New Urbanism In New Jersey

There's an interesting real estate development being built in Livingston, New Jersey, near where I live. It's like a New Urbanist project, one of those developments where a new town or neighborhood is built virtually from the ground up and is planned the way towns and neighborhoods used to be built - before cars, before big box discount marts, before shopping malls. I say it's "like" a New Urbanist project because it may actually be less of a New Urbanist project than a mendacious knockoff of one.

Livingston is a typical postwar automobile suburb, complete with a mall and several strip shopping centers. While it does have a legitimate town center anchored by Livingston Avenue and Mount Pleasant Avenue, it has been down on its heels for some time. Recently a group of developers proposed buying up the storefronts on the northeastern corner of the junction of the two avenues (most of which were vacant and rundown anyway) and adjacent undeveloped land, bulldozing everything, and building a new town center that would include stores, townhouses (real townhouses, like the ones you find in Boston), condominium apartments, detached houses that would be right next to each other and would have small yards and hidden garages, and a small parklike square in the center. All of this would front the two avenues, with narrow side streets in the back. There would be a corner fountain with a front garden at the northeastern corner of the intersection of Livingston and Mount Pleasant Avenues. The town fathers enthusiastically approved, and work began almost immediately; it's been progressing slowly, but at a steady rate. Sales of the new residences have been brisk and the new neighborhood is slated to be completed within the next year.

So what's the problem? Well, Livingston Town Center, as the project is called, does meet many requirements of New Urbanist philosophy. It's compact and dense, it mixes residential and commercial uses, it offers diverse housing styles, and it even rests at the junction of two bus lines to Newark (and, I believe, a bus line to New York). But here's where it goes wrong. The housing stock at Livingston Town Center is all aimed at upper- and upper-middle-class residents. It doesn't even attempt to accomodate people of different economic backgrounds to produce the kind of mix that's essential to a vibrant community. The only solidly middle-class residents who will benefit from the new stores in Livingston Town Center are the folks who already live adjacent to it - though it's unlikely they'll be able to join the health club that will be part of the project, as that will probably be for its own residents only. And while the public transportation will be convenient, and some new residents may use the bus to New York, will any of them use the NJ Transit buses to Newark? Especially when most of them probably won't have any reason to go there and the bus lines' sole reason for being is to transport poor people to and from their suburban jobs?

Alright, so Livingston Town Center is elitist. But it's still going to look great when it's done, right? Well, yes, but it will still violate a central tenet of New Urbanism - that architectural embellishments be functional. Driving past the main Colonial-style two-story building under construction, I was pleasantly surprised to notice the steel skeletons of window gables protruding from the roof, the suggestion being that there would be third-story flats in what would normally be attic space.

Then I noticed that they're not real. The windows are held up by webs of steel built into the roof, to be covered by plywood and sided to give the appearance of a real gabled window. But the fake gables are there merely for aesthetic, not functional, purposes. To add insult to injury, fake cupolas - the kind you find on gas station garages - are to be appended to the corner pitches of the roof on either side of the building's central clock tower.

At least that will be real.

The fakery notwithstanding, the completion of Livingston Town Center - indeed, its mere presence - will hopefully encourage the sprucing up of the aging storefronts still in place along Livingston and Mount Pleasant Avenues, and it might even lead to a badly needed makeover of commercial buildings farther down each street. It might even inspire less ambitious but equally pedestrian-friendly development nearby, at least where it can be accommodated. But any New Urbanist project that ignores the most basic components of New Urbanism is likely to fall short of its ambitions.

You can check it all out for yourself at these two sites:  www.livingstontowncenter.com or www.carillonltc.com.