A Couple New Urbanism Examples

This post was inspired by This Article on CNN.com about a development planned for the area around Salt Lake City that seems to follow new urbanist principles.

This part definitely sounds familiar:

Home builders were skeptical when the Salt Lake valley's biggest landowner laid out the plan for a 20-mile string of densely packed communities framing the rural west side of Salt Lake County. The communities would be laid out along a planned highway and light-rail lines connecting to Salt Lake City.

Mining executives pitched the idea to some 50 builders. "A lot of them rolled their eyes and walked away," said Keith L. Morey, manager for Kennecott's flagship Daybreak project, where just seven builders were chosen to help build the first town of 14,000 homes.

It will be interesting to see how that project works out. Hopefully it will go as well as the Stapleton Denver project that is currently converting the former Stapleton Airport in Denver to a 4700 acre new urbanist community. Here's an article about it from the NYTimes.

I first heard about the project when I saw that sign at the new Denver International Airport on my way home from Phoenix in January. Even 4700 acres doesn't begin to compare to the 144 square MILES that are owned by the Utah developer. That's over 92,000 acres of new urbanism-style development.

This pretty much defuses the argument that new urbanism only works in places where land is at a premium, forcing higher density. Denver has quite a bit of room to sprawl, and 144 acres could be a lot of typical curvy street, big yard, ugly house development instead of mixed-income, high density, alley-filled development.

I am hoping that Davenport's small trial of this concept in the Prairie Heights neighborhood will demonstrate how successful this can be.