Diversity Is Chic (Sorta)
Planning Magazine discusses the way suburban municipalities are slipping multi-family housing into formerly homogeneous single-family areas through the use of small projects--often consisting of a single building of 5-6 flats or rowhouses--that fit into the prevailing lot pattern. There's a good analysis of why mixture is good for the neighborhood, financing issues faced by small but non-standardized projects, and perhaps most amusingly, the still virulent and sometimes personal attacks against the developers by NIMBYs.
Most interesting is that the typical New Urbanist canard about providing for an economically diverse neighborhood is only hinted at, but never directly asserted. New Urbanism provides many good things but economic diversity is not one of them. Given that the single biggest unspoken (and oftentimes spoken) fear of these NIMBYs is of having to live next to the racial or economic other, perhaps the the key to "infiltration" is dropping the pretense that you're solving social problems.
[Jan 05, 2006] | [cities] | # | G
