We're talking about this a lot in Cambridge and I'm hoping to put together an analogous map for us. For example, here's a map of parcels where the floor-area-ratio exceeds 0.75: http://i.imgur.com/D9m9Gx2.jpg
Most of our residential zones are currently zoned with a 0.5 or 0.6 cap.
The local NIMBY group has been petitioning the zoning board for more restrictions: downzone an entire neighborhood, add setbacks and more area restrictions along the main thoroughfare. Meanwhile, everyone who isn't affluent or in subsidized housing is getting pushed out to the surrounding towns.
Everyone is a NIMBY in their own way, it's just a difference of how much annoyance you are willing to tolerate. Most people wouldn't want a noisy factory or a smelly dairy next door, for example, but those things have to be somewhere.
Now imagine you spent a lot of money to get a house with a nice view. Suddenly Larry Ellison decides to build a skyscraper next door, which blocks the sun on your property every day. You can't even grow flowers anymore because there's not enough sun. Some of your trees die. Are you happy?
Now imagine you spent a lot of money for your house. A housing company proposes changes to the neighborhood that will reduce the value of your house by 20%. In other words, you will be working and paying for years on a portion of your house that no longer has value. Are you happy? Well, maybe you can handle it because you're rich.
So these are the kinds of things that go through the minds of NIMBYs.
I think it would mean that either you rent (but someone else is still an owner and has to deal with the situation) or you don't care much about the property value (which means, in other words, you are rich).
Or it means I'm not planning to sell for a very very long time and thus appreciate the tax break a lower appraisal gives me. The same logic applies if I am a landlord--as long as the rent and thus cash flow stays the same, I don't particularly care about what some appraiser says the property is worth.
Anyways, it seems to me that restrictions on construction are a lazy owner's way to maintain property values. After all, there is no better way to add value to and capture the revenue from my house than to add another 2 stories to it and rent it out. I do own the land underneath it, after all.
Funny you mention Ellison. That's pretty much what he's doing on Lānaʻi, though less the giant skyscraper and more the idea of remaking the island for his own purposes.
How strange is it to be Larry Ellison? Actually, all parties in that dispute are weird. Dude expects the world to freeze around him (who knew that redwoods would grow), so he offers to double the landowner's investment, giving them an $8 million dollar profit...and they don't accept.
Know what I'd do with $8 million dollars in real estate profit? Retire immediately.
>Now imagine you spent a lot of money to get a house with a nice view. Suddenly Larry Ellison decides to build a skyscraper next door, which blocks the sun on your property every day. You can't even grow flowers anymore because there's not enough sun. Some of your trees die. Are you happy?
I have trees now!? Flowers? Luxury! My current apartment doesn't get enough sun to grow plants that need sun. And we pay $2200/month for a two-bedroom apartment here.
Wow $2200 for a 2 bed? Luxury! That's how much you'll pay for a studio here in Mission, SF... if you're lucky. (and I wish this were a Four Yorkshiremen reference[1]. No!)
No, I'm pointing out that the hypotheticals used to make NIMBY sound sensible apply very, very rarely, and also presume that the supposed beneficiaries of NIMBY have a higher initial, pre-urban-density standard of living than we actually do.
I think you need to read the third paragraph, which is the more common case (although the other two paragraphs were based on real-life experience, too).
I own because I want to live where I am, but I might eventually want to move. If someone builds something that lowers my home's value by 25%, then that's a good chunk of change that I won't be able to repay on the loan if I were to want to sell. I didn't buy because it's an investment, but it acts like one anyhow, whether I like it or not. I'd prefer it if someone else's actions don't essentially shackle me to where I am.
TL;DR: it's because home equity is used as a savings account, and it's the primary or sometimes only means whereby most members of the middle class can accumulate significant savings.
Therefore any land use changes that might negatively impact home values threaten peoples' savings, and alternately any land use changes that positive impact home values can be profitable to existing homeowners.
It's a very simple, deeply perverse incentive structure. It's in the best interests of those who own homes to lock people out of homeownership.
Realistically, in areas where housing cost and shit is a big problem, prices will always go up even if you build a skyscraper in my backyard.
My personal issue and why we've fought against some developments in the past, is because city noise/animal/traffic/blah blah rules are just not being enforced. At all. So if I ever want to be able to sleep (not sleep in. Just sleep at all...like at 4 in the morning or whatever), I had to buy a place that was totally overpriced, and in a totally sub-optimal location, just so I'd have tolerable neighbors.
Then someone decided to build a rental-only land-locked high rise where the only possible access point is through my development's parking lot. And said high rise, even though it is in my backyard, is technically in a different city, so when there's neighbor issues, it gets really complicated.
If it was in my Canadian hometown, it honestly wouldn't matter: some asshole decides to throw a party at 3 in the morning or play hockey in my yard, I call the cops on them, 10 minutes later problem is over. Here? They'll just laugh at me and tell me to grow a thicker skin.
So the only thing I -can- do is prevent it from happening in the first place. If it was like in other countries I lived? Knock yourself out, build away!
> It's in the best interests of those who own homes to lock people out of homeownership.
This is only true in the absence of periodic appraisals to recalculate property taxes. In states where that is the norm, homeowners are incentivized to allow other homeowners to prevent their properties from appreciating, so long as they're not planning to sell in the immediate future. This has its own drawbacks (mostly longtime, fixed-income homeowners who are forced out due to onerous property taxes), but it's a much healthier dynamic than what states like California, where property taxes are capped, have.
Property tax caps can be a good thing in inexpensive areas. Indianapolis instituted a property tax cap almost a decade ago when some unscrupulous politicians used the appraisal office to gain tax revenue by artificially raising everyone's valuation. I suppose the same thing could happen in California, but at least you have the potential to sell your house for a profit there.
It appears that you are getting down voted. I can only assume its because people don't like taxes, of any type, in general or that they don't understand what you mean by land taxes. Perhaps if you elaborated on land taxes then people would understand that "property" taxes should be determined by the value of the land being occupied and not include the value of what it is being used for (the tax amount shouldn't be more if its a 10 story high rise vs. a parking lot). Land is a fixed asset. If someone owned an entire block in San Francisco that was just surface parking they should pay the same amount of [land] tax as the owner of the lot across the street that has a multi-million dollar high rise housing complex. The nuances of various land tax plans can be interesting. One being that EVERYONE (human) that lives in a city/state/country gets an allowance based on the amount of land in that city/state/country divided by the number of people living in that city/state/country (and even perhaps multiplied by days living/residing divided by 365).
Yes, you could use the proceeds of a land tax to eg pay for a universal basic income.
You can also use some proceeds to pay for infrastructure development (of any kind). If done well, then the additional infrastructure will raise land values enough to pay for itself in higher taxes.
Hmmmmmm... As someone with family in Boston and who plans to return there, I really want a some way to invest 20% of my IRA contributions in the Boston housing market until I can actually afford to buy a house there and move back.
I wonder if I can help someone else hedge against the market going down.
Slightly related, they have housing cooperative in Germany, especially the East. You can own a share, and get much reduced rent in return, in any of the cooperatives apartments and houses in the city. Depending on how well they do, they might also pay a dividend, but mostly the owners of the cooperative are also the renters, so generally they rather keep the rent down than make a profit.
I know old people who `paid' for their shares by working on building sites for these very houses in the 50s and 60s.
I do like it, too. However, my policy recommendation differs from the author: use a land tax to cut down land valuations.
One goal is of course to allow substituting capital for land (ie higher houses) to make housing cheaper. There's a reinforcing cycle: less NIMBYs, leads less restriction on that substitution, leads to less NIMBYs as per the paper.
One way to look at the problem is that something thought to handle externalities creates a bigger externality itself.
If zoning laws could be priced somehow so that when they become a cost they had to change or reduce it might help.
Zoning laws in places without expensive real estate like, say, much of the US midwest probably makes things better for people. In SF or in this example in MA and other really popular places they make things worse.
Perhaps some economist has tried to calculate the price of NIMBY, zoning law externalities. Anyone know of someone who has tried?
I really doubt that zoning laws improve quality of life for people in your average randomly selected town. Zoning laws give us things like parking requirements which drive down density and force everyone to drive. Then there's frontage requirements, setbacks, bans on multifamily and commercial construction.
One way we could price zoning laws is through their impact on buildable space. As long as we raise taxes on the beneficiaries, everything'll come out in the wash, right?
>I really doubt that zoning laws improve quality of life for people in your average randomly selected town. Zoning laws give us things like parking requirements which drive down density and force everyone to drive.
If you do drive, though, you are not going to appreciate new development which makes it impossible to park when you get home from work.
Not everyone hates living in places where people drive.
If people want a guaranteed place to park, they should build a parking space on their own property. There is no reason that public space should be given away to people for the purpose of parking.
The issue is when there is some limited quantity of shared parking and some choose to free-ride on that shared space rather than dedicating parking on their own property.
I have a handful of friends who left Russia in the early 90s and the pictures they paint of the USSR are highly unflattering in this regard. One, the daughter of Lenin Prize winner, grew up in a cramped two bedroom apartment. My guess is that things were much worse down the social totem pole.
Things have, for better or worse, changed pretty dramatically, at least from my experiences. I've been in Russia with my partner for about 3 years now, and we've lived in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and for a brief time, in Pereslavl.
While the apartments aren't huge by comparison to most houses in the US, they are pretty comfortable, though the quality will vary depending on the particular building and region you live in. Most of the buildings appear to be the same that were built during the USSR, it's just the internals were remodeled with more modern amenities.
It can take a little getting used to, living in somewhat cramped quarters, but for me anyways, I've always had fairly small places to live growing up, whether it was living in a 3 bedroom with 6 people in college, my cheapo first apartment, I guess it's more just something you get used to. Even now, my partner and I live with her mom/aunt in a 3 bedroom apartment in SPB and, aside from occasionally stumbling across each other in the kitchen and funny battles for the bathroom, we get by just fine.
heh, meant it sarcastically. Both where I live now and growing up, I've been in situations where it's 1 bathroom for 5 and 4 people respectively, and a queue forming in your own home for the toilet just gets silly, even if it's frustrating.
Well, part of the Communist marketing brand is that everyone equally gets a cramped two bedroom apartment, so it'd be useful to get hard evidence one way or another.
From what I've read about Soviet housing in the Krushchev era, though, you were very lucky if you got a cramped two bedroom. Not sure about the 70s and 80s.
That sounds more like capitalism, which says that you might someday earn a one-bedroom condo, if you're innovative enough to start a company and get a good exit.
No, capitalism is realizing that Zillow.com can find you a host of cheap properties in minutes, and HomeDepot.com or Tumbleweed.com can put a house on it cheap. ...while you start a company.
You're dodging my actual point, which the other replier definitely understood.
Once Upon a Time, we Westerners looked at Communism and laughed. We justified our system (democracy for the state, capitalism for the economy) by pointing out all the obvious material benefits we reaped from it:
* A class structure that looked more like a Gaussian curve than an exponential distribution, with greater actually-existing, de-facto equality than the Communist countries
* Workers' rights and the free formation of unions
* Public infrastructure, parks, and transit
* Cheap, acceptable housing for families, leading to widespread owner-occupancy becoming the norm, something rarely seen in civilized human history
* Ever-climbing life expectancies at birth, thanks to rigorous public health, sanitation, and disease control measures
In contrast, the Eastern Bloc promised that Real Soon Now, actually-existing socialism would be transformed into Full Communism, and people could have nice things. All they had to do was make a few sacrifices today to defeat the fascist capitalists and experience great rewards tomorrow!
Whereas nowadays, the spectrum of jam-promises has shifted. Nowadays, the capitalist West promises its people, "Jam tomorrow, for the deserving", while most of the Second and Third World have switched to promising, "Jam never, it was always a lie meant to lead you away from God and Putin."
We can still kinda say we've got the cheap, widespread consumer goods, but not so much the rest of it.
In the actual apartment isn't so hot either. I've stayed in my wife's childhood home a couple of times, and it's like two concrete shipping-container-sized boxes set side by side, with a tenth story balcony.
My sister lived in Cambridge for awhile. What a shitshow.
They wanted to add a second floor to their home, which would have basically made it look like the rest of the block.
Some neighbor raised a stink, because they had built a potting shed on my sisters land, and the shadow of the higher roof would damage the plants in the shed!
> Fortunately, the market is insane and they sold the place sight unseen to some Chinese dude for a significant profit.
That's one of the larger issues with the housing market: it's seen as an investment tool by foreigners (especially in hot markets where prices are rising like crazy), so you end up with tons of real estate that's not on the market but also not being used to actually house anyone.
There are many requirements other than simple time to successfully adverse possess property, such as the possession being open and notorious. Also, adverse possession as such applies only to real property; analogous concepts may exist with respect to personal property depending on the jurisdiction.
In an upper-middle class leafy neighbourhood in my hometown of Melbourne, there's a retirement home run by a charity, for people with special needs. They wanted to expand to double capacity, and the complaints came rolling in. The usual to be expected "The expansion is ugly, and will bring down the tone of the neighbourhood" (read: lower house prices with more homeless retirees around), with the best being "The expansion will need to cut down a beautiful 100-year-old tree"
Getting services for underprivileged people in a wealthy neighbourhood was always going to be tough, but the kicker for me was this - the residents against the expansion were clear to state "We're not NIMBYs!". Really? What kind of things do you think NIMBYs complain about, if not exactly what you've just said?
Seriously. I manage a building in Cambridge and get notifications about zoning changes all the time. And definitely can't afford to live there any more.
The city council is currently considering an expansion of inclusionary zoning. The gist is that 20% of new apartments in buildings with six or more units will be reserved for people earning between 50-80% of median income. Put concretely, a school teacher with a stay at home spouse and two kids would be ineligible for one of these units.
Since there's no concomitant increase in density, we should see two things:
1. Overall construction should decrease relative to where it would have been. Projects that were previously viable are now underwater. Even worse, if the cap rate fluctuates entire classes of projects become nonviable.
2. Market rate housing will become more expensive at a faster rate. The market is clearing at levels that people at 50% median income can't afford, so setting aside units strictly reduces the market rate supply without any demand reduction.
>The gist is that 20% of new apartments in buildings with six or more units will be reserved for people earning between 50-80% of median income. Put concretely, a school teacher with a stay at home spouse and two kids would be ineligible for one of these units.
Are these developments really as "welfare cliff"-y as they seem? As in: if your income goes up, are you kicked out of the house?
Although, most of what I've read suggests that laws which increase cost (such as affordable housing requirements) have a tiny impact relative to laws which increase development time (such as the Telegraph Hill Dwellers calling for a stay of ~everything at council meetings); the latter are far more damaging. On your tool: if you move the affordability requirement from 10% to 25% and reduce the time to approval from 6 months to 4 months, you still build more housing!
> As in: if your income goes up, are you kicked out of the house?
I went to a City Council debate where this was a big issue. Theoretically, yes.
But the city doesn't actually want to kick people out of their houses.
But there was some concern that people had already pulled some shenanigans to make their finances temporarily suck so that they could get a house in Cambridge.
Friend of mine did something similar in San Francisco. Got a low-work part time job that paid in the affordable housing range for a year or two; he had accrued a large down payment; and he managed to win the BMR lottery. Bought a place in North Beach, tripled or quadrupled his income the following year.
That makes it sound a lot more cynical than it actually was--he originally chose the badly paying job for the lifestyle it allowed him--but it's definitely an abuse of a system that doesn't even function well when it's not being abused.
Permit delays introduce huge costs. While a developer is durdling around waiting for building approval they still need to finance the damn thing. At current interest rates every month in delay should work out to something like a 0.3% increase in costs. When we're talking about developments hovering on the border of profitability, this can make or break a project.
If you think about the current incentives for the DOBs that makes sense. Their KPI is essentially number of inspections, violations, plan re-views. How quickly the permits get done is usually not on the list.
It's not uncommon in NYC to go for more then a year through a permitting process for 1 to 3 family reno. That's one of the reason there was so much illegal construction happening here in the past.
It's super loosely enforced. I even knew someone in Cambridge who was -renting out- their affordable housing unit. So you had someone who qualified at some point for a $850,000 3 bedroom in a prime Cambridge location for just a few hundred bucks a month, who just moved out and rented it out for 2500 bucks a month. They never got caught.
Someone is always paying for that 20%. Hint: it's not the builder.
I genuinely don't get the point. Of course the buildings aren't legal under current zoning laws. They weren't built under current zoning laws! We don't tear down every skyscraper whenever the earthquake requirements change. Nobody moves their house when the setback requirement goes from 8' to 12'. These kinds of articles are tautological.
edit: the article mentions "illegal neighborhoods and illegal houses" but doesn't say anything about the laws when they were built.
You're missing the point. What's being said is this:
1. People highly praise city/town/neighborhood X for its density, walkability, livibility, sustainability, and other quality of life elements.
2. That city/town/neighbourhood could not be built today because of laws which explicitly ban the things which make it so highly praised. If it was destroyed in an earthquake, it couldn't be rebuilt in any form which shared the attributes which made it loved.
This isn't about earthquake strengthening; it's about density, parking, transport, multi-family dwellings, mixed-use neighborhoods, etc. An ocean of ink has been spilled on the problems of suburbs full of single-family homes (and zero commercial presence), but our laws frequently require that, regardless of the preferences of consumers.
(More generally: The argument for zoning laws is that local government knows better than residents what the people really want, and what makes for a good city. That does not seem to reflect reality.)
This comment likely also misses the point, but the zoning laws are not really intended to cover situations where the entire city is destroyed and rebuilt. Realistically, if the city were rebuilt from scratch today, much of what people love about it now would be gone regardless of zoning laws.
It seems like it's theoretically possible for residents and visitors in a given city to enjoy its current building stock while simultaneously desiring different standards for new construction. Whether or not that is the case in Somerville, I don't really know, but a statement that the city couldn't legally be built from scratch the same way today doesn't necessarily imply (in my mind) that the zoning laws are illegitimate.
I get that there are other issues here too, of course.
Yes, the fact that you couldn't raze and rebuild Somerville does imply that the existing zoning laws are illegitimate.
Proponents of zoning talk about things like reducing congestion and preserving the character of the neighborhood. If you can't exchange like for like these arguments fall flat. Changing the rules of the game after you've won, so to speak, smacks of crony capitalism. Cynically I believe that zoning laws primarily exist to extend property rights over land that a person is unwilling or unable to buy.
Just to be clear, I didn't mean my comment as a broad defense of zoning laws. Rather, I think it's only fair to consider that there's a very large difference between the relevance of zoning laws when the city is in its infancy and zoning laws when the city is pretty much entirely built up. When the city is, say, 97% built up, any zoning laws should reflect how its residents want the last 3% developed—if at all. I do realize it's more complicated than that (what about redevelopment, for example?), and I realize zoning is fraught with issues and controversy, but I don't think it logically follows that if present zoning laws in an older built-up area don't reflect the existing building stock, that the laws are illegitimate or corrupt. You may not like the zoning laws or the general concept of zoning (I'm not sure I do either, frankly), but that's not the same argument.
> It seems like it's theoretically possible for residents and visitors in a given city to enjoy its current building stock while simultaneously desiring different standards for new construction.
Is it? Can you explain why this would be so? Or even better, provide any evidence that this is true in any of the locations people have been discussing (Montreal, Somerville, Manhattan, Portland, etc.?)
Let's drill down and focus in particular on laws about multi-family dwellings. What logic would make them good when they already exist, but bad if you wanted to build more, and even bad if you wanted rebuild them after a natural disaster?
Talk to a typical owner of an old house, and you'll likely hear something about how they love its quirks. But would they build a house the same way today? Some probably would, but others would certainly not. This actually probably applies well outside of old homes too. I suspect something akin to the endowment effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect) plays in here.
It also makes sense to me that someone would appreciate a historical landmark but place a lesser value on a modern replica of that landmark. Similarly, I could imagine a person admiring a historical neighborhood more than a modern recreation of it.
> Let's drill down and focus in particular on laws about multi-family dwellings. What logic would make them good when they already exist, but bad if you wanted to build more, and even bad if you wanted rebuild them after a natural disaster?
I'm not sure the answer needs to be logical (see above), but even if it must be, I don't know why placing limits on something implies that it was never actually good in the first place. Natural disasters are another story for sure, but I would imagine that sort of massive rebuilding was not the primary motivation for the present zoning laws in Somerville.
> What logic would make them good when they already exist, but bad if you wanted to build more
A duplex is split between two families. They both think multi-family housing is for college students, the universal bane of Massachusetts housing debates.
Most zoning codes with which I'm familiar permit rebuilding on the same footprint even after a total destruction (fire/earthquake), even if the building does not meet current size/setback codes.
You're focussing on a nit. The situation is not "the neighbourhood is generally fine, but would need some tweaks for the fire code"
The situation is: it's impossible to build a neighbourhood resembling somerville under current zoning laws.
I live in a prewar neighbourhood in Montreal. It's dense, beautiful, and loved by locals and tourists alike. If you could clone it and build it elsewhere, it would be worth trillions to cities across North America.
But it's illegal to build, because the streets are too narrow, there isn't enough parking, there is a mix of residential buildings and businesses, the buildings aren't set back far enough, and so on.
Most modern cities are either tall uniformly looking high-rise building or extremely boring suburbs.
I know it's a matter of personal taste, but I yet to see a modern residential area where I would want to live. Some of these neighbourhoods seems designed to suck the personality out of anyone who dear to move in.
Montreal's urban planning is seriously underrated. The city has a winning formula of medium-density walk-ups with lots of parks and commercial mixed in, and the formula is replicated over and over to create a huge, highly-liveable area with tons of interesting and beautiful neighbourhoods. Montreal affordably houses 1.6 million people in a fairly modest footprint without ever feeling crowded.
Contrast with Vancouver, where land is overwhelmingly allocated to large, residential-only neighbourhoods of tightly-packed single-family dwellings with a starting price of $1.5 million. These neighbourhoods are often beautiful, tree-lined utopias with lovely heritage homes, but they are walking distance from nowhere and can't effectively house the city's growing population. And you can bet that the people who live in them furiously oppose any change to that status quo.
I think a key to our success is that almost all the areas you describe were built before cars. Montreal was once the biggest city in Canada, then declined.
So we have a large amount of housing/commericial stock when neighbourhoods were mixed used and designed for walking.
I'm actually not sure you could build Montreal again in Montreal. (I mean, I really don't know what regulations are like for new neighbourhoods)
Agreed, I studied in Montreal for half a year. Was amazed to find a cheap room, cheaper than back home in Europe, in a prime location in a similarly awesome city.
Price of groceries really hit me though haha, but Montreal's living arrangements felt incredibly balanced, and that's a really hard thing to pull off.
> I live in a prewar neighbourhood in Montreal. It's dense, beautiful, and loved by locals and tourists alike. If you could clone it and build it elsewhere, it would be worth trillions to cities across North America.
I wonder though, to what extent this is success and love by scarcity.
i.e. if you outlawed oatmeal in 99% of cities, sure there'd be an absolutely booming tourist destination around that 1% of cities which will specialise in artisanal oatmeal. It'd create lots of jobs and become an attractive place to visit for its rich, unique and vibrant food culture, and attract all kinds of wealthy people who have financial and mental bandwidth to care about something like a $25 unique oatmeal recipe. It'll be a clean and wealthy city attracting students, artists and tourists. (I'm exaggerating the effect of oatmeal here haha but you get my point).
And so you may conclude that if you'd clone that, it'd be worth trillions for cities across the country. When in reality, if you'd deregulate oatmeal, there's none of that boom, oatmeal is just oatmeal like it is today, a boring staple of a lot of people's breakfasts that has none of the flair of the city described earlier. Quite a lot of people will eat oatmeal and there'll be a substantial industry behind it sure, but there'd be no particular love or specialness about it.
At scale, it's quite likely that a lot of the old zoning laws just wouldn't work, and were changed (dare say fixed) for a reason. Inevitably some old neighbourhoods of cities which thrived for various reasons (perhaps including, being connected to a larger city with modern zoning laws) may do very well, like pre-war Montreal. But that may also just be survivor-bias. All over Europe there are thousands of old villages with similar old infrastructure, beautiful too, that are just not appealing and where the population is shrinking, and where modern zoning laws could make interesting improvements to public infrastructure.
Lastly I feel people are appealed by some more older building materials and the notion that age correlates with authenticity. It's not that in newer neighbourhoods people are uninterested in living there because the zoning laws create too large or too narrow sidewalks, or too low or too high buildings, it's probably more about a new office made of glass rather than brick isn't appealing to the well to do stereotype hipster, despite there perhaps not being any specification that new buildings can't be made of brick in the zoning laws. But even if you clone an old neighbourhood's style, and build it new, but the tourists you mentioned wouldn't come to such a new place because it's new. In fact they'd be more more interested to visit parts of Montreal that were built under newer zoning laws, than an entirely new city with none of the culture, built similar to Montreal's old zoning laws.
So I'm not entirely convinced you can just clone it and get great results. Just thinking out loud.
IMO it's more like strawberries or something similarly delicious than it is like oatmeal.
Strawberries are a commodity. They're also great, and liked by nearly everyone. We are all better off for being able to go down to the grocery store and pick up a box of strawberries for a few bucks. That's worth a huge amount, even if it may not express itself within our lives in direct monetary terms.
If Montreal-like neighborhoods were ubiquitous then we might not find it special, but we'd still enjoy it and benefit from it enormously.
To recast it in tech terms, ubiquitous internet connectivity is surely worth trillions, even though it's a total commodity that people basically don't care about unless it breaks. It was a lot more special back when it was rare (I still remember my first taste in a university computer lab) but it's a lot more valuable now.
You may be right for most people! I'm sure you're right for yourself. As someone who lives in such a neighborhood (and lived for two years attempting to survive biking and walking among the plentiful parking, wide streets, and zero pedestrians of suburban Los Angeles) you are very wrong for me.
Regardless, I just wish that the US government (and the vast majority of state and local governments) would stop making the choice for all of us with massive explicit and implicit subsidies for motor-vehicle-optimized travel.
As a resident of near-downtown Boston, I want cars out of my neighborhood, ideally the entire downtown. I love the wide sidewalks and want bigger ones. Mostly I'm jealous that we can achieve neither the efficiency nor the beauty of transportation in Central European cities like Zürich because the suburbanites, their remote matchboxes, and their eyesore parking garages are obstacles to every proposal to improve (or even maintain) public transportation. To choke those folks out of the area with narrow streets and zero-car zones would be a blessing.
Although a more effective solution would be to scrap zoning laws and actually make the suburban blight towns convenient for workers and pedestrian residents.
If you got narrow streets, they'd be bumper-to-bumper spewing exhaust. You would be unhappy.
If you excluded cars, the place would turn into a downtown version of a strip mall. (expensive tourist trap) There would be no jobs other than things like waiter, retail clerk, manicurist, etc. -- is that how you wish to be employed?
You are focusing on the bad of cars, and ignoring all the benefit they bring. They even bring benefit to people without cars. Heck, you can rent one. I bet you've done it.
Consider Delft and Leuven. Two small vibrant cities, near Rotterdam and Brussels respectively. Both don't have a lot of cars in their center, are completely walkable, both are wealthy cities, both are not tourist traps, both offer employment for all ages from retail clerk to PhD computer chip researcher, they are most certainly not outdoor strip malls. Those are just two examples that I know personally, but there are hundreds more the world over.
Cars indeed have benefits, but they are noxious to cities. In my experience, the fewer cars there are in the city, the more pleasant that city is. And as the above examples demonstrate, that doesn't mean you are suddenly killing the economy or your job prospects.
As a resident of Somerville, I definitely want narrow streets and a lack of parking. I'm really tired of drivers almost running me over on the way to work on my bike because they think they have exclusive rights and high speed limits on any road with at least two lanes.
Pedestrians looking in the first-floor windows can be solved by putting shops on the first floor.
I'm also strongly in favor of the forever-proposed Green Line Extension into Somerville and Medford. I know it will increase rents while I'm still a renter, and I know it's gentrifying some neighborhoods at the moment, but by God it has to happen! It's downright shameful the way a Somerville resident has to walk or drive to Davis, Porter, or Charlestown to get to a T stop, and those will only travel through selected arteries that don't necessarily include most of our workplaces.
Heck, we could redraw the bus-lines too, so maybe I could get a bus from Somerville through to the main artery roads of Cambridge. When the weather sucks too much to bike, at the moment, my commute doubles, because instead of a 15-minute bike ride, I have to walk 10 minutes to the Red Line at Porter, take the train for five minutes to Central, and then walk another 10 minutes to work from there -- a circuitous route that just happens to go through the Mass Ave-focused Red Line we actually have transit for.
You hate being almost run over. (oddly, you think narrow streets will... give you more space???) You hate the weather enough to spend 20 minutes in it (10 plus 10 is 20) rather than just 15 minutes in it.
Pardon the suggestion, but it seems you'd rather be in a car.
Narrow streets are safer for cyclists. Cars tend to drive as fast as feels safe regardless of posted speed limits, which makes wide streets into dangerous speedways.
Slower cars kill you slowly. Dropping the speed from 40 MPH to 20 MPH means it takes twice as many milliseconds to grind you against a planter, mailbox, bus, parked car, etc.
This is wildly untrue--to a greater extent than one might expect. If you're a pedestrian and are hit by a car at an impact speed of 40mph, you have a roughly 50% chance of dying. The odds of death if you're hit at 25mph are roughly 12%.[0]
That's in addition to the fact that slower cars are much less likely to hit you at all, because they have more time to brake and maneuver before impact.
The point seemed pretty clear to me from reading the article: The author is questioning whether zoning laws actually reflect what we want in a city, given that they would prevent well-liked places such as Somerville from having been built the way they are.
The laws reflect what those with the money to influence decision makers want in property allocation - maximum long term value through line item qualifications of a properties worth, rather than how useful that property actually is.
But it comes full circle, because at the end of the day these properties must have a foundational estimate of value based on what everyone thinks of them. As long as most people agree an acre yard 3 car garage and wall around your land to hide the neighbors is optimal, at least a block away from any highly trafficked street, that is what you get.
The argument isn't about building code (e.g. safety standards) but more so zoning about neighborhood character. The author's point is that the type of higher density housing that actually makes up Somerville could not be built under current zoning laws even if safe and allowed under modern building code.
Now, it's entirely possible the dataset the author is using to justify his position actually covers things that are safety issues.
The irony is that the laws are intended to protect Somerville's "character" and "charm".
This article lacks some context. The housing market here (I live in Somerville) is red fucking hot. Somerville desperately needs more housing, especially high density housing.
I live in Waltham... I can tell you Waltham is not far off from Somerville. With Waltham we have the added complexity of having lots of mixed commercial and residential zones (Somerville on the other hand is mainly residential). Waltham is also more diverse than Somerville economically (Somerville has a large amount of college kids that skew the demographics). Waltham has a lot of first generation Americans that are afraid to report violations or just don't know that they can. I have seen single bed apartments with serious safety issues housing families of eight people and more.
Almost every house in my neighborhood is in some sort of serious violation. In my small neighborhood (called the Island neighborhood) we have had 3 fires. That is three houses that have had fires substantial enough where they pretty much need to be demoed (luckily not the large family mentioned previously).
Nobody has wired smoke alarms but every three family or above requires it. You are not supposed to have grills on any balcony or porch... everyone does... Somerville is massively guilty of this as well. Proper egresses... haha use a window.
Such is the style of living in ancient New England houses in high density areas.
There is very little incentive to update or even try to correct behavior legally. I'm not sure how towns like Somerville can get their landlords (I am landlord so I am guilty as well) to update their properties. I do know lots of people updated with the federal energy subsidizations.
It would be nice if their was some safety subsidizations to maybe start turning this around (along with the rest of our crumbling infrastructure).
Somerville is not necessarily typical, though. Not sure if it is still true, but as of a few years ago it had the highest population density in all of Massachusetts. Higher than Boston, higher than Cambridge, higher than Worcester. Introducing it as an ordinary suburb of Boston is perhaps a little misleading.
It has the highest density because it doesn't have any large parks or open space unlike boston which has the islands the arboretum and the airport or Cambridge which has a large pond
Now you could argue that US cities are generally not that dense; NYC is half the density of Paris. But Amsterdam, say, is only 2/3 as dense as Somerville is. Berlin is even less dense than that (but I know its boundaries contain some serious chunks of park/woodland).
Somerville is hardly sparse. It's not high rises but it's a densely packed urban neighborhood without much in the way of industry (any longer) but local stores. As someone else said, it appears to be the most densely populated (i.e. people living in the space) area in Massachusetts. Sure, areas of NYC are denser and I appreciate that some might prefer that.
This is in spite of the fact that Somerville rail transportation is limited. There's an effort to improve that but it's way over budget.
Density is always a difficult comparison as it depends upon the area chosen. But,according to Wikipedia, Somerville is about 50% denser than Munich for example.
That's not really a direct comparison. Somerville is a residential area just outside of Boston, but central Boston is full of places similar to the German examples:
One of those pics is in the North End, an historically Italian neighborhood that has become increasingly primarily tourist-oriented with the removal of the above-ground highway. In this respect, it's very much like the old town of a lot of European cities.
Another in a somewhat grimy commercial street that used to be the Combat Zone/Red light district that nonetheless now has some very luxury high rise apartments on it.
The third is the high-end retail street in the Back Bay which is indeed a nice mixed use area so long as you have a couple million to drop on a condo.
To my way of thinking, Cambridge and Somerville are more livable though Somerville is mostly notable for not yet being quite as expensive as Cambridge for the most part. (Somerville was historically pretty down-market and the interest today is mostly because Cambridge has gotten so expensive.)
The raw density numbers are misleading. Somerville has a relatively low proportion of commercial real estate. It's also a small city. Carve up Boston into Somerville sized chunks and you can beat Somerville. Roxbury and Roslindale do a number on the average density.
For purposes of comparison it might make more sense to take the total floor area and divide it by the municipality's area, subtracting out things like lakes.
Almost none of the houses in the article are of "free standing houses" (at first glance, there's only one building that might have been a single family).
That's just how multi-families and condos look in the area.
(Sorry, I can only judge by the Street View pictures, I haven't been in Somerville.)
If that's the densest they have, yes, that's sparse sprawl by European standards.
Have a look at https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!i+innenstadt for some random pictures of German inner cities. (You can use Google translate to look for eg the equivalent in Spanish, centro de la ciudad, or other languages/countries.)
Somerville's population density is, from good old Wikipedia, 7,253.3/km2
It's no Paris or NYC, and doesn't make the list of most dense cities in the world by any mean, but it isn't a "sparse sprawl" either. A quick glance at population density statistics
The main reason being that Somerville doesn't have that many large buildings (though there are some bigger ones. No real skyscrapper mind you), but there's nearly nothing else. Very few businesses and commerce. It's just people packed against each other.
If you cherry pick an area where several of the main roads for a town come together, it's not going to look very dense. Go a block or two away and you see actual representation of Somerville:
somerville was last rated the 16th most densely populated city in the US. i don't know how you can call it "sparse sprawl". have you actually ever been there?
There's almost no commerce in Somerville (compared to other cities). It's residential next to residential next to residential. As someone pointed out, it is among the most densely populated cities in the US, and significantly more so than Cambridge, because there's nothing else BUT residential properties. So even though the buildings aren't that large, it's really dense.
exactly. how many cities are forced to close schools on snow days basically just so that school parking lots can host residents' cars while the streets are plowed?
How does this affect resale? I know when I sold my house the buyer's agent insisted that we bring it up to modern code first, and that involved some rather expensive retrofitting of the house.
The article is discussing zoning codes; not building codes. Different issues entirely.
It's not uncommon to find that you'll need to retrofit an old building to match current fire safety laws, etc. My family recently had to rip out a bunch of old electrical outlets and replace them with newer ones that were deemed safer.
As long as you can get a Certificate of Occupancy (which in my town requires smoke and CO alarms only), I'd never cure a building code violation in a building I was selling (certainly not in the current Cambridge/Somerville market).
You want the code violation cured? No problem; I'll take one of the other 17 offers.
I wouldn't imagine new zoning that prevents new buildings in the Somerville model of triple deckers (with flat roofs) and Philadelphia 3 story houses (http://boston.curbed.com/2013/11/25/10170482/defining-philad...) with very little space between them would have much effect, those sorts of density details are grandfathered, and whatever the city council did is most grandstanding, seeing as how there's no space to build new buildings anyway (I was told houses were torn down to make a few parks in the city).
As for code ... heh, I spend a lot of time in Somerville, witnessed a remodeling job in the house I was in back in the late '80s, and am now remodeling a house built in 1910 in my home town (which if memory serves is generally a bit older than most Boston area rental houses). The modern codes are a very different thing and mostly focused on the property itself, although to the extent they decrease the probability of fire they're better for your neighbors (although Somerville's fire department is top notch, which I've witnessed first hand, otherwise not much of it would still be standing, it's one of the few cities in the US that has the fuel density to support a firestorm).
What sort of "fire resistant" exterior materials could work with a relatively inexpensive 3 story house that's 6 feet apart from another (yeah, the separation can be that small; and in my somewhat crowded 1-2 story house neighborhood far away from Somerville, with 0.14 acre lots, my house is ... 3 feet or less from the property line, then there's a driveway, then not many feet to a 2 story house; our garages have 1 foot of separation)?
Even if you were to build a Somerville today, you'd be hard pressed to achieve such a thing, instead, more separation is required (which does comport with your specification point).
(Although that's not part of the code. Which does say if you've got townhouses, or two family houses (for this level of the code I've purchased/you can find online: http://publicecodes.cyberregs.com/icod/irc/2012/icod_irc_201...) they've got to have a firewall between them that's rated for 1 hour.)
A triple decker that has its stud bays dense packed with cellulose, 3 inches of continuous exterior rock wool insulation, and fiber cement siding is pretty damn fire resistant, even with <6 foot separation. Getting rid of exterior-facing wood and empty stud bays, which are fantastic heat pipes and chimneys, the flammability goes way down.
Having lived in Somerville, there's another reason to eliminate empty stud bays: holy crap it's cold. We spent something like $200/month heating under 1000 sq. ft. to 62 degrees F in the winter for four hours a day. Take a wildly inefficient boiler, uninsulated steam pipes, crappy radiators next to exterior walls, and no insulation, and you get a hot basement, a freezing apartment, and insane natural gas use.
I would love to see a law that requires landlords to get a basic energy audit and advertise the estimated heating cost. Then they'd have an incentive to fix it, which, quite frankly, is cheap: just blow dense-filled cellulose into the stud bays, insulate the pipes in the basement, and upgrade the boiler. At, say, $15k per unit, it'll pay for itself in a few years of tenants who want to heat to 68F for more than four hours per day.
(Amusingly, my place had new double-paned windows. They were invariably warmer than the plaster walls in the winter.)
Landlords already have an incentive to make their units more energy efficient--they can capture the revenue stream that currently goes to the gas, electric, and oil companies. I'm not sure why more landlords don't do this though. Probably because methods that don't disturb tenants (e.g. exterior rock wool or foam insulation) run afoul of zoning/setback/property tax assessment rules, and those that do comply (e.g double stud wall retrofits) disturb the tenants and/or reduce marketable space.
Especially since stud bays in those days were often continuous, they used available back then very long pieces of wood to frame the entire building, instead of stacking floors on top of each other: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(construction)#Balloon...
Yeah, I can see that, most likely long enough to give the fire department plenty of time to save the adjacent buildings, as I witnessed once (but didn't know their construction details). I worry about flat roofs, though, how fire resistant do they tend to be? Original formula asphalt shingle with an organic base aren't super fire resistant from what I've just read and basic principles (when I re-roof, which will require taking off 3 layers (!) plus the original wood shingles, I'll be sure to get the more fire resistant fiberglass base ones).
If you're taking shingles, chances are you don't have a true flat roof (or just a terribly built one), since those are supposed to continuous roofing in order to withstand water puddles. Back in the day the only material available was asphalt tar, which obviously isn't very fireproof. Modern alternatives such as EPDM and TPO though are plenty fireproof, especially if placed on top of polyisocyanurate insulation (which doesn't burn, only char) instead of directly on the wood deck.
Sorry for my lack of clarity, I was talking about both types of roofs, since the classic Somerville triple decker has a flat roof, and the classic Philadelphia a pitched roof with shingles. I was wondering about the former since I've never seen one as such, aside from some one story commercial ones when I lived in a higher adjacent apartment.
And thanks for the comments, you've saved me some research when it comes time to replace my roof.
Florida normally has concrete block. Newer construction has that covered in insulation and then stucco, which is more concrete.
Note that Florida houses are inexpensive. They are insulated pretty well, obviously for the opposite reason.
The nicer houses in Florida are solid poured concrete. Considering the expense of property in Massachusetts, the extra expense of poured concrete would be a smaller portion of the total cost. You might as well do it. You're already paying quite a bit for the land; why build a shack?
This apartment was constructed elsewhere, assembled on site. You could see whole units (I remember seeing the kitchen microwave) dangling from construction cranes.
Isn't there something like a "Bestandsschutz" for buildings? I couldn't find a fitting translation, it basically means, if you got a legal permit for building something and the rules are changing, your building is still legal. Which means that a town can only change the building code for the future, not for the past.
On a side note, somewhere I heard or read that many US cities and town don't allow mixed use zoning, so that a building can used commercial and residential. Something which is very common in German town, especially in downtown areas, you have a lot of stores in the ground level and above that are flats.
That is Somerville's biggest problem right now: very tight and inappropriate zoning and building regulations, but they only take effect in if you demolish your house and build something new. So Somerville is frozen in amber.
A few years ago, I saw developers in Somerville get around that problem when they wanted to replace one 3-apartment house with one exactly the same shape, minus a whole lot of rotten wood, and plus a whole lot of good insulation and the like.
So instead of tearing the building down and building it anew, they tore down half of it, all the way down to the foundation, then removed all the parts connecting to the foundation, leaving half of the building on stilts, and then started building the new building, with the shell still in place.
They did good work. They replaced a well-designed but badly neglected building with one that is also well designed and more liveable. They should not have had to do this charade that they were just "renovating" it, but that was the only way to do it legally.
Generally, yes. The phrase is "grandfathered in." If you have a building, and they change the zoning so that building your building would now be illegal, your building is grandfathered in, such that it is legal for it to continue to exist.
Personally I would love to see a suburb go completely rogue and draft up zoning laws that flipped the script and required their town be built to 1890's code.. or better yet, 15th century Europe code.
Victorian era density is nice but we have so few places in the USA that have any of the human-scale character of the Old World to pull from, that most Americans have no idea what a small walkable village really should feel like. If we want to talk about the good old days before postwar zoning in order to get the character in our places back, why not look at the places that are real gems that we never had at all, like UNESCO villages and such?
Massachusetts is doing that. Every outlying town is now required to select an area where they will now zone for denser housing with offices and shops. If they don't, Beacon Hill (the state government) will select it for them.
It's still not going to be completely European (the early American settlers built streets wide for fear of fire, and because they really, really liked being able to do U-turns with horse carts,) but American 1890's style is well worth cherishing on its own merits.
They are even doing it in the rich suburbs of MA like Wellesley. Wellesley and Newton are trying to stop tear down McMansion mania and our passing laws that you can't knock and rebuild unless you have lived there for a while or have an "accident".... I predict more fires in the coming years...
FWIW the City of Somerville recognizes this and is working to reform the zoning code.[1] Here are some highlights from the proposal:
"Makes Somerville a national leader in using zoning to produce affordable housing with the most ambitious inclusionary housing requirements in the state"
"In areas of the city where major new development is planned, up to 20% of new units must be set aside for affordable housing."
"Ensures that infill development fits into the form, scale, and pattern of existing neighborhoods and squares."
"Only permits formula businesses and big-box stores by special permit."
"Requires new buildings in certain districts... to set aside 5% of gross floor area as leasable arts and creative use spaces."
I don't see anything there that, strictly speaking, requires them to actually build dense housing. Setting aside 20% of suburban development for people poor enough to qualify for "affordable housing" subsidies just creates a welfare cliff.
There's no solving the housing problem without more transit. You're just not going to ever have enough housing here for everyone to live in one place, zoning or no zoning. So: people need ways to get from one place to another. More cars? No. Then you need more roads, more parking. Where are they going to go? Guess what? Some people are going to end up in Malden, Medford, Everett, Revere, etc. So what? Is that so bad? Not if you have a way to get to work in the morning. I'm old enough to remember when we lived in Somerville because it was cheap. The Red Line and the end of rent control in Cambridge brought a lot of gentrification to Somerville. Transit is absolutely necessary in a dense urban area (and yeah, Somerville and Cambridge are already among the most densely populated cities in the country.
Another thing is that people use more space now: Before WWII, these cities had more people living in fewer units of housing. We've gone from 4 per unit to 2. As you make more housing available, people want more of it. That's why there's never enough no matter how much you build.
The way people use land varies a lot of with time but the laws created by all wise bureaucrats don't. SF and bay area in general has been classic good example. The government attempts to solve problems creating by zoning law is to create more zoning laws eventually becoming an overfiting problem.
Of course, and I was jokingly pointing out a slight similarity between Somerville and the famed Kowloon Walled City, which was demolished because of its extreme density (3.25 M inhabitants / square mile vs. 18K inhabitants / square mile for Somerville).
Basically, is it possible for the mores to change so much (as reflected in the zoning codes) that not only would the city be illegal to build now, but that it should be demolished? What happened to Kowloon suggests that it is.
Most of our residential zones are currently zoned with a 0.5 or 0.6 cap.
The local NIMBY group has been petitioning the zoning board for more restrictions: downzone an entire neighborhood, add setbacks and more area restrictions along the main thoroughfare. Meanwhile, everyone who isn't affluent or in subsidized housing is getting pushed out to the surrounding towns.