How I used my two minutes of zoning proposal hearing time

Quoting from The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.

Chapter 10: The need for aged buildings.

The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones.

Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them. By old buildings I mean not museum-piece old buildings, not old buildings in an excellent and expensive state of rehabilitation… but… plain, ordinary, low-value old buildings, including some rundown old buildings.

If a city area has only new buildings, the enterprises that can exist there are automatically limited to those that can support the high costs of new construction….

Chain stores, chain restaurants and banks go into new construction…. Well-subsidized opera and art museums often go into new buildings. But the unformalized feeders of the arts--studios, galleries, stores for musical instruments and art supplies… these go into old buildings. …[H]undreds of ordinary enterprises, necessary to the… public life of streets and neighborhoods… can make out successfully in old buildings, but are inexorably slain by the high overhead of new construction.

As for really new ideas of any kind--no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be--there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error, and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.