I had a video call today with a young man about to get his Masters in Architecture  from a  decent program where a friend of mine teaches.  Prior to grad school he put in a couple years working for an outfit that does high end retail interiors.  The job offers he is getting are from similar enterprises or from retailers.  Most of the offers involve moving to New York City.

Here is the problem. He wants to be a developer.  Land a design gig in NYC and you could remain an aspiring developer for a very long time.  It is a tough place to get started in.  Costs are high and the consequences for screwing up your freshman project are higher than many other perfectly good places.

I suggested that rather than taking the day job working on retail stores and figuring out where he can afford to live in New York City, think hard about where he would like to build his own projects.  Then find a day job in that city.  Turns out he is interested in Western New York, a place that has a lot of opportunity for a young developer.  I recommended that he take some time to get to know the people who were already on the ground doing the kind of work he wants to do.  He should map out the opportunity sites in the neighborhood he wants to work in and start doing back of the envelope site plans and the accompanying back of the envelope pro formas on multiple sites.  Put together your own fantasy football league in which 7 or 8 potential sites compete for your attention (based upon the stat's they can produce.)  Don't fall in love with just one site and design it to the max.  Pull multiple sites up at teh same level of detail and understand the trade offs between them, their relative strengths and weaknesses.  That exercise will help you see the opportunities for how the neighborhood can get better.  Doing your part to spin that larger scale neighborhood flywheel is the best approach to building and maintaining long term value with your projects.  Make them add up into something more important and more valuable than the sum of the parts.

There are a lot of places that can benefit from the work of a rookie developer who wants to build reliable background buildings.  Pick a place you really like, rather than trying to break into a larger market in a place where you happened to get a job offer.  No place is perfect.  Every place needs work.  Get used to making consequential decisions with limited information.  That's what a developer does for a living.

A Residential Liner Building has a few jobs it needs to do well.

• Hide the parking lot from the street.
• Provide reasonable privacy for the folks who are living on the ground floor.
• Fit into the local context (not stick out).

The Hutchinson Green Apartments designed by my able partner David Kim, do a good job with all three.    The ground floor is raised from the sidewalk, but the ground floor units are still accessible with zero-step entries from the rear (which is where the accessible parking is anyway).  The apartments are laid out as through units, with windows on the front and the back to provide good natural light and cross ventilation.  The scale of the buildings and the detailing of the exteriors fits in well with the existing townhouses, four-plexes, and detached houses.

Having good tools like the Residential Liner Building should help aspiring developers look at ugly surface parking lots in a whole new light.

In between the polar extremes of that beloved great old neighborhood and the bland shiny new subdivision of garage forward tract houses there is a third possibility.  The Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND)  There are lots of these places built over the last 40 years. One of my early favorites is Kentlands in Gaithersburg, Maryland.  TND's demonstrated that narrow, slow streets with cars parked at the curb, houses with porches, and alley's serving garages at the back of the lot were not the work of some distant lost race.  They show that better places can be built again by regular humans.  We are not stuck with a world assembled out of housing tracts, McMansions, apartment complexes, office parks and strip malls.  Finding out that we can do better lets us move on to wrestling with questions like "Will we do better?"

A common criticism is that TND's are "inauthentic" places, that they lack the subtle layering and nuanced patina of the great old neighborhoods they have been modeled after.  This really does miss some very important points, in my view.  Yes, Kentlands is not Georgetown or Adams Morgan.  But seriously, look around.  Kentlands may not be Georgetown, but it is way better than the crappy sprawl across the arterial road in Montgomery County, Maryland.

We will be building a larger number of new buildings, new streets and new public spaces in the coming years.  We should do this with care and attention to detail, but we should also recognize the what time can do to subtly improve a place. May of the aspects we value in older places have been accumulated over time, through trial and error.

The authentic stuff always requires time and wear. We don't expect instant comfort from new shoes.

A substantial definition and explanation of the term Traditional Neighborhood Development can be found in the Lexicon of the New Urbanism.  I recommend downloading the PDF for close study.

http://www.dpz.com/uploads/Books/Lexicon-2014.pdf