Housing Starts to Look the Same
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Taking a look at the "character of the neighborhood" in South Bay and I couldn't be more thrilled that developers are putting up inoffensive boxes rather than some rehash of "Spanish/Mediterranean revival" that seemed to dominate circa 2000-2015. I have a little more hope that these "bland boxes" won't look garishly outdated in a generation. And that's neglecting the irony entirely of "European" styling applied to single family sprawl.
EDIT: Spoke too soon, "For many people, 5-over-1s have come to symbolize the most painful aspects of today’s housing crisis — stand-ins for gentrification, corporate landlords and excessively high rents." Do better, NYT.
Why is the post cringe?
Being bold and out of character may inadvertently build character (brutalism). Movies have done the same: appeal to the masses by not being noticeably placeable.
Chicago has this many (show 1 finger) new floorplans replacing the brown/graystones which were themselves ubiquitous, and it's soul crushing. Every year I live in this city adds to the bane of noticing all the "misses" on long term investments and diversity (housing, minimal investment in public spaces, say "bike lane" as many times as you can in one sentence.)
Keep contention high by being noticeable and trying. not bland by contrast.
It says a lot about the state of America that in unit laundry and ~500 sq ft is “luxury”.
The working people that built my house didn't give a shit that it wasn't unique then and working people don't care now. Folks want an affordable place to live.
Aesthetic "concerns" around new apartment housing is a desperate attempt by the rich to keep the poor out of their exclusive neighbourhoods.
The majority of nimbys aren't rich - they're pretty average. They're not trying to "keep the poor out."
In typical American fashion, they're trying to pull the lader up from under them to keep anyone else from having what they do.
The easiest way to Keep Up With The Joneses is to make sure there's never anymore of them to keep up with.
This isn't to say the rich are innocent.
I'm just tired of everyone pretending like American society is perfect except for a teeny tiny portion of rich people that ruin everything.
We have many systemic problems.
We normally think of the top 0.1% as rich, but even the top 1/3 is much better off than average.
It’s only when you’re talking 0.001% that things get really different.
You can live off $1M (after taxes) indefinitely, and still have an inflation-adjusted $25M nest-egg to pass on to someone else after you die.
The idea that you can't live a lavish life on $1M in spending - even in Manhattan - is absurd.
$1M could get you a $50k per month apartment in Manhattan plus leave you almost $1500 per day in spending.
There's almost no one on this forum spending that kind of money, and many of us have VERY nice lives.
A lot of people in the 0.1% still work - but they definitely do not need to. You can be a part of the yacht class with $25M.
I mean, you're not going to have your own - but you can afford to rent one regularly... You can fly private, etc.
There's an enormous difference between someone in the 0.1% and someone in the 1% - namely that you have 0 reason to work, and you can afford a staff to do everything for you...
For probably >75% of the 5%-1% - there isn't that much difference between you and someone average beside you have a nicer car, a nicer house, you eat out more often, go on nicer vacations, and pay a LOT more taxes...
As to 0.1% vs 0.01% I am mostly talking about staff. You can own and operate a boat at relatively low wealth. The UK famously has a lot of people living cheaply on narrow boats but there are US equivalents. The 0.1% wealth level owns a much nicer boat while the 0.01% owns a boat with it’s own staff.
That’s the tipping point IMO. People of most income levels can go to the beach it’s mostly nicer versions of the same basic thing. From living in a tent to a large mansion you’re cooking lunch or eating out until suddenly the option for a private chef becomes normal.
> It is not surprising that Doelger was a great admirer of Henry Ford, and in some ways, the Sunset rowhouses were the "Model T's" of housing. [...] It was not uncommon for the framing crews to race one another down two sides of one street to see which crew could complete framing their side first.
The subhead, does it matter given the housing shortage, can be answered in a word: no.
There's a lot more to whether either of these are good than these talking points.
As someone who has lived in both “squeezed on top of” and “more dense”, I’ll take the “squeezed on top of” over the “more dense” any day of the week. However my preference is “no one else living within a mile in all directions”.
Of course, I'm no fan of ultradense living. But in cities that have lots of businesses, parks, public transit stations, etc to walk to, density is a huge win, and the author uses the positive term to convey that.
Essentially the same trait is positive in one context but negative in another. Consider cakes and apples. Everyone wants a juicy apple. Nobody wants a soggy cake.
In this respect, I don't mean "density" as strictly spacial. The subdivisions I'm referring to stretch on for blocks with no businesses or services mixed in. Typically they're zoned strictly residential. No corner stores, transit, restaurants, coffee shops, etc. And this means people have to rely on cars to go do simple things like grocery shop or socialize outside the home.
There's quite a bit of research and discussion on the value of walkable communities if you're interested in learning more. Maybe you disagree, but I believe the kind of "density" created by mixed 5-over-1s is better for people and their communities than mile long cookie cutter subdivisions.
I think you'll find there's no squeezing involved in stacking. There might be if you get rid of the "yards" and push them together, though.
You don't need to use cupcakes. I added that because I thought the experiment would be more fun.
For example old NYC skyscrapers look just like other skyscrapers built at the time. The difference is few cities built significant skyscrapers during that time period, and NYC avoided losing building in WWI/WWII etc.
The result is what we see virtually mandated now in cities like Austin: A modern rehash of Soviet/Eastern Bloc housing projects, recast as "vertical mixed use" developments. Mid-rises that are invariably too tall and too close to the street, blocking out the sky and leaving just a strip of concrete to the road, which is now rendered even less useful by the copious bike lanes that no one uses because it's way too damn hot most of the year. They have only minimal windows on the exterior walls, and if there's a balcony, it's usually either a completely non-functional decorative appendage a foot deep, or it's too small for even a cafe table set. Green space and lawns (even though grasses are the most effective plants for cleaning the air), or even big trees, are discouraged.
Worse, no one wants to live in them unless they have to: First of all, they have mandated "low income housing", guaranteeing a resident population of thugs and criminals, second, the real estate is so incredibly expensive that no commercial or retail businesses can survive in the first floor locations that are supposed to provide some aspect of "community". (Austin's preferred housing model is deliberately family-hostile.)
I'll take suburban single family homes ANY day over that - this kind of "modern" architecture will crush your soul - people should be free and kings and queens of their own castles, not proles in a pod eating bugs with Big Brother on the viewscreen.
If your daily driver doesn’t do something you need weekly, buy a second one. If your house doesn’t do something you need weekly, you’re far more likely really stuck.
Mandating that anyone who wants to live in an area must living in a detached house on a big lot is terrible. Anyone who would rather pay less for less home is completely left out, by government decree no less.
Upzone and let the market cater to what people are willing to pay for, same as cars.
i have no love for the nimbys but its also not a win to turn a neighbordhood into a bunch of low rent duplexes. theres a differenxe between rempving restrictions for new development and using these changes to undermine the property rights of others.
The entitlement complex so many people have these days to mandate that to live in their community, you must control X amount of land, is simply classism, with economic segregation as the result: you must make this much money to live here. Working class? Get the fuck out.
And the real gall here, is that NIMBYs insist that the government be the one to enforce these invisibly gated communities, as if it should be in the government's interest to enforce the social stratification that NIMBYs so desire.
Bare minimum, you need to solve this at the metro area level. But since metro area governments don't really exist (at least in the US), it has to be the state. Which is exactly what's happening right now in the bay area (state law coming into force that's forcing cities to either adopt a serious growth plan that accommodates significantly more housing, or lose their zoning powers entirely).
edit: also note that this
> Individual neighborhoods can’t block a city-wide vote.
isn't really accurate. It's common to have zoning that allows for more housing on paper, but then the existence of community meetings that the housing commission or whoever listens to means that developers have to abide whatever the neighborhood residents at the meetings say they want, and sometimes what they want is no denser housing near themselves for any reason.
Just because you can build more on paper doesn't mean you can actually build. The US largely doesn't have "as of right" development rules. There's one set of transparent regulations that are put there democratically, and another set of opaque regulations that exist only in the minds of whichever locals are most motivated to show up to the neighborhood meetings.
It's at the point now where you can build your house out of a catalog then do VR walkthroughs. That's a great sell to the customer and something you can't do the old way.
Overall I welcome it, because there's a herd strength in having a generation of homes all built the same way, with the same kinds of known caveats.
The skills weren't lost, just no one wants to pay for them. If ten people can build ten houses in a year, but to do decorative houses they can only do five, hey suddenly the masonry costs on your house have doubled.
> You basically can't get brick work of a quality comparable to what was done 100 years ago any more.
Bricks were mostly used structurally a century ago. In about the late 1930s, most brickwork started being veneer (non-structural). Combined with dramatically increase labour costs as a proportion of overall building cost, it's pretty clear why.
If you want some decorative brickwork done, order a pallet of brick and some bags of mortar and learn how to do it yourself. Anything else is reserved for those with money to burn.
That's fine, what gives cities character is when a) styles are mixed up by virtue of having been built in different time periods, and b) as the fronts/facades get gradually transformed over time.
So the answer could be anywhere from "1-2 generations" to "never", depending on our immigration policies & relative desirability for people to come here.
Western countries have somehow managed to develop learn helplessness on housing. It should be easier than ever to make safe, high quality housing, and yet it's become absurdly difficult and expensive instead.
It's common to hear anecdotes from homeowners merely trying to do an extension or add an ADU on the kafkaesque nightmare of bureaucracy that we've managed to create.