One of my shibboleths concerns the need to use transit-oriented development space carefully. It should be an integrating, useful, functional, and highly public space with a lot of job and residential diversity.

Why? One of rail transit’s major benefits is that it ties the region together. It unifies. It integrates. If the stations become exclusionary and the land uses around the stations simply become playspots, then we lose opportunities to increase the productivity of those places. Nothing with wrong with playspots, but there has to more there there. These places are too important for anything else to happen.

So here’s the story that got me thinking about this problem today, as a social and residential experiment:

The W Hollywood Hotel & Residences: An urban complexity – latimes.com