First, full disclosure – the bulk of my work as an architect has been for and with developers and their cousins, commercial property managers.
In the world of urban design, developers, many times, become the fall guys and/or are blamed for building the suburban blandness that we all love to take pot shots at. I fall into the camp that the development community is much like any other – you have few crooks and sleazeballs, you have a few truly outstanding, creative and “sensitive” individuals, and most just fall in the inoffensive middle. I’m also a big believer in the three-legged stool analogy – developers don’t and can’t act in vacuum. Before anything can be built or renovated, in addition to the developer, a project requires approvals by “the government” and willing buyers or renters. Granted, developers are “in it for the money”, and many times tend to favor “cost-effective” choices over more sustainable ones, but they can only “get away with it” IF the government approves and/or IF their customers are willing to write the check for the finished product. People are buying vinyl-sided boxes in O’Fallon for a variety of reasons (including “affordability” and a “yard”), but having a gun held to heads isn’t one of them. The same goes for the proliferation of Walgreen’s at the expense of the locally-owned corner pharmacies – people are voting with their wallets.
Unless you’re one of those real rarities, a fourth of fifth generation living on the family farm/homestead, you can thank a developer for where you live, where you work and where you go to school. Someone, sometime, took a risk and laid out your block or cul de sac. Someone built a structure, and it may have been renovated, one or more times, by other people, or even you, willing to take the risk, a.k.a, developers. And in the realm of higher education, nearly every institution continues to invest and reinvest in their facilities, acting very much as developers.
The second leg of the stool is “the government”. I’m going to save a discussion of the quality of our elected officials for another post, but we can certainly kick around the wonderful world of government regulation. If you go to any jurisdiction that has a Planning, Community Development or Public Works department, you can be pretty sure that you’re going to have rules that limit what you can do and specify what you can’t do. And while appeals of and challenges to the regulations remain a possibility, most developers and most clients would much rather just comply with them, get the project done, and move on. These rules and regulations don’t just magically appear on the law books – they originate either from the professional staff or from the legislative side, and almost always are enacted, with the best of intentions, to address, in someone’s eyes, a bad or problem situation. Unfortunately, that Law of Unintended Consequences has a nasty habit of kicking in, and bland is “safe”, which is one big reason why suburbia looks remarkably consistent across the United States.
Finally, the third leg is the consumer. Like they say, never overestimate the taste of the American public. We’re a country that has embraced the mullet, shag carpet, avocado green appliances, vinyl siding, PBR and jacked-up pickup trucks. There’s a saying in the auto industry that “there’s a butt for every bucket”. Most developers aren’t stupid – if nobody’s buying at the price that they’re selling, guess what, they don’t do it again! So while it’s easy to sit in our ivory towers, in front of our keyboards, lamenting that too many people simply “don’t get it”, the hard reality is that they DO! The developers are giving them what they want, at a price they can afford, and everyone (except maybe “us” urbanists) is walking away happy . . .
– Jim Zavist
