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I think that with the ever rising price of gas, you will start to see a retraction into more densely populated, urban areas. Developments like this and one recently done in Long Branch, NJ aim to make this more densely populated lifestyle more appealing because it reminds them of "Smalltown USA."

I think that you are being a little too harsh on developments like this. From the impressions I read, the suburbs are too banal, yet this emerging type of new development is too commercial. It just gives me the impression that your can never be satisfied. Given the choice, I would much rather see developments like this pop up that enable people to comfortably live smaller than more neighborhoods of 4,000 sq ft, McMansions on Farmer Browns recently sold back 40.

I too understand the concept of this instant neighborhood type of development, although it seems a bit redundant in a large city like LA. There are talks about (and I suppose some examples of, although I couldn't name any offhand) developments along these lines in the Northeast. Not necessarily with such an obvious commercial/retail aspect, but more like instant small town-type living where schools, locally owned retail businesses and multi-family dwellings are all situated in an area with the focus on walkability and community. I think the concept is great, especially if they are built with an eye toward self-sustainability.
That being said, I've been to the Grove, although not Americana, and sort of cringe at the artifice. It reminds me far too much of the Forum shops in Vegas, and there's no way I would be able to live there.

oops, sorry, realize now that Americana's not actually in LA proper.

Glendale is in LA and is $2000 a mo a lot for rent in Los Angeles anymore? Seems like that's beginning to be the norm these days.

There's always going to be malls and building bigger and more expensive ones. As a girl who likes to shop i'm pretty sure that some female AT readers would not object to the barneys co-op or the anthropologie. I do object to leaving all the doors open while running the air conditioning, which seems the wasteful norm of outdoor malls.

This wastefulness is my biggest issue with the americana - not the stores or the forced community - it's that damned fountain and huge thirsty swaths of grass that you're not allowed to step on. It really is like las vegas in that sense, hundreds of gallons of water wasted every hour. And the trolley car running through it. Makes it look like a life-size railroad model in somebody's basement.

As for the rent I second Gigi818, that seems standard for "luxury" apts. I live in Glendale and have a deal for half that amount in a cute 1940's duplex. With the last heat wave I understand the appeal of airconditioning, (and good insulation for that matter) but the subsequent blackout on the hottest night of the year made me realize my swamp cooler is just fine.

I'm not as forcibly recalcitrant as our dear author, but I think that there is a slight undercurrent of distaste in these types of developments, if only for the fact that it's a place where rich people go to live and shop -- as opposed to be a truly "new urban" living area, where people from all shades of the wealth classes can live and thrive together. If we're re-imagining America with this, are we re-imagining it without all the people who serve our food, clean our toilets, and vaccuum our floors? Where are they going to live? In this facade of "Americana," we've simply taken our pencil to the blueprint of our country and erased the "unsavory" elements, while tracing heavily over our bourgeoisie lines.

Nonetheless, you can't argue with the fact that these types of places help draw people out of the suburbs, and into the cities where public transportation is (... will become eventually ... ) available, walking is encouraged, and so-forth. The unfettered consumerist roams free in this Americana prairie!

hideous.

The "neighbourhood" is a fake -- it is all scripted, all controlled, and nothing is authentic. It's a stage set, a back lot, with about as much life. Very L.A. , very Hollywood when you think of it. Mind you, it reminds me more of Disneyland.

So Fake.
We have them here in Virginia, also. Now my town, which was is the process of revitalizing it's "real" original downtown, has approved one of the "Faux" downtowns about a mile away. Some developers are such con men.

I, too, live in VA (Alexandria City). I never really got the appeal of living at a mall, for example, the apartments at Pentagon Row in Arlington. I support denser developments; it's just too bad that within these developments are essentially chain stores and restaurants.

The Truman show, anybody?

These are popping up in the metro dc area....and while the example above is creepy, I really think we have to support more mixed-used developments. It's my understanding that it's much more profitable to just throw up a big strip mall--and to me that is way worse. Has anyone in this area ever driven down 355 in Rockville? A six lane highway jammed with more disjointed strip malls than the mind can conceive. And you can't walk from one to another. Now that's a nightmare.

I don't really like it, nor the similiar set up in Pasadena, but I've noticed a lot of older people bought in Pasadena. Convenience, some sort of community, and location.

Conversely, what the LAT always fails to notice (although they did just have a blog post about this, in their Echo Park coverage) is that many people who build those hated McMansions are immigrants--Indian, Korean and Chinese, Central American, Mid-eastern--who live with several generations in one house, and for whom urban density and multi-family apartment buildings are bad memories of their lives back home, before they came here and became successful. Go take a look out in Santa Paula--it's not the white bread development that many assume it to be.

The Truman Show is exactly what I thought too!

For the people who are interested in, as the author said, a perpetually new-feeling environment, they'll either be living in a development like this or a McMansion with the same chain stores a 10 minute drive away. Lack of availability for one option means those people would probably go for the other, not change their taste and suddenly become community gardeners and restore a brownstone in Bed-Stuy. If anything, things like the Americana can give people an alternative to a high resource-consumption lifestyle. That's not so bad.

What I think is a little sad is all the opportunity that's missed by filling the retail space with chains instead of independent stores. I live in a rapidly developing area (Astoria, Queens), which might not have a very different ratio of residential to retail space from the Americana. Our storefronts are filled by the entrepreneurs who live, develop and employ in our neighborhood. Besides the character (which Americana residents clearly wouldn't miss), those businesses generate and keep wealth here, where it's being used to improve people's homes, send kids to school, and scale their businesses to employ more local people. People in neighborhoods like mine get to see the money they spend come back to them in a lot of ways. Sadly, employees of chains take their dinky checks back to another part of town while the rest of the money gets funneled to people who will never see or care about the community.

Conversely, what the LAT always fails to notice (although they did just have a blog post about this, in their Echo Park coverage) is that many people who build those hated McMansions are immigrants--Indian, Korean and Chinese, Central American, Mid-eastern--who live with several generations in one house, and for whom urban density and multi-family apartment buildings are bad memories of their lives back home, before they came here and became successful.

Do you have any statistics on this? I could be completely off base, but I find it a little hard to believe that there's a huge underworld of immigrants who have banded together to covertly build McMansions for multi-generational throughout suburbia, and all of the rest of us are just assuming it's those rich white-folk up to their no-good sprawl...

I am very impressed with the quality of the comments in this thread! very good discussion....

I jut wanted to mention that, being an immigrant myself, I can attest that many mcMansions are indeed inhabitated by extended-family-type arrangements (grandparents, kids, grandkids).

I suppose many of the "more-recent" immigrants (since all Americans are immigrants) prefer to live with their extended families than other types of Americans do. And why not? It's actually a very positive development, both socially and environmentally. Long live diversity!

just gross...I can envision these when "lifestyle centers" are no longer "hot". The new "projects" for urban living.

But chain stores can afford the rents, and the indie stores aren't going to be the charming little boutiques, but rather less desirable tenants. It's not likely that these are ever going to turn into slums.

In Glendale, Americana didn't replace any community to speak of, but rather an undistinguished block of parking lots.

Here's a story about McMansion wars in Queens:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/05/nyregion/05forest.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

great neighborhoods are the result of development over time - that is what creates interesting layers of building types, scale differences, a natural mixture of uses, old and new, perfect and imperfect, etc.

This project and many others like it (and becoming more common everyday) is the result of a single point in time development cycle that is responsible for everything from designing the structures to leasing the retail spaces all within one neat package to satify the bank. it is not the developer's "fault" or the consumer's "fault" or even the bank's "fault" - it is the result of creating a "product" to satisfy all these parties needs at once and it is a building 'architype' that will represent this era and will be replaced by whatever comes next - hopefully something better.

I live in Eagle Rock, California which is in-between Glendale and Pasadena. I have not been to the AMERICANA. I was across the street from it recently watching THE HAPPENING but after the movie was over I went home instead of walking across the street to the AMERICANA.

I like the name. It looks clean. I didn't see any riff-raff milling about.

I'll start off by saying I'm terribly conflicted.

These developments are just the latest iteration of gated communities. Just add chain stores.I think it's probably the strangest thing I've ever seen. What is the appeal of living above an Apple Store?

I frequented The Grove when I lived in L.A. - Morels restaurant was there and it was affordable and really tasty. While I don't like the theme park fakeness of the community, one thing The Grove has going for it is access to the Farmer's Market that DOES have several independent food-related vendors you can patronize. At least it did then.

Why build brand new communities like this when cities, especially L.A., have neighborhood after neighborhood with tons existing buildings in need of revitalization?

HOWEVER, just because a neighborhood has poop on the sidewalks, a few homeless people we all choose to ignore, an old dive bar, and crumbling bodegas doesn't mean it's worth preserving. I don't call that local color, I call it depressing. If residents of old neighborhoods like this really cared about where they lived, they would make an effort to clean them up, wouldn't they? So many neighborhoods in L.A. have totally fallen apart, and it's largely the residents fault. I highly doubt residents of Beverly Hills are tossing their garbage onto the sidewalks of East Los Angeles or Norwalk.

Besides, neighborhoods like the ones I described in the previous paragraph don't receive the badge of "local color" until scores of unbathed white hipsters sporting beards and ironic t-shirts discover them.

pandemicsoul:

Palmetto is right, I work for a home builder that specializes in McMansions (please no tomato throwing) and yes, they are almost all foreign. At first, the comments remarking on that fact really bothered me and seemed racist, but it seemed as though almost all our purchasers were people that English was their second language.

This place is gross...I went once to see a movie on a Saturday night...parking is impossible, and there were hoards of families and kids just slothing around, doing nothing but moving slowly and taking up space.

I guess it's a great place to go if you just want to leave your house and sit around somewhere "new", but don't even think about going there if you have some kind of purpose like actually buying something specific, seeing a movie, etc.

It's basically Disneyland on a bad day minus all imagination and fun. You couldn't pay me $2000 a month to live here.

My god--families taking up space. What could be worse?

@pandemicsoul--drive out to Santa Paula and look around. It's not an "underworld of immigrants banding together"--it's people who made money in the US and have large, multi-generational families. So yes, you're completely off base.

"scores of unbathed white hipsters sporting beards and ironic t-shirts discover them."

Hey! I bathe. ;)

I saw WALL-E at the Pacific Theatre at Americana. As we stepped out of the spectacularly over-air-conditioned theatre into the "street" where touridents photographed each other by the dancing fountain, the air was as thick with irony as it was with canned Greatest Generation crooners. Ah, Americana. Why is there a little Eiffel Tower perched atop your cute steampunk elevator shaft? Was it a gift from the people of France to the people of Glendale? If I climb up to the top, will I have better cell reception? And how should I characterize your style, you coy jewel of the San Fernando? Is it that you bring to mind the faux Belle Epoque charm of that other tres jolie gem of the desert, the Bellagio, or that you remind me of Japan's idea of pre-World War II Europe, as I've so often seen it imagined in anime films? Or are you, perhaps most evidently, the wet dream come true of that empire-building cartoonist who lived and died not far from where your fake turn-of-the-century street lamps now stand sentry in the somewhat dark night?

About the hipsters; please, you give them too much credit! They do not discover these neighborhoods... Poor starving artists move to grungy areas because it's all they can afford. Then, the spoiled rich kid hipster friends of theirs, seeking a "real-world experience", move in until their parents, appalled by the squalor their darlings are subjected to, buy them a new condo from the development next door. Turns out the 'hood ain't so bad; everyone says it's up and coming. Buying into a condo now is a great investment!

Glendale is in LA and is $2000 a mo a lot for rent in Los Angeles anymore? Seems like that's beginning to be the norm these days.

posted by Gigi818 on 2008-07-04 00:17:46
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Probably not when you look at these GlendaleApartments