Housing Choices
This article talks about bundling and unbundling of housing choices.
In fact, we know many baby boomers, the generation that embraced the suburbs most wholeheartedly, want retail that's walkable from their homes, because they tell us they do: It's rated right below "typically suburban" among their top priorities in the NAHB study.
You can have a moderately walkable/bikeable neighborhood, if you choose to design or retrofit that, with cul-de-sacs even thought it's not as convenient as a grid.
* Simply cut across with walk/bike paths where cars can't go. It's less bothersome to neighbors and wastes less space. In fact, some planned neighborhoods are car-light with parking toward the entrance and most or all of the remaining space for human-powered travel.
* You can have retail, and also services, but you have to size them to the local market which is affected by density. A place that can't support a whole supermarket often can support a corner store or greenstand if people want one. Other good choices include a beauty salon, a laundromat, an ice cream or coffee shop, and a thrift store. What you want local is stopgap stuff so you don't have to waste 2 hours on a special trip, and things to support local culture so neighbors can socialize. Just make a space in the neighborhood, either near a corner or in the center (there are good arguments for each) to put a few businesses. Or if your residents really like walking, instead of a business dot you can declare one street mixed-use and businesses will accrete along that.
In general, survey questions in which respondents are not prompted to consider trade-offs—i.e. acknowledge the fact that all else is never actually equal—are often fairly useless.
They're also useless if the choices exist only in theory, not in practice. If only one option is available, or there are multiple providers but they offer the same poor options, that isn't really a choice.
In some cases, the answer is that the "bundling" is inherent to the attributes in question, because they are inherently linked: for example, urban form itself affects the ability of your city to deliver walkable amenities. Culs-de-sac and large lots put a cap on the achievable population density.
That's only true if the neighborhood is a monoculture, as many are nowadays. But a mixed neighborhood -- of which some still survive -- is a very different environment. There are lots of different sizes. Around here, we have older grid neighborhoods (which are still pretty quiet) where the bigger lots are usually on the corners and have bigger houses, or occasionally, a small apartment (4-12 units) or a business (like a little gas station). A planned mixed neighborhood may have a large apartment building, some rowhouses, and some freestanding houses of varying sizes. Now you can find anything from a studio apartment to a 3+ bedroom house in the same area. Across from the apartment building you might put a little business park and/or the bottom floor of the rowhouses could be shops/offices. It doesn't all have to be the same; you can have different densities in different parts of the same neighborhood.
This car-free neighborhood has a small parking lot in the commercial area, but mostly it has paseos instead of streets, with the mixed-use buildings mixed into all the housing blocks. Semiprivate courtyards encourage neighborliness. Anyone working in that neighborhood probably wouldn't need to leave it often, if they had a decent mix of retail and services. Plus the paseos and courtyards make it super accessible for seniors, small children, or anyone else on wheels.
This neighborhood supports multiple types of activities in smallish clusters, with a lot of variety crammed pretty close together. It has retail, clubhouse, hotel, active, picnic, fitness, senior, entertainment, arts & crafts areas as well as housing. The housing appears as little white dots, but those could be anything from cottages to fourplexes. Logically apartments could go in the central area, the retail could have live-work buildings, and the senior area could have apartments and/or cottages for seniors. The hotel means you don't need a guest room in most houses; the arts & crafts area means less need for a garage or craft room. The more public amenities, the less need for private amenities. Really, consider the amenities a framework, and you could tinker with the housing as much as desired. Pop in a cottage courtyard for more freestanding homes or extra rowhouses for more energy efficiency.
Here's an example of a neighborhood with uses that are divided but still close by. A dedicated walker or a casual biker would find plenty in reach, even though it's still car-centric. It'd be easier to build this than something far-out walkable -- and this would be easy to increase in walkability if people wanted to.
This one doesn't have retail, but has 3 types of housing plus nature and social amenities.
For comparison, look at two areas in Ann Arbor, contrasting more walkable mixed-use and less walkable suburban.
Each of those places would have different pros and cons, and prices. We need variety, because not everyone wants or needs the same things. And we need a financial and zoning environment that doesn't strangle diversity.
Also, keep in mind that not all density looks the same. You can boost density without changing the visible character much by using things like corner duplexes each fronting a different street, sharehouses for groups of friends, multiplexes or small apartments that look like big houses, multigenerational houses which actually are big houses with subsections, garage apartments that don't increase the footprint, and so on. If you additionally provide walk/bike features, then you won't increase car traffic as much. And these are all things that lend themselves very well to incremental growth, so you can slowly improve your neighborhood even if it was "built out" to some long-ago standard.
It's estimated that a full-service grocery store has a market area of close to 10,000 people—that is, for roughly every 10,000 people, your local economy can sustain one grocery store. (Estimates vary, but here's one study by consulting firm Metropolitan Research and Economics that estimates 8,000 to 9,500.) What's a reasonable walking distance to a grocery store, assuming you have to lug groceries home with you? Let's say half a mile. A half mile radius around a store has an area of 0.785 square miles. To fit 10,000 people in this area would require a population density of 12,739 people per square mile.
That's only if they ALL walk. Realistically, a town of about 10,000 people can support its own grocery store and most people will go there, but some of them will drive; plus you pick up some from surrounding rural areas. If you want more walking access, you need to add corner stores or similar -- gas station convenience stores, dollar stores, that sort of thing.
So yeah, your preferred urban form is inherently at odds with your preferred neighborhood amenities. Unless what you're saying is actually, "I want a house on a cul-de-sac with a large yard on a quiet street, but nearby areas should be dense enough to support walkable retail."
That's a mixed neighborhood. They do exist, new and old. But they're not common enough for everyone who wants that to live there, so they're expensive. They wouldn't be if we built more of them ... or retrofitted extant neighborhoods to add more amenities and/or density. Pop in some live-work buildings on one block and you have not only more homes but also space for businesses. Add a midrise apartment building and you have enough people to support more amenities. You can mix right in every block, in small clusters, or in medium clusters depending how much quiet you want and how far you're willing to walk.
My suspicion is that these survey questions are basically understood by readers as, "Would you like to have your cake and eat it too?"
A more important question: What would it take for that to happen? Then: Is there a sweet spot where you can have both, or a sour spot with neither, or what? Are there barriers in the way, and if so, can they be removed?
There's another problem. We could have a far more "unbundled" mix of housing and neighborhood choices without the policy distortions that have led to our suburban status quo. For one thing, FHA lending requirements privilege very specific building types and neighborhood types.
While this is primarily the territory of those activists who tilt at government windmills, there are ways to do an end-run around some of it.
* Any town can decide they want to do something like revitalize the downtown, expand affordable housing, or promote small business; and then tailor their budget, local tax structure, grants, etc. to support those goals. Some people have had excellent results with these municipal tactics.
* Small developers or crowdfunders can seek other, less restrictive types of funding. This works especially well if you can find a town interested in such diversity or problem-solving, but some of it works anywhere.
Additionally, white flight, racial tension, and macroeconomic forces that eliminated working-class jobs —i.e. all the factors that led to urban decline in the mid-to-late twentieth century—meant that neighborhoods that might be very desirable on the H and L axes of the hedonic pricing model (housing features and locational attributes) became extremely undesirable on the N axis (neighborhood amenities, like good schools and low crime).
While annoying, this provides many more angles of approach to address those problems, from teaching diversity skills to creating neighborhood workshops or offices to allowing home businesses as of right. The best all-around improvement is plain old trees.
Zoning is another culprit. In most parts of most cities, zoning rules explicitly disallow neighborhood typologies that might represent "intermediate" forms between urban and suburban.
Zoning is a solution-caused problem. Anything humans created entirely, humans can change. It's not the same kind of challenge as physical space constraints like figuring out how to provide activity for athletic people and accessibility for disabled people (and those who are both).
There is a nationwide shortage of missing middle housing—duplexes, fourplexes, small apartment buildings—because it's so difficult to find places to build these things.
True, so look for ways to increase these.
Throw in trailer parks, those are pretty dense but many trailers are freestanding 3-bedroom units. For fucksake put in storm porches or a communal shelter, but aside from being flimsy these are often better than other cheap housing.
In this context, try coming up with a novel mix of those attributes people look for in a house or neighborhood. Where can you build a place with that mix? Where can't you?
Zoning always has a map. It's made of maps. That means there's always an edge. You can buy property outside the zoning map and have much more freedom to build what you please there. Look at the edges of town and there's often a growth zone. If that's in your price range, buy there; if not, buy somewhere else on the edge. So then, look at the expensive places that are expensive because people want them and there's not enough. Plan to build something like that. You don't even have to do it all yourself; you can buy a large plot and subdivide it, then sell it for other people to build what they want -- just like cities used to do. Some intentional communities and many cohousing communities use this approach, precisely because they want something more walkable, and often more mixed-use, than most zoning codes permit.
Alternatively, you can wait for people to have problems they can't solve, and suggest any of the above solutions as a way to address things like sprawl, budget shortfalls, affordable housing lacks, or all the kids moving away. Sometimes they'll be desperate enough to try it.
Consider the much-derided "snout house," with the garage in front and the "front" door comparatively off to the side and nondescript. Pretty sure no one actually likes these things aesthetically. It's like living in an attractively landscaped loading dock. Developers of this stuff insist, "This is what the market wants," based no doubt on survey research. No, the market would probably love it if you could deliver the convenience of driving (given the presumption of an environment that requires driving) in a different way.
* Put front porches facing the street and garages facing the back, accessed by an alley. Many traditional neighborhoods are designed this way, and so are good promenades. It's also good if you want auxiliary living or commercial units that front the alley.
* Make the street-facing garage effectively the back of the house. The front of the house faces an interior courtyard or park within the block. You can either have all common center, small private yards and a medium center, or larger private yards and a small center. Any way you slice it, there's some community space for neighbors to share that is entirely insulated from cars. Many car-light neighborhoods use a similar courtyard structure between houses, but restrict cars to a small parking area.
* Sink the parking under the residential level. This is more efficient under an apartment building, but people have done it under other neighborhood types. It works pretty well with rowhouses.
What we need is thousands of small experiments that would give us a truly diverse mix of housing options and neighborhood options. We need the targeted deregulation that would help unleash it. A nation of Strong Towns would be a nation in which our housing choices are far more "unbundled" than they are now. The market could then evolve far more effectively in response to actual consumer preferences, because those actual preferences would be more accurately revealed if we had greater real choice.
Very true.
"Without Stable Shelter" discusses some Terramagne-American approaches to affordable housing and mixed neighborhoods.
In fact, we know many baby boomers, the generation that embraced the suburbs most wholeheartedly, want retail that's walkable from their homes, because they tell us they do: It's rated right below "typically suburban" among their top priorities in the NAHB study.
You can have a moderately walkable/bikeable neighborhood, if you choose to design or retrofit that, with cul-de-sacs even thought it's not as convenient as a grid.
* Simply cut across with walk/bike paths where cars can't go. It's less bothersome to neighbors and wastes less space. In fact, some planned neighborhoods are car-light with parking toward the entrance and most or all of the remaining space for human-powered travel.
* You can have retail, and also services, but you have to size them to the local market which is affected by density. A place that can't support a whole supermarket often can support a corner store or greenstand if people want one. Other good choices include a beauty salon, a laundromat, an ice cream or coffee shop, and a thrift store. What you want local is stopgap stuff so you don't have to waste 2 hours on a special trip, and things to support local culture so neighbors can socialize. Just make a space in the neighborhood, either near a corner or in the center (there are good arguments for each) to put a few businesses. Or if your residents really like walking, instead of a business dot you can declare one street mixed-use and businesses will accrete along that.
In general, survey questions in which respondents are not prompted to consider trade-offs—i.e. acknowledge the fact that all else is never actually equal—are often fairly useless.
They're also useless if the choices exist only in theory, not in practice. If only one option is available, or there are multiple providers but they offer the same poor options, that isn't really a choice.
In some cases, the answer is that the "bundling" is inherent to the attributes in question, because they are inherently linked: for example, urban form itself affects the ability of your city to deliver walkable amenities. Culs-de-sac and large lots put a cap on the achievable population density.
That's only true if the neighborhood is a monoculture, as many are nowadays. But a mixed neighborhood -- of which some still survive -- is a very different environment. There are lots of different sizes. Around here, we have older grid neighborhoods (which are still pretty quiet) where the bigger lots are usually on the corners and have bigger houses, or occasionally, a small apartment (4-12 units) or a business (like a little gas station). A planned mixed neighborhood may have a large apartment building, some rowhouses, and some freestanding houses of varying sizes. Now you can find anything from a studio apartment to a 3+ bedroom house in the same area. Across from the apartment building you might put a little business park and/or the bottom floor of the rowhouses could be shops/offices. It doesn't all have to be the same; you can have different densities in different parts of the same neighborhood.
This car-free neighborhood has a small parking lot in the commercial area, but mostly it has paseos instead of streets, with the mixed-use buildings mixed into all the housing blocks. Semiprivate courtyards encourage neighborliness. Anyone working in that neighborhood probably wouldn't need to leave it often, if they had a decent mix of retail and services. Plus the paseos and courtyards make it super accessible for seniors, small children, or anyone else on wheels.
This neighborhood supports multiple types of activities in smallish clusters, with a lot of variety crammed pretty close together. It has retail, clubhouse, hotel, active, picnic, fitness, senior, entertainment, arts & crafts areas as well as housing. The housing appears as little white dots, but those could be anything from cottages to fourplexes. Logically apartments could go in the central area, the retail could have live-work buildings, and the senior area could have apartments and/or cottages for seniors. The hotel means you don't need a guest room in most houses; the arts & crafts area means less need for a garage or craft room. The more public amenities, the less need for private amenities. Really, consider the amenities a framework, and you could tinker with the housing as much as desired. Pop in a cottage courtyard for more freestanding homes or extra rowhouses for more energy efficiency.
Here's an example of a neighborhood with uses that are divided but still close by. A dedicated walker or a casual biker would find plenty in reach, even though it's still car-centric. It'd be easier to build this than something far-out walkable -- and this would be easy to increase in walkability if people wanted to.
This one doesn't have retail, but has 3 types of housing plus nature and social amenities.
For comparison, look at two areas in Ann Arbor, contrasting more walkable mixed-use and less walkable suburban.
Each of those places would have different pros and cons, and prices. We need variety, because not everyone wants or needs the same things. And we need a financial and zoning environment that doesn't strangle diversity.
Also, keep in mind that not all density looks the same. You can boost density without changing the visible character much by using things like corner duplexes each fronting a different street, sharehouses for groups of friends, multiplexes or small apartments that look like big houses, multigenerational houses which actually are big houses with subsections, garage apartments that don't increase the footprint, and so on. If you additionally provide walk/bike features, then you won't increase car traffic as much. And these are all things that lend themselves very well to incremental growth, so you can slowly improve your neighborhood even if it was "built out" to some long-ago standard.
It's estimated that a full-service grocery store has a market area of close to 10,000 people—that is, for roughly every 10,000 people, your local economy can sustain one grocery store. (Estimates vary, but here's one study by consulting firm Metropolitan Research and Economics that estimates 8,000 to 9,500.) What's a reasonable walking distance to a grocery store, assuming you have to lug groceries home with you? Let's say half a mile. A half mile radius around a store has an area of 0.785 square miles. To fit 10,000 people in this area would require a population density of 12,739 people per square mile.
That's only if they ALL walk. Realistically, a town of about 10,000 people can support its own grocery store and most people will go there, but some of them will drive; plus you pick up some from surrounding rural areas. If you want more walking access, you need to add corner stores or similar -- gas station convenience stores, dollar stores, that sort of thing.
So yeah, your preferred urban form is inherently at odds with your preferred neighborhood amenities. Unless what you're saying is actually, "I want a house on a cul-de-sac with a large yard on a quiet street, but nearby areas should be dense enough to support walkable retail."
That's a mixed neighborhood. They do exist, new and old. But they're not common enough for everyone who wants that to live there, so they're expensive. They wouldn't be if we built more of them ... or retrofitted extant neighborhoods to add more amenities and/or density. Pop in some live-work buildings on one block and you have not only more homes but also space for businesses. Add a midrise apartment building and you have enough people to support more amenities. You can mix right in every block, in small clusters, or in medium clusters depending how much quiet you want and how far you're willing to walk.
My suspicion is that these survey questions are basically understood by readers as, "Would you like to have your cake and eat it too?"
A more important question: What would it take for that to happen? Then: Is there a sweet spot where you can have both, or a sour spot with neither, or what? Are there barriers in the way, and if so, can they be removed?
There's another problem. We could have a far more "unbundled" mix of housing and neighborhood choices without the policy distortions that have led to our suburban status quo. For one thing, FHA lending requirements privilege very specific building types and neighborhood types.
While this is primarily the territory of those activists who tilt at government windmills, there are ways to do an end-run around some of it.
* Any town can decide they want to do something like revitalize the downtown, expand affordable housing, or promote small business; and then tailor their budget, local tax structure, grants, etc. to support those goals. Some people have had excellent results with these municipal tactics.
* Small developers or crowdfunders can seek other, less restrictive types of funding. This works especially well if you can find a town interested in such diversity or problem-solving, but some of it works anywhere.
Additionally, white flight, racial tension, and macroeconomic forces that eliminated working-class jobs —i.e. all the factors that led to urban decline in the mid-to-late twentieth century—meant that neighborhoods that might be very desirable on the H and L axes of the hedonic pricing model (housing features and locational attributes) became extremely undesirable on the N axis (neighborhood amenities, like good schools and low crime).
While annoying, this provides many more angles of approach to address those problems, from teaching diversity skills to creating neighborhood workshops or offices to allowing home businesses as of right. The best all-around improvement is plain old trees.
Zoning is another culprit. In most parts of most cities, zoning rules explicitly disallow neighborhood typologies that might represent "intermediate" forms between urban and suburban.
Zoning is a solution-caused problem. Anything humans created entirely, humans can change. It's not the same kind of challenge as physical space constraints like figuring out how to provide activity for athletic people and accessibility for disabled people (and those who are both).
There is a nationwide shortage of missing middle housing—duplexes, fourplexes, small apartment buildings—because it's so difficult to find places to build these things.
True, so look for ways to increase these.
Throw in trailer parks, those are pretty dense but many trailers are freestanding 3-bedroom units. For fucksake put in storm porches or a communal shelter, but aside from being flimsy these are often better than other cheap housing.
In this context, try coming up with a novel mix of those attributes people look for in a house or neighborhood. Where can you build a place with that mix? Where can't you?
Zoning always has a map. It's made of maps. That means there's always an edge. You can buy property outside the zoning map and have much more freedom to build what you please there. Look at the edges of town and there's often a growth zone. If that's in your price range, buy there; if not, buy somewhere else on the edge. So then, look at the expensive places that are expensive because people want them and there's not enough. Plan to build something like that. You don't even have to do it all yourself; you can buy a large plot and subdivide it, then sell it for other people to build what they want -- just like cities used to do. Some intentional communities and many cohousing communities use this approach, precisely because they want something more walkable, and often more mixed-use, than most zoning codes permit.
Alternatively, you can wait for people to have problems they can't solve, and suggest any of the above solutions as a way to address things like sprawl, budget shortfalls, affordable housing lacks, or all the kids moving away. Sometimes they'll be desperate enough to try it.
Consider the much-derided "snout house," with the garage in front and the "front" door comparatively off to the side and nondescript. Pretty sure no one actually likes these things aesthetically. It's like living in an attractively landscaped loading dock. Developers of this stuff insist, "This is what the market wants," based no doubt on survey research. No, the market would probably love it if you could deliver the convenience of driving (given the presumption of an environment that requires driving) in a different way.
* Put front porches facing the street and garages facing the back, accessed by an alley. Many traditional neighborhoods are designed this way, and so are good promenades. It's also good if you want auxiliary living or commercial units that front the alley.
* Make the street-facing garage effectively the back of the house. The front of the house faces an interior courtyard or park within the block. You can either have all common center, small private yards and a medium center, or larger private yards and a small center. Any way you slice it, there's some community space for neighbors to share that is entirely insulated from cars. Many car-light neighborhoods use a similar courtyard structure between houses, but restrict cars to a small parking area.
* Sink the parking under the residential level. This is more efficient under an apartment building, but people have done it under other neighborhood types. It works pretty well with rowhouses.
What we need is thousands of small experiments that would give us a truly diverse mix of housing options and neighborhood options. We need the targeted deregulation that would help unleash it. A nation of Strong Towns would be a nation in which our housing choices are far more "unbundled" than they are now. The market could then evolve far more effectively in response to actual consumer preferences, because those actual preferences would be more accurately revealed if we had greater real choice.
Very true.
"Without Stable Shelter" discusses some Terramagne-American approaches to affordable housing and mixed neighborhoods.