When Sherry and Gerry Berklan were new-house shopping last year, they were thrilled to find a pie-shaped, cul-de-sac lot in Centex Homes’ Old Renwick Trail development in Joliet.
“It cost more than the other lots, but it was worth it,” says Sherry Berklan, mother of a 3-year-old son and 7-month-old daughter.
“My son can ride his bike around the cul-de-sac with his friends and I don’t have to worry about the traffic you have on through streets.”
Already, she says, the eight families in her cul-de-sac, where single-family home prices started at $169,900, are friendly.
“We all get along and look out for each other. We even had our own block party,” she says
Although the Berklans are among thousands of home buyers who prefer living in cul-de-sacs, and are willing to pay premiums to do so, not everyone wants to be a cul-de-sac cronie.
In fact, in some circles, the cul-de-sac is a metaphor for sprawl.
Unlike traditional neighborhoods with streets in grids, curving neighborhoods with cul-de-sacs tend to be isolated, connected only by main roads.
“The result is a new phenomenon: the ‘cul-de-sac kid,’ the child who lives as a prisoner of a thoroughly safe and unchallenging environment,” says Andres Duany and his co-authors in “Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream” (North Point Press, $30).
“While this state of affairs may be acceptable, even desirable, through about age 5, what of the next 10 or 12 years?
“Dependent always on someone to drive them around, children and adolescents are unable to practice at becoming adults . . . children are frozen in a form of infancy, utterly dependent on others, bereft of the ability to introduce variety into their own lives, robbed of the opportunity to make choices and exercise judgment.”
Others, however, find the lifestyle to be friendly and social.
Planners trace the cul-de-sac’s roots to Radburn, a subdivision in Fair Lawn, N.J., built in 1929. Part of the “garden city” movement of the early 1900s, Radburn was among planned communities of its era with open land, built away from crowded cities.
Radburn’s cul-de-sacs were backwards compared to those that followed in later decades, with homes backing up to the cul-de-sacs and green spaces in front of the homes.
“Radburn was the ideal,” says Emily Talen, assistant professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois.
“It had green spaces, some neighborhood retail and pedestrian paths. Then it was bastardized. The cul-de-sac survived [from the Radburn model] but the the other things didn’t.”
Cul-de-sac communities multiplied in the post-World War II housing boom, says Talen.
“The federal government encouraged new housing vs. remodeling, FHA loans were available and the population was exploding,” she says. “The cul-de-sac-type of subdivision proliferated because it gave everyone his own, little private world.
“Home buyers shied away from the grid system because it implied higher density.”
Whole communities affected
By 1980, whole suburbs in major metropolitan areas, including the Chicago area, were cul-de-sac collections, linked by hierarchical street networks.
“Major arterial streets led to collector streets, which led to residential streets, which led to cul-de-sacs, each one its own little pod,” says Talen.
Although the cul-de-sac concept is ancient, especially in Islamic countries, the 20th Century cul-de-sac craze was essentially an American phenomenon, says Kiril Stanilov, assistant professor of planning at the University of Cincinnati and co-editor of “Suburban Form: A Global Perspective,” a new book due out in 2003.
“It isn’t very common in Europe, where even newer cities have grid patterns,” says Stanilov. “We’re seeing some in Asia now, but only in very, very affluent suburbs because of the high cost of land.”
As the traditional, grid-type street system lost out to cul-de-sac neighborhoods in many American cities and villages, so, too, did central gathering places such as neighborhood groceries and civic squares.
Now, New Urbanists promote the return to the grid street system. Talen says about 450 New Urbanism developments have been built across the country in the last 10 years. In addition to grid layouts, they are marked by their rear garages, diversity of housing and community anchors such as parks or churches.
Thanks to this school of thought, village officials no longer rubber-stamp new developments with cul-de-sacs. In fact, many do their best to discourage them.
“The trend is to have connected communities,” says James Willey, mayor of Elburn. “So we tell developers we prefer grids, not cul-de-sacs. You can still have some curves in a grid pattern. But we want new neighborhoods to connect. We try to look at the community as a whole.”
Some communities, including Huntley, take this one step further and charge developers extra fees for cul-de-sac subdivisions.
“It’s $6,000 per cul-de-sac, even if they call it an `eyebrow’ and if it is 100 feet or more back from the center of the main road,” says Chuck Sass, Huntley’s village president.
It’s not just the inherent isolation of the cul-de-sac that bothers them, say village officials.
“Snowplowing is the biggest problem,” says Willey. “In a cul-de-sac, there’s nowhere to put the snow. We actually have to bring in front-end loaders for some of them and put the snow in a truck. And, it’s hard to plow a cul-de-sac without hitting mailboxes.”
The “you can’t there from here” aspect of some cul-de-sac neighborhoods creates quandaries for fire and police vehicles, too, he adds.
“They get blocked in or blocked out [of cul-de-sac neighborhoods] because there’s only one way to get from point A to point B,” says Willey. “With a grid pattern, they have more options.
“And, when there’s a fire, it’s most likely to be in a kitchen at the back of the house. That’s especially hard to reach in a cul-de-sac house.”
Meanwhile, developers weigh buyers’ wants vs. village and city restrictions.
“I have never heard a buyer say, `I don’t want to live on a cul-de-sac,'” says Drew Ferris, president of Ferris Homes in Northbrook. “They like the pie-shaped lots, which are usually the largest in the subdivision, the reduced traffic and the sense of community within the cul-de-sac.”
His cul-de-sac neighborhoods include Ashton Park, a $700,000-plus, 16-home, in-fill development in Glenview. And Glenmore Woods, a $600,000-plus, 54-home development on the western edge of Lake Bluff.
Although parents of young children gravitate toward cul-de-sacs, say the builders, other buyers crave their built-in privacy.
“My kids are teenagers, so they don’t play in the cul-de-sac,” says Nancy Torrenti, who bought a house on a cul-de-sac in the Saddle Oaks neighborhood in Cary, built by Cary-based Verseman Development.
“But we like it for the tranquility. No one ever comes through here except the people who live here and the occasional UPS man. For us, it’s a little refuge.”
Judging from an aerial view of the Chicago area, Ferris and Verseman aren’t the only builders employing cul-de-sacs. And, the Berklans and the Torrentis aren’t the only homeowners who appreciate them. But at least one Chicago-area developer shuns cul-de-sacs.
Hainesville-based Deer Point Homes Inc. has built cul-de-sac-less subdivisions in Woodstock and Wauconda and has one in the works in Zion.
“In order to make the cul-de-sacs big enough for school buses, snowplows and fire trucks, you create a sea of pavement,” says Deer Point’s vice president of engineering, Wallace Stilz.
“From our point of view, [building with cul-de-sacs] is a less-efficient use of land. I’d rather see common open common space.”
The cul-de-sac vs. grid system debate will continue in years to come, predicts Susan Handy, an associate professor from the University of California at Davis who is editing a report about street connectivity ordinances for the American Planning Association.
“Nationwide, we’re seeing more cities provide incentives to developers to build grid-like patterns or at least build cul-de-sac developments that connect,” she says. “It’s all about smart, thoughtful design.
“Cul-de-sacs aren’t all evil. The trick is to combine pedestrian, bike and automobile connectivity with privacy and safety.”
