THE NEED FOR AGED BUILDINGS - JANE JACOBS

FOREWORD
LEVAN ASABASHVILI

The Need for Aged Buildings”, the 10th chapter of Jane Jacobs’s book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” belongs to that part of the book where the author describes the four conditions necessary for generating city diversity. According her observations for generating and maintaining diversity in city districts there should be present: 1.Mixed primary uses, 2.Small blocks, 3.Aged buildings and 4.High level of human concentration. 

To fully grasp the interrelationship of these four conditions and to acquire deeper understanding of her ideas, it is better to read the book. But for proper reading of the following chapter we have to mention what is meant under the term city diversity. For the author diversity is not a superficial, formal feature of the city. Rather it signifies deeper social, economic and functional diversity, where even antagonistic subjects coexist in high concentration. According to author this condition is a primary determinant of city vitality, its economic and social success. 

Jacobs argues that presence of aged buildings is necessary for generating such city diversity. Instead of romantization of oldness, characteristic to the post modern urban thought her arguments are made from the economic perspective. This approach is especially considerable for our context because in our society old buildings are considered only from the perspective of cultural heritage, which is more symbolic than practical. In practice such approach proves to be incomplete and superficial. In our cities the best form of treatment towards the cultural heritage is considered its complete renovation while the buildings which don’t have such status are often deemed for destruction. In contrast to this the author suggests universalistic approach where each building can be viewed as an economic entity and the forms of treatment can be considered adding this criterion. 

In economic terms this approach connotes constraining the unlimited power of capital in urban space. Parallel to advocating the maintenance of aged buildings the author speaks about the necessity of new construction as well. But her main argument implies the necessity of keeping the balance between the buildings of different age and physical condition, which on its side requires active involvement of government with planning tools. Author argues that only in such balance is it possible to assure the sustainable development of cities and districts. 

On 4th April 2016 Georgian Prime Minister George Kvirikashvili, after leaving the economic forum declared that principles of neoclassical economics don’t work in practice and it is time to change something in the established attitudes. I think in the coming years Georgia will join with the global trend and will start rethinking of Neoliberal economic principles and will try to form the mixed economy where together with private capital state planning and intervention has a decisive role. In this case the ideas of Jacobs can have invaluable practical importance for us.

Condition 3: The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones.

Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them. By old buildings I mean not museum-piece old buildings, not old buildings in an excellent and expensive state of rehabilitation - although these make fine ingredients - but also a good lot of plain, ordinary, low-value old buildings, including some rundown old buildings. 

If a city area has only new buildings, the enterprises that can exit 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 the construction. However the cost are paid off, the have to be paid off. And for this reason, enterprises that support the cost of new construction must be capable of paying a relatively high overhead - high in comparison to that necessarily required by old buildings. To support such high overheads, the enterprises must be either (a) high profit or (b) well subsidized. 

If you look about, you will see that only operations that are well established, high-turnover, standardized or heavily subsidized can afford, commonly, to carry the costs of new construction. Chain stores, chain restaurants and banks go into new construction. But neighborhood bars, foreign restaurants and pawn shops go into older buildings. Supermarkets and shoe stores often go into new buildings; good bookstores and antique dealers seldom do. Well-subsidized opera and art museums often go into new buildings. But the unformalized feeders of the arts - studios, galleries, stores for musical instruments and art supplies, backrooms where the low earning power of seat and a table can absorb uneconomic discussions - these go into old buildings. Perhaps more significant, hundreds of ordinary enterprises, necessary to the safety and public life of streets and neighborhoods, and appreciated for their convenience and personal quality can make out successfully in old buildings, but are inexorably slain by the high overhead of new construction. 

As for really new ideas of any kind - no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be - there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use old buildings. New ideas must use old buildings. 

Even the enterprises that can support new construction in cities need old construction in their immediate vicinity. Otherwise they are part of a total attraction and total environment that is economically too limited - and therefore functionally too limited to be lively, interesting and convenient. Flourishing diversity anywhere in a city means the mingling of high - yield, middling - yield, low - yield no and no - yield enterprises. 

The only harm of aged buildings to a city district or street is the harm that eventually comes of nothing but old age - the harm that lies in everything being old and everything becoming worn out. But a city area in such situation is not a failure because of being all old. It is the other way around. The area is all old because it is a failure. For some other reason or combination of reasons, all its enterprises or people are unable to support new constraction. It has perhaps, failed to hang on to its own people or enterprises that do become successful enough to support new building or rehabilitation; they leave when they become this successful. It has also failed to attract newcomers with the choice; they see no opportunities or attractions here. And in some cases, such an area may be so infertile economically that enterprises which might grow into successes in other places, and build or rebuild their shelter, never make enough money in this place to do so.

A successful city district becomes a kind of ever-normal granary so far as construction is concerned. Some of the old buildings, year by year, are replaced by new ones - or rehabilitated to a degree equivalent to replacement. Over the years there is, therefore, constantly a mixture of buildings of many ages and types. This is of course, a dynamic process, with what was once new in the mixture eventually becoming what is old in the mixture. 

We are dealing here again, as we were in the case of mixed primary uses, with the economic effects of time. But in this case we are dealing with the economics of time not hour by hour through the day, but the economics of time by decades and generations. 
Time makes the high building costs of one generation the bargains of a following generation. Time pays off original capital costs, and this depreciation can be reflected in the yields required from a building. Time makes certain structures obsolete for some enterprises, and they become available to others. Time can make the space efficiencies of one generation the space luxuries of another generation. One century’s building commonplace is another century’s useful aberration. 

The economic necessity for old buildings mixed with new is not an oddity connected with the precipitous rise in building costs since the war, and especially throughout the 1950’s. Tu be sure, the difference between the yield most postwar building must bring and the yield that pre - Depression buildings must bring is especially sharp. In commercial space, the difference between carrying cost per square foot can be as much as 100 or 200 percent even though the older buildings may be better built than the new and even though the maintenance costs of all buildings, including old ones, have risen. Old buildings were a necessary ingredient of city diversity back in the 1920’s and the 1890’s. Old buildings will still be a necessity when today;s new buildings are the old ones. This has been, still is, and will be, true no matter how erratic and how steady construction costs themselves are, because a depreciated building requires less income than one which has not yet paid off its capital costs.Steadily rising construction costs simply accentuate the need for old buildings. Possibly they also make necessary a higher proportion of old buildings in the total street or district mixture, because rising building costs raise the general threshold of pecuniary success required to support the cost of new construction.

A few years ago, I gave a talk at a city design conference about the social need for commercial diversity in cities. Soon my words began coming back at me from designers, planners and students in the form of a slogan (which I certainly did not invent): “We must leave room for the corner grocery store!”

At first I thought this must be a figure of speech, the part standing for the whole. But soon I began to receive in the mail plans and drawings for projects and renewal areas in which, literally, room had been left here and there at great intervals for a corner grocery store. These schemes were accompanied by letters that said, “ See, we have taken to heart what you said.”

This corner - grocery gimmick is a thin, patronizing conception of city diversity, possibly suited to a village of the last century, but hardly to a vital city district of today. Lone little groceries, in fact, do badly in cities as a rule. They are typically a mark of stagnant and undiverse gray area. 
Nevertheless, the designers of these sweetly meant inanities were not simply being perverse. They were doing, probably, the best they could under the economic conditions set for them. A suburban-type shopping center at some place in the project, and this wan spotting of corner groceries, were the most that could be hoped for. For these were schemes contemplating either great blankets of new construction, or new construction combined with extensive, prearranged rehabilitation. Any vigorous range of diversity was precluded in advance by the consistently high overhead. ( The prospects are made still poorer by insufficient primary mixtures of uses and therefore insufficient spread of customers through the day.) 

Even the lone groceries, if they were ever built, could hardly be the cozy enterprises envisioned by their designers. To carry their high overhead, they must either be (a) subsidized - by whom and why? - or (b) converted into routinized, high-turnover mills. 
Large swatches of construction built at one time are inherently inefficient for sheltering wide ranges of cultural, population, and business diversity. They are even inefficient for sheltering much range of mere commercial diversity. This can be seen at a place like Stuyvesant Town In New York. In 1959, more than a decade after operation began, of the 32 storefronts that comprise Stuyvesant Town’s commercial space, seven were either empty or were being used uneconomically (for storage, window advertising only, and the like). This represented disuse or underuse of 22 percent of the fronts. At the same time, across the bordering streets, where buildings of every age and condition are mingled, were 140 storefronts, of which 11 were empty or used uneconomically, representing a disuse or underuse of only 7 percent. Actually, the disparity is greater than this would appear, because the empty fronts in the old streets were mostly small, and in linear feet represented less than 7 percent, a condition which was not true of the project stores. The good business side of the street is the age-mingled side, even though a great share of its customers are Stuyvesant Town people, and even though they must cross wide and dangerous traffic arteries to reach it. This reality is acknowledged by chain stores and supermarkets too, which have been building new quarters in the age - mingled setting instead of filling those empty fronts in the project.

One-age construction in city areas is sometimes protected nowadays from the threat of more efficient and responsive commercial competition. This protection - Which is nothing more or less than commercial monopoly - is considered very “progressive” in planning circles. The Society Hill renewal plan for Philadelphia will, by zoning, prevent competition of it’s developer’s shopping centres throughout a whole city district. The city’s planners have also worked out a “food plan” for the area, which means offering a monopolistic restaurant chain for whole district. Nobody else’s food allowed! The Hyde Park-Kenwood renewal district of Chicago reserves a monopoly on almost all commerce for a suburban-type shopping center to be the property of that plan’s principal developer. In the huge Southwest redevelopment district of Washington, the major housing developer seems to be going so far as to eliminate competition with himself. The original plans for this scheme contemplated a central, suburban-type shopping center plus a smattering of convenience stores - our old friend, the lonely corner grocery gimmick. A shopping center economist predicted that these convenience stores might lead to diminished business for the main, suburban-type center which, itself, will have to support high overhead. To protect it, the convenience stores were dropped from the scheme. It is thus that routinized monopolistic packages of substitute city are palmed off as “planned shopping”. 

Monopoly planning can make financial successes of such inherently inefficient and stagnant one - age operations. But it cannot thereby create, in some magical fashion, an equivalent to city diversity. Nor can it substitute for the inherent efficiency, in cities, of mingled age and inherently varied overhead. 

Age of buildings, in relation to usefulness or desirability, is an extremely relative thing. Nothing in a vital city district seems to be too old to be chosen for use by those who have choice - or to have its place taken, finally, by something new. And this usefulness of the old is not simply a matter of architectural distinction or charm. In the Back-of-the-Yards, Chicago, no weather-beaten, undistinguished, run-down, presumably obsolete frame house seems to be too far gone to lure out savings and to instigate borrowing - because this is a neighborhood that people are not leaving as they achieve enough success for choice. In Greenwich Village, Almost no old building is scorned by middle-class families hunting a bargain in a lively district, or by rehabilitators seeking a golden egg. In successful districts, old buildings “filter up”. 

At the other extreme, in Miami Beach, where novelty is the sovereign remedy, hotels ten years old are considered aged and are passed up because others are newer. Newness, and its superficial gloss of well-being, is a very perishable commodity. 

Many city occupants and enterprises have no need for new construction. The floor of the building in which this book is being written is occupied also by health club with a gym, a firm of ecclesiastical decorators, an insurgent Democratic party reform club, a Liberal party political club, a music society, an accordionists’ association, a retired importer who sells mate by mail, a man who sells paper and who also takes care of shipping the mate, a dental laboratory, a studio for watercolor lessons, and a maker of costume jewelry. Among the tenants who were here and gone shortly before I came in, were a man who rented out tuxedos, a union local and a Haitian dance troupe. There is no place for the likes of us in new construction. And the last thing we need is new construction. What we need, and a lot of others need, is old construction in a lively district, which some among us can help make livelier. 

Nor is new residential building in cities an unadulterated good. Many disadvantages accompany new residential city building; and the value placed on various advantages, or the penalties accruing from certain disadvantages , are given different weights by different people. Some people, for instance, prefer more space for the money (or equal space for less money) to a new dinette designed for midgets. Some people like walls they don’t hear through. This is advantage they can get with many old buildings but not with new apartments, whether they are public housing at $14 a room per month or luxury housing at 95$ a room per month. Some people would rather pay for improvements in their living conditions partly in labor and ingenuity, and by selecting which improvements are most important to them, instead of being indiscriminately improved, and all at a cost of money. In spontaneously unslumming slums, where people are staying by choice, it is easy to observe how many ordinary citizens have heard of color, lighting and furnishing devices for converting deep or dismal spaces into pleasant and useful rooms, have heard of bedroom air-conditioning and of electric window fans, have learned about taking non-bearing partitions, and have even learned about throwing two too small flats into one. Minglings of old buildings, with consequent minglings in living costs and tastes, are essential to get diversity and stability in residential populations, as well as diversity in enterprises. 

Among the most admirable and enjoyable sights to be found along the sidewalks of big cities are the ingenious adaptations of old quarters to new uses. The town-house parlor that becomes a craftsmen’s showroom, the stable that becomes a house, the basement that becomes an immigrant’s club, the garage or brewery that becomes a theater, the beauty parlor that becomes a ground floor of a duplex, the warehouse that becomes a factory for chinese food, the dancing school that becomes a pamphlet printer’s, the cobbler’s that becomes a church with livingly painted windows - the stained glass of the poor - the butcher shop that becomes a restaurant: these are kinds of minor changes forever occurring where city districts have vitality and are responsive to human needs. 
Consider the history of the no-yield space that has recently been rehabilitated by the Arts in Louisville Association as a theater, music room, art gallery, library, bar and restaurant. It started life as a fashionable athletic club, outlived that and became a school, then the stable of a dairy company, then a riding school, then a finishing and dancing school, another athletic club, an artist’s studio, a school again, a blacksmith’s, a factory, a warehouse, and it is now a flourishing center of the arts. Who could anticipate or provide for such a succession of hopes and schemes? Only an unimaginative man would think he could, only an arrogant man would want to. 

These eternal changes and permutations among old city buildings can be called makeshifts only in the most pedantic sense. It is rather that a form of raw material has been found in the right place. It has been put to a use that might otherwise be unborn.

What is makeshift and woebegone is to see city diversity outlawed. Outside the vast, middle-income Bronx project of Parkchester, where the standardized, routinized commerce (with its share of empty fronts) is protected from unauthorized competition or augmentation within the project, we can see such an outcast huddle, supported by Parkchester people. Beyond a corner of the project, hideously clumped on a stretch of pocked asphalt left over from a gas station, are a few of the other things the project people apparently need: quick loans, musical instruments, camera exchange, Chinese restaurant, odd-lot clothing, How many other needs remain unfilled? What is wanted becomes academic when mingled building age is replaced by the economic rigor mortis of one-age construction, with its inherent inefficiency and consequent need for forms of “protectionism”.

Cities need a mingling of old buildings to cultivate primary - diversity mixtures, as well as secondary diversity. In particular, they need old buildings to incubate new primary diversity. 

If the incubation is successful enough, the yield of the buildings can, and often does, rise. Grady Clay reports that this is already observable, for instance, in the Louisville sample-shoe market. “Rents were very low when the market began to attract shoppers” he says. “For a shop about twenty feet by forty feet, they were $25 to $50 a month. They have already gone up about $75.” Many a city’s enterprises which become important economic assets start small and poor, and become able, eventually, to afford carrying costs of rehabilitation or new construction. But this process could not occur without that low-yield space in the right place, in which to start. 

Areas where better mixtures of primary diversity must be cultivated will have to depend heavily on old buildings, especially at the beginning of deliberate attempts to catalyze diversity. If Brooklyn, New York, as an example, is ever cultivate the quantity of diversity and degree of attraction and liveliness it needs, it must take maximum economic advantage of combinations of residence and work. Without these primary combinations, in effective and concentrated proportions, it is hard to see how Brooklyn can begin catalyze its potential for secondary diversity.
Brooklyn cannot well compete with suburbs for capturing big and well-established manufacturers seeking a location. At least it cannot at present, certainly not by trying to beat out the suburbs at their game, on their terms. Brooklyn has quite different assets. If Brooklyn is to make the most of work-residence primary mixtures, it must depend mainly on incubating work enterprises, and then holding on to them as long as it can. While it has them, it must combine them with sufficiently high concentrations of residential population, and with short blocks, to make the most of their presence. The more it makes of their presence, the more firmly it is apt to hold work uses. 

But to incubate those wor uses, Brooklyn needs old buildings, needs them for exactly the task they fulfill there. For Brooklyn is quite an incubator. Each year, more manufacturing enterprises leave Brooklyn for other locations than move into Brooklyn from elsewhere. Yet the number of factories in Brooklyn has been constantly growing. A thesis prepared by three students at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute explains this paradox well:
The secret is that Brooklyn is an incubator of industry. Small business are constantly being started there. A couple of machinists, perhaps, will get tired of working for someone else and arted up.start out themselves in the back of a garage. They’ll prosper a rented loft; 
Why do they move when they build for themselves? For one thing, Brooklyn offers too few attractions aside from those a new industry finds are necessities - old buildings and nearness to the wide range of other skills and supplies a small enterprise must have, For another, little or no effort has been made to plan for working needs - e.g., great sums of money are spent on highways choked with private automobiles rushing into the city and out of it; no comparable thought or money is spent on trucking expressways for manufactures who use the city’s old buildings, its docks and its railways.

Brooklyn, like most of our city areas in decline, has more old buildings than it needs. To put in another way, many of its neighborhoods have for a long time lacked gradual increments of new buildings. Yet if Brooklyn is ever to build upon its inherent assets and advantages - which is the only way successful city building can be done - many of those old buildings, well distributed, will be essential to the process. Improvement must come by supplying the conditions for generating diversity that are missing, not by wiping out old buildings in great swathes.

We can see around us, from the days preceding project building, many examples of decaying city neighborhoods built up all at once. Frequently such neighborhoods have begun life as fashionable areas; sometimes they have had instead a solid middle - class start. Every city has such physically homogenous neighborhoods.

Usually just such neighborhoods have been handicapped in every way, so far as generating diversity is concerned, We cannot blame their poor staying power and stagnation entirely on their most obvious misfortune: being built all at once. Nevertheless, this is one of the handicaps of such neighborhoods, and unfortunately its effects can persist long after the buildings have become aged. 

When such an area is new, it offers no economic possibilities to city diversity. The practical penalties of dullness, from this and other causes, stamp the neighborhood early. It becomes a place to leave. By the time the building have indeed aged, their only useful city attribute is low value, which by itself is not enough. 

Neighborhoods built up all at once change little physically over the years as a rule. The little physical change that does occur is for the worse - gradual dilapidation, a few random, shabby new uses here and there. People look at these few, random differences and regard them as evidence, and perhaps as cause, of drastic change. Fight blight! They regret that the neighborhood has changed. Yet the fact is, physically it has changed remarkably little.

Finally comes the decision, after exhortations to fix up and fight blight have failed, that the whole thing must be wiped out and a new cycle started. Perhaps some of the old buildings will be left if they can be “renewed” into the economic equivalent of new buildings. A new corpse is laid out. It does not smell yet, but it is just as dead, just as incapable of the constant adjustments, adaptations and permutations that make up the processes of life. 

There is no reason why this dismal, foredoomed cycle need be repeated. If such an area is examined to see which of the other three conditions for generating diversity are missing, and then those missing conditions are corrected as well as they can be, some of the old buildings must go: extra streets must be added, the concentration of people must be heightened, room for new primary uses must be found, public and private. But a good mingling of the old buildings must remain, and in remaining they will have become something more than mere decay from the past or evidence of previous failure. They will have become the shelter which is necessary, and valuable to the district, for many varieties of middling-, low - and no -yield diversity. The economic value of new buildings is replaceable in cities. It is replaceable by the spending of more construction money. But the economic value of old buildings is irreplaceable at will. It is created by time. This economic requisite for diversity is a requisite that vital city neighborhoods can only inherit, and then sustain over the years.