Here are ideas new urbanists can use to offset high housing prices and economic segregation.
Although housing prices in many regions have declined in the past several months, they rose tremendously in the past few years, and affordability remains a big problem in many places. Fortunately, it’s a problem that New Urbanism is well equipped to address — in ways that also improve livability.
After discussing the cost and economic segregation issues with others, including Emily Talen at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, I’ve put together a series of ideas. The concepts below should be considered simply an expansion of the New Urbanism toolkit, which has for years included things like granny flats, a broad range of housing types and sizes, and inclusionary zoning. None of them are entirely new; they advance or combine ideas that new urbanists have been talking about.
CITY-SCALE IDEAS
At the scale of the city, consider building entire working-class neighborhoods near the higher-priced ones. Every developer I’ve worked with wants an overlap between the price range of the working-class neighborhood and that of the more expensive one. We have had neighborhoods of different ranges of price points forever. It’s just that recently the stratification has reached absurd levels, with price points in ridiculously narrow ranges in typical suburbia.
Before anyone has a knee-jerk reaction to this idea, which might sound like hybridization to some, consider the following:
1) New Urbanists rail against sameness at the scale of the neighborhood. “Why should houses not be different within neighborhoods?” we ask. I agree. But why can’t the same be asked at the scale of the city? Why should neighborhoods not be diverse within cities?
2) Neighborhoods with differing but broad ranges of price points have been a fact of life in most naturally-occurring places ever built. Clearly, there are strong natural forces creating this phenomenon. The difference between this and conventional suburban development (CSD) is that CSD has almost no range within its pods, whereas naturally-occurring neighborhoods typically have larger spreads. In other words, one is diverse and the other is not.
3) Make every effort to ensure that the affordable housing is connected to transit. A recent study showed that families making from $20,000 to $50,000 per year spend more on transportation than they do on housing — up to 30 percent of their total expenditures. Most of the costs go into automobiles because other options are not available.
NEIGHBORHOOD-SCALE OPTIONS
1) Build five-story town center buildings containing basic services that construction workers can use on the first level, such as a bank, hardware store, laundry, and grocery. In the upper levels, build very efficient units that can be stacked in modular fashion. Later, when the construction workers are gone — or have dispersed to cottage courts and the like, throughout the neighborhoods — this building can operate as a hotel. A nice hotel room is comparable in size to an efficiency housing unit.
2) Because affordability is partly a function of building cost but also partly a function of land cost, affordable lots should be smaller than most others. If you’re looking for a greater number of units than what can be provided with granny flats as dependencies to larger houses, then the grain of the plan will be finer because the lots are smaller. Consider having a segment of the neighborhood in which the entire fabric is finer-grained. This would constitute the more affordable quarter of the neighborhood. This is anathema to the way many of us have thought, but we need the tool of the more affordable quarter in our toolbox. We need to consider how we can dignify it.
3) Do a green overlay that generates serious amounts of food production in or around the neighborhood. We’re not talking about just a feel-good marketing-fluff program, but rather one that generates significant amounts of food. Food is part of the cost of living, just like mortgages and transportation.
4) Build the neighborhood center buildings a few years early. Do this by relying on simple steel-frame boxes, skinning them in corrugated steel siding or similar. Use them as mini-storage until you’re ready to start on the neighborhood. At that point, you can convert them as needed. Even if only a portion is re-skinned and built out, the entire neighborhood square will be enclosed. Units that began as simple steel boxes lend themselves more to being finished out as industrial lofts, which can be quite affordable.
BLOCK-SCALE IDEAS
1) Cottage courts can work in mid-block by using Katrina Cottages, as long as the end unit on either side is a Katrina Turning Cottage. This cottage can turn its broad side to face the street, giving the appearance that it is the same size as larger houses on the street. KC-DC (the Katrina Cottage installed near the District of Columbia — see photo on next page) is currently the ideal Turning Cottage because it can expand in so many directions.
2) Katrina Condos can achieve a similar effect. The side of the end unit looks like a normal house facing the street on dense blocks where most housing is attached. Once you walk through the garden wall, however, you see a string of one- or two-story units facing one or two sides of a central court.
2) Build Katrina Carriage Cottages along side streets adjacent to the main street. Build them tight to the sidewalk. Later, when the main street becomes prosperous, the first-level garage, tucked under the carriage cottage, can be converted to commercial, making this a Katrina Live/Work.
3) Mews courts in mid-block can be very affordable and also quite cool.
4) If you have rambles (areas left natural) in the middle of blocks, consider scattering Katrina Cottages or carriage houses through the mews. The lot should be the size of the unit so that the ramble belongs to the entire block.
SCALE OF THE BUILDING
1) Build Katrina Cottages wherever you can. By “build,” I mean choose from the full range of delivery techniques: manufactured, modular, kit, panelized, and site-built. Select whichever one makes the most sense for your development.
2) Build Katrina Kernel Cottages. The KC-DC is the first of these. Because the cottage can grow so easily, a young family could see itself living in one when there are just two adults or when the children are very young; they could imagine adding a bedroom wing easily. So far, most Katrina Cottage designs haven’t sold in large numbers because they aren’t easily expandable and a family can’t imagine living in something that small forever.
3) If you really want to go all out on the Kernel Cottage ideal (build very small and expand later), do something like the Wet Appliance that was proposed at the Kingston charrette. A Wet Appliance is a roughly 8-foot-by- 8-foot concrete box that includes the basic plumbed necessities of life — a bathroom inside the box, and a countertop with sink outside. Attached to a water and drain line, this can form the core of a house that a family can build around.
4) Produce seriously passive solar buildings. Passive measures cost little if anything, and can significantly reduce utility costs.
5) Build Katrina Condos. These are a combination of manufactured modules and “mansion condos.” While working recently with Urban Design Associates on a project in the New Orleans area, I realized that there are close to 20 types and subtypes of New Orleans houses that could be modularized at up to 10 units or more per building, yet which would look exactly like the mansions. This works if you keep the units simple enough. They’re composed of modular units that are shipped to the site complete, stacked up, and then roofed/skinned as necessary.
This article is available in the December 2006 issue of New Urban News, along with many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue. |