The illegal city of Somerville
cityobservatory.org
cityobservatory.org
Most of our residential zones are currently zoned with a 0.5 or 0.6 cap.
The local NIMBY group has been petitioning the zoning board for more restrictions: downzone an entire neighborhood, add setbacks and more area restrictions along the main thoroughfare. Meanwhile, everyone who isn't affluent or in subsidized housing is getting pushed out to the surrounding towns.
Since there's no concomitant increase in density, we should see two things:
1. Overall construction should decrease relative to where it would have been. Projects that were previously viable are now underwater. Even worse, if the cap rate fluctuates entire classes of projects become nonviable.
2. Market rate housing will become more expensive at a faster rate. The market is clearing at levels that people at 50% median income can't afford, so setting aside units strictly reduces the market rate supply without any demand reduction.
The Terner Center at Berkeley has an interesting policy tool that simulates the impact of various policy choices: http://ternercenter2.berkeley.edu/examplecities/index.html
Are these developments really as "welfare cliff"-y as they seem? As in: if your income goes up, are you kicked out of the house?
Although, most of what I've read suggests that laws which increase cost (such as affordable housing requirements) have a tiny impact relative to laws which increase development time (such as the Telegraph Hill Dwellers calling for a stay of ~everything at council meetings); the latter are far more damaging. On your tool: if you move the affordability requirement from 10% to 25% and reduce the time to approval from 6 months to 4 months, you still build more housing!
I went to a City Council debate where this was a big issue. Theoretically, yes.
But the city doesn't actually want to kick people out of their houses.
But there was some concern that people had already pulled some shenanigans to make their finances temporarily suck so that they could get a house in Cambridge.
That makes it sound a lot more cynical than it actually was--he originally chose the badly paying job for the lifestyle it allowed him--but it's definitely an abuse of a system that doesn't even function well when it's not being abused.
It's not uncommon in NYC to go for more then a year through a permitting process for 1 to 3 family reno. That's one of the reason there was so much illegal construction happening here in the past.
Someone is always paying for that 20%. Hint: it's not the builder.
This shortage is man-made.
From what I've read about Soviet housing in the Krushchev era, though, you were very lucky if you got a cramped two bedroom. Not sure about the 70s and 80s.
Christianity and some other religions also promise some utopia in the future.
Once Upon a Time, we Westerners looked at Communism and laughed. We justified our system (democracy for the state, capitalism for the economy) by pointing out all the obvious material benefits we reaped from it:
* High economic growth
* Cheap, varied, available, high-quality consumer goods
* High and climbing wages
* A class structure that looked more like a Gaussian curve than an exponential distribution, with greater actually-existing, de-facto equality than the Communist countries
* Workers' rights and the free formation of unions
* Public infrastructure, parks, and transit
* Cheap, acceptable housing for families, leading to widespread owner-occupancy becoming the norm, something rarely seen in civilized human history
* Ever-climbing life expectancies at birth, thanks to rigorous public health, sanitation, and disease control measures
In contrast, the Eastern Bloc promised that Real Soon Now, actually-existing socialism would be transformed into Full Communism, and people could have nice things. All they had to do was make a few sacrifices today to defeat the fascist capitalists and experience great rewards tomorrow!
They promised "jam tomorrow" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jam_tomorrow), but we had jam today.
Whereas nowadays, the spectrum of jam-promises has shifted. Nowadays, the capitalist West promises its people, "Jam tomorrow, for the deserving", while most of the Second and Third World have switched to promising, "Jam never, it was always a lie meant to lead you away from God and Putin."
We can still kinda say we've got the cheap, widespread consumer goods, but not so much the rest of it.
Communism seemed to have higher growth rates for a while.
While the apartments aren't huge by comparison to most houses in the US, they are pretty comfortable, though the quality will vary depending on the particular building and region you live in. Most of the buildings appear to be the same that were built during the USSR, it's just the internals were remodeled with more modern amenities.
It can take a little getting used to, living in somewhat cramped quarters, but for me anyways, I've always had fairly small places to live growing up, whether it was living in a 3 bedroom with 6 people in college, my cheapo first apartment, I guess it's more just something you get used to. Even now, my partner and I live with her mom/aunt in a 3 bedroom apartment in SPB and, aside from occasionally stumbling across each other in the kitchen and funny battles for the bathroom, we get by just fine.
funny battles for the bathroom
Therefore any land use changes that might negatively impact home values threaten peoples' savings, and alternately any land use changes that positive impact home values can be profitable to existing homeowners.
It's a very simple, deeply perverse incentive structure. It's in the best interests of those who own homes to lock people out of homeownership.
I wonder if I can help someone else hedge against the market going down.
I know old people who `paid' for their shares by working on building sites for these very houses in the 50s and 60s.
See http://www.wohnungsbaugenossenschaften.de/genossenschaften/h... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_cooperative#Germany
My personal issue and why we've fought against some developments in the past, is because city noise/animal/traffic/blah blah rules are just not being enforced. At all. So if I ever want to be able to sleep (not sleep in. Just sleep at all...like at 4 in the morning or whatever), I had to buy a place that was totally overpriced, and in a totally sub-optimal location, just so I'd have tolerable neighbors.
Then someone decided to build a rental-only land-locked high rise where the only possible access point is through my development's parking lot. And said high rise, even though it is in my backyard, is technically in a different city, so when there's neighbor issues, it gets really complicated.
If it was in my Canadian hometown, it honestly wouldn't matter: some asshole decides to throw a party at 3 in the morning or play hockey in my yard, I call the cops on them, 10 minutes later problem is over. Here? They'll just laugh at me and tell me to grow a thicker skin.
So the only thing I -can- do is prevent it from happening in the first place. If it was like in other countries I lived? Knock yourself out, build away!
This is only true in the absence of periodic appraisals to recalculate property taxes. In states where that is the norm, homeowners are incentivized to allow other homeowners to prevent their properties from appreciating, so long as they're not planning to sell in the immediate future. This has its own drawbacks (mostly longtime, fixed-income homeowners who are forced out due to onerous property taxes), but it's a much healthier dynamic than what states like California, where property taxes are capped, have.
You can also use some proceeds to pay for infrastructure development (of any kind). If done well, then the additional infrastructure will raise land values enough to pay for itself in higher taxes.
If well designed, one can't take more than 100%.
I do like it, too. However, my policy recommendation differs from the author: use a land tax to cut down land valuations.
One goal is of course to allow substituting capital for land (ie higher houses) to make housing cheaper. There's a reinforcing cycle: less NIMBYs, leads less restriction on that substitution, leads to less NIMBYs as per the paper.
If zoning laws could be priced somehow so that when they become a cost they had to change or reduce it might help.
Zoning laws in places without expensive real estate like, say, much of the US midwest probably makes things better for people. In SF or in this example in MA and other really popular places they make things worse.
Perhaps some economist has tried to calculate the price of NIMBY, zoning law externalities. Anyone know of someone who has tried?
One way we could price zoning laws is through their impact on buildable space. As long as we raise taxes on the beneficiaries, everything'll come out in the wash, right?
If you do drive, though, you are not going to appreciate new development which makes it impossible to park when you get home from work.
Not everyone hates living in places where people drive.
I don't have a problem with people who live in a place determining what the public space there should be dedicated to.
Now imagine you spent a lot of money to get a house with a nice view. Suddenly Larry Ellison decides to build a skyscraper next door, which blocks the sun on your property every day. You can't even grow flowers anymore because there's not enough sun. Some of your trees die. Are you happy?
Now imagine you spent a lot of money for your house. A housing company proposes changes to the neighborhood that will reduce the value of your house by 20%. In other words, you will be working and paying for years on a portion of your house that no longer has value. Are you happy? Well, maybe you can handle it because you're rich.
So these are the kinds of things that go through the minds of NIMBYs.
Know what I'd do with $8 million dollars in real estate profit? Retire immediately.
Being able to tell Larry Ellison to &#%@ off? Some things are priceless.
Jesus what a self-important thing to say while not outright denying it.
I have trees now!? Flowers? Luxury! My current apartment doesn't get enough sun to grow plants that need sun. And we pay $2200/month for a two-bedroom apartment here.
It certainly seems that many people want to be the last person to move into their neighborhood/area.
I'm happy, because for me housing is consumption, not an investment.
Or it means I'm not planning to sell for a very very long time and thus appreciate the tax break a lower appraisal gives me. The same logic applies if I am a landlord--as long as the rent and thus cash flow stays the same, I don't particularly care about what some appraiser says the property is worth.
Anyways, it seems to me that restrictions on construction are a lazy owner's way to maintain property values. After all, there is no better way to add value to and capture the revenue from my house than to add another 2 stories to it and rent it out. I do own the land underneath it, after all.
They wanted to add a second floor to their home, which would have basically made it look like the rest of the block.
Some neighbor raised a stink, because they had built a potting shed on my sisters land, and the shadow of the higher roof would damage the plants in the shed!
The city made it clear that they didn't give a hoot about it. So she would have to litigate.
Fortunately, the market is insane and they sold the place sight unseen to some Chinese dude for a significant profit.
That's one of the larger issues with the housing market: it's seen as an investment tool by foreigners (especially in hot markets where prices are rising like crazy), so you end up with tons of real estate that's not on the market but also not being used to actually house anyone.
Getting services for underprivileged people in a wealthy neighbourhood was always going to be tough, but the kicker for me was this - the residents against the expansion were clear to state "We're not NIMBYs!". Really? What kind of things do you think NIMBYs complain about, if not exactly what you've just said?
Maybe this is just the fame going to my head, but I sure would like some semblance of a yard.
edit: the article mentions "illegal neighborhoods and illegal houses" but doesn't say anything about the laws when they were built.
But it comes full circle, because at the end of the day these properties must have a foundational estimate of value based on what everyone thinks of them. As long as most people agree an acre yard 3 car garage and wall around your land to hide the neighbors is optimal, at least a block away from any highly trafficked street, that is what you get.
Now, it's entirely possible the dataset the author is using to justify his position actually covers things that are safety issues.
The situation is: it's impossible to build a neighbourhood resembling somerville under current zoning laws.
I live in a prewar neighbourhood in Montreal. It's dense, beautiful, and loved by locals and tourists alike. If you could clone it and build it elsewhere, it would be worth trillions to cities across North America.
But it's illegal to build, because the streets are too narrow, there isn't enough parking, there is a mix of residential buildings and businesses, the buildings aren't set back far enough, and so on.
We don't actually want narrow streets, lack of parking, and pedestrians looking in our windows. The novelty makes it cute though.
If neighborhoods like yours were common, they would have no value.
Regardless, I just wish that the US government (and the vast majority of state and local governments) would stop making the choice for all of us with massive explicit and implicit subsidies for motor-vehicle-optimized travel.
Although a more effective solution would be to scrap zoning laws and actually make the suburban blight towns convenient for workers and pedestrian residents.
If you excluded cars, the place would turn into a downtown version of a strip mall. (expensive tourist trap) There would be no jobs other than things like waiter, retail clerk, manicurist, etc. -- is that how you wish to be employed?
You are focusing on the bad of cars, and ignoring all the benefit they bring. They even bring benefit to people without cars. Heck, you can rent one. I bet you've done it.
Cars indeed have benefits, but they are noxious to cities. In my experience, the fewer cars there are in the city, the more pleasant that city is. And as the above examples demonstrate, that doesn't mean you are suddenly killing the economy or your job prospects.
Pedestrians looking in the first-floor windows can be solved by putting shops on the first floor.
I'm also strongly in favor of the forever-proposed Green Line Extension into Somerville and Medford. I know it will increase rents while I'm still a renter, and I know it's gentrifying some neighborhoods at the moment, but by God it has to happen! It's downright shameful the way a Somerville resident has to walk or drive to Davis, Porter, or Charlestown to get to a T stop, and those will only travel through selected arteries that don't necessarily include most of our workplaces.
Heck, we could redraw the bus-lines too, so maybe I could get a bus from Somerville through to the main artery roads of Cambridge. When the weather sucks too much to bike, at the moment, my commute doubles, because instead of a 15-minute bike ride, I have to walk 10 minutes to the Red Line at Porter, take the train for five minutes to Central, and then walk another 10 minutes to work from there -- a circuitous route that just happens to go through the Mass Ave-focused Red Line we actually have transit for.
Pardon the suggestion, but it seems you'd rather be in a car.
That's in addition to the fact that slower cars are much less likely to hit you at all, because they have more time to brake and maneuver before impact.
[0] https://www.aaafoundation.org/sites/default/files/2011Pedest...
I don't know. We had that kind of stuff in Europe for a long time. We don't value it for novelties sake there.
I know it's a matter of personal taste, but I yet to see a modern residential area where I would want to live. Some of these neighbourhoods seems designed to suck the personality out of anyone who dear to move in.
Contrast with Vancouver, where land is overwhelmingly allocated to large, residential-only neighbourhoods of tightly-packed single-family dwellings with a starting price of $1.5 million. These neighbourhoods are often beautiful, tree-lined utopias with lovely heritage homes, but they are walking distance from nowhere and can't effectively house the city's growing population. And you can bet that the people who live in them furiously oppose any change to that status quo.
Price of groceries really hit me though haha, but Montreal's living arrangements felt incredibly balanced, and that's a really hard thing to pull off.
So we have a large amount of housing/commericial stock when neighbourhoods were mixed used and designed for walking.
I'm actually not sure you could build Montreal again in Montreal. (I mean, I really don't know what regulations are like for new neighbourhoods)
I wonder though, to what extent this is success and love by scarcity.
i.e. if you outlawed oatmeal in 99% of cities, sure there'd be an absolutely booming tourist destination around that 1% of cities which will specialise in artisanal oatmeal. It'd create lots of jobs and become an attractive place to visit for its rich, unique and vibrant food culture, and attract all kinds of wealthy people who have financial and mental bandwidth to care about something like a $25 unique oatmeal recipe. It'll be a clean and wealthy city attracting students, artists and tourists. (I'm exaggerating the effect of oatmeal here haha but you get my point).
And so you may conclude that if you'd clone that, it'd be worth trillions for cities across the country. When in reality, if you'd deregulate oatmeal, there's none of that boom, oatmeal is just oatmeal like it is today, a boring staple of a lot of people's breakfasts that has none of the flair of the city described earlier. Quite a lot of people will eat oatmeal and there'll be a substantial industry behind it sure, but there'd be no particular love or specialness about it.
At scale, it's quite likely that a lot of the old zoning laws just wouldn't work, and were changed (dare say fixed) for a reason. Inevitably some old neighbourhoods of cities which thrived for various reasons (perhaps including, being connected to a larger city with modern zoning laws) may do very well, like pre-war Montreal. But that may also just be survivor-bias. All over Europe there are thousands of old villages with similar old infrastructure, beautiful too, that are just not appealing and where the population is shrinking, and where modern zoning laws could make interesting improvements to public infrastructure.
Lastly I feel people are appealed by some more older building materials and the notion that age correlates with authenticity. It's not that in newer neighbourhoods people are uninterested in living there because the zoning laws create too large or too narrow sidewalks, or too low or too high buildings, it's probably more about a new office made of glass rather than brick isn't appealing to the well to do stereotype hipster, despite there perhaps not being any specification that new buildings can't be made of brick in the zoning laws. But even if you clone an old neighbourhood's style, and build it new, but the tourists you mentioned wouldn't come to such a new place because it's new. In fact they'd be more more interested to visit parts of Montreal that were built under newer zoning laws, than an entirely new city with none of the culture, built similar to Montreal's old zoning laws.
So I'm not entirely convinced you can just clone it and get great results. Just thinking out loud.
Strawberries are a commodity. They're also great, and liked by nearly everyone. We are all better off for being able to go down to the grocery store and pick up a box of strawberries for a few bucks. That's worth a huge amount, even if it may not express itself within our lives in direct monetary terms.
If Montreal-like neighborhoods were ubiquitous then we might not find it special, but we'd still enjoy it and benefit from it enormously.
To recast it in tech terms, ubiquitous internet connectivity is surely worth trillions, even though it's a total commodity that people basically don't care about unless it breaks. It was a lot more special back when it was rare (I still remember my first taste in a university computer lab) but it's a lot more valuable now.
1. People highly praise city/town/neighborhood X for its density, walkability, livibility, sustainability, and other quality of life elements.
2. That city/town/neighbourhood could not be built today because of laws which explicitly ban the things which make it so highly praised. If it was destroyed in an earthquake, it couldn't be rebuilt in any form which shared the attributes which made it loved.
This isn't about earthquake strengthening; it's about density, parking, transport, multi-family dwellings, mixed-use neighborhoods, etc. An ocean of ink has been spilled on the problems of suburbs full of single-family homes (and zero commercial presence), but our laws frequently require that, regardless of the preferences of consumers.
(More generally: The argument for zoning laws is that local government knows better than residents what the people really want, and what makes for a good city. That does not seem to reflect reality.)
It seems like it's theoretically possible for residents and visitors in a given city to enjoy its current building stock while simultaneously desiring different standards for new construction. Whether or not that is the case in Somerville, I don't really know, but a statement that the city couldn't legally be built from scratch the same way today doesn't necessarily imply (in my mind) that the zoning laws are illegitimate.
I get that there are other issues here too, of course.
Is it? Can you explain why this would be so? Or even better, provide any evidence that this is true in any of the locations people have been discussing (Montreal, Somerville, Manhattan, Portland, etc.?)
Let's drill down and focus in particular on laws about multi-family dwellings. What logic would make them good when they already exist, but bad if you wanted to build more, and even bad if you wanted rebuild them after a natural disaster?
A duplex is split between two families. They both think multi-family housing is for college students, the universal bane of Massachusetts housing debates.
It also makes sense to me that someone would appreciate a historical landmark but place a lesser value on a modern replica of that landmark. Similarly, I could imagine a person admiring a historical neighborhood more than a modern recreation of it.
> Let's drill down and focus in particular on laws about multi-family dwellings. What logic would make them good when they already exist, but bad if you wanted to build more, and even bad if you wanted rebuild them after a natural disaster?
I'm not sure the answer needs to be logical (see above), but even if it must be, I don't know why placing limits on something implies that it was never actually good in the first place. Natural disasters are another story for sure, but I would imagine that sort of massive rebuilding was not the primary motivation for the present zoning laws in Somerville.
Proponents of zoning talk about things like reducing congestion and preserving the character of the neighborhood. If you can't exchange like for like these arguments fall flat. Changing the rules of the game after you've won, so to speak, smacks of crony capitalism. Cynically I believe that zoning laws primarily exist to extend property rights over land that a person is unwilling or unable to buy.
This article lacks some context. The housing market here (I live in Somerville) is red fucking hot. Somerville desperately needs more housing, especially high density housing.
Somerville is awesome. It leaves you wondering why we can;t have more towns like it.
And this is the answer: because building Somerville today would be illegal.
Almost every house in my neighborhood is in some sort of serious violation. In my small neighborhood (called the Island neighborhood) we have had 3 fires. That is three houses that have had fires substantial enough where they pretty much need to be demoed (luckily not the large family mentioned previously).
Nobody has wired smoke alarms but every three family or above requires it. You are not supposed to have grills on any balcony or porch... everyone does... Somerville is massively guilty of this as well. Proper egresses... haha use a window.
Such is the style of living in ancient New England houses in high density areas.
There is very little incentive to update or even try to correct behavior legally. I'm not sure how towns like Somerville can get their landlords (I am landlord so I am guilty as well) to update their properties. I do know lots of people updated with the federal energy subsidizations.
It would be nice if their was some safety subsidizations to maybe start turning this around (along with the rest of our crumbling infrastructure).
Now you could argue that US cities are generally not that dense; NYC is half the density of Paris. But Amsterdam, say, is only 2/3 as dense as Somerville is. Berlin is even less dense than that (but I know its boundaries contain some serious chunks of park/woodland).
This is in spite of the fact that Somerville rail transportation is limited. There's an effort to improve that but it's way over budget.
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3645779,-71.0554965,3a,75y,1...
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3578491,-71.057966,3a,75y,20...
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3503591,-71.0797167,3a,75y,9...
One of those pics is in the North End, an historically Italian neighborhood that has become increasingly primarily tourist-oriented with the removal of the above-ground highway. In this respect, it's very much like the old town of a lot of European cities.
Another in a somewhat grimy commercial street that used to be the Combat Zone/Red light district that nonetheless now has some very luxury high rise apartments on it.
The third is the high-end retail street in the Back Bay which is indeed a nice mixed use area so long as you have a couple million to drop on a condo.
To my way of thinking, Cambridge and Somerville are more livable though Somerville is mostly notable for not yet being quite as expensive as Cambridge for the most part. (Somerville was historically pretty down-market and the interest today is mostly because Cambridge has gotten so expensive.)
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Davis+Square,+Somerville,+... ?
(Sorry, I can only judge by the Street View pictures, I haven't been in Somerville.)
If that's the densest they have, yes, that's sparse sprawl by European standards.
Have a look at https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!i+innenstadt for some random pictures of German inner cities. (You can use Google translate to look for eg the equivalent in Spanish, centro de la ciudad, or other languages/countries.)
And, yes, I can very well believe that it's the 16th most densely populated city in the US. The US just doesn't have many proper cities.
It's no Paris or NYC, and doesn't make the list of most dense cities in the world by any mean, but it isn't a "sparse sprawl" either. A quick glance at population density statistics
Eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Germany_by_p...
The main reason being that Somerville doesn't have that many large buildings (though there are some bigger ones. No real skyscrapper mind you), but there's nearly nothing else. Very few businesses and commerce. It's just people packed against each other.
https://www.google.com/maps/@50.117833,8.6878675,3a,75y,83.6...
If you cherry pick an area where several of the main roads for a town come together, it's not going to look very dense. Go a block or two away and you see actual representation of Somerville:
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3967365,-71.119784,3a,75y,11...
Street after street of densely packed three family houses and nothing else.
Thanks for the other street view. I still thinks that's pretty sparse---there's lots of space between them.
But, hey, I'm used to Barcelona or Singapore by now.
Compare eg this random edge-of-city in Germany http://kultur-in-krefeld.de/medien/uploads/2015/01/KiK-Dreif... It's not Manhattan by far, just a bit denser. And this is not a city centre.
(Alas, they don't have Google Street View in Germany.)
That's just how multi-families and condos look in the area.
For purposes of comparison it might make more sense to take the total floor area and divide it by the municipality's area, subtracting out things like lakes.
As for code ... heh, I spend a lot of time in Somerville, witnessed a remodeling job in the house I was in back in the late '80s, and am now remodeling a house built in 1910 in my home town (which if memory serves is generally a bit older than most Boston area rental houses). The modern codes are a very different thing and mostly focused on the property itself, although to the extent they decrease the probability of fire they're better for your neighbors (although Somerville's fire department is top notch, which I've witnessed first hand, otherwise not much of it would still be standing, it's one of the few cities in the US that has the fuel density to support a firestorm).
This seems like yet another issue of baking the solution in to the specification instead of just asking for what you actually need/want.
Even if you were to build a Somerville today, you'd be hard pressed to achieve such a thing, instead, more separation is required (which does comport with your specification point).
(Although that's not part of the code. Which does say if you've got townhouses, or two family houses (for this level of the code I've purchased/you can find online: http://publicecodes.cyberregs.com/icod/irc/2012/icod_irc_201...) they've got to have a firewall between them that's rated for 1 hour.)
Yeah, I can see that, most likely long enough to give the fire department plenty of time to save the adjacent buildings, as I witnessed once (but didn't know their construction details). I worry about flat roofs, though, how fire resistant do they tend to be? Original formula asphalt shingle with an organic base aren't super fire resistant from what I've just read and basic principles (when I re-roof, which will require taking off 3 layers (!) plus the original wood shingles, I'll be sure to get the more fire resistant fiberglass base ones).
And thanks for the comments, you've saved me some research when it comes time to replace my roof.
I would love to see a law that requires landlords to get a basic energy audit and advertise the estimated heating cost. Then they'd have an incentive to fix it, which, quite frankly, is cheap: just blow dense-filled cellulose into the stud bays, insulate the pipes in the basement, and upgrade the boiler. At, say, $15k per unit, it'll pay for itself in a few years of tenants who want to heat to 68F for more than four hours per day.
(Amusingly, my place had new double-paned windows. They were invariably warmer than the plaster walls in the winter.)
In the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Performance_Certificate
In Belgium: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energieprestatiecertificaat (nl language only, sorry)
In Ireland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_energy_rating
Note that Florida houses are inexpensive. They are insulated pretty well, obviously for the opposite reason.
The nicer houses in Florida are solid poured concrete. Considering the expense of property in Massachusetts, the extra expense of poured concrete would be a smaller portion of the total cost. You might as well do it. You're already paying quite a bit for the land; why build a shack?
But what you say is true for new housing for sure. The style I see around here is http://www.bostonherald.com/photos/hot_property_603_concord_...
This apartment was constructed elsewhere, assembled on site. You could see whole units (I remember seeing the kitchen microwave) dangling from construction cranes.
It's not uncommon to find that you'll need to retrofit an old building to match current fire safety laws, etc. My family recently had to rip out a bunch of old electrical outlets and replace them with newer ones that were deemed safer.
Nobody requires you to match current zoning laws.
You want the code violation cured? No problem; I'll take one of the other 17 offers.
On a side note, somewhere I heard or read that many US cities and town don't allow mixed use zoning, so that a building can used commercial and residential. Something which is very common in German town, especially in downtown areas, you have a lot of stores in the ground level and above that are flats.
And I don't know about the rest of the US, but the city from the article, has a fair bit of mixed used zoning.
A few years ago, I saw developers in Somerville get around that problem when they wanted to replace one 3-apartment house with one exactly the same shape, minus a whole lot of rotten wood, and plus a whole lot of good insulation and the like.
So instead of tearing the building down and building it anew, they tore down half of it, all the way down to the foundation, then removed all the parts connecting to the foundation, leaving half of the building on stilts, and then started building the new building, with the shell still in place.
They did good work. They replaced a well-designed but badly neglected building with one that is also well designed and more liveable. They should not have had to do this charade that they were just "renovating" it, but that was the only way to do it legally.
Victorian era density is nice but we have so few places in the USA that have any of the human-scale character of the Old World to pull from, that most Americans have no idea what a small walkable village really should feel like. If we want to talk about the good old days before postwar zoning in order to get the character in our places back, why not look at the places that are real gems that we never had at all, like UNESCO villages and such?
It's still not going to be completely European (the early American settlers built streets wide for fear of fire, and because they really, really liked being able to do U-turns with horse carts,) but American 1890's style is well worth cherishing on its own merits.
My impression is that one of the goals of updating it is to make much more of the city be zoning conforming.
"Makes Somerville a national leader in using zoning to produce affordable housing with the most ambitious inclusionary housing requirements in the state"
"In areas of the city where major new development is planned, up to 20% of new units must be set aside for affordable housing."
"Ensures that infill development fits into the form, scale, and pattern of existing neighborhoods and squares."
"Only permits formula businesses and big-box stores by special permit."
"Requires new buildings in certain districts... to set aside 5% of gross floor area as leasable arts and creative use spaces."
Another thing is that people use more space now: Before WWII, these cities had more people living in fewer units of housing. We've gone from 4 per unit to 2. As you make more housing available, people want more of it. That's why there's never enough no matter how much you build.
Basically, is it possible for the mores to change so much (as reflected in the zoning codes) that not only would the city be illegal to build now, but that it should be demolished? What happened to Kowloon suggests that it is.