This could be about cityhood movements that just will not go away no matter how directly and firmly the voters tell them to; they're like that cold sore that keeps coming back. This is about those developers hell-bent on building cookie-cutter clutter buildings. Everywhere. Oh, and they expect the taxpayers to pony up some additional profits.
And TOD isn't the only one who finds these buildings to be architectural trash and aesthetically odious. Click that link. The entire article is well worth reading but one of the many knock-out punches is:
The “Stick Frame Over Podium” building—a model of cheap, expedient construction—is creating freight trains of mute boxes cropping up throughout America’s urban landscape. These dreary buildings have made so much money for their developers that the typology is changing apartment living for enormous numbers of people. A code evolution has caused a revolution in how buildings can dominate the aesthetics of our communities.
The article offers many insights into how this plague rots the very soul of our community offering little but profits to developers and possibly to enabling friends and family in city bureaucracies and administrations. Is there any hope? Perhaps a glimmer:
I think we will soon see the inoculation of the recession vaccine. In the coming months, the low interest rates that power development will be jacked up to temper the inflation that post-pandemic expectation has nurtured. When the cost of money rises, the savings of stick-frame-over-podium vanishes. And developers will stop building them.
This hope is mitigated by the reality of this cheap, but highly profitable for the developers, development practice:
But, like the chicken pox, there will be a shingles replay for our thoughtless intoxication with expedience and profit. Cheap boxes do not weather well. Skins intended to keep weather out only do so until their seams fail—and they eventually do. Flat roofs inevitably welcome water inside, and flat faces made of veneers decay in the freeze and thaw, expansion and contraction, of wind and water.
And the author shares his fear that greed will conquer all:
[...]this huge wave of 5-over-2 buildings will fail in just a generation or two. The difference is that while cars can be recycled, we may discover that the rotting sticks of these cheap buildings might be easier to remove than reuse or repair. Will we learn from their failure?
What the author fails to mention, or notice, is that this planned obsolescence is intentional on the part of the developers. This will be timed pretty nicely with the expiration of tax handouts. These gulags will look so trashy that the next crop of bureaucrats and politicians will all but beg them to "re-develop" these odious hovels. And as long at the residents of this city are held powerless by the city charter, we can expect developers to get some pretty hefty tax handouts, just as they did the first time.
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