The more time I spend in this profession, the more I believe that it's the places that have their main destination areas along five-lane throughways that want the standards. It's as if the leaders know their area is a suck-hole and are desperately trying to apologize to everyone by showing them that, yes, we too can get new beautiful boxes for recompense of past mistakes. Just look how pretty next door is! Unfortunately, it's too late, the land has been carved up in a way that is difficult, nay, impossible to reverse, because the road system is established with all that necessary infrastructure for public services in the right-of-way.
Ahem, yes, that pretty box will most assuredly make it better. Keep telling yourself that. (Not you michaelskis, but all the local officials today who have been converted to Design Standards Evangelists.) Given current retail trends, that pretty box will be as valuable as a wet paper bag in ten years unless our culture changes and shifts in significant ways. I'm not pulling a Kunstler-esque doomsday scenario here, but the writing has been on the wall for nearly five years.
It would be interesting to query local officials as to why they've become Design Standards Evangelists. I suppose there are two main camps. The first says we made past mistakes, we've become a suck-hole, and we know we can get that pretty box because just look at how next door gets them. And the second camp says, we need that pretty box becasue we don't want to become a suck-hole like next door. See how that works?
I try not to be cynical about this, there is nothing wrong with pretty boxes per se, but if your community is spending precious limited resources on getting those pretty boxes, then there is something fundamentally wrong with local mindsets, if I could just spitball here. Thanks for reading. I wish I was more articulate about this, I am not a researcher, just sharing my observations and analysis. Time to get back to Tik Tok
