Can We Afford to Care About Design in a Housing Crisis?
Image via Flickr
San Francisco taught me to be an urbanist. There are few better classrooms in America in which to learn the delight of strolling down a cozy street and turning the corner to an unexpected discovery in an alley or shop window; the freedom of having your daily needs within a short walk of home; or the excitement of stepping outside into a hyper-diverse milieu of people whose stories you'll never know and feeling part of something grand even on your loneliest days.
San Francisco also taught me to be a YIMBY. To live there in the past decade was to watch the mournful procession (if you were lucky enough not to be part of it) of those giving up on America's most expensive city or being pushed out of it—artists, immigrants, teachers, nonprofit workers, bartenders, cooks, people of color with roots in the city several generations deep—and to want to stop the bleeding.
As a result, I've never seen these two identities—urbanist and YIMBY—as in conflict. A human-scaled, compact, walkable city is the best and most sustainable (in every sense of the word) habitat ever created for human flourishing. And this is both the case for learning and respecting the accumulated wisdom of history on how to make these places beautiful and functional, and for welcoming more of our fellow humans to share them with us and being unthreatened by that prospect.
It's been my deep surprise to learn lately that there's a subset of housing advocates who seem to believe that supporting more housing and demanding good urbanism are in conflict now.
Specifically, some people seem to have concluded that since "neighborhood character" is often a smoke-screen for any number of selfish (and even classist and racist) objections to change, that therefore, neighborhood character (without the scare quotes) itself warrants discarding as a relic of a less enlightened time. And with it, concern for a sense of place, a cohesive and enjoyable (dare I say lovable) public realm, and design features that bring out the best in humanity.
The offending house. Photo by Jeff Speck.
Even luminaries of urbanism aren't immune to critique on this point. In late 2019, Jeff Speck, co-author of Suburban Nation and author of Walkable City, two of the most important books about cities yet this century, tweeted a criticism of a new house in Brookline, MA, and the swift condemnation poured in, accusing him of being an aesthetic snob, an out-of-touch architect more concerned with the subjective beauty of a upper-middle-class enclave than with who can or can't afford to live in it. It was a grossly unfair criticism, but Twitter pile-ons are Twitter pile-ons.
It's true: design requirements can raise the cost of building, or even rule out good projects that would otherwise happen. They can make infill extraordinarily difficult. And they can be ahistorical, arbitrary, and, indeed, sometimes driven by snobbery rather than true understanding of what makes a place desirable.
So can we afford to, like Speck urges, care about design even in the midst of a housing crisis?
Yes, and I'll go further:
We can't afford not to care about design in a housing crisis.
People who want inclusive, broadly affordable cities ought to be wholly on board with good urbanism. Even at the expense of some new homes in the short term. Here's why, in a simple observation:
What's the main reason people tend to oppose urban density or infill?
If you said "parking" or "traffic," congratulations, perhaps you've been to a public meeting lately, and listened to the numbing repetition of these two themes like a Philip Glass soundtrack by a long line of project opponents claiming their 3 minutes at the microphone.
Traffic and parking are the twin suns around which everything in the politics of urban growth revolves. Sure, there are people who are worked up about noise, or school crowding, or about negative stereotypes of renters or low-income residents. But for the most part, most of us don't really have a problem with new neighbors. It's their cars we don't like.
The car has become in many ways the primary focus of urban planning. This observation from Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking, sums up the problem neatly:
Cities are limiting the density of people to limit the density of cars. Free parking has become the arbiter of urban form, and cars have replaced humans as zoning’s real density concern.
It follows that if you want majority public support for a city that makes room for new people without each proposal being a battle that requires activist mobilization, you ought to support a less car-centric city.
Cars and the Bad Party Problem
“For the most part, most of us don’t really have a problem with new neighbors. It’s their cars we don’t like.”
I wrote in a 2016 post called The Neighbor's Dilemma about how car culture poisons the politics of urban growth and change. Designing at car scales, for people who get everywhere by car, ensures that the benefits of new development are broadly diffused, while the downsides (noise, traffic, crowds) are tightly concentrated. I might want new cool stores and restaurants and recreational opportunities in my city, and even understand that population growth is what makes those things possible—but why would I want them (and all the other customers and their cars) to be right near my house?
Growth in a car-dependent neighborhood is a bad party. Every new arrival makes things a little worse for the people who were already there. Growth in a traditional, walkable neighborhood is a good party. Every new arrival makes things better and more interesting for those who were already there.
New Urbanist developer Vince Graham likes to make this observation (as paraphrased by Kevin Klinkenberg):
“When you sell privacy & exclusivity, every new home is a degradation of that asset. When you sell community, each new home enhances the asset. Most of our suburbia does very well for exclusivity and privacy.”
What does the design of a house—irrespective of its location—have to do with whether it sells exclusivity and privacy, or community and connection?
How Design Tells Us to Be Threatened By New Neighbors
What 95% of those piling on Jeff Speck on Twitter missed was a crucial point about Speck's criticism. The problem with the Brookline house is not that it's ugly or in an inconsistent architectural style to its neighbors. The problem is that its design is antisocial and actively harming the neighborhood. There's nuance here, but 80% of why comes down to two words:
The. Garage.
And yet, almost none of the countless Twitter responses to Jeff Speck even mention the word "garage."
What's wrong with front loading garages? A few things:
They mean there are no eyes on the street, and no interaction between the private and the public realm. They are they absolute functional opposite of a front porch or stoop.
They degrade pedestrian comfort and safety. If you're walking, now there's another place you have to have your guard up because a car might hit you.
Curb cuts result in the loss of on-street parking, a vicious cycle which makes off-street parking more necessary. And off-street parking requirements cut into buildable space, which often makes affordable housing economically impossible.
Curb cuts also render some uses of street space, such as protected bike lanes, impossible.
The traditional city is a sort of social compact. It adheres to certain rules of design not because of aesthetic conformism, but because they produce an environment that is pro-social. The public realm enriches the buildings that front it, and the buildings enrich the public realm.
A front-loading garage, a blank wall, an absent or hard-to-find front door, an over-tall fence around a property: these things spit in the face of that social compact. They send the message, "My world is made up of my private space and the other private spaces I travel to and spend time in. The streets in between are not places to be but merely places to pass through, and I have no obligation to contribute to their quality."
There is a lot besides design that plays into car dependence, of course. Density itself has much to do with whether walking is a viable means of transportation (how much stuff is within a 15-minute walking radius). Public transportation is often a crucial missing piece that would give people viable alternatives to driving. We need all these things in our cities.
But to build an environment where robust, mass political support for those things is possible, we also need to challenge the assumption that making room for people means making room for cars. How better than to insist on design that puts pedestrians first in the public realm?
We don't need to ban cars, but by all means, ban garage-dominated facades. Require the garage, if there is one, to be a secondary feature, off to the side or in back. Limit curb cuts.
The YIMBY project is a project of cultural change, not just one of getting housing units built. Want YIMBYism to be the cultural default? It will never be until we challenge car hegemony. Jeff Speck, the foremost American authority on walkability, understands this. And that's what he's talking about when he says this house is a thumb in the eye of its neighborhood.
Do his critics understand?
Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is also a founding member of the organization. His work at Strong Towns focuses on housing issues, small-scale and incremental development, urban design, and lowering the barriers to entry for people to participate in creating resilient and prosperous neighborhoods. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota, with a concentration in Housing and Community Development.
Daniel’s work with Strong Towns reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children.