A revealing piece by Granola Shotgun:
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Growth and the Suburban Chassis
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I tend to explore what happens to suburbs as they age and begin to decline. But this time I’m going to explore what happens to suburbs that thrive and continue to grow and work their way up the value chain. It isn’t exactly what many people expect. “Be careful what you wish for.” …
By the 1960’s the area had become home to military and aerospace firms that then spun off civilian electronics companies in little low rise office parks. By the 1980’s the area had officially emerged as Silicon Valley. Oracle, Apple, Facebook, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Google, eBay, Juniper Network, PayPal… these companies stretch out for miles in every direction. It’s an economic development dream for local governments. ….
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Here’s what’s happening to these office parks as the economy heats up. The land has become very valuable and it makes good economic sense to build new eight or ten story office blocks on vacant land and surface parking lots. …
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This inward looking mega block form of development is common in suburbia. The images above show a college, an amusement park, and a corporate office park. When you’re inside one of these bubbles it’s actually very pleasant.
But getting to and from these locations is pretty much impossible without a car. Even if you live directly across the street walking wouldn’t work all that well. Add in the fact that many of the nearby residential subdivisions are gated communities and that each of these bubbles are separated by highways, walls, and drainage canals… a car becomes essential. That loads the road network with an insane amount of traffic. If the one story buildings incrementally ramp up to eight story buildings you have a very big transportation problem on your hands.
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Driving to and from Silicon Valley to the outer outer outer suburbs is like pouring molasses through a funnel. People are willing to pay a lot extra to not have to endure that schlep every day. In theory public transportation could ease the commute for many people, but the dispersed development pattern guaranties that transit will never be efficient or cost effective since most people need to drive from their house to a transit center and then take a shuttle bus to the office at the other end of the train line.
From my perspective these intensifying suburbs are in an adolescent phase of development. They are rapidly losing the qualities that people like about the suburbs: open space, privacy, convenience, quiet, lower cost, ample free parking, and so on. But they aren’t yet delivering the things people like about cities: culture, vibrant street life, walkability, convenient public transportation, night life, and such.
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I stopped and took photos of large numbers of tech workers walking along the side of the eight lane highways at lunchtime. There isn’t anyplace for these folks to walk to. There’s nothing but parking lots, highway fly-overs, gas stations, landscaped berms, and convenience stores as far as the eye can see. When I ask the workers where they’re going they say they’re just stretching their legs and getting some air. They eat lunch (and very often breakfast and dinner) inside their office compounds in subsidized cafeterias.
Perhaps in another thirty years the transformation from suburb to something more vital may be complete. Given the suburban chassis these places inherited I don’t see how the underlaying infrastructure will ever support anything other than a bad compromise.
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Joel Garreau calls places like this Edge City: a place that has a suburban form but at an urban density. Driving private cars is no longer convenient here anymore, but transit will never function well either. Jobs are plentiful, but housing is too expensive. It lacks the privacy and peace of a good suburb, but is deficient in the vibrancy and culture available in a real city.
It’s too thick to be jam, but too thin to be jelly.
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