Cities: January 2018 Archives
Fred Bass, Who Made Strand Bookstore a Mecca, Dies at 89 - The New York Times
'Following his father's playbook, he pursued a policy of aggressive acquisition.
'"At first I used to think he was crazy," Mr. Bass told the cable news channel NY1 in 2015. "Why are we buying extra books? We haven't sold all these. But we just kept buying and buying. It was a fact -- you can't sell a book you don't have."
'The 70,000 books in the Fourth Avenue store swelled, at the Broadway site, to half a million by the mid-1960s and 2.5 million by the 1990s, requiring the purchase of a storage warehouse in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. By the time Mr. Bass bought the building for $8.2 million in 1997, the Strand had become the largest used-book store in the world.'"
Surprising Approaches To Achieving Density -- Strong Towns
Andrew Price writes: "I'm not anti-towers, but building up is not the only way to achieve density. Brickell [in Miami, Florida] achieves a population density of 27,302 people per square mile. In contrast, Union City, New Jersey has a population density of 51,810 people per square mile (89% higher) without resorting to towers.
"Most buildings in Union City are low-rise (two to four stories)Â plus a handful of midrises, all on on small lots. There are many single family homes, and many small-scale apartment buildings and condominiums with a single digit number of units. The cost of developing one of these buildings is within the range of a mortgage for a middle-class family.
"You can achieve extremely high population densities before having to build up. The 11th arrondissement of Paris houses an astounding 110,000 people per square mile (4x that of Brickell and 2.1x that of Union City) without building up....
"Again, I'm not against towers, but I want to show you that there are cheaper, more adaptable, and more economically inclusive development patterns that achieve high population densities without having to jump straight into high-rise towers financed by big banks and built by huge development companies. The secret starts with looking at the development pattern's granularity."
