My years working on slums, slum formalization, and slum upgrading have opened my eyes to two urban phenomena – informality and urban evolution – that are seemingly invisible to ordinary formal-world observers, even people paid to look at such things, as illustrated by this interesting Wall Street Journal (June 3, 2013) article that entirely misses the point:
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The back porch of Mr. Kumar’s cottage
The Latest Urban Development Trend: Less Elbow Room
As we’ll see, this headline is diametrically wrong: cities aren’t losing something, they’re gaining something.
Vancouver, British Columbia—To get a sense of how America will pack more people into its cities, head north to an alley that runs behind Petersham Avenue here. That’s where Ajay Kumar built a $300,000, Moroccan-themed cottage that sits in his backyard and will soon be occupied by his parents.
In fact, Mr. Kumar’s action is in multiple traditions stretching back hundreds of years – expanding the homestead from a core house into a family compound, and periodically improving and modifying the house – as well as technologizing the twenty-first century granny flat and the accessory dwelling unit.
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Discreet additional verticality
Mr. Kumar’s “laneway house” is part of a broader plan that encourages Vancouver homeowners to add rental units in their basements, attics and backyards.
Cities have always densified, and that density increase has very often entailed housing the extended family, which throughout urban history has been a more common family unit, I suspect, than the postwar ‘nuclear family’ that my generation was brought up to believe in.
The hope is to reduce sky-high housing costs and increase population density throughout the city—including the single-family-home neighborhoods like Mr. Kumar’s that surround the city’s towering downtown.
Vancouver, like many modern cities, is strung up tightly into zoning’s invisible corset, which must have seemed like a good idea at the time but now causes the city to bust at the seams.
Cities across the U.S. and Canada are liberalizing their zoning codes to allow multiple dwellings on a single lot.
The zoning revolution is desperately needed, as it is long overdue, in part because it is defended by a powerful cabal of homebuilders and NIMBYite locals.
Planners like these “accessory units” because they steer growth to developed land and infrastructure, reducing the cost of city services. Such housing can allow seniors to live near their children. And the dwellings are smaller and cheaper—helping cities create more affordable housing.
I’ve previously posted about the importance of redesigning homes and apartments to be smaller without sacrificing functionality, and the occasional follies and false starts taken in this direction.
“These units are one front in a giant war for how our cities are going to grow,” says Alan Durning, executive director of the Sightline Institute, a Seattle think tank.
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Now this is our mission objective
That’s quite some metaphor barrage there, Mr. Durning.
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Fire another infill!
Businesses are entering the market. Advantis Credit Union in Portland, Ore., late last year started marketing mortgages that allow homeowners to build accessory units. Home builders such as Lennar Corp. have started marketing “multigenerational” homes that have separate quarters for a family member. In Berkeley, Calif., a company called New Avenue was founded to help people design, finance and build accessory units.
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A New Avenue small house
As often happens, the market leads, and the politicians follow.
Late last year Salt Lake City passed an ordinance to allow accessory units within a half mile of the city’s two dozen light-rail stations.
While the greeny coalition pushing Transit-Oriented Development comprises many militia, they provide an external motive force to encourage boosting density within walkable distances of transit stops and nodes, in part as a flanking action around the entrenched single-family zoning barricades. [Pretty military yourself, there, general – Ed.]
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To the Zoning Board of Appeals, men!
Then too, an intriguing use-creep is undermining the foundations of classical single-family zoning:
Washington, D.C.’s planning department is recommending giving owners that already have an accessory structure in place the right to rent them out without seeking zoning approval, as they must now.
The ooze-through-the-bars approach is interesting: first the density increase is approved based on a limited use (extended family) and then, once the original resident has moved out (passed on?), the locality realizes the accessory or attached apartment is a unit of accommodation that could absorb one household’s demand without requiring the building of another expensive, NIMBY-incendiary unit elsewhere.
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I’m just working my way in
Seattle has allowed backyard cottages since 2009, and homeowners have applied to build 168 of them.
This is not yet a flood, but already more than a trickle.
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A trend, definitely a trend
Several Silicon Valley cities, looking to increase the stock of affordable housing, have used a combination of measures to encourage single family homeowners to build rental units.
Common to all these development proposals is the idea that the new flat is part of a compound where the paterfamilias will live in the big house.
Those include reducing permit fees, increasing the allowed square footage and getting rid of administrative steps such as the public hearing process. Hillsborough has permitted 117 accessory units since 2003, while Los Altos Hills has permitted 68.
The changing composition of the American family over the last half-century, coupled with the continuing and powerful wind of urbanization, has now built up enough pressure that municipalities are being forced to innovate new configurations.
In psychosocial terms, housing is at least two things:
1. A visual representation of the family.
2. A window into the past definitions of family.
Because housing is exoskeletal, it expresses the shapes of interior spaces that are defined by family and household uses: sleeping, bathing, living, eating, entertaining, and more. Just as a paleontologist can deduce a dinosaur from its thigh bone, an urban anthropologist can deduce a family configuration from a floor plan.
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Even without the captions, you could figure out what type of family lives here
But as our notion of family changes, then too changes the floor plan and amenity configuration we need to accommodate (in the literal sense) and encapsulate that family.
US cities used to be more compact. But by the 1920s, Americans were fleeing urban neighborhoods for leafy suburbs — a movement that accelerated after World War II.
In point of fact, after an initial bout of urbanization in the early 1800’s, America steadily de-urbanized as Americans moved west across the continent, despite the presence of that century’s megacities, and reached a point, by maybe 1910, when the country was as de-urbanized as it would get.
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1880 Boston and Charlestown, among the densest places in America back then
Since then, the century-long de-urbanization has reversed, and the rate of coastal urbanization shows no signs of decreasing, cities faced immigration pressure have looked around for any ‘underutilized’ portions of their built environment.
Single-family neighborhoods have become less dense over the years –
This despite the occasional outbreak of McMansionism that offend the curmudgeons.
—a function of an aging population and falling household sizes, says Robert Bruegmann, a professor emeritus of architecture and urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Professor Bruegmann has previously demonstrated that when it comes to sprawl, everything you know is wrong.
As children leave for college and jobs [If they do and if they stay away! – Ed.] many seniors find themselves in homes too big for their needs. The generation behind them, meantime, continues to have fewer children—reducing its need for space.
With a temperate climate and links to growing economies in Asia, Vancouver has all the affordability and space problems that most U.S. cities have and then some. Its real-estate prices have become unhinged from its local economy.
The upward pressure on Vancouver prices comes from global immigrants buying homes and condos in Vancouver as capital’s bolt hole.
Prices have been affected by an inflow of investors and speculators—many from Asia—buying homes and condominiums. A recent study by Bing Thom Architects found that roughly half of Vancouver’s downtown condominiums aren’t occupied by the owners.
New money buying homes and taking them off-line results in displacement: of prices, and of people.
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Downtown Vancouver: where are all the people:?
[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]