The Best American Magazine Writing 2014

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  Corcoran Jennison is strict about enforcement, but Byrne emphasizes that, in the case of subsidized tenants, eviction is a last resort. “Guns and drugs are the third rail, but on everything else, we—the developer and the council—try to make it work. After all, subsidized tenants have many fewer housing options than market tenants.” He emphasizes that managing low-income housing is more demanding than managing simple market housing and that many municipal housing bureaucracies are bad at it. “They’re not very entrepreneurial,” he says. “And they often develop an adversarial relationship with their tenants.”

  Sound management and tenant control are crucial, but urban design is important, too. The plan for Harbor Point was the work of the late Joan E. Goody of Boston-based Goody, Clancy & Associates. She sympathized with the demands of the public housing occupants. “They wanted to live in a ‘normal’ neighborhood,” she wrote in a 1993 article in Places magazine, “one that didn’t look or work like a project, one that felt safe for walking around and letting their children out to play.”

  To achieve normality, the Ville Radieuse plan was converted into a street grid with sidewalks, on-street parking, and no culde-sacs. Seventeen of the original buildings were replaced by new five-, six-, and seven-story brick apartment blocks oriented to the street; the rest of the structures were renovated and given pitched roofs and bay windows. Among the apartment buildings, Goody placed groups of two- and three-story townhouses—modest, New England–style buildings of painted clapboard with stoops and picket fences. All the ground floor apartments were given their own front doors—a simple feature “that nurtures pride and identity,” as the architecture critic of the Boston Globe, Robert Campbell, wrote in a 1990 article.

  Although this sounds a lot like what would later become known as New Urbanism, the first designs for Harbor Point predate Seaside and call for none of the decorative charm of that seminal project; this is New Urbanism on a diet. In any case, Goody, a Harvard-trained modernist, did not consider herself a New Urbanist. “Joan was a humanist rather than a traditionalist,” says David Dixon, FAIA, principal in charge of urban design at Goody Clancy. “She was more interested in how people live today than in how they wanted to live in the past. That’s why she looked to nearby Boston neighborhoods such as Dorchester, rather than to old New England towns.”

  In his 1990 article, Campbell concluded that “Harbor Point will flourish if it begins to grow at its edges and mesh with its surroundings.” The ten lanes of Interstate 93 are a formidable barrier between the site and the rest of Dorchester, but the immediate surroundings are being filled in, and Harbor Point itself is flourishing. There are two schools and a church across the street, the adjacent University of Massachusetts campus has expanded, and the projected Edward M. Kennedy Institute, next to the JFK Library, is in the works. Corcoran Jennison has built an apartment building, an office building, and a hotel next to the housing development, and although its plans for a new residential community were scotched by the recession—the university acquired the land—a $60 million apartment complex is on the boards for another neighboring site.

  On a recent warm and sunny day in June, I walked over to Harbor Point from the nearby MBTA station and discovered a surprising number of people on the street. “Surprising” because a typical planned community of nine-to-five white-collar workers is usually empty at noon on a weekday. Since many of the subsidized tenants at Harbor Point work at nontraditional jobs—night-shift cleaners, taxi drivers, security guards—they are around during the day. Another result of the mixed-income community is greater heterogeneity. There are mothers with strollers (a third of the subsidized residents are children), and elderly bench sitters from the seniors’ residence. A large number of the market tenants at Harbor Point are college students, and while there are fewer of them today than when regular classes are in session, they are a presence, too.

  Harbor Point is a walkable community: The buildings are close to the sidewalks and the mature trees offer plenty of shade. It’s leafy green, but at thirty units per acre, the impression is urban. Goody, whose sensible, low-key architecture has stood the test of time, oriented the streets so that they terminate in views of either the harbor or the Boston skyline. Along the water’s edge is a public promenade with a spectacular vista of downtown across the bay. The other major landscape feature of Harbor Point is a 1,000-foot-long mall modeled on Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue in Back Bay. This kind of mimicry doesn’t always work—many neotraditional developments have “boulevards” weakly defined by single-family houses—but here the apartment buildings, barely visible behind a line of street trees, are exactly the right scale for the long green space.

  The base of one of the apartment buildings facing the mall houses a small commercial strip containing a convenience store, dry cleaner, hair salon, daycare center, and Fiskie’s Café, whose tables and chairs spill out onto the sidewalk. I ordered a Buffalo chicken wrap at the café for lunch. At the table next to me, three East Asian kids were having a snack; another table was occupied by a group of Hispanic men.

  Harbor Point is as ethnically diverse as Boston itself. Although the one-to-two ratio between subsidized and market units remains, the last twenty-five years have seen changes in the population. The majority of the subsidized residents today are Hispanics, rather than African Americans as in the past; family size has dropped, leading Corcoran Jennison to convert some of the four- and five-bedroom apartments into smaller units. Less than half of the market tenants are white, and there is a large Asian population. There are also more college students sharing apartments, as well as retirees and young professionals.

  “We attract out-of-towners who like coming here because of the racial mix,” Corcoran told me. In a Yelp review, a University of Massachusetts student from the Bay Area who identified herself as Katy H. wrote that she enjoyed her year living in Harbor Point: “Lots of residents were students, but in addition to that, there were families, single adults, elderly couples, you name it—they lived here.” She added, “If you consider yourself to be close-minded or intolerant of different cultures and people—this is NOT the neighborhood for you.”

  Most of the Yelp reviewers seemed unaware that many of their neighbors were low-income families. This is not surprising, since the units occupied by subsidized tenants are indistinguishable from the rest, inside and out. But reading between the lines, I sense occasional tensions: complaints about scratched cars, noisy parties, teenagers acting up. This might dismay social activists who imagine mixed-income housing to be some sort of happy melting pot. On the other hand, the market rents that Corcoran Jennison is able to charge (a one-bedroom apartment is currently about $2,400 a month, up from $800 fifteen years ago) and the satisfaction expressed by most of the Yelp reviewers lays to rest skeptics’ fears that rich and poor can’t live together. At Harbor Point, the two groups share amenities, exercise in the same fitness center, swim in the same pool, shop in the same convenience store, serve as building captains, and deliberate together on the tenants’ council. Given the disparity among different income groups today, a degree of social distance would hardly be surprising. But with American society economically polarized as never before, creating an environment in which rich and poor live amicably side by side is no mean accomplishment.

  So, what did it take to make Harbor Point a success? A visionary and committed developer + a responsive architect + the active participation of low-income residents + an experienced property-management team. Not a simple formula. But to paraphrase Winston Churchill: It could be said that Harbor Point is the least likely model for public housing, except for all the others that have been tried.

  Behind the Façade

  Poundbury is “the town that Prince Charles built.” Not surprisingly, given his royal highness’s vocal campaign against modern architecture, British critics have been merciless in their ridicule of Poundbury’s perceived shortcomings. “An embarrassing anachronism as the new century dawns,” wrote Hugh Aldersey-Williams in the
New Statesman in 1999, when the project was still in its infancy. More recently, writing in the Observer, Stephen Bayley found Poundbury “fake, heartless, authoritarian and grimly cute,” and Andy Spain, blogging on ArchDaily, characterized it as “an over sanitised middle-class ghetto that has a whiff of resignation that there is nothing positive to live for so we must retreat to the past.” Snide judgments made on the basis of seemingly fleeting visits.

  What’s the town really like? I spent six days there in September, frequenting its eateries, wandering its streets, and generally trying to experience the place as a resident might. Construction started twenty years ago, and while two decades is a short time in the life of a town, it’s long enough for the newness to start to rub off. As I discovered, there is a lot more to Poundbury than meets the modernist critic’s jaundiced eye. The place is neither anachronistic nor utopian nor elitist. Nor is it a middle-class ghetto. In fact, Poundbury embodies social, economic, and planning innovations that can only be called radical.

  What struck me first was the unusual layout, a rabbit warren of dog-legged streets and crooked lanes, interspersed with many small squares—none of them actually square. Although confusing at first, after a day or two it’s easy enough to find one’s way around—much like navigating the center of a medieval town. Instead of a main street, shops, cafés, and a pub are scattered here and there. I had a beer at The Poet Laureate, which is named in honor of Ted Hughes. The outdoor tables spill out onto a square dominated by a market hall with fat columns shaped like milk bottles.

  This particular village square is part of the first phase of Poundbury’s construction, which was completed in 2001. The scale becomes larger and denser in the newer sections, which have rows of terrace houses, small apartment buildings, and office blocks. Poundbury is built on a hill, and the highest spot is occupied by Queen Mother Square, named in honor of the prince’s grandmother. The partially complete plaza is lined by four- and five-story office and residential buildings, and will soon have a 120-foot-tall campanile-like tower. But the impression of a small market town is maintained in the higgledy-piggledy street layout and in the resolutely traditional—that is to say, not-modernist—architecture.

  The bright blue electric bus that swings by the square, on the other hand, is very modern indeed. POUNDBURY VIA TOWN CENTRE reads its destination board, a reminder that Poundbury is not a stand-alone community—this is not Celebration or Seaside—but an extension of Dorchester, a small county town of 20,000, set among the gently rolling hills of Dorset in southwest England.

  For Dorchester residents, Poundbury is a new appendage on the edge of town, but for designers it is a demonstration of Prince Charles’s ideas about architecture, which he first detailed in a 1988 BBC documentary, A Vision of Britain. That film, which was followed by a book of the same name, came four years after he had delivered the first of his antimodernist broadsides, characterizing a proposed extension to London’s National Gallery as a “monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.” In his book, Charles threw down the gauntlet: “We can build new developments which echo the familiar, attractive features of our regional vernacular styles,” he wrote. “There are architects who can design with sensitivity and imagination so that people can live in more pleasant surroundings.” Whence Poundbury.

  • • •

  How did the heir apparent become a real estate developer? You can blame Edward III. In the fourteenth century, the king established the Duchy of Cornwall, a land trust to benefit his eldest son, Edward, known as the Black Prince. The king cannily prevented the prince and his successors from touching the capital, and over the centuries the duchy has done well, with a current worth of more than $1 billion. In 1987, Dorchester’s local planning authority determined that the only open land that could accommodate the future growth needs of the town was 400 acres belonging to the duchy. Under ordinary circumstances, as it had done in the past, the duchy would have sold the land to be developed in a conventional manner. But because Charles, the twenty-fourth duke of Cornwall, had such an interest in urbanism, with the town’s consent, the duchy took a more active role.

  In 1988, after several false starts, Charles appointed the urban theorist and planner Léon Krier to prepare a master plan for an “urban village,” a dense (fifteen to twenty dwellings per acre, instead of the usual ten to twelve), walkable, sustainable model for suburban development. Following a public consultation process, the local planning authority approved the concept, and five years later construction began.

  The work is being carried out by a variety of regional builders working with local and London-based architects, each of whom has been given a restricted number of dwellings in any one contract to promote architectural variety. Peterjohn Smyth was the coordinating architect for the project’s first phase, and Ben Pentreath is managing the current phase. Architecturally, there is nothing here that would be out of place in the prewar center of any provincial British town: Brick and stucco boxes with slate or clay-tile roofs and occasional flint panels, a scattering of Georgian and Regency revival townhouses, the occasional larger classical pile, and many buildings that are what one can only call “generic traditional.”

  The market hall with the milk bottle columns was designed by the prominent classicist John Simpson; the office blocks on Queen Mother Square are the work of Quinlan and Francis Terry; and an Arts & Crafts nursing home is designed by James Gorst. I liked Simpson’s market hall; and the Terrys’ classical office building, while a little standoffish, has a marvelous cupola. On the other hand, the fire station struck me as particularly heavy-handed; Mey House, designed by Barbara Weiss Architects, is altogether too self-important for an office building; and some of the larger residences veer dangerously close to McMansion territory.

  Of course, the last is a relative judgment: The largest house at Poundbury is smaller than the median size of new houses in America (2,400 square feet), and an upscale Georgian revival terrace house in Woodlands Crescent squeezes four bedrooms into only 1,400 square feet. This particular crescent of thirty-eight virtually identical houses, designed by Pentreath, merely hints at its eighteenth-century roots and seems to me to strike exactly the right architectural note.

  • • •

  Despite the picturesque street layout, Krier’s approach is not simply scenographic: It embodies the theories of the nineteenth-century Viennese architect and planner Camillo Sitte. Sitte believed that the old cities that people admired were not happy accidents but were in fact designed according to principles no less specific than in the other arts. In Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen (1889), translated into English as The Art of Building Cities, Sitte provided a detailed urban design analysis of streets and squares in old Italian and northern European cities. “Modern city planning completely reverses the proper relationship between built-up area and open space,” Sitte wrote. “In former times the open spaces—streets and plazas—were designed to have an enclosed character for a definite effect. Today we normally begin by parcelling out building sites, and whatever is left over is turned into streets and plazas.”

  Poundbury’s Sitte-esqe roots are visible in its compact plan. Only 250 of the 400 acres are to be urbanized; the unbuilt space is concentrated at the edges, a green swathe of playing fields, allotment gardens, and pastures with grazing sheep. Krier has learned another lesson from Sitte: the value of accidental events. “We set up rigid systems, and then grow fearful of deviating from them by as much as a hair’s breadth,” Sitte wrote, bemoaning that city planning had become a branch of engineering in which formulaic solutions were rigorously applied. For Sitte—and Krier—planning is an art, and in art rules may be broken.

  For example, in Poundbury, buildings generally come up to the sidewalk, but some have projecting stoops. Occasionally there are planting beds between the building and the sidewalk; sometimes a narrow garden, occasionally a deep garden. In a few cases, a building projects over the sidewalk to form an arcade. Simon Con
ibear, Poundbury’s development manager, characterized Krier’s planning to me as “80 percent harmony and 20 percent discord.”

  In Poundbury, the layout of the buildings predetermines the road pattern, not vice versa. Roads are merely a way of getting around, not an armature within which buildings must tightly fit, as is the case with most planned communities. The first time I heard Krier lecture, many years ago, he talked mainly about parking. Krier’s point was that whereas the principles of sound urban design were all known long ago—and did not need to be reinvented—the great challenge for the modern city planner was how to accommodate the automobile.

  This is as true in Britain as elsewhere: More than 77 percent of households currently own at least one car, and the ownership rate continues to increase. Krier’s solution is not to banish cars to the periphery or to separate them from pedestrians. In Poundbury, automobiles are everywhere: The interiors of the blocks have parking courts with open-air stalls, car ports, and garages; there is parallel and head-in street parking, and some of the apartment buildings integrate on-grade protected parking. But it didn’t feel as if the cars had taken over. For example, although several cars were parked in front of The Poet Laureate, the little square didn’t resemble a parking lot. There were no white lines, no signage—people parked willy-nilly, where they wanted. On Saturday night the square was full of cars, but on Monday morning it turned back into an empty plaza.