The Trouble With the Way We Build

According to the principles of contemporary urban planning, my neighborhood should not even exist. Although the goals of urban planning typically revolve around keeping the types of buildings in a city segregated by their function, our neighborhood takes a blender approach to planning and land use.

Within three blocks of our downtown St. Charles home, one can find: single family, owner-occupied homes, single-family rental homes, single-family homes that have been retrofitted to allow multiple tenants to live in them, multi-family rental housing, light industrial uses (two auto body shops, a metal stampings company, an engine rebuilder, and a towing service to name some), a bank, office space, a church, a pre-school, retail shops, a bakery, bars, restaurants and a VFW post.

And that is just for starters.

If you expand the range to a fifteen-minute walk, you can add more banks, more restaurants, more retail shops, the , two theaters, a Post Office, the , multiple churches, two grade schools, two middle schools and a grocery store to the list. In short, just about everything we need for daily life is within comfortable walking distance of our home; this is exactly how people have been building and living in cities since the time of the ancient Greeks.

Viewed through the lens of the “modern,” post-World-War-II mindset, where an unlimited supply of cheap energy and the unlimited, repercussion-free use of the automobile was going to usher in a never-ending era of unprecedented personal freedom and prosperity, there was seemingly no longer any need to consider the ways in which mankind had been building towns and cities for over three millennia.

Indeed, the car was supposed to be the ticket to a better way of doing things; we could all live in one area, shop in another area, work in yet a different area, and so on. As a society, we would transition from living in discreet neighborhoods where we depended on walking to get around, into a pattern of living that would be totally dependent on the automobile to move us between different districts, segregated by land use. 

The automobile, and the freedom of movement that it represented, was going to save us all from the perceived problems of the previous three-thousand year history of mankind living in towns and cities. This shift in thinking forced virtually our entire nation into what it is now: entirely dependent on the automobile for virtually every daily need, save taking out the trash or picking up the mail.

As a society, we now have precious little institutional memory for how things used to be, and little understanding of what a huge set of problems we have accepted in exchange for the perceived freedom of the automobile. Only the urban areas built before World War II survived this transition into a completely automobile-dependent lifestyle, and downtown St. Charles just happens to be one of those areas.

Sixty years after our total transition to the automobile, we are all suffering from the hangover that has been brought on by embracing this new way of building our towns and cities. Global climate change, air pollution, obesity, oil that now costs $100/barrel, environmental degradation due to drilling for oil, wars fought to ensure the free flow of oil, foreign trade deficits, and a free-flow of money to governments who, in some cases, funnel a portion of their oil money back to groups who are bent on our destruction. Surely, there has got to be a better way than to continue to plan our development, our communities, and our cities in such a manner that they are totally and completely dependent on the automobile to assure their continued existence.

Happily, there is a better way. It is a return to the walkable neighborhood, which is defined as a neighborhood that contains most of what one needs to live daily life, all contained within a 15 minute walk of one’s home. The push towards this new way of thinking about living and how we build and structure our communities has a name, and it is called New Urbanism. They have a professional organization to promote this vision, called the Congress for New Urbanism (www.cnu.org).  

Why does this matter to the City of St. Charles? Because next month, the City Council is going to start a set of hearings on a proposed development for a nearly 28-acre tract of land (roughly the size of about ten square blocks in our neighborhood) located right here in the heart of the downtown district. It is the site formerly occupied by Applied Composites, and is bounded roughly by the train tracks to the north, State Street to the south, 12th Street to the west, and 5th Street to the east. This tract of land represents the one and only chance this City will ever have to build a new development of a significant scale within the area where the principles of New Urbanism can be applied without having build all the necessary mixed-use support network from scratch. For this site, the support network of businesses, schools, churches, offices, etc. is already in place in the form of downtown St. Charles.

It is our only chance to do this simply because there are exactly zero other tracts of land of this scale that already have the necessary support network within that magic fifteen-minute-walk zone.

Sure, we could sell off Potawatomie Park or Mt. St. Mary’s Park to a developer to gain another opportunity like this, but barring those actions, the Applied Composites site is our one and only chance. As such, this proposed development demands much more serious deliberation on the part of the City Council than is normally afforded to most proposed developments.

In the undeveloped fields west of town, if the first development gets a few things wrong, there will always be another chance to get it right in a year or two when the next development comes along.  However, with this development, we have a one-time-only opportunity to get things done right. If we blow this opportunity, there will be no second chances. 

We can build more of what we have been building as a society for the past sixty years—with more of the same mistakes—or we can lead the way in showing true innovation, true sensitivity to the historic context, and true eco-friendliness in both how we build and how we live. We have an historic opportunity here; let’s not settle for anything less than the best.