The Scar of Modern Urban Planning
Editor’s Note: Andrew Price is a founding member of Strong Towns and has been a regular contributor since 2013. This article first appeared on his blog, where you can also read Part 2, “The Scar of Modern Architecture,” and Part 3, “The Scar of Modernity.” Unless otherwise noted, images are courtesy of the author.
The Need for Old Buildings
A Copy-and-Paste town has nothing unique to offer, and can be described simply by its combination of fast food retailers and big box stores that it offers its residents.
In Death and Life of American Cities, Jane Jacobs talked about the need for a variety of ages of buildings. Many businesses, such as thrift stores and used bookstores, have narrow profit margins. These businesses cannot afford to carry the costs of new construction, even if it is amortized over a mortgage. One of the most valuable functions of a city is offering its residents the chance to turn near nothing into something. A new restaurant wanting to open or a teacher wanting space to provide singing lessons probably cannot afford to carry the costs of new construction without getting into a lot of debt.
Chain stores and franchises, with a proven business model, are some of the only entities can that can take on the risk and cost of new construction. In many cities across the United States, the lack of old buildings—or what could be better described as a lack of old buildings that can be re-purposed after the first generation of owners have moved on—creates what I call a Copy-and-Paste town.
When we make it difficult to create something from nothing, we make it hard for new businesses to get established. When only businesses that are already profitable can expand, it contributes to an environment where only the rich have ownership and get richer; everyone else becomes their employee. We wonder why new construction is filled with the same old chain stores we see everywhere else in the country, and why we lose urban biodiversity.
The mixed-use SkyView Center in Flushing, Queens is filled with the same old chain stores found anywhere in the country. There is no need for me to travel to Flushing to visit the same stores and buy the same products I can get anywhere.
A shortage of old buildings that can be repurposed is not the only factor that leads to economic polarization. A lack of granularity and the corresponding urban illnesses that come with it; lack of public markets and locations for street vendors to try out business opportunities without going all-in on a brick-and-mortar location; oppressively high taxes and fees that make it impossible for anything other than the ultra-profitable to survive—these are just a few other factors.
Street vendors are a sign of urban vitality. Very low cost to get started, this fellow can pull his cart anywhere he believes he can sell hotdogs, or fresh fruit, or haircuts. Image source.
Incremental Wealth Building
In a healthy city, change should be good. It takes a lot of energy to tear something down. It would be better to incrementally adapt what already exists. We see this process at work in architecture, as at Laverock Hall Farm—
—and at the Palace of Versailles, which was built not all at once, but incrementally over centuries:
Beginning as a chateau, successive generations of kings inherited the property and spent their resources expanding it, until it grew into a grand palace. It is not hard to imagine that the cost of building the Palace of Versailles from scratch today would exceed what any one king could afford. Instead, the palace was accomplished by each generation adding on to the work done by a previous generation.
Wealth can accumulate by iterating what already exists. A town may not have had the wealth in a single generation to build a great cathedral from scratch, but they could if they set out on a multi-century construction project. Likewise, a city built from scratch within a year is not going to have the same urban biodiversity grown incrementally and adapted over centuries.
When to Rebuild
In many cases, it is better to adapt what already exists than to demolish and start over again. But there are times when it makes sense to tear down and rebuild, such as when a building's structure has been so much neglected that it is impractical to save. Part of this is economics, which I will talk about in a moment. We should take good care of our buildings.
I think it was Steve Mouzon who said that "maintenance free" often means "not able to be maintained." We should build with traditional materials that can easily be maintained and age gracefully. Wood can be puttied, sanded, repainted, and, at worst, turned into wood-chips for garden mulch that will eventually biodegrade. Plaster can be patched up. Stones can be replaced—and broken stones can be reused as is, or cut into smaller stones, or grounded into gravel. Metal can be welded back into shape.
A stone wall in Wave Hill, The Bronx, New York. That fact the stones are not perfectly cut adds character, while still making a durable and nice looking wall that will age gracefully.
I am digressing a little here and will follow up on this topic in the future, but I am trying to make the case that buildings, when they are maintained—and lovable enough that we want to maintain them—should be expanded and adapted if possible; when that’s not possible, they should not be replaced unless they are going to be replaced with something better. There are always going to be exceptions, although this should generally hold true.
The problem, however, is defining what is "better.”
A Better Purpose?
Better could mean a better purpose. Sometimes buildings outlive their original purpose. Some buildings are made for a specific function, and that function is reflected in their layout and architecture. This is a church, and it looks obviously like a church:
All Souls Church in Tannersville, New York. There is no mistaking this for a church.
If the building outlives its purpose—for example, if the church, as an organization, moves on—the building often gets destroyed (or sits abandoned, decays, and then gets destroyed). If it is lovable enough and there are people with the money and willpower to do so, the church might get re-purposed, but more likely, it will be abandoned or destroyed. You see this in many American cities that used to have ornate train stations. The trains stop running, so the train station has lost its purpose and gets replaced by something better suited for the current situation.
A Better Economic Fit?
Better can mean a better Improvement to Land (I/L) ratio. Strong Towns assumes that a natural Improvement to Land value ratio is somewhere around 9:1. This means that you would spend approximately $90,000 of improvements (the building) on a parcel of land valued at $10,000. It's very unlikely someone is going to build a $100 million skyscraper on land that is only valued at $10,000, and nobody is going to put a mobile home on a $1 million parcel of land in the core of the city. Strong Towns also points out that, if the underlying land value increases but the improvement either stays the same or deprecates, eventually the I/L ratio falls so low—such as 2:1, or a $90,000 house on a $45,000 lot—that it is likely that the property will be redeveloped (for example, into a $405,000 house).
When the land value significantly changes, it increases the likelihood of the property being redeveloped to bring it back into a natural I/L ratio. Image source.
In ”Density Without Zoning,” I showed how the transportation network affects population density, but it can also affect land values. Transportation infrastructure can either increase land values (by connecting two productive places together—e.g., running a rail-line between Boston and New York City is beneficial to both), or it can redistribute land values.
When you run a highway or a rail-line from the middle of a city out to the countryside, you increase the value of the previously inaccessible countryside that is now within commuting distance. The law of supply and demand dictates that if you increase supply without any significant change in demand (such as a larger population), the price will fall. So we can think of this as redistributing the land value from the middle of the city to the land now within commuting distance. People can now build homes on the cheaper land rather than compete for homes in the city. Workers who would have worked in the city now work for businesses that serve those new houses—we have this ecosystem of people and businesses spread over a larger land area, and land values in the center of the city are going to reflect that.
Freeways bisecting the urban landscape of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. These freeways dramatically increased the supply of land within commuting distance, distributing the land value away from downtown. Image source.
In towns all across the United States, we have massively increased the supply of land within commuting distance. We have gone from walking and riding street cars to four-lane roads where cars travel at 45 miles per hour. Unless your population has increased 200-fold, the population density and underlying land value has likely fallen.
We know it is ridiculous to build a $100 million skyscraper on a parcel of land costing $10,000, and we know that increasing land values increases the likelihood of property being redeveloped. Yet the opposite is just as true. If land that was previously worth $100,000 had a $1 million improvement on it, but now the land value has fallen across the course of a century and it is only worth $10,000, does it justify keeping the $1 million building on it?
Buildings are expensive—they require maintenance and usually there is some form of property tax. You need to find owners willing to pay the upkeep or tenants to cover the cost, and as land values are an indication of how desirable the land is, it is unlikely that you will be able to find an owner or a tenant willing to upkeep a $1 million building on a $10,000 lot. So, there is an economic incentive to replace the $1 million building with a $100,000 building—it brings us back into a more natural I/L ratio.
The extreme case, which unfortunately is far too common in many American towns, is when it is uneconomical to keep the building—because of mounting maintenance costs—and it is uneconomical to build anything new, because we have redesigned our city to be car-dependent so that no business would want to be located somewhere their customers cannot drive to. In this case, the only perceived viable option is to replace the building with a parking lot.
A 'missing tooth' in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. You can tell a building of approximately 4 stories used to exist here, because it has left an imprint on the building next door by the exposed brickwork and lack of windows. Image source.
Replacing buildings in urban areas has gotten so common that the term ”parking crater” was coined. Parking craters look as if a comet fell from the sky and randomly leveled buildings.
Parking craters in Rochester, New York highlighted in red. If one did not know better, they could assume the city had been leveled in war. Image source.
Parking lots are so worthless that their value is essentially the underlying land value. So under a property tax system, you are just paying the tax on the now cheap land and not the improvement. (In some American states, property taxes do not get reevaluated for decades unless the property is sold, so even when land prices increase, there is often no incentive to redevelop the parking lot into something better.) Since surface parking lots pay very little in taxes, they are often owned by land speculators, who are in the business of holding on to land for a very long time, hoping to sell at a profit in the far future. Since parking lots pay very little in taxes, land speculators are incentivized to keep it that way.
Most of us would not consider that replacing a $1 million building with a $100,000 building or a parking lot would be "better," but it might be better economically, and that disconnect creates mistrust.
The Problem with Losing What We Have
In many cases, it is illegal to rebuild what is torn down. With zoning and land use laws—parking requirements, setback requirements, maximum lot coverage ratios, minimum lot sizes, etc.—even if land values did increase, often what should be a positive change ends up being suburban in character. Sometimes, you cannot even rehabilitate a “grandfathered in” building because it is not up to code. We have made it illegal to rebuild our best neighborhoods.
The United States has a shortage of quality urban neighborhoods because we have made it illegal to build neighborhoods as we used to. You cannot just pick a random suburb and start building another Beacon Hill.
Build a neighborhood similar to Beacon Hill, Boston in just about any city and it would be immediately popular and would likely win all kinds of awards, and yet we have made it illegal.
The Scar of Modern Urban Planning
Modern urban planning has scarred us. Change should be good. But over the last century, we’ve reconfigured our cities around the automobile. Because old forms became obsolete, because infrastructure "investments" meant devaluing the urban core and turning buildings into garages and parking lots, because we watched our communal wealth being destroyed, and because modern building codes and zoning regulations prevent us from building more of our best stuff, change has been bad.
To help visualize how modern urban planning has changed our cities, check out this website. Compare Detroit in 1951 to Detroit roughly 60 years later.
Aerial view of Detroit in 1951. Image source.
Aerial view of Detroit in late 2010. Image source.
I do not blame cities that form historical districts and try to glass-case entire neighborhoods, or citizen advocacy groups that fight to prevent old buildings from being modified—because a century of change has often resulted in worse outcomes.
We need a better way.
Urban planning involves a lot of jargon that can be obscure or confusing. Here’s one term you might not have heard, but that can make a big difference in the design of your city.