I live 2 counties away and 40 miles from work. I’ve commuted for 20 years. My current house size would easily cost 300k - 400K more if I lived closer to work. The hours on I95 are my choice, not complaining.
But whenever I think of the kind of community I’d like to age in, it’s not my current neighborhood. I would love to be able to walk to stores, parks, restaurants. I would gladly trade 1000 SF for a walkable neighborhood.
The problem is these neighborhoods are not built in my county - it’s mostly single family homes and some townhouse communities. Even the apartment complexes we have are siloed. There are a few diverse neighborhoods with apartments, townhouses & houses but the sprawl is still immense. We have to drive to everything.
Even if citizens want walkable neighborhoods, how do we get developers to make that happen. My neighborhood was advertised to have trails in it but after all the houses were built the developer renege on the trails.
One thing which might contribute to this logical discontinuity is that people don’t own (or rent) neighbourhoods, but only individual properties within it.
They may well feel a sense of “ownership” (as I do with my neighbourhood) but so do many other people who only visit it (as I do with the next neighbourhood over).
I wish I could say where this thought leads. I can’t, but just wanted to throw it out there.
The other thing is that most cities do in fact have cheaper versions of walkable neighborhoods. The housing stock is usually older, has often been modified many times since built, and is probably a little run down. But they are still nice, walkable, interesting neighbourhoods.
They are also ripe for gentrification. That would make them more expensive, at least in housing costs per individual. (The house that used to shelter four families of five now shelters one family of three, for example.)
One other aspect is that what I often see touted as walkable neighbourhoods aren’t complete ones. They do not have retail selling basic needs. In my neighbourhood; I can buy an amazing bagel or a delicious pastry, I can go to a bar or out for breakfast or dinner, I could put my visiting relatives up at either a moderately expensive B&B or at one with eye watering rates. But if I want to buy groceries I have to walk a bit more than is truly convenient and if I want to buy a spool of thread or a sheet of sandpaper, I have to get in my car and drive to the edge of town.
As someone else said above, Europe has these denser neighborhoods in all reasonably sized cities. They are often built around 4-6 story walk-up buildings with a variety of apartment sizes built around one (!) central staircase. The flats are delightful, with windows on multiple sides--and they would be 100% illegal in almost all of the US due to our stupid building codes that require two staircases for anything higher than 3 stories.
That law--allegedly in place for fire safety, but somehow Europe has fewer fire deaths!--drives up costs and makes for the ugly buildings we have with the central hotel-like corridor and windows only one one side.
If that’s the alternative, I’ll take a free-standing suburban house any day.
So let’s make single staircase buildings legal in the US so we can build like Europeans do.
You have explicitly written about supply issues that drive prices, but left the issue of demand implicit. Both are explicitly part of setting prices. Demand for a lovely neighborhood drives up the price of lovely relative to the price of mundane. You've mostlyleft that out. Price discovery happens in exchanges, and exchange is where supply meets demand.
You have speculated that "we" don't build more lovely because "we" think some metaphysical thing. The relevant "we" is owners and execs of residential construction companies. They tend to be motivated by money ahead of metaphysics. I'm afraid you've published a thought about our feelings of self-worth before subjecting it to Occam. Is there no simpler explanation for our shortage of lovely neighborhoods than a deep-seated drive toward self-abnigation?
OK, three things. It's also unclear whether your metaphysical explanation is falsifiable. Unless it is, it's barstool stuff, though in a fancy bar.
Nice line, but I think you missed my main point. I'm not saying the metaphysical explanation simply results in not building classical urbanism. I'm arguing, based on having heard it many times, that people have NIMBY attitudes about building this way and oppose it because either they have an incorrect understanding of how prices work, or because they hold some notion that urban living is immature, or just for play - that serious people buy a house and a car and drive to work. Maybe you haven't heard things that would lead you to believe that a sizeable number of people think this way. I have.
From the economist’s perspective, one way to talk about this is that people confuse movement along the demand curve with shifts in the demand curve, right? Ie, people see that something (nice neighborhoods) is expensive because it is scarce, without realizing that making it ~not scarce~ would make it ~not expensive~?
Here’s the thing on the “lack of diversity” though… go ANYWHERE else in the world and this is the basic model of a village. You see all kinds of people living densely in towns and more spread out rural land. Often, immigrants equate “the American or the Australian dream” with suburbia. You have SPACE! This was my great grandparents and grandparents by the way. Especially if they are emerging middle class professionals from densely populated cities in developing countries.
We have a special challenge in Australia in the sense that no urban development is older than the 1790s and a significant lot of the growth and development was post WWII in the golden age of the automobile and suburbia and the massively immigration wave. We actually tried to flatten the original settlement of Sydney in the 1960s in the name of ‘progress’. which involved the state government selling off its dilapidated aging social housing stock and experimenting with (disastrous) suburban social housing developments away from everything.
I’ll stop there but I loved the article! Urbanism is not a luxury. It’s a necessity!
They are now facing the same problem as in the 60s. The quality of the buildings were not great and they are now deteriorating. The cost of repairs are more than what the house is worth. The incentive is for the state government to sell them off to developers and try and substitute with rental subsidies in the tightest rental market we’ve seen. Most people living in social housing are not just poor families, they’re also elderly, or got some kind of lifelong disability or mental illness. These suburban communities were built with cars in mind… that no one who lived there could really afford nor even be able drive. Access to ammenities was walking, bikes (if they had them) or by infrequent circuitous bus routes that were an afterthought. There was little public communal space (because that encouraged antisocial behaviour) or things like shops or doctors surgeries. The isolation compounded to poverty and the social dysfunction. The houses themselves were cheap and cheerful but are basically permanent tents. Temperatures in western Sydney through the year swing between 0 Celsius in winter and 45 in the summer, in an uninsulated house is unpleasant (our current house is of a similar make an model, we’re currently saving to replace it with a better built and insulated house).
Sydney is a bit of an odd duck. We have a ridiculously inflated housing market, a rapidly growing population and we’re now hitting the limits of suburban sprawl. None of the development is well though out beyond ‘crap we need houses!’ Urban infill is awful quality apartment blocks (some of which were evacuated because the building began to catastrophically crack) that seem targeted to single people. All our capital cities are suffering similar problems and our regional towns are too as more people are pushed out to the regional towns looking for that kind of community. We’re an odd one.
Sorry to bring this up a week later, but you mentioned “awful quality apartment blocks...targeted to single people.” Can you elaborate a bit more? “Evacuated because the building began to catastrophically crack” indicates a fatal structural design or installation failure, but were there additional problems with eg layout, or maybe the insulation like the earlier houses you mentioned?
Designed for single people doesn’t seem like a problem for at least some percentage of new housing, with the increased number of people living alone.
Now that I think of it, what building material is most common for new housing in Australia? Lumber, concrete walls?
Good questions. There are a couple of things going on in Australia that is skewing the incentives for developers versus actual housing needs. One is the compulsory allocation of “affordable housing” in every apartment block over a certain size. Most developers build extra studio or one bed appartments at the expense of 2 or 3 bed apartments driving up their prices and making it unaffordable as a starter home for families. You could spend $800k on a 2 bed apartment plus strata in an urban area or that same money will buy you a house on a 400 m2 block on the suburban periphery with out strata fees. Developers are only liable for faults in the building for 7 years. A lot of the apartment developments built in the last 15 years are made with concrete like you’d see anywhere. But they’re made extremely cheaply, are often poorly finished and designed to fit the maximum number of appartments rather than the liveability of the apartments. Most have no communal space other than hallways or a perfunctory reception area to house the lift. I’ve seen apartment buildings built in the last 2 years on the coast that have deteriorated massively (at least the facades have) because the developers got away with only covering the steel reinforcement with 20mm of concrete instead of the required 50mm for buildings within 50 m of the ocean. You can see rusting steel cracking and shredding the concrete that is exposed to the elements.
The state I lived in privatised building certification perverting the incentives for certifiers to pass outright illegal and dodgy finishes in order to get more work. My brother worked for a firm that retrofitted and upgraded fire safety systems in appartments buildings. 50% of his work was retrofitting new apartment buildings which had NO code required fire safety mechanisms like fire collars, fireproof doors or even smoke
Alarms in the apartments. All of the retrofitting was paid for by the residents as the developer had ‘gone bankrupt’. This is a widespread problem in new builds in Sydney because there is no penalties for failing to install the required fire containment equipment or for certifying it. It’s a miracle that no one has died yet.
These were all ‘certified’ to be built to code and sound by private certifiers. It’s left residents without a home in the tightest housing market in the country and with no hope of recouping the losses.
We lived in a 2 bed apartment like this when we got married. Our apartment was a ‘relaxed’ 2 story development with subsides housing set aside for nurses at the hospital 300 m away. But. The whole thing was rendered concrete block with NO insulation anywhere and the whole complex was surrounded by ashphalt car park. We had no ventilation because we had a single common wall running up the spine of the building and all the windows (which were sliding patio doors with a metal basket around it) on one side facing west. In summer we recorded temperatura of 37 degrees Celsius INSIDE the apartment. It cooled to 30 overnight. Outside was 48 degrees on the ashphalt which was eight degrees hotter than the suburb average. With the help of a portable air conditioner we managed to get the temperature in summer down to about 29 degrees with it running full blast. This is just my experience. We urged to build good apartments. I’ve visited friends with 1930s built apartments. They are lovely and cool, have high ceilings and are considered spaces. Now we don’t do any of that.
Funny how "people" object to spending money on things that make society nice, yet ALL the money has been going to just roads and roads only to serve the needs of cars - what about the needs of all the other forms of transportation, as if somehow those needs don't deserve resources?!
There are definitely cases where the "green" version of a product costs the same or less to produce than the "normal" version but gets sold at a premium due to some combination of economies of scale and people being willing to pay extra for the (real or imagined) environmental benefits.
I no longer use paper coffee filters, but back when I used to buy them I sometimes saw unbleached filters advertised as if they were a more premium product at a correspondingly higher price. The idea was the they were "greener" because they required fewer harmful chemicals to manufacture. Obviously, there's no inherent reason why an unbleached filter should cost more than a bleached one. If they cost more to manufacture, it's only due to economies of scale, and if the whole coffee filter industry switched to unbleached filters I would expect the per-unit cost to manufacture to go down slightly.
I also once heard an advocate for sustainable farming claim that it can actually be cheaper to product grass-finished beef vs. the usual US method of fattening cattle in a feed lot - both because of reduced feed costs and because you no longer need to pay someone to haul away the manure (since it stays in the field where it fertilizes the grass). However, I don't know enough about the industry to know if this is really true.
I live 2 counties away and 40 miles from work. I’ve commuted for 20 years. My current house size would easily cost 300k - 400K more if I lived closer to work. The hours on I95 are my choice, not complaining.
But whenever I think of the kind of community I’d like to age in, it’s not my current neighborhood. I would love to be able to walk to stores, parks, restaurants. I would gladly trade 1000 SF for a walkable neighborhood.
The problem is these neighborhoods are not built in my county - it’s mostly single family homes and some townhouse communities. Even the apartment complexes we have are siloed. There are a few diverse neighborhoods with apartments, townhouses & houses but the sprawl is still immense. We have to drive to everything.
Even if citizens want walkable neighborhoods, how do we get developers to make that happen. My neighborhood was advertised to have trails in it but after all the houses were built the developer renege on the trails.
One thing which might contribute to this logical discontinuity is that people don’t own (or rent) neighbourhoods, but only individual properties within it.
They may well feel a sense of “ownership” (as I do with my neighbourhood) but so do many other people who only visit it (as I do with the next neighbourhood over).
I wish I could say where this thought leads. I can’t, but just wanted to throw it out there.
The other thing is that most cities do in fact have cheaper versions of walkable neighborhoods. The housing stock is usually older, has often been modified many times since built, and is probably a little run down. But they are still nice, walkable, interesting neighbourhoods.
They are also ripe for gentrification. That would make them more expensive, at least in housing costs per individual. (The house that used to shelter four families of five now shelters one family of three, for example.)
One other aspect is that what I often see touted as walkable neighbourhoods aren’t complete ones. They do not have retail selling basic needs. In my neighbourhood; I can buy an amazing bagel or a delicious pastry, I can go to a bar or out for breakfast or dinner, I could put my visiting relatives up at either a moderately expensive B&B or at one with eye watering rates. But if I want to buy groceries I have to walk a bit more than is truly convenient and if I want to buy a spool of thread or a sheet of sandpaper, I have to get in my car and drive to the edge of town.
Good post. More of this please. Every berg of 1000 people can and should have more of this. Shared on Facebook and Linked-in.
As someone else said above, Europe has these denser neighborhoods in all reasonably sized cities. They are often built around 4-6 story walk-up buildings with a variety of apartment sizes built around one (!) central staircase. The flats are delightful, with windows on multiple sides--and they would be 100% illegal in almost all of the US due to our stupid building codes that require two staircases for anything higher than 3 stories.
That law--allegedly in place for fire safety, but somehow Europe has fewer fire deaths!--drives up costs and makes for the ugly buildings we have with the central hotel-like corridor and windows only one one side.
If that’s the alternative, I’ll take a free-standing suburban house any day.
So let’s make single staircase buildings legal in the US so we can build like Europeans do.
My essay on this from a while back:
https://heikelarson.substack.com/p/why-are-european-apartments-better
Two things: demand and Occam.
You have explicitly written about supply issues that drive prices, but left the issue of demand implicit. Both are explicitly part of setting prices. Demand for a lovely neighborhood drives up the price of lovely relative to the price of mundane. You've mostlyleft that out. Price discovery happens in exchanges, and exchange is where supply meets demand.
You have speculated that "we" don't build more lovely because "we" think some metaphysical thing. The relevant "we" is owners and execs of residential construction companies. They tend to be motivated by money ahead of metaphysics. I'm afraid you've published a thought about our feelings of self-worth before subjecting it to Occam. Is there no simpler explanation for our shortage of lovely neighborhoods than a deep-seated drive toward self-abnigation?
OK, three things. It's also unclear whether your metaphysical explanation is falsifiable. Unless it is, it's barstool stuff, though in a fancy bar.
Nice line, but I think you missed my main point. I'm not saying the metaphysical explanation simply results in not building classical urbanism. I'm arguing, based on having heard it many times, that people have NIMBY attitudes about building this way and oppose it because either they have an incorrect understanding of how prices work, or because they hold some notion that urban living is immature, or just for play - that serious people buy a house and a car and drive to work. Maybe you haven't heard things that would lead you to believe that a sizeable number of people think this way. I have.
This is how I live in Spain, and it's not expensive. It is possible.
From the economist’s perspective, one way to talk about this is that people confuse movement along the demand curve with shifts in the demand curve, right? Ie, people see that something (nice neighborhoods) is expensive because it is scarce, without realizing that making it ~not scarce~ would make it ~not expensive~?
Urban as “luxury” and suburban as “normal” is so deep-wired it defies logic.
We get people bemoaning $4000 apts as “luxury housing” while insisting $2 million 3bed/2ba homes are “just normal starter homes.”
Here’s the thing on the “lack of diversity” though… go ANYWHERE else in the world and this is the basic model of a village. You see all kinds of people living densely in towns and more spread out rural land. Often, immigrants equate “the American or the Australian dream” with suburbia. You have SPACE! This was my great grandparents and grandparents by the way. Especially if they are emerging middle class professionals from densely populated cities in developing countries.
We have a special challenge in Australia in the sense that no urban development is older than the 1790s and a significant lot of the growth and development was post WWII in the golden age of the automobile and suburbia and the massively immigration wave. We actually tried to flatten the original settlement of Sydney in the 1960s in the name of ‘progress’. which involved the state government selling off its dilapidated aging social housing stock and experimenting with (disastrous) suburban social housing developments away from everything.
I’ll stop there but I loved the article! Urbanism is not a luxury. It’s a necessity!
What happened to the suburban social housing developments?
They are now facing the same problem as in the 60s. The quality of the buildings were not great and they are now deteriorating. The cost of repairs are more than what the house is worth. The incentive is for the state government to sell them off to developers and try and substitute with rental subsidies in the tightest rental market we’ve seen. Most people living in social housing are not just poor families, they’re also elderly, or got some kind of lifelong disability or mental illness. These suburban communities were built with cars in mind… that no one who lived there could really afford nor even be able drive. Access to ammenities was walking, bikes (if they had them) or by infrequent circuitous bus routes that were an afterthought. There was little public communal space (because that encouraged antisocial behaviour) or things like shops or doctors surgeries. The isolation compounded to poverty and the social dysfunction. The houses themselves were cheap and cheerful but are basically permanent tents. Temperatures in western Sydney through the year swing between 0 Celsius in winter and 45 in the summer, in an uninsulated house is unpleasant (our current house is of a similar make an model, we’re currently saving to replace it with a better built and insulated house).
Sydney is a bit of an odd duck. We have a ridiculously inflated housing market, a rapidly growing population and we’re now hitting the limits of suburban sprawl. None of the development is well though out beyond ‘crap we need houses!’ Urban infill is awful quality apartment blocks (some of which were evacuated because the building began to catastrophically crack) that seem targeted to single people. All our capital cities are suffering similar problems and our regional towns are too as more people are pushed out to the regional towns looking for that kind of community. We’re an odd one.
Sorry to bring this up a week later, but you mentioned “awful quality apartment blocks...targeted to single people.” Can you elaborate a bit more? “Evacuated because the building began to catastrophically crack” indicates a fatal structural design or installation failure, but were there additional problems with eg layout, or maybe the insulation like the earlier houses you mentioned?
Designed for single people doesn’t seem like a problem for at least some percentage of new housing, with the increased number of people living alone.
Now that I think of it, what building material is most common for new housing in Australia? Lumber, concrete walls?
Good questions. There are a couple of things going on in Australia that is skewing the incentives for developers versus actual housing needs. One is the compulsory allocation of “affordable housing” in every apartment block over a certain size. Most developers build extra studio or one bed appartments at the expense of 2 or 3 bed apartments driving up their prices and making it unaffordable as a starter home for families. You could spend $800k on a 2 bed apartment plus strata in an urban area or that same money will buy you a house on a 400 m2 block on the suburban periphery with out strata fees. Developers are only liable for faults in the building for 7 years. A lot of the apartment developments built in the last 15 years are made with concrete like you’d see anywhere. But they’re made extremely cheaply, are often poorly finished and designed to fit the maximum number of appartments rather than the liveability of the apartments. Most have no communal space other than hallways or a perfunctory reception area to house the lift. I’ve seen apartment buildings built in the last 2 years on the coast that have deteriorated massively (at least the facades have) because the developers got away with only covering the steel reinforcement with 20mm of concrete instead of the required 50mm for buildings within 50 m of the ocean. You can see rusting steel cracking and shredding the concrete that is exposed to the elements.
The state I lived in privatised building certification perverting the incentives for certifiers to pass outright illegal and dodgy finishes in order to get more work. My brother worked for a firm that retrofitted and upgraded fire safety systems in appartments buildings. 50% of his work was retrofitting new apartment buildings which had NO code required fire safety mechanisms like fire collars, fireproof doors or even smoke
Alarms in the apartments. All of the retrofitting was paid for by the residents as the developer had ‘gone bankrupt’. This is a widespread problem in new builds in Sydney because there is no penalties for failing to install the required fire containment equipment or for certifying it. It’s a miracle that no one has died yet.
We’ve had two large apartments developments (that I know of) where the residents have had to be evacuated for catastrophic structural failures that rendered them unsafe for occupancy. https://www.afr.com/property/residential/30-nsw-apartment-blocks-hit-with-serious-defect-orders-20230706-p5dm8l
These were all ‘certified’ to be built to code and sound by private certifiers. It’s left residents without a home in the tightest housing market in the country and with no hope of recouping the losses.
We lived in a 2 bed apartment like this when we got married. Our apartment was a ‘relaxed’ 2 story development with subsides housing set aside for nurses at the hospital 300 m away. But. The whole thing was rendered concrete block with NO insulation anywhere and the whole complex was surrounded by ashphalt car park. We had no ventilation because we had a single common wall running up the spine of the building and all the windows (which were sliding patio doors with a metal basket around it) on one side facing west. In summer we recorded temperatura of 37 degrees Celsius INSIDE the apartment. It cooled to 30 overnight. Outside was 48 degrees on the ashphalt which was eight degrees hotter than the suburb average. With the help of a portable air conditioner we managed to get the temperature in summer down to about 29 degrees with it running full blast. This is just my experience. We urged to build good apartments. I’ve visited friends with 1930s built apartments. They are lovely and cool, have high ceilings and are considered spaces. Now we don’t do any of that.
Funny how "people" object to spending money on things that make society nice, yet ALL the money has been going to just roads and roads only to serve the needs of cars - what about the needs of all the other forms of transportation, as if somehow those needs don't deserve resources?!
There are definitely cases where the "green" version of a product costs the same or less to produce than the "normal" version but gets sold at a premium due to some combination of economies of scale and people being willing to pay extra for the (real or imagined) environmental benefits.
I no longer use paper coffee filters, but back when I used to buy them I sometimes saw unbleached filters advertised as if they were a more premium product at a correspondingly higher price. The idea was the they were "greener" because they required fewer harmful chemicals to manufacture. Obviously, there's no inherent reason why an unbleached filter should cost more than a bleached one. If they cost more to manufacture, it's only due to economies of scale, and if the whole coffee filter industry switched to unbleached filters I would expect the per-unit cost to manufacture to go down slightly.
I also once heard an advocate for sustainable farming claim that it can actually be cheaper to product grass-finished beef vs. the usual US method of fattening cattle in a feed lot - both because of reduced feed costs and because you no longer need to pay someone to haul away the manure (since it stays in the field where it fertilizes the grass). However, I don't know enough about the industry to know if this is really true.