Last Harvest: How a Cornfield Became New Daleville by Witold Rybczynski Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Last Harvest: How a Cornfield Became New Daleville
Book Review: Excellent book
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a great book on how suburban development works. It is very well researched and all the ideas are based on deep reasoning. There's no opinionated ranting, it was a pleasure to follow the stories described in the book.
If you are into development, new urbanism and urban design, this book's for you.
Book Review: good journalism, so-so social science
Summary: 4 Stars
When this book focuses on the story of one development in Chester County (a suburb of Philadelphia), it is quite good. It is a breezy, easy-to-read story of how one developer views the zoning process.
Some of the things I got from this book:
*Chester County's suburbanites want to limit development as much as possible. As the author notes, "New houses mean extra cars, extra traffic at rush hour, more kids in the schools, and in the long run, higher taxes."
*As a result, Chester County's zoning board tends to favor low density development; the size of an average lot in Chester County increased from half an acre in the 1960s to an acre and a half in the 1990s.
*One reason housing prices are so high is that developers have to bribe local residents to get new development approved. For example, the developer profiled in this book had to buy neighbors' support by giving away 12,500 square feet of open space.
*In Chester County, the price of land has become a greater percentage than ever of housing prices, due to (according to the developer profiled in this book) zoning-induced scarcity. In 1976, the cost of a lot represented only 15% of a Chester County house's selling price- today, the cost of land represents 30% of the sale price.
*Contrary to conventional wisdom among property rights types, homeowners' associations and the restrictive covenants they enforce are not a result of free choice among consumers. According to the developer of New Daleville, "all our projects include community associations. The local municipal governments insist on it" so that the associations (rather than municipalities) will be responsible for the costs of street maintenance.
On the other hand, the book's attempts to describe broader social trends outside Chester County are occasionally simplistic. For example, the book repeats the common chestnut that the East and West Coasts are more anti-development than the rest of the country - but doesn't supply any real evidence for this assertion.
Similarly, the book's general discussion of sprawl is a bit confused. On the one hand, it claims that there is "no significant relationship betweeen sprawl and urban decline" - but on the other, it correctly points out that "there is no widely agreed-upon definition of sprawl". But if we don't know what sprawl is, how can we know what its results are?
Book Review: Behind the scenes in real estate development
Summary: 5 Stars
If you work in a field related to real estate development, this is a great book to read. The author tracks the development of a small subdivision from initial planning to government permitting to final sales. All the while, he provides insight into the evolution of residential real estate sales in the US, and the varying perspectives of the main characters in the process. This is a great read for urban (and not-so-urban) planners. I highly recommend the book.Book Review: Excellent Overview
Summary: 4 Stars
A great book for anyone who has driven through the ex-urbs lately and wondered why and how suburban development is the way it is. A good primer for both the aspiring residential developer and the township board member.Book Review: Planning
Summary: 4 Stars
A design profession relief from the more informative norm that planning, landscape architecture, urban design, and architecture are represented by. Rybczynski presents, in a very storyteller-like way, the process from visioning to implementation to construction, and finally, the homeowner's first thoughts of their new home. It is rare to read accounts of this genre that keep you focused on how things will actually work out in the end: especially when thinking of the arduous process behind the finalization of land development projects. Although most of the book was explained with tremendous success towards transmitting the sequences involved in building communities, it would have given the reader a better perspective to see how the process was transformed and the plans that made all of the discourse worth it in the end.
Nevertheless, a great account told in honest fashion, and backed by historic and cultural facts that have shaped land development in the US.