At CNU 34 in Bentonville, Andrés Duany led a session titled “The Invaluable Lessons of Failure: A Look Back at the Mistakes that New Urbanists Can’t Afford to Forget!” The panel included Frank Starkey, Chief Places Person at People Places, LLC; Louis Nequette, founder of Nequette Architecture & Design; and Ward Davis, principal of High Street Real Estate & Development.
The premise was direct: New Urbanists have spent decades criticizing suburbia, zoning, sprawl, and conventional development, but the movement has its own record of mistakes. The value of the session was that the speakers did not treat failure as an embarrassment. They treated it as field knowledge.
Too Timid Where It Should Be Bold, Too Controlling Where It Should Be Flexible
The panel’s strongest message was that New Urbanism has often been too timid where it should be bold, and too controlling where it should be flexible. The speakers argued that failure often comes from trying to please too many constituencies and attracting no one with conviction.
A project needs a clear promise. It cannot be all things to all buyers, regulators, lenders, architects, and future homeowners’ associations.
The HOA Problem
The discussion returned several times to HOAs. The warning was blunt.
Early buyers often enter a project because they believe in the vision. Later buyers may come mainly for appreciation, resale value, or control. At that point, the HOA can become hostile to the community’s original purpose.
Buyers must be educated before closing, not after. If the association is later run by people interested only in keeping assessments low, the physical environment begins to decline. If it is run by people hostile to the original civic idea, the project loses its soul by procedure.
Scale Is Still an Unresolved Failure
A second theme was scale. New Urbanists may build 20 communities while production builders build 20,000. That imbalance matters.
The panel did not present scale as a crude developer’s obsession. It presented scale as the movement’s unresolved failure. New Urbanism has too often depended on exceptional designers, exceptional developers, exceptional codes, and exceptional patience.
That does not produce enough housing, enough neighborhoods, or enough influence.
The business model has to become repeatable. It has to be reduced to checklists without killing the idea. That is the contradiction the movement has not solved.
The Pursuit of Perfection Can Defeat the Good
The speakers warned against excessive preciousness. The pursuit of perfection often defeats the good.
Repetition is not the enemy if the product is good. A high-quality repeated building can create economy, legibility, and affordability. The savings that come from repetition can become virtuous if they produce better streets, better houses, and lower costs.
The panel pointed to New Town at St. Charles and Steve Witicar as examples worth studying because they learned how to repeat without making repetition deadening.
New Urbanists Must Take Suburbia Seriously
The discussion also challenged New Urbanists to take suburbia more seriously.
Conventional builders have not stood still. Their houses often have better interiors, and buyers buy interiors. New Urbanists may care most about the street, the block, and the civic realm, but the buyer still walks through the kitchen, the bath, the closet, and the family room.
A movement that ignores the science and discipline of the Pultes of the world is choosing ignorance.
Production builders know how to sell. They know how to simplify. They know how to build at speed.
Architecture Needs More Economy of Means
That led to a hard point about architecture. The panel urged a return to economy of means: simple plans, ordinary dimensional lumber, background buildings, and today’s vernacular.
Older neighborhoods were not built as collections of masterpieces. Much of the best American domestic architecture was built by tradesmen, not architects.
The lesson is not to lower standards. It is time to stop pretending every building deserves the same level of attention.
Eighty percent of the fabric can be the background. Twenty percent can carry the architectural emphasis.
Too Much Variety Creates Noise
The speakers also cautioned against showroom variety. Too much variation becomes visual noise and costs without value.
The better approach is disciplined repetition, with enough difference to avoid monotony and enough consistency to make the place coherent.
The street matters more than the individual house.
A buyer should not be shown a single house as an isolated object. The buyer should be made to experience the street: park away, walk in, and understand the house as part of a place.
Humility in Design
Louis Nequette’s comments placed value on humility in design.
The Auburn tradition under Sam Mockbee was invoked as a model of creativity, grit, and practical invention rather than academic classicism. The point was not to turn every architect into Palladio. It was to build well, avoid embarrassment, and forgive the imperfect.
Landscape architects were described as central because streets, shade, planting, and outdoor rooms often determine whether a place works before architecture gets a chance to speak.
Housing Architects Don’t Really Have Clients
The panel also exposed a basic mismatch in housing practice.
Architects who design housing do not really have “clients” in the usual sense. They have customers, often unseen until after the product is built.
That changes the relationship.
A custom architect can educate a client over the course of months. A developer and production architect must anticipate a buyer they may never meet.
That requires discipline, market knowledge, and less romanticism.
The Case for Simpler Codes
The critique of coding was severe.
The speakers argued for lighter, shorter, more durable codes. Andres himself was said to have moved beyond some of the detailed dogma preserved in old videos and early lectures. The older message hardened into doctrine after the market, the movement, and Duany’s own thinking had moved on.
The simpler the code, the better.
The briefer the code, the better.
A good community can include vinyl siding. A code should protect the public realm without freezing the project into an expensive diagram.
Building Codes Remain a Major Barrier
The panel also identified building codes as an unresolved front.
New Urbanists spent decades fighting zoning, but many of the projects they now want to build are blocked or distorted by building-code rules.
Small mixed-use buildings, missing-middle housing, single-stair buildings, live-work units, and modest multifamily forms often fail not because the plan is wrong but because the regulatory framework makes them too expensive or too complicated.
The movement won part of the zoning argument but left the building code argument underdeveloped.
Don’t Start with the Most Ambitious Building Type
The speakers warned especially against starting with the most ambitious building type.
The “3M” building — masonry, multistory, mixed-use — should not be the opening move in most new communities. That is how projects fail.
Communities usually begin with one-story buildings, basic lots, simple streets, and adaptable fabric.
Starting with a three-story mixed-use is like giving birth to a teenager.
A new town should begin as a baby with the DNA to grow. The project must be designed for maturation, not forced maturity.
Speed Has Become the Tail That Wags the Dog
That point is connected to the discussion of time.
Developers often want their capital back in seven years and expect a project life of ten. That expectation has become dogma.
“Scale” is often misunderstood as doing something bigger, when in practice, it means doing it faster.
Speed has become the tail that wags the dog.
New Urbanist projects need enough streets and lots built early to establish momentum, but they also need flexibility to adapt to the market. Overplanning can kill that flexibility.
Community Is More Than Design Symbols
The most pointed cultural observation was that some trailer communities, resort communities, and places like Margaritaville may now offer more lived community than many New Urbanist projects.
Their buyers are not necessarily coming for appreciation or architectural doctrine. They are buying a lifestyle in pure form.
People may not sit on the formal New Urbanist front porch, but they will show up for the nightly fiesta.
That is not a small failure.
It suggests that New Urbanism has sometimes designed the symbols of community better than the rituals that sustain it.
Final Takeaway
The panel’s implied recommendation was a more practical, less doctrinaire New Urbanism.
Build more streets. Use lighter codes. Accept today’s vernacular. Study production builders without condescension. Reward developers who build affordable, community-friendly neighborhoods even when imperfect. Let places grow. Do not demand legacy projects every time. Market the simplest projects. Design communities with the capacity to mature rather than the burden of arriving complete.
The session’s final lesson was that New Urbanism must recover its experimental nerve.
The movement began by challenging the development system. It now risks becoming another system of rules, awards, aesthetic anxieties, and inherited formulas.
The speakers called for something harder and more useful:
Build more. Simplify more. Forgive more. Repeat what works. Stop confusing complexity with quality.
Also read: Low-Cost Road Crossings Using Culvert Systems
Subscribe to our YouTube channel.