Question:
I like the traditional detailing on the facades, but I'm wondering if there are good examples of modern architecture in a neotraditional environment?

Kramer:
No. [laughs]

Kunstler:
If you go to Seaside, Fla., there is a part of Seaside called Ruskin Square, where they deliberately encouraged contemporary architects to design some of the buildings to demonstrate that within the Seaside codes, it was possible to put any kind of architecture.

Kramer:
That was my smart-ass answer! I would love to see great examples of modern architecture that would fit into Haile Village Center—even now. It's been almost impossible to get any positive reaction or influence from any of the local architects in Gainesville who have any interest in doing anything [modern]. I would say that if you made a survey—and I don't mean to belittle any particular area, especially Gainesville—but if you make a survey of the recent, modern architecture of ordinary America, it's pretty lousy. And the places where people would work and shop and play ordinarily—if you took those as examples of ordinary buildings that you're going to use, I don't think there are good examples. So we're developing things, we're using precedents that we think are appropriate for the region, but we certainly have never ruled out modern architecture in Haile Village Center.

Miller:
I might quickly add: If any of you are familiar with Prospect, just outside Longmont, Colorado—a portion of that TND also has a section of very contemporary, modern buildings.

Question:
How can we really do something different in the face of all the current habits and behavior of corporate America building the kind of commercial stuff they do?

Kunstler:
I try to make this point not totally directly, but slightly, 10 percent off: When I say that the future is telling us that we're going to have to change, I mean it. One of the things that I've been predicting for the past couple of years is that it's not going to take very much in the way of oil disruptions to put national chain retail (and a lot of other things) out of business. It will only take mild to moderate disruptions of the oil supply and pricing schedule to put Wal-Mart out of business. If they can't depend absolutely on predicting what the cost of their gasoline is going to be in the next fiscal quarter, their warehouse on wheels is not going to be a profit-making activity. And that's going to be the end of them.

So I'm predicting that big-box retail is going to fail—and catastrophically—within the next five to ten years, perhaps even sooner. And that one of the features of our lives, going into the future, is going to be the reduced scale of many, many activities—everything from retail to schooling is going to have to take place on a smaller scale, more equitably distributed around, not just in central places. In other words, to a certain extent, this is a self-limiting disease and we can see the horizon, the limits, ahead already.

Question:
Are there any attempts to retrofit suburbia and make suburbia have a "center" or a "village"?

Kramer:
When I stopped my presentation with Andres Duany in the ditch, there were a few more slides, which presented a new project we are doing that is exactly that. It's a 52-acre infill project in the middle of built-out suburbia, within the city of Gainesville, which has a very new urbanist-friendly city commission that asked us to come to the city and develop. I don't know how many places that happens, but they asked us to come and do a project in the city and to build a center for this area of Gainesville that didn't have a center. We're building on 50 acres a village that will be probably twice as dense as Haile Village Center and have much more multi-family housing, plus single-family housing, live/work, all of that, but will also have 80,000 square feet of office retail with residential above, in a neighborhood of single-family homes that fronts on an arterial road—all the things that you normally have in suburbia, but with a center. I think it certainly takes local regulators and government to recognize the need and then to encourage it, to allow developers to do it without such a battle. In this case it's a very friendly, cooperative venture so far.

Question:
On a private, new urbanist street, where do the services go, the electrical transformers and so on? I looked for them in your slides, but couldn't see them.

Kramer:
In general, in a traditional neighborhood, you try to put all of the wire utilities—the cable TV, the telephone, the electric, and in our case the natural gas—in the alley, so all the meters that hang on the buildings and look ugly, are in the alley. I showed a couple alley shots that had all of the services placed there, and they weren't too ugly anyway, but we still don't want those out on the front of the house.

The wet things—water, sewer, storm—go in front, under the street. We did the private roads because we couldn't wait—we didn't think—till we had changed all of the rules at the county level (public works, land-use regulations). We had the option of creating private streets in one part of Haile Plantation and that's what we did. The street widths were dictated still; we have sections of pavement that suddenly widen from 20 to 22 feet because an alley is opening into it and because of trip counts—really inflexible traffic engineering at the village scale. Those are things that need to be overcome, but, in general, we did that because we thought we couldn't wait until the standards were changed.

In the city of Gainesville with our new projects, the standards are changed; we have a new standard based on the model that we've created to allow them to change the standard.

Question:
What are the homeowners' fees in Haile Plantation?

Kramer:
The homeowners' fees are $35 per month, which, by today's standards, is not a whole lot.

Read James Howard Kunstler's remarks from TND Breakfast V
Read Robert Kramer's remarks from TND Breakfast V
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