"These buildings are going up, en masse, in places that make no danged sense to long-time Madison inhabitants, including far, far outlying Madison and the suburbs. But there's nowhere else to put them, without knocking down other stuff."
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. The attitude that some neighborhoods are basically "finished", so we can't build anything new there. I think a lot of it comes down to just what we are used to. To use myself as an example, I grew up in a neighborhood where the housing stock basically hadn't changed since the 1960s. This is just what seemed normal to me, and I never really questioned it during the time I lived there. This was in the 80s and 90s, but even now there has been almost no new development in the area, despite a growth in housing prices that is consistently above inflation.
As long as existing neighborhoods are sacrosanct, we will continue to build new apartment buildings in "illogical" places, because they are the only places left to build. I do think more and more people are waking up to the fact that we have a housing crisis in this country, and we need to rethink our existing development patterns, but actually changing policy to make this happen is going to take time. Until that happens, developers are going to keep building 5-over-1s in places that seemingly make no sense, and people with no better options will continue to rent them.
What really drives me nuts is that plenty of people are opposed to building apartment buildings on the sites where single-family homes now stand, but are totally OK with tearing down those homes and replacing them with much larger SFHs--usually with the garage in front as the primary entrance, to really put the nail in the coffin of any form of community or walkability.
A much simpler framework for thinking about why residents of small communities resist beneficial changes is that, as comfortable risk-averse Americans, they resist ALL change that they didn't think of themselves & have the privilege of doing so. There's the obvious direct effect of change proposed -> resistance encountered -> change nixed... but I also want to present the idea that, for lack of any other durable community options in an overly materialistic/commercial society, *the act of resisting change is forming communities that now have gatekeeping, virtue signaling and continuity across projects/time/distance*. You, too, can be friends with people if you say the right things to slam urbanists as delusional planners and barbarians of the suburbs. And all of that noise is viewed by some politicians as meaningful blowback against, uh, solving a housing crisis?
I think "young drunk yuppies", when we're talking about upwardly mobile Millennials, is a stereotype that helps this wave of NIMBYs characterize the housing needs of the young as illegitimate and ruinous. But, aside from being broadly erroneous, it's also not a situation where the naysayers are willing to offer conditional approval if the housing-needy meet some (deranged) community standards? They would have found something else negative if that image didn't stick. Usually urbanist resistance conjures more vile declarations that people even less deserving of housing (due to class or race factors) might be moving in.
People have discussed for a long time that elderly people are going to start to need, almost universally, some kind of improvements in our typical suburban lived environments so that they can maintain mobility and health. The actual target audience for this doesn't show a lot of support for it! Asking the average citizen to approve something on the basis of planning for a future hip mobility issue that they do not have now is a non-starter. The elderly in this country have long fought the mass seizure of their drivers' licenses, and many of them retire to even more spread-out communities in Florida or Arizona where it sounds like, one way or another, Mother Nature may come to claim them faster than the New Jersey Grim Reaper. When they ARE finally, definitively too frail for living like Desi & Lucy, they opt for "assisted living" communities that make Brooklyn rental prices look sane in comparison. Meanwhile, back up in the Northeast, they've sold their old homes to a bank (who rents it out for eye-popping cost, with the residents getting zero equity or tax breaks) & their prior resistance to change has screwed the remaining residents indefinitely, plus given rise to a new generation of anti-urban reactionaries who continue the momentum toward a death spiral (without even having a clear idea of why? If the bank owns your home fully, why are you echoing development criticism that was originally about property values?)
This is all... extremely stupid and ruinous. All for maintaining a post-war movement that is now seen as counterproductive and racist. (It is roughly as bad as the Le Corbusier model, in terms of results; awful ideas are not confined to the suburbs) It is a deep mess that requires a lot of bold leadership to get out of. All while Northeastern states seem to be running toward political shenanigans and not away from them.
I'd gently push back on the idea that primarily single people are renting these. Well, maybe it is *primarily* young singles renting these. But many young married professionals are also living here! I'm a single mother, and I live in one with my son. Many of the young families I know in my DFW-Catholic circles also live in an apartment. Houses are not affordable for many of them, especially if they happen to work for the Church or in education.
Now, that said, I do plan to move to a single family home when I can afford it, and I suspect most of them are, too. But these are fine homes for young married couples with no children or with one (or even two) small children.
Aesthetically, the five-over-ones are hands down better than the typical 1970s suburban "garden apartments" or vaguely brutalist concrete tower blocks that came before. (compare them to StuyTown) Cheap construction is not a new problem, and at least these newer buildings aren't over-sized, and tend to be mixed-use with some degree of variety on the facade.
Urbanistically, the five-over-one on a stroad in a car-sprawl suburb is (IMO) far worse than an organically-evolved walkable neighborhood of townhomes and three to six unit small apartments or retail with apartments/offices above. But that's an issue for local politicians and the zoning board.
This is absolutely a conversation I've been having with friends lately. The part that does not compute for me is that it doesn't feel like I live in a city that is creating the very well-paying jobs that facilitate paying the rent on all these new apartments. The average income does not pay the rent on these apartments. And yet I see these same buildings being build on the outskirts of cities much smaller than mine and renting for comparable prices regardless of the city they're in.
"These buildings are going up, en masse, in places that make no danged sense to long-time Madison inhabitants, including far, far outlying Madison and the suburbs. But there's nowhere else to put them, without knocking down other stuff."
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. The attitude that some neighborhoods are basically "finished", so we can't build anything new there. I think a lot of it comes down to just what we are used to. To use myself as an example, I grew up in a neighborhood where the housing stock basically hadn't changed since the 1960s. This is just what seemed normal to me, and I never really questioned it during the time I lived there. This was in the 80s and 90s, but even now there has been almost no new development in the area, despite a growth in housing prices that is consistently above inflation.
As long as existing neighborhoods are sacrosanct, we will continue to build new apartment buildings in "illogical" places, because they are the only places left to build. I do think more and more people are waking up to the fact that we have a housing crisis in this country, and we need to rethink our existing development patterns, but actually changing policy to make this happen is going to take time. Until that happens, developers are going to keep building 5-over-1s in places that seemingly make no sense, and people with no better options will continue to rent them.
What really drives me nuts is that plenty of people are opposed to building apartment buildings on the sites where single-family homes now stand, but are totally OK with tearing down those homes and replacing them with much larger SFHs--usually with the garage in front as the primary entrance, to really put the nail in the coffin of any form of community or walkability.
Good thoughts.
A much simpler framework for thinking about why residents of small communities resist beneficial changes is that, as comfortable risk-averse Americans, they resist ALL change that they didn't think of themselves & have the privilege of doing so. There's the obvious direct effect of change proposed -> resistance encountered -> change nixed... but I also want to present the idea that, for lack of any other durable community options in an overly materialistic/commercial society, *the act of resisting change is forming communities that now have gatekeeping, virtue signaling and continuity across projects/time/distance*. You, too, can be friends with people if you say the right things to slam urbanists as delusional planners and barbarians of the suburbs. And all of that noise is viewed by some politicians as meaningful blowback against, uh, solving a housing crisis?
I think "young drunk yuppies", when we're talking about upwardly mobile Millennials, is a stereotype that helps this wave of NIMBYs characterize the housing needs of the young as illegitimate and ruinous. But, aside from being broadly erroneous, it's also not a situation where the naysayers are willing to offer conditional approval if the housing-needy meet some (deranged) community standards? They would have found something else negative if that image didn't stick. Usually urbanist resistance conjures more vile declarations that people even less deserving of housing (due to class or race factors) might be moving in.
People have discussed for a long time that elderly people are going to start to need, almost universally, some kind of improvements in our typical suburban lived environments so that they can maintain mobility and health. The actual target audience for this doesn't show a lot of support for it! Asking the average citizen to approve something on the basis of planning for a future hip mobility issue that they do not have now is a non-starter. The elderly in this country have long fought the mass seizure of their drivers' licenses, and many of them retire to even more spread-out communities in Florida or Arizona where it sounds like, one way or another, Mother Nature may come to claim them faster than the New Jersey Grim Reaper. When they ARE finally, definitively too frail for living like Desi & Lucy, they opt for "assisted living" communities that make Brooklyn rental prices look sane in comparison. Meanwhile, back up in the Northeast, they've sold their old homes to a bank (who rents it out for eye-popping cost, with the residents getting zero equity or tax breaks) & their prior resistance to change has screwed the remaining residents indefinitely, plus given rise to a new generation of anti-urban reactionaries who continue the momentum toward a death spiral (without even having a clear idea of why? If the bank owns your home fully, why are you echoing development criticism that was originally about property values?)
This is all... extremely stupid and ruinous. All for maintaining a post-war movement that is now seen as counterproductive and racist. (It is roughly as bad as the Le Corbusier model, in terms of results; awful ideas are not confined to the suburbs) It is a deep mess that requires a lot of bold leadership to get out of. All while Northeastern states seem to be running toward political shenanigans and not away from them.
I'd gently push back on the idea that primarily single people are renting these. Well, maybe it is *primarily* young singles renting these. But many young married professionals are also living here! I'm a single mother, and I live in one with my son. Many of the young families I know in my DFW-Catholic circles also live in an apartment. Houses are not affordable for many of them, especially if they happen to work for the Church or in education.
Now, that said, I do plan to move to a single family home when I can afford it, and I suspect most of them are, too. But these are fine homes for young married couples with no children or with one (or even two) small children.
Aesthetically, the five-over-ones are hands down better than the typical 1970s suburban "garden apartments" or vaguely brutalist concrete tower blocks that came before. (compare them to StuyTown) Cheap construction is not a new problem, and at least these newer buildings aren't over-sized, and tend to be mixed-use with some degree of variety on the facade.
Urbanistically, the five-over-one on a stroad in a car-sprawl suburb is (IMO) far worse than an organically-evolved walkable neighborhood of townhomes and three to six unit small apartments or retail with apartments/offices above. But that's an issue for local politicians and the zoning board.
This is absolutely a conversation I've been having with friends lately. The part that does not compute for me is that it doesn't feel like I live in a city that is creating the very well-paying jobs that facilitate paying the rent on all these new apartments. The average income does not pay the rent on these apartments. And yet I see these same buildings being build on the outskirts of cities much smaller than mine and renting for comparable prices regardless of the city they're in.