I was shocked at how vividly the contrast of the city's low and high density came to life when I visited the new exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York. What the model most powerfully shows is that most of the city is actually a suburb of one and two-story buildings. The New York of our minds, towering structures and vast numbers of people, is really quite limited.
Plans for an eight-story apartment building are taking shape in the East Whisman area of Mountain View, a part of the city that is better known for office buildings and surface parking lots than high-density housing. The applicant, Jeffrey Stone of WTA Middlefield, is proposing to build a 460-unit apartment complex with nearly 9,400 square feet of ground floor retail at 490 E. Middlefield Road, replacing a two-story office building. Currently, the site is surrounded by other office buildings, but more residential growth is planned for the East Whisman area, including a massive development down the street at 675 and 685 E. Middlefield Road.
The new city will be laid out on a compact grid, with interlocking streets, rapid-transit routes and greenways for pedestrians and cyclists. The city's least dense residential neighborhoods will be zoned for 85-foot apartment buildings, taller than essentially every apartment building erected before 1880. House hunters will be able to purchase row houses as if they were shopping for real estate in 19th century Brooklyn, not in cookie-cutter suburban sprawl.
This has been a generational mistake. Transit makes it possible to capture the benefits of density - a diversified economy and thriving neighborhoods - while mitigating the bad stuff, namely congestion and its attendant maladies: pollution, car crashes, injuries, fatalities, property damage, noise, road repairs, and more. Any city that hopes to grow its tax base by adding population and jobs without expanding its physical footprint needs a high-capacity transit system that enables anywhere-to-anywhere connectivity without succumbing to density's negative attributes.
"We must build more housing, faster, because building more homes means life can be more affordable," said Mayor Olivia Chow at a news conference announcing details of the plan Thursday. The plan, which would require council to approve bylaw changes, could lead to the building of about 1.5 million homes, according to the province. That could include 53,000 affordable homes, Chow said.
