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Last Harvest: From Cornfield to New Town: Real Estate Development from George Washington to the Builders of the Twenty-First Century, and Why We Live in Houses Anyway
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Customer Reviews
Rating:  - An impressive piece of work
An impressive piece of work, which I read at two sittings. The review you want to read is Penelope Green's, at the New York Times -- I'll put the link in a comment, as Amazon won't allow outside links in their reviews.
Rybczynski writes a very nice portrait of the contemporary subdivision planning and building process, with the focus on a particular exurb near his home in Philadelphia. In the process, you'll learn a lot about the history of suburban living in America -- and perhaps unlearn some persistent misinformation from urban intellectuals who don't like the suburbs. Highly recommended.
Happy reading--
Peter D. Tillman
Rating: - A Man A Plan- Daleville
"The modest single-family house is the glory of the suburban tradition."
"It offers its inhabitants a comprehensible image of independence and privacy while also accepting the responsibility of community."- Rober A.M. Stern
Andres Duany is harshly critical of conventional suburban planning, "The classic suburb is less a community than an agglomeration of houses, shops, and offices connected to one another by cars, not by the fabric of life."
But the developers of New Daleville have a dream: shared public spaces,walking paths, parks, all reminding people they are not only living in private homes but they are also members of a community. Instead of building ugly landscaped berms around ugly developments, people friendly communities should be well planned attractive and useful. They demonstrate how Rothenburg and other old European towns which are incredibly quaint, have the delicate relationship that exists between the large and small spaces.
If you have any interest in suburban development, this is a well written, easy to understand book. Rybczynski tells of New Daleville a plan of developers in Pennsylvania who hope to turn a cornfield into a neotraditional neighborhood.
The problem is that everyone hate developers; "Conservationists decry the loss of agricultural land; proponents of mass transit don't like spending more money on highway construction; environmentalists oppose continued dependence on fossil fuel, sociologist contend that low density suburbs undermine community..."
Getting New Daleville built takes a lot of expertise, compromise, patience, money. ambition, and optimism about the future.
Rybczynski has done a lot of research and has crunched a lot of numbers to tell the whole story with all the facts and makes it interesting.
Rating: - Excellent book
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.
Rating:  - good journalism, so-so social science
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?
Rating: - Behind the scenes in real estate development
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.
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