It gets exhausting seeing the same NIMBY talking points trotted around every once in a while. I guess the "new developments are just luxury housing" talking points have started to smell so we're back to the good old "character of the neighborhood."
Taking a look at the "character of the neighborhood" in South Bay and I couldn't be more thrilled that developers are putting up inoffensive boxes rather than some rehash of "Spanish/Mediterranean revival" that seemed to dominate circa 2000-2015. I have a little more hope that these "bland boxes" won't look garishly outdated in a generation. And that's neglecting the irony entirely of "European" styling applied to single family sprawl.
EDIT: Spoke too soon, "For many people, 5-over-1s have come to symbolize the most painful aspects of today’s housing crisis — stand-ins for gentrification, corporate landlords and excessively high rents." Do better, NYT.
The frustrating thing is that these units aren’t even luxurious, they are just new and relatively expensive. Having lived in and visited other who live in this type of construction, you consistently see that these are slapped together to look nice in photos, while the laminate floors, sinks, etc are poorly installed, and the wear shows pretty quickly.
It says a lot about the state of America that in unit laundry and ~500 sq ft is “luxury”.
And yet it's still an valued point. Some things can be trite and true, why spend energy entertaining contrairianism.
Being bold and out of character may inadvertently build character (brutalism). Movies have done the same: appeal to the masses by not being noticeably placeable.
Chicago has this many (show 1 finger) new floorplans replacing the brown/graystones which were themselves ubiquitous, and it's soul crushing. Every year I live in this city adds to the bane of noticing all the "misses" on long term investments and diversity (housing, minimal investment in public spaces, say "bike lane" as many times as you can in one sentence.)
Keep contention high by being noticeable and trying. not bland by contrast.
I live in a 120 year old house and it looks the exact same as a bunch of other 120 year old houses around here because they were all obviously either done by the same builder or straight up bought out of a sears catalogue.
The working people that built my house didn't give a shit that it wasn't unique then and working people don't care now. Folks want an affordable place to live.
Aesthetic "concerns" around new apartment housing is a desperate attempt by the rich to keep the poor out of their exclusive neighbourhoods.
Nimby’s are statistically wealthier than average for the area. Renters simply have less money on average and don’t care as much about such issues because they are more mobile.
We normally think of the top 0.1% as rich, but even the top 1/3 is much better off than average.
Right, but 1/3 of the US population is 100M people, far greater than 0.1%. I agree with the GP's point: many people constantly try to demonize some tiny sliver of ultra-rich people in the US, and blame them for all of the society's problems, and act like the other 99.9% are their victims, but this just isn't the case. America's problems are really caused by a very large fraction of the American public (if not a large majority). The top 0.1% certainly are to blame for some of the problems, but not nearly all of them. The NIMBYs causing many of America's housing woes are not in the 0.1%.
In many ways the gap between the bottom 1/3 and top 1/3 of Americans is larger than the difference between someone at the 70th percentile vs 0.1% percentile.
It’s only when you’re talking 0.001% that things get really different.
You can live off $1M (after taxes) indefinitely, and still have an inflation-adjusted $25M nest-egg to pass on to someone else after you die.
The idea that you can't live a lavish life on $1M in spending - even in Manhattan - is absurd.
$1M could get you a $50k per month apartment in Manhattan plus leave you almost $1500 per day in spending.
There's almost no one on this forum spending that kind of money, and many of us have VERY nice lives.
A lot of people in the 0.1% still work - but they definitely do not need to. You can be a part of the yacht class with $25M.
I mean, you're not going to have your own - but you can afford to rent one regularly... You can fly private, etc.
There's an enormous difference between someone in the 0.1% and someone in the 1% - namely that you have 0 reason to work, and you can afford a staff to do everything for you...
For probably >75% of the 5%-1% - there isn't that much difference between you and someone average beside you have a nicer car, a nicer house, you eat out more often, go on nicer vacations, and pay a LOT more taxes...
Edit: My point was mostly that top 70th percentile or a little over 300k isn’t US retirement money but it is third world retirement money. It’s the bottom threshold for unlimited food and shelter being guaranteed as long as you keep expenses low enough. Meanwhile the bottom 1/3 is basically trusting on borrowing for their capital, they simply need to work. A pension is just another form of wealth.
As to 0.1% vs 0.01% I am mostly talking about staff. You can own and operate a boat at relatively low wealth. The UK famously has a lot of people living cheaply on narrow boats but there are US equivalents. The 0.1% wealth level owns a much nicer boat while the 0.01% owns a boat with it’s own staff.
That’s the tipping point IMO. People of most income levels can go to the beach it’s mostly nicer versions of the same basic thing. From living in a tent to a large mansion you’re cooking lunch or eating out until suddenly the option for a private chef becomes normal.
I always liked this bit of lore from the Sunset District of San Francisco:
> It is not surprising that Doelger was a great admirer of Henry Ford, and in some ways, the Sunset rowhouses were the "Model T's" of housing. [...] It was not uncommon for the framing crews to race one another down two sides of one street to see which crew could complete framing their side first.
Yawn. This has been the case forever as different construction methods and architectural styles come and go. With a small bit of architectural education you can walk around just about any city and guess the decade any building was built at a glance… or the century if we’re taking pre-industrial era.
The subhead, does it matter given the housing shortage, can be answered in a word: no.
I assume they are talking about all this mid rise mixed use stuff. In general I like it. It’s no more bland than single occupant suburban development or ultramodern or brutalist high rises.
Preach. Walking through any new subdivision in the burbs or more rural areas is so depressing. Cheap, cookie cutter houses squeezed on top of each other as far as the eye can see. At least there's a big push to make most of these mid-rise developments mixed use, making the area more dense and walkable. The benefits out weigh the cons.
Definitely a language bamboozle, but the author has a point: in a residential-only subdivision, dense houses feel "squeezed in" to a lot size for no real purpose. If you can't walk to anything other than identical houses, why locate them that close? Only justification I can imagine is "to make the developers more money on the same lot size."
Of course, I'm no fan of ultradense living. But in cities that have lots of businesses, parks, public transit stations, etc to walk to, density is a huge win, and the author uses the positive term to convey that.
Essentially the same trait is positive in one context but negative in another. Consider cakes and apples. Everyone wants a juicy apple. Nobody wants a soggy cake.
In this respect, I don't mean "density" as strictly spacial. The subdivisions I'm referring to stretch on for blocks with no businesses or services mixed in. Typically they're zoned strictly residential. No corner stores, transit, restaurants, coffee shops, etc. And this means people have to rely on cars to go do simple things like grocery shop or socialize outside the home.
There's quite a bit of research and discussion on the value of walkable communities if you're interested in learning more. Maybe you disagree, but I believe the kind of "density" created by mixed 5-over-1s is better for people and their communities than mile long cookie cutter subdivisions.
Glad I wasn’t the only one who noticed that nifty little PC language trick they employed.
As someone who has lived in both “squeezed on top of” and “more dense”, I’ll take the “squeezed on top of” over the “more dense” any day of the week. However my preference is “no one else living within a mile in all directions”.
A lot of folks who seek to minimise noise and even visibility of neighbors would consider subdivision side yards "squeezed" compared to rural single-family homes. The "squeezing" refers to the entire lot, not just the house.
Same as it ever was. Cities largely get their look from when various booms and busts occurred which links up to when specific styles were popular.
For example old NYC skyscrapers look just like other skyscrapers built at the time. The difference is few cities built significant skyscrapers during that time period, and NYC avoided losing building in WWI/WWII etc.
The results of our broken zoning systems and NIMBYism. If we had done 20 years ago what we are doing now (drastically reducing single family zoning) the shortage would not be as severe.
Exactly. There’s a shortage of housing that will take many years to remedy. We can’t afford to nitpick about architectural aesthetics until we’ve built enough houses for everyone.
Though there are several things that drive it, the real problem is that today's "modern" architects have no vision and imagination - they produce soul-crushing dreck that incorporates all the worst features you'd expect from really bad copies of 100-year-old modernism, cubism, and brutalism. This is a problem with single-family "modern" homes, but especially, with the newer mixed While density is always best avoided, it can be done well: The Scots showed how you can have uniformity of design with character, warmth, and function in their architecture of 200 years ago.
The result is what we see virtually mandated now in cities like Austin: A modern rehash of Soviet/Eastern Bloc housing projects, recast as "vertical mixed use" developments. Mid-rises that are invariably too tall and too close to the street, blocking out the sky and leaving just a strip of concrete to the road, which is now rendered even less useful by the copious bike lanes that no one uses because it's way too damn hot most of the year. They have only minimal windows on the exterior walls, and if there's a balcony, it's usually either a completely non-functional decorative appendage a foot deep, or it's too small for even a cafe table set. Green space and lawns (even though grasses are the most effective plants for cleaning the air), or even big trees, are discouraged.
Worse, no one wants to live in them unless they have to: First of all, they have mandated "low income housing", guaranteeing a resident population of thugs and criminals, second, the real estate is so incredibly expensive that no commercial or retail businesses can survive in the first floor locations that are supposed to provide some aspect of "community". (Austin's preferred housing model is deliberately family-hostile.)
I'll take suburban single family homes ANY day over that - this kind of "modern" architecture will crush your soul - people should be free and kings and queens of their own castles, not proles in a pod eating bugs with Big Brother on the viewscreen.
Some amount of repetition is a small price to pay for plentiful quality housing. We probably need about as much variety in housing as we do in cars. There are hundreds of currently produced car models (and thousands more available used) with enough variety and options to suit almost every need.
We need (and fortunately have) vastly more variety in housing than in cars. A car is much more practical to have multiple of, where a house is less so. Some people will want theater rooms, workshops, a studio space, 4+ garage spots, extra sound-proofing, an office (or multiple), a yard, master and laundry on the first floor, an in-law or nanny apartment, and the list goes on and on. Some of those are simple preferences; others are practical necessities for some.
If your daily driver doesn’t do something you need weekly, buy a second one. If your house doesn’t do something you need weekly, you’re far more likely really stuck.
Agreed, which is why the mandatory single family home zoning that dominates most of America's residential land is such a disaster.
Mandating that anyone who wants to live in an area must living in a detached house on a big lot is terrible. Anyone who would rather pay less for less home is completely left out, by government decree no less.
Upzone and let the market cater to what people are willing to pay for, same as cars.
so the wants of those who wish to move to a neigh orhood outweigh the needs of those who are already there?
i have no love for the nimbys but its also not a win to turn a neighbordhood into a bunch of low rent duplexes. theres a differenxe between rempving restrictions for new development and using these changes to undermine the property rights of others.
The needs of society as a whole outweigh the needs of every single neighborhood saying, "yes we need housing, but please do it somewhere that's not next to me." Besides hurting local economies and people's pocketbooks, that just results in endless suburban sprawl, which hurts the environment.
The entitlement complex so many people have these days to mandate that to live in their community, you must control X amount of land, is simply classism, with economic segregation as the result: you must make this much money to live here. Working class? Get the fuck out.
And the real gall here, is that NIMBYs insist that the government be the one to enforce these invisibly gated communities, as if it should be in the government's interest to enforce the social stratification that NIMBYs so desire.
Cities are still too low of a government level, because cities can choose to reap the rewards of a booming metro area economy, while pushing housing supply and the associated growing pains onto everyone else. See: my native bay area, and its disastrous housing situation.
Bare minimum, you need to solve this at the metro area level. But since metro area governments don't really exist (at least in the US), it has to be the state. Which is exactly what's happening right now in the bay area (state law coming into force that's forcing cities to either adopt a serious growth plan that accommodates significantly more housing, or lose their zoning powers entirely).
edit: also note that this
> Individual neighborhoods can’t block a city-wide vote.
isn't really accurate. It's common to have zoning that allows for more housing on paper, but then the existence of community meetings that the housing commission or whoever listens to means that developers have to abide whatever the neighborhood residents at the meetings say they want, and sometimes what they want is no denser housing near themselves for any reason.
Just because you can build more on paper doesn't mean you can actually build. The US largely doesn't have "as of right" development rules. There's one set of transparent regulations that are put there democratically, and another set of opaque regulations that exist only in the minds of whichever locals are most motivated to show up to the neighborhood meetings.
One reason to make the buildings all look the same is so that some decades down the road it's less likely to be stolen from the owner by being designated a "landmark".
This is really the result of the massive skills loss in the construction industry. Everything has to be cheap to purchase and installable by low skilled labor. The whole point is to maximize profit with minimal quality. This is most evident in masonry construction. You basically can't get brick work of a quality comparable to what was done 100 years ago any more.
> This is really the result of the massive skills loss in the construction industry
The skills weren't lost, just no one wants to pay for them. If ten people can build ten houses in a year, but to do decorative houses they can only do five, hey suddenly the masonry costs on your house have doubled.
> You basically can't get brick work of a quality comparable to what was done 100 years ago any more.
Bricks were mostly used structurally a century ago. In about the late 1930s, most brickwork started being veneer (non-structural). Combined with dramatically increase labour costs as a proportion of overall building cost, it's pretty clear why.
If you want some decorative brickwork done, order a pallet of brick and some bags of mortar and learn how to do it yourself. Anything else is reserved for those with money to burn.
I worked for the biggest building supply/manufacturing company in the US. It's not a loss of skill, it's the economies of scale that comes with prefab. It's not only faster to build with, it's cheaper to the builder, and it's a higher margin product to sell. It's the right choice for a majority of homes, and a majority is what you see.
It's at the point now where you can build your house out of a catalog then do VR walkthroughs. That's a great sell to the customer and something you can't do the old way.
Was going to echo this. There has been an explosion of building products/systems/technologies that make comparing to even just 20+ years ago difficult. A focus on energy efficiency and air quality also means that some old methods have been demoted from their status quo position of the past. Other products actually enable low skilled workers to do things that once required high skilled craftsmen.
It's a combination of prefab cost meeting regulatory constraint. The most generic of the new builds have been optimized for cost while also working within legal requirements for many states and cities.
Overall I welcome it, because there's a herd strength in having a generation of homes all built the same way, with the same kinds of known caveats.
One thing that drives me nuts is architects using asymmetrical window placements. It's hard to look at a building with windows randomly placed here and there. I don't care if it's a Philly Shit Box™ or some other hastily constructed building, it's the asymmetry of the window placements that I can't stand.
That's fine, what gives cities character is when a) styles are mixed up by virtue of having been built in different time periods, and b) as the fronts/facades get gradually transformed over time.
Has anyone done the math on when we will have too much housing? With the boomers dying off and the much smaller following generations, I presume at some point in the next 50-100 years we will have way more houses than people to fill them. Surely some statistician has done the math.
Germany has had a relatively stagnant population for some time now and they still have housing price problems, especially for buying real estate.
Western countries have somehow managed to develop learn helplessness on housing. It should be easier than ever to make safe, high quality housing, and yet it's become absurdly difficult and expensive instead.
It's common to hear anecdotes from homeowners merely trying to do an extension or add an ADU on the kafkaesque nightmare of bureaucracy that we've managed to create.
In the US it's almost all immigration dependent now.
So the answer could be anywhere from "1-2 generations" to "never", depending on our immigration policies & relative desirability for people to come here.
Houses aren't fungible either. Some places have dirt cheap homes, many places don't. The number of buildings is only important so far as they are located where people want to live.
They actually did studies and predictions. It is not pretty. The story is that when we were an agricultural society, huge families lived in teeny tiny houses for generations. As we become more industrialized, we first saw the nuclear family (2 parents and 2 children), then single families (1 parent and 2 children and the dad living by himself, and then finally digital nomads (1 dude living by himself or shacking up with 3 other dudes). We may need the same number of housing units as families split up and everyone becomes a digital nomad. The long term strategy is that everyone lives in an RV and we just move city to city and live in an RV park. When I was growing up, we called people who lived in RV parks "trash". I guess we will become trash.
Taking a look at the "character of the neighborhood" in South Bay and I couldn't be more thrilled that developers are putting up inoffensive boxes rather than some rehash of "Spanish/Mediterranean revival" that seemed to dominate circa 2000-2015. I have a little more hope that these "bland boxes" won't look garishly outdated in a generation. And that's neglecting the irony entirely of "European" styling applied to single family sprawl.
EDIT: Spoke too soon, "For many people, 5-over-1s have come to symbolize the most painful aspects of today’s housing crisis — stand-ins for gentrification, corporate landlords and excessively high rents." Do better, NYT.