street, Marion, Iowa |
Most of the Cedar Rapids metropolitan area, I'd wager, consists of this sort of suburban design, including garage-front houses. This block is physically walkable--the subdivision is full of fine sidewalks--but the design of the houses say people live inside and get everywhere else by motor vehicle. (The Walk Score for this area is 24 out of 100.)
9th Avenue SE, by contrast, has a Walk Score of 83. It is close to Downtown and the New Bohemia commercial district, and residents can do a lot of errands on foot or by bicycle. A better design for this block would be something like this.
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| 600 block of 9th Avenue SE, 2012 Google Maps screenshot |
That is, in fact, what the street looked like before the 2008 flood, and maybe some of the houses were too far gone to rebuild. It looks like a street one could enjoyably walk down, though.
Today, on the other side of this street is a large vacant lot full of junk. This hardly encourages walking in the neighborhood (though it is possible, as witness the sidewalk?
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| What the residents see out their front doors |
It's been eighteen years after the flood, and this is the highest, best use of land barely a mile from the center of town? Maybe we have bigger things to worry about than what these houses look like.
ORIGINAL POST: "Snout Houses? In Oak Hill Jackson??" 16 October 2016
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