Fenster writes:
Sounds like Celebration, Florida, the Disney-inspired small town, is not immune from the problems of the real world: a murder at the end of 2010, followed shortly thereafter by a suicide. And now this article about murder’s dark backstory.
Makes one wonder about the possibility of manufacturing innocence. I know that’s not the goal of new urbanism, but it did seem to be the goal of this Disney iteration.
If you have a choice where you want to live, and you want to live under new urbanist principles, there’s always the prospect of existing places!
One of my favorites, and a place I called home for almost five years: lovely Hopewell, New Jersey. Compact, walkable, self-contained, surrounded by open land (a lot of it recently conserved), filled with older homes with charm and character, and nice people, too.
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 
Queers will be queers. By dying prematurely, he didn’t get the honor of sharing a cell with Sandusky. Pity.
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The collage is of Hopewell? Lovely place — I remember driving thru it and being struck by what a pretty, quiet place it seemed to be.
As for New Urbanism … In and around a lot of American cities these days, there really aren’t many traditional-living options — a lot of downtowns have been plowed under, and a lot of once-nice small town have been ruined by thruways and big-box stores. And the trad neighborhoods that do exist often have drawbacks. They’re downtown (and downtown isn’t what it once was), or they’re really old (and thus you need to be willing to devote lots of time and money to nursing your house along), or they’re 30 miles outside of downtown (and thus a long commute). A lot of people would like to live in trad-style neighborhoods, but they want newly (or recently)-built homes, and in convenient, safe locations. So even an uninspired New Urbanist neighborhood — and New Urbanism sometimes gets some legit criticism as the New Suburbanism — is often a decent option: it’s like a suburban neighborhood, only nicer in many ways. It’s a housing product many people find attractive.
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I really enjoyed this posting. A few of my random thoughts and observations: Hopewell is beautiful. And this may be on the subject or a bit off, but here’s my theory which I’ve come up with after having grown up in one of the most perfect places to live on earth (a beautiful city in Central Coast, CA) and finding that the people who live there are more stressed out than the people I know in NYC: It’s that any place which is seen as perfect will always drive the people who live in it to do imperfect things. It must be some deep need in humans. Or perhaps perfection just makes us more miserable than imperfection.
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Maybe when you’re around so much perfection you develop an anxiety about maintaining and perpetuating that perfection? Or when your surroundings are perfect you get upset that everything else isn’t?
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I hate, hate, hate, artificially-designed communities.
Years ago, I visited a neighbourhood of a large city that was meant to look and feel like a small town, but it was so utterly fake, esp. in comparison to some small towns that got swallowed into the same city, which kept their small-town atmosphere. The fake one had, appropriately enough, a faux-Scottish-pub, which didn’t have haggis or tatties and neeps or a single Scottish food item on their menu, despite the kilts and bagpipes decor… They had good mulligatawny (Indian) soup, though, I’ll give them that – even though it’s completely unScottish…
Though they had a main street that seemed, in terms of design and the small buildings, small-townish, it just reeked of artificiality… I never went back there, and I never will.
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