Density as Geometry Problem

Profession? What Profession?

Like activity at architecture firms, the economy continues to slide. Businesses reported an additional 651,000 payroll job losses in February, with the national unemployment rate rising to 8.1%. The design and construction industry has suffered some of the most serious loses. Fully 17% of payroll losses his year have come from the construction sector, even though this sector accounts for less than 5% of national payrolls. Architecture firms lost over 18,000 jobs between August 2008 and this past January, accounting for 7.5% of all jobs at these firms.

-American Institute of Architects, 2009 [emphais added]

Zoning Insanity

Am I the only one that has a problem with this?

This is the area that Dallasites lovingly refer to as the “five points,” a square mile of low income multifamily housing on the near Northeast side of the central city. The whole of North Texas seems to follow this example. The “home ownership” cult has classified multifamily housing as beyond the pale of respectability, and then accidentally (I hope) set out to make it so. This area is zoned as MF-2(A) which produces a uniform two-to-three-story garden apartment, and incredible densities of population when things like city health, sanitation, and safety ordinances are laxly enforced. As a consequence, this area includes the most dense census tract in Texas (topping out at a mind-blowing 57,709.4 persons per square mile. The average population density of Dallas is 3,469.9 ppn/mi2.) Density qua density is not the problem here, it’s the rigid absurdity of the zoning. Multifamily housing is considered to be undesirable generally, and thus shunted to its own special districts away from the “decent” folk. As the good commercial land and vast districts of single-family housing dominate the commanding heights of the real estate map, MF is lumped together into a few giant continuous districts. This building stock does not age well, leading to a bifurcation into the brand-new yuppie districts and the beat-to-hell instant slums of the marginalized. Is this planning, or is it apartheid? It’s not the buildings themselves, or their carless management, or even depressed income levels; it’s their concentration. As the entire neighborhood is a 45-minute walk with nothing but more of the same, these dispiriting places become loci of negativity, when even retail is not allowed anywhere but the edge of the district. We’ve been building cities for centuries, but never before the advent of single-use zoning (at least to my knowledge) have this many people been put in a place at this density with no access to markets, local employment, or anything but housing.

Beware the dominance of the map.

Excerpting Camille Paglia

Contemporaneity is an even worse plague upon the “best” higher education. The most interesting and daring minds of my generation did not, as a rule, go on to graduate school or succeed in the academic system. Hence our major universities are now stuck with an army of pedestrian, toadying careerists, Fifties types who wave around Sixties banners to conceal their record of ruthless, beaverlike tunneling to the top.

-from the introduction to Sex, Art, and American Culture, 1992