Utopian misprint

There is a new community. STOP.
Affordable luxury lofts for artists. STOP.
(oxymoron) A smarter girl would've stopped reading there.
I am not very smart but incredibly hopeful. Maybe I've read too many textbooks on planning, maybe too many poems about utopia, maybe I've just got the Barack either way I read the website and believed.
Here's the premise: A site plan with two rectangular renovated buildings affixed at a 90 degree angle. The property includes a community garden, storage & a parking lot while overlooking a park. The first building, a mod 60's renovation composed of 'luxury' lofts at an affordable price for 'creatives'(their word). The second building is a creepy brick Victorian three story with vines crawling up windows and boards masking rotted masonry. I preferred the second immediately. It's 'proposed' to have work/live studios, gallery space, cafes, and shops. Proposed is a lawyer word. You buy the apartment or house and hope for the best, hope for the proposed. Developers pitch potential as reality, the last real alchemists. My parents bought a home in a subdivision when I was a child. There was a proposed lake with a man-made beach. These were the woods I grew up exploring, they had a puddle in the center. Alchemy. Dirt becomes water becomes money becomes dirt. As a planner, I deal in the proposed, not the real. I am a schill posing as a bastion between the public and the alchemist. When I went to see milepost 5, I was not a schill. I was the public, the proposed sucker.
Unfortunately, this proposed sucker is a sceptic & an academic , in practice they are the same. Milepost 5 was not the first to make this pitch. The design is a hybrid of early twentieth century planning principles popular in Europe. European housing markets do not have the same mortgage structure which has become the sinkhole of the current economy. America was once a fabled land was our unique and effective path to home ownership & acquired equity providing the bridge between classes. America's situation was unique for two reasons, our sheer mass combined with populist scrapper ideology. Europe didn't have the space and socialist policies were expressed in communal housing. Smaller units set on parks to provide the practical uses of an aristocratic expanse o f lawn without the payments. Although communes and low income housing gained popularity in the states they were not expressed with the traditional European design methods.
Taking a site in Portland, OR which likes to fancy itself a European city in both attitudes and transportation if not culture or design and applying these principles with the economic tools to create affordable housing for artists sounded too good to be true. I swooned.
I read the website everyday, checked their calendar for 'artsy' events, even started to dream of all the amazing cooperative relationships i would have there. A building - a space - creating the canvases within it. This building would define my life from the outside in.
one could argue, and I have before that true change comes from within. Although, it can't be denied that we feel differently standing in a corner or a portico. A blue room feels different from a yellow room. There is a reason, a psychology, a science behind the design of institutions to create a certain effect on inhabitants. This space was more than a structure. Residents would be hand picked 'creatives'. I know the great artistic communities were organic. Stardust that flashed between the grand lawns of Columbia U and the heroin house in Morningside Heights. If we can design a heart, then why not design a spontaneous combustion of thought? Sure, these developers probably read Richard Florida's 'The Creative Class' at some goddamn real estate convention. But, I read it too in my bed and bled economic theory and promise all over my sheets for days.
So I quieted my fears about what a developer would deem to be 'a creative'. Ignored the intuition in favor of the promise, because Barack DIDN'T get shot so to hell with my negative rational thoughts. It's time to believe again.
Days passed on the calendar and finally it was time to meet the artist in residence/real estate broker. We drove up to the building and I swear it looked different. I'd seen it once in person with no signs of life and all seeds of promise. The sprouts in the garden seemed to be wilting now. An old man walking his dog seemed to shake his head.
Inside the artist in residence/real estate broker was a girl filling in for a friend of a friend. She was neither an artist nor realtor. Basically she was a nice regular girl who happened to live there. The kind of girl you'd see exiting old navy on a Saturday afternoon with a latte in her hand. There was another couple viewing apartments. They were . . . attractive.
The girl was tiny, with crunchy stripper blond locks. He was broad, full of questions, and wearing one of those random garage jackets so popular in the 90's. his questions were not my questions. He demanded to know about ventilation systems, washer dryer hookups, square footage and pricing. Ok, I know artists do laundry too. Utopia was looking a little more no place and milepost 5 was looking a little more everyplace.
Photos & sculptures were displayed outside doors and taped up in the hallway. The cheap concrete glowed grey beneath fluorescent lights. We marched 5 abreast down the hall and opened door number one. It was . . . small. 440 sq. ft. to be exact. That's about two dog houses. There were no appliances, the carpet was cheap, nubby, gray blocks. Concrete walls, more fluorescent lighting, exposed concrete beams. It was institutional, in the way that only places without regard for their inhabitants could be. I have lived in real beat down loft buildings in Brooklyn. The lights are dim bulbs because the landlords don't want you to see the cracks or the rats. The walls are covered in graffiti. The residents are anyone, everyone. Some luxury some broken, some just trying, trying everything. Those were real collectives. Those were real.
We thanked old navy for her time and drove on down the highway. A road once marked by a wild time and infant horizon now reading Walmart,Home Depot, Applebees, WalmartHomedepotapplebees. . . waldepotbeee. . . .
Proposed convenience, proposed happiness. Proposal rejected.