Submitted by Benjamin Hemric, Aug 30, 2007 23:43

I think both admirers and detractors often misunderstand Jane Jacobs, basing their comments more upon what "people" have said about her over the years, rather than upon what she actually wrote or was quoted as saying.

Jacobs was not against high-rise buildings per se -- in fact she thought they were virtually necessary much of the time in city neighborhoods in order to obtain the high densities that she believed in. (Although she felt that, like anything else, high-rises could also be overdone -- as when a mindless overabundance of them contributes to the needless stamping out of a district's diversity of building-types.)

What Jacobs was really against, though, was TOWER-IN-THE-PARK high rises -- buildings built tall on small footprints in order to economically produce low ground coverage and copious amounts of sterile, anti-urban "open space." (Jacobs was also against what might be called low-rise "row-house-in-the-park" developments, like much of the Society Hill redevelopment in Philadelphia, that put a premium on vacuously "pretty" open spaces over high densities, mixed uses and the husbandry of cheap older buildings.)

In terms of the city's plans for her neighborhood, Jacobs and her neighbors were against what they felt was the needless destruction of many sound buildings -- not only homes, but businesses also -- and against an unnecessary and counterproductive separating out of the area's land uses. (Part of the city's rationale for redeveloping the area was to separate out the "inappropriate" commercial uses that were supposedly "blighting" the otherwise residential portions of the area.) Jacobs and her neighbors felt, instead, that new housing could be built -- and should be built -- intermixed with the area's commercial uses and ONLY on the small vacant lots that already dotted the district.

So the point of building West Village Houses as a development of low-rise structures wasn't so much a result of a supposed commitment to small-scale (i.e., low-rise) neighborhoods on the part of Jacobs -- actually the Village, even then, was not quite as low-rise as many people seem to believe -- but because Jacobs and her neighbors wanted to 1) prevent the needless (and economically expensive!) destruction of existing sound buildings, 2) to build ONLY on the area's already vacant lots, some of them small, and 3) to build housing that was low cost to construct, operate and maintain (without, for example, having the added expenses of elevators).

Jacobs, by the way, has always maintained that it was opposition by an entrenched bureaucracy -- essentially foot dragging sabotage -- that caused West Village Houses to originally be unsuccessful financially. And I think a good case can be made when one considers that 1) small renovated walk-ups -- at the right price, though -- were already popular in the area, 2) by the time West Village Houses was finally built, two other more conventionally conceived urban renewal developments were also experiencing similar financial problems, and 3) there have been a slew of similar (built on odd lots in odd locations) non-subsidized developments in subsequent years.

In the end, the success of West Village Houses has very little to do with the buildings themselves being low-rise, however, or even with the buildings themselves at all. Rather it has to do with the fact that, with this development, Jacobs and her neighbors were successfully pointing urban renewal in an entirely different direction -- they were planning to create a net increase of 475 new apartments (175 more apartments than in the city's original plan!) for a planned cost of only $8.5 million dollars ($21.5 million dollars less than the city's original plan!) and they were going to do so without the destruction of any existing homes or businesses. Furthermore, the end result, would be a living, breathing urban district, one capable of self-generated change -- and even capable of spawning new businesses -- instead of an orthodox, economically sterile, tower-in-the-park, frozen-in-stone urban renewal "project."

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