Livability

Downtown Cranford, New Jersey, circa 2018

A recent article in New Jersey's local news drew my attention to the subject of charming towns. In the town-planning world, the criteria by which we measure "charming" is called livability, and there's been plenty of towns seeking this status as of late.

Livability is related to walkability, like when you can get all your errands done with only parking your car once. And when you can walk from one store to another without crossing an 8-lane superhighway pedestrian deathtrap. It's also one of the reasons that lots of younger people are preferring to live in the density of downtown instead of on its spacious suburban fringes (which may be related to the reason for towns paying more attention to this stuff).

But livability goes further, as it is even more qualitative. It's not only "can I easily walk around town," but "is it a nice walk?" Livability measures how nice the greenery is, what the awnings look like on storefronts, and the feeling of open-ness vs closed-ness that one feels while walking around town or sipping coffee on a sidewalk bench after lunch.

There's ways to approach such qualitative measures quantitatively. For example, we can simply measure the amount of greenspace in square feet, or we can measure the ratio of the width of the streets to the height of the buildings (which is a good determinant of close-ness/open-ness). Or you can do what Haddonfield did, because they got notoriety.

Haddonfield adopted a business improvement district in 2004. This is a special distinction that allows certain properties in certain parts of town to get tax breaks, with the hope that it will "promote the economic and general welfare of the District and Borough." And words like 'general welfare' mean quality-of-life.

Forming these districts happens by way of a public/private partnership between property owners and a municipality. They are run via a board composed of professionals working in the town, retail business owners, property owners, and residents who are none of the above, that way their interests are diverse and vested.

The charge of this new entity is vast, but critical to a flourishing hyperlocal economy in today's world. They encourage self-help and self-financing, provide leadership, offer grant programs to attract new business, enhance the look of the downtown, sponsor networking events, organize special events, and market the downtown, all of which can help to raise the quality of living in these towns.

Improvements don't happen overnight. It took a good 15 years for Haddonfield to get this credit. Then again, what do I know, maybe it started being awesome a long time ago.

There's another town that established its own improvement district, and they've also been doing really well in the Livability Department. Cranford started an improvement district in 1992, and were the first to do so in New Jersey. If you drive through their downtown, right past the train station, you'll notice, or not notice, any Big Dog businesses. No fast food giants, no consumer goods warehouses, just mom-and-pop businesses.

This helps because the business owners are way more invested in what goes on locally than would be a multinational corporation. They care whether their sidewalks look nice. They care about quality of life issues.

Their District was created, among other things, to preserve historic aesthetics, establish a design criteria,  and ultimately to deal with funding and decision-making for the district so they could compete with the flow of commerce that went rushing through the recently-opened doors of the nearby Short Hills Mall.

Cranford recently took things a step further by hiring a town planner, because paying someone to think about all these little things makes a difference. There's a piano sitting in the middle of their downtown, all day all night. Sometimes they plan for an event there and invite a musician or a school music group, and sometimes, like on Friday nights, this random guy just shows up and plays old school Nintendo songs all night. They put up barricades and do yoga in the street. They get residents to loan their porch to local musicians who then travel around to all the different volunteer porches in town, followed by a crowd of drinking town residents (a crowd of residents, mind you, that is ok with paying somewhat higher property taxes to live somewhere that makes being an adult a little less soul-sucking).

Anyway, you can't just string up some Edison bulbs and call it a day. Livability requires planning. And it requires patience. And if you want your town to make it into the local news, or the national news, or you just want it to be a nice place to walk around, then you may want to take a stroll through these neighborhoods, take notes, and take action.

Post Script:
I neglect to mention that it doesn't hurt if you have a train station nearby.

Notes:
This town was named the 'most charming' one in all of N.J. We offer these pics as proof
Aug 2018, NJ.com

Crowdsourcing Reform: Community Participation and Land Use Regulation in New Jersey
Research paper for studies in urban planning, 2010

Haddonfield Business Improvement District

Partnership for Haddonfield 

Cranford Business Improvement District
adopted 1992

Cranford was recently named by The New Jersey Chapter of the American Planning Association as one of the 2018 Great Places in New Jersey.
Oct 2018, nj.com

Streets for People: A Primer for Americans
Bernard Rudofsky, 1969
(Read this book to learn the hows and whys of the enjoyable dowtown experience from renowned thinker, designer, and creator of the Bernardo sandal, yes it's true.)

The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Jane Jacobs, 1961
(The number one book about what makes a nice place to live by the number one person to write about such things.)


Post Script:
Here's a peek through the looking glass. An article just come from the BBC, about poor town planning. It describes the lives of many young adults stuck in this new autocentric anticulture nightmare. In America it's called "suburbia" and it's been a problem for decades.
[poor town planning]

Apparently developers did not consult planners when they plopped hundreds of residential units so far out of the city that you can't get to the market - or anywhere else - without a car.

Some developers buck this trend, and their successful recipe is detailed in the article as such:

“The secret is the layout of connected streets with interesting squares and courtyards, coupled with the way that offices, small shops, cafés, pubs and even a garden centre were integrated with the homes as in an authentic small town.”

Young couples 'trapped in car dependency'
Oct 2018, BBC