By Katherine Salant
Saturday, July 26, 2008

Many years ago when I was backpacking through Asia, I bought books based on the number of pages per dollar. This sounds hopelessly philistine, but the best buys were long books. I read many classics, including, as I recall, "A Tale of Two Cities" and "The Brothers Karamazov."

On that years-long journey, hefty novels made a two-day train ride pass quickly. But now my vacations are only one or two weeks, so I like books with short chapters. For a real-estate-oriented read, Witold Rybczynski's "Last Harvest," recently issued in paperback, fits the bill perfectly.

Rybczynski is known for lively writing on architecture and housing. For this book, he spent several years following a real estate development deal and the subsequent construction of New Daleville, a community in Chester County, Pa.

His you-are-there treatment includes many brief asides on the history of land development and tract home building in the United States. Among other things, we learn that land development schemes began with the first European settlers, perhaps the most famous being William Penn and his 30 million acres in Pennsylvania. We also learn that many famous Americans have dabbled in this, including George Washington -- he tried unsuccessfully to develop land in the Ohio River Valley.

Each chapter of "Last Harvest" is 10 pages or less. Besides the reader-friendly length, the short chapters are a clever way to reinforce one of Rybczynski's major themes: Most residential development deals entail an endless number of small steps over a protracted period of time. If the goal is something new and different, the process will be even longer. In this case the something different was a New Urbanist type of community on the rural fringes of Philadelphia's suburbs.

A hallmark of New Urbanism is density, with houses close to each other, front porches close to the street, garages accessed from rear alleys, pocket parks and shopping within walking distance.

Although such communities have been built all over the country, New Urbanism is still a novel idea in Chester County and not one that the locals in Londonderry Township embraced. Most of the homeowners love the rural character of their township -- the 1,600 residents are scattered over 12 square miles -- and they don't want any development at all.

The developers, Joe Duckworth and his son Jason, persevered because the local planning commissioners and supervisors indicated that they are open to new ideas, spurred on by their own planning consultant who began preaching the virtues of density after a trip through the old towns of Europe.

Rybczynski, a professor of urban design at the University of Pennsylvania, has an eye for the telling detail and a gift for succinct explanation. As he describes the travails of the developers, he also discusses why suburban housing looks the way it does. Though many architects are quick to dismiss new home communities as "kitschy, bland and boring," few understand why builders and home buyers are so oblivious to their calls for cutting-edge aesthetics.

Unlike a custom house project for which the architect has to please only the one homeowner who engages him, Rybczynski points out, most subdivisions have many cooks. That's especially the case when the land developer wants to do something that requires a zoning change, as was the case with the Duckworths' New Daleville. It entailed many reviews by the planning commission, numerous meetings with the board of supervisors and plenty of opportunities for a host of players to get in the act.

Even when a developer does not have to jump through those hoops, houses in most new-home communities will not break any aesthetic barriers because, as Rybczynski makes clear, most buyers are not interested.

The Duckworths' concept for New Daleville is eventually approved, but they're still far from breaking ground. The next hurdle is the architectural guidelines. We learn that even when the local bodies reviewing and approving a project include design professionals, the results can still be mediocre. A planning commissioner who is an architect wants to raise the bar and require more durable, upscale materials and higher-quality design, but the developers don't want to tie the hands of the home builders who will eventually be working there. The Duckworths know that houses at this location will not command high sale prices; the only builders interested will be high-volume production firms. If the architecture guidelines are too stringent, they'll take a pass.

There are minor victories. The developers eventually agreed that huge glass windows over the front door of the two-story foyer -- a feature that builders love and most architects hate -- would not be allowed. They also agreed that shutters should be sized to fit each window opening, instead of the builders' standard "one shutter fits all windows" approach.

Finally, more than three years after the developers first began to put the project together, construction began.

Two years on, Rybczynski returned to New Daleville in October 2007 to find that one of the two national builders had left and only 40 of the 125 lots had been sold. With the current down market, the developers' profit margin is slowly dwindling, although they're still optimistic they'll come out ahead.

The hero of Rybczynski's book is clearly Joe Duckworth, a developer and former home builder with nearly 30 years of experience. Although many people consider developers to be untrustworthy, Rybczynski regards Duckworth and many of his colleagues as the visionaries behind change in the suburban landscape. They're risk-takers who leap into the future, surveying raw land and divining what kind of house and community will be marketable years down the road, when they have finally pulled all the pieces of the deal together. If their hunch is correct, they may make a huge of amount of money. If they are wrong, though, they can lose their shirt.

Katherine Salant can be contacted via her Web site, www.katherinesalant.com.

© 2008, Katherine Salant