The Death and Life of Great American Cities

The third kind of money comes from a shadow world of investment, an underworld of cash and credit, so to speak. Where this money comes from ultimately, and by what avenues it finds its way, is concealed and devious. This money is lent at interest rates starting at about 20 percent and ranging as high as the market will bear, apparently in some case

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Elevator apartments do not produce standardization by virtue of being elevator apartments, any more than three-story houses produce standardization by virtue of being three-story houses. But elevator apartments do produce standardization when they are almost the only way a neighborhood is housed—just as three-story houses produce monotonous standar

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Among all the various kinds of buildings (old or new) in a city, some kinds are always less efficient than others in adding dwellings to the land. A three-story building will get fewer dwellings onto a given number of square feet of land than a five-story building; a five-story building, fewer than a ten-story building. If you want to go up far eno

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The first thing to understand is that the public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves. In some city areas—olde

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The projects that today most urgently need salvaging are low-income housing projects. Their failures drastically affect the everyday lives of many people, especially children. Moreover, because they are too dangerous, demoralizing and unstable within themselves, they make it too hard in many cases to maintain tolerable civilization in their vicinit

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Attrition of automobiles operates by making conditions less convenient for cars. Attrition as a steady, gradual process (something that does not now exist) would steadily decrease the numbers of persons using private automobiles in a city. If properly carried out—as one aspect of stimulating diversity and intensifying city use—attrition would decre

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What sorts of new street uses and street buildings are possible? The general aim should be to bring in uses different from residence, because lack of enough mixed uses is precisely one of the causes of deadness, danger and plain inconvenience. These different uses can occupy entire new street-side buildings, or merely the first floors or basements

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You can neither lie to a neighborhood park, nor reason with it. “Artist’s conceptions” and persuasive renderings can put pictures of life into proposed neighborhood parks or park malls, and verbal rationalizations can conjure up users who ought to appreciate them, but in real life only diverse surroundings have the practical power of inducing a nat

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Only experience and trial and error can indicate what diverse combinations of activities can operate effectively as demand goods for any specific problem park. But we can make some useful generalized guesses about components. First, a negative generalization: Magnificent views and handsome landscaping fail to operate as demand goods; maybe these “s

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If a city area has only new buildings, the enterprises that can exist there are automatically limited to those that can support the high costs of new construction. These high costs of occupying new buildings may be levied in the form of rent, or they may be levied in the form of an owner’s interest and amortization payments on the capital costs of

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