Can we still build low slung, urban neighborhoods (Greenwich Village, North End, etc)
 

Personally, my favorite urban neighborhoods are the hyper-dense, low slung old school urban neighborhoods like you see in NYC/Bos/SF and all over Europe. Places like Greenwich Village, Nolita, East Village in NYC, the North End in Boston. Nob Hill/Chinatown in SF or most European cities with their endless seas of 4-6 story apartment buildings.

Despite the praise these neighborhoods received, it's hard to think of many areas being built like this today. It seems today's low rise neighborhood suffer from
1) wide setbacks and streets which kill the intimate feeling
2) lots of accommodations to parking
3) sterile, cookie cutter architecture
4) big retail bays that tend to be either vacant or filled by destination restaurants/banks, etc.

Can anyone think of some good examples where we are still building quality, low rise (but denser than row houses), urban neighborhoods?

I can't think of this being done much, save for a few New Urbanist projects and most trailer-parks.

This is the #1 development type in Seattle (six stories, no setbacks), and is common in other cities like Portland, Denver, and LA.

To make them work properly, you need:
--Low parking ratios, because density only works that way.
--Larger floorplates so they're cost-efficient (though small ones can be nicer).
--Retail on only a fraction of the frontages, because otherwise it's more than residents' buying power merits. Think London high streets surrounded by quieter back streets.

We don't have an endless sea of these buildings, but quite a few neighborhoods have six-story housing units in the four figures, and some have a lot of commercial buildings of of this height also.

portland's pearl district is mostly this, with a few 15+ towers mixed in. its all pretty modern but there are a few good buildings with retro/deco-y touches. its a pretty dense area too. can't really comment on the car situation though. street parking is a b!tch but it seems most new buildings have underground parking too. so maybe auto dependance is lessened on a day to day basis because of its close proximity to downtown but there are still lots of cars present.

Unfortunately, no. I can't think of any urban neighborhoods anywhere being built right now with a North End/Greenwich Village typology.

Yes, you will get the New Urbanist Disneyeque neighborhoods, but always with lots of parking, too wide streets, too much separation of use, not enough consistent density, etc.

The closest I can think of would be the new build Hasidic neighborhoods of Brooklyn, but they're ugly and kind of exclusionary. From an urbanistic perspective they're great though. No parking provisions, and just wall-to-wall midrise housing. Some other neighborhoods, like Williamsburg, and parts of Upper Manhattan, come close, but are urban infill, not whole-scale neighborhood building.

The reason you don't see such neighborhoods being built is because they're generally illegal. Zoning codes generally require parking, fire codes generally require wider streets, etc. We've regulated our land to death, and can't build neighborhoods anymore. You need something really funky like the Hasidic population to get something really out-of-the-norm.

Not to mention that these neighborhoods were built in a time before cities were really into planning beyond a street level. Do you have overhead power lines? The power company will need 10-15' on each side of the pole - in perpetuity. Now there is underground fiber to deal with. Does it rain in your city? Where does that go?

Metro Vancouver has plenty of examples.

In order for this to work well, I think you need to be building next to or within a highly walkable urban neighbourhood. Greenfield sites in such locations are essentially non-existent. The few places that are this urban in North America are typically separated from greenfield sites by miles and miles of sprawl.

Also, most building around that height is on pretty large floorplates. I think a big part of the appeal of places like the North End is the narrow building frontages and the diversity they bring. The best chance at creating places like this imo is through infill of lower density neighbourhoods of urban cities like New York, Philadelphia, Toronto, Chicago, maybe Vancouver... Since this would involve building in places where existing lots are small, it will be difficult to combine them into large lots and most development will likely be fine grained. In the end, I think most of the historic examples were built through infill redevelopment (unlike parts of the Plateau or Brooklyn where I think much of what's there is the first generation of development).

I wouldn't call Greenwich Village & friends "low slung". Those are just about the pinnacle of metropolitan urbanity. This is low slung:


http://i.imgur.com/QxJpZEF.jpg
By Segun



Anyway, as far this type of development goes, it's theoretically possible to build modern variations of them so long as lots are zoned small enough and developed individually. I'm not aware of any greenfield developments of that sort anywhere, however, though there are plenty of individual, infill buildings being built that would meet these criteria (see the DC pop-up thread, for example). Some of the new neighbourhoods in cities like Vancouver, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Oslo, Toronto, etc. sort of come close, but they still lack the narrow lots of traditional urban neighbourhoods.


https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3828/...7b286c76_b.jpg
Olympic Village at sunset by Kevin Krebs, on Flickr

http://i.imgur.com/m1G5yLd.jpg
http://portlandsconsultation.ca/site...%2015%20LR.pdf

Even in Europe most new developments are large building lots, not the old fine grain you find in the center of cities like Amsterdam, London, Copenhagen, etc. However, we don't need that. All we need is good architecture, narrow streets and interesting ground level retail and the lots can be large. small funky neighborhoods with 5 different buildings styles in a block appears dead, although I would like to see that happen again.

Residents don't value small-lot developments the same way urbanists often do. The buidings tend to cost more per unit to build (all else being equal) but residents won't pay more to live in them. For example, a large building might have a full-time front desk, but not a small one. Why do they cost more? Inefficiencies. Fewer units to share the cost of entitlements, design, and the static aspects of construction. Fewer units to share the cost of the same number of elevators and stairs. Parking layouts with way too much circulation area per space. Larger excavation shoring costs per unit. And then the reduced amenities: no 24-hour staff, no common roof deck (ADA requires an elevator), minimal common area, etc.

A couple skinny mid-rise developments with ground floor retail have recently been proposed for a neighborhood in SF (western SOMA). It's not a new neighborhood getting built from scratch, but it is full of old warehouses, car repair shops, and small-lot lowrise commercial buildings that can be replaced with residential, and its height limits were recently raised in anticipation of future redevelopment (not enough IMO, but enough for midrises up to ~100' in height). Of course these new buildings won't give quite the same kind of vibe you get from older buildings with that type of small footprint, and who knows how many will get built, but it's better than giant block-sized buildings.

The buildings in question:

http://www.socketsite.com/wp-content...-Rendering.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/NhIblms.jpg

Answer to your question: absolutely not.

I don't see any city ever building a modern North End type neighborhood ever again. Could you imagine California building anything like this? Nope. Coastal commission wouldn't allow it.

Fire requirements and zoning laws would prevent this, not to mention the NIMBYs.

I spent the 4th of July on the rooftop of the colorful building on the right in this rendering, and everyone who lives there knows there is a new building on the way. This is going to happen.

To me, this isn't really what we're talking about. This is just normal urban infill, and can be found in almost every successful city. It doesn't even look like very pedestrian-oriented urban infill, with the above-ground parking deck, and lack of retail.

I thought this is about creating new neighborhoods, from scratch, with no parking, narrow streets, small retail spaces and the like, North End style. The above pics look like most of the urban infill anywhere.

One of the appeals of smaller building footprints on the consumer end is the opportunity for ownership. With smaller (and therefore more affordable) lots, an individual or family or small business can more readily have the resources necessary to build their own home or small apartment/mixed-use building - giving them more control over what they want in their home, and greater potential economic opportunity. Large-lot developments on the other hand limit land ownership & development to all but major corporations.

I'm trying to imagine the average homeonwer taking a crack at being a developer. It doesn't sound pretty!

Leading the design process, dealing with contract language, dealing with entitlements, understanding what renters value, timing the market, and so on.....all over most people's heads.

Their only hope would be to hire owner representatives to manage the process. Even then they're paying money and deferring some control. The end result would be paying a lot more money for worse product in most cases.

Did you actually read what I posted?

Both buildings do have ground floor retail. And neither of them have above ground parking decks, I don't know where you got that idea. The renderings certainly don't show anything like that, and I can find no mention of it in any articles either. The first building has no parking spaces at all, but it does have 30 bike spaces. And I already mentioned that it isn't a neighborhood being built from scratch (though a LOT of residential is going to get built there, that wasn't there before), and that it wouldn't create quite the same vibe as older small lot mid rise buildings. But that it is better than the large block-sized buildings that typically get built when it comes to those kind of heights. It certainly isn't the typical kind of infill for SF, and it isn't the typical kind of midrise construction you see in new neighborhoods either (compare to mission bay, for example). It's pretty much a modern answer to the kind of buildings that the OP is talking about. Otherwise I wouldn't have posted it.

The photos clearly show a building with above-ground parking, and multiple buildings with no street-level retail.

You then changed your post to add a second building, but I'm still not getting the point. Every city has random infill buildings. What reasonably urban city doesn't have such infill buildings?

If you're talking about building such a neighborhood from scratch, then the answer is no. I think what you do have are gentrifying neighborhoods in certain cities in which the majority of development are small-ish infill projects. These are neighborhoods on the periphery of downtown areas that don't really call for tall high-rises. But there's enough structure in place for all future development to follow. Mostly, it's in the form of rehabs; new buildings are either low rise buildings or groups of rowhomes.

But still, you won't often get a new infill project that doesn't have parking.