Changing Skyline | He puts the 'urban' back in New Urbanism

For all their idealistic talk, it often seems that New Urbanist developers are looking to save the world in all the wrong places. They insist they want to create sustainable neighborhoods where you don't need a car to get to work or run out for a quart of milk. But then they locate their utopias in a landscape governed by the logic of sprawl, far from convenient shops, jobs or transit stops.

It's long been known that New Urbanist developments look and perform best when they can latch onto existing infrastructure, like street grids and transit networks. Yet New Urbanists have been oddly reluctant to venture into places where those amenities exist in abundance: the decaying quarters of American cities.

The housing boom of the last decade encouraged practitioners like Sam Sherman to rethink their resistance to urban sites. Sherman, a suburban developer, first experienced his New Urbanist epiphany in 2000 while stuck in traffic on the Schuylkill Expressway. During the time he was trapped in his car, he heard Andres Duany, founder of the movement, expound on his New Urbanist principles in a radio interview. Sherman vowed then and there never to assemble another suburban subdivision.

But it wasn't until 2004 that Sherman found the perfect urban location to try Duany's ideas. His dream site sits in tattered North Philadelphia, at 10th and Mount Vernon Streets, just south of the notorious Richard Allen housing project.

Sherman and his business partner, Lawrence Rust, identified four separate parcels that had been cleared by the city in the name of urban renewal back in the 1960s - and then left to gather trash. A few disembodied rowhouses and the St. Paul's Baptist Church on Wallace Street were the nearest neighbors. But there were also restaurants on nearby Spring Garden Street. The site is four blocks from the Broad Street Subway and a 20-minute walk to Market Street's office towers. Sherman and Rust were inspired.

As is often the case in Philadelphia, it took two years for their New Urban Ventures partnership to win zoning approval to build in a traditional rowhouse format, and to acquire the land from the city's Redevelopment Authority. Sherman had to live off his savings while the project, called Spring Arts Point, stalled. But this summer, when all but one of the first 16 townhouses sold, they felt they had mastered the goals of New Urbanism.