This is an old neighborhood in Denver. (“Old” by American standards goes back to about the 1890s in Colorado. It ain’t Rome.) But when I daydream about places I love these are the kinds of neighborhoods and buildings that come to mind. These are modest yet sturdy buildings that were constructed incrementally over time by many individual families. Collectively they form a coherent town.
I’ve learned not to get too romantic about how these places came to exist. They’re the product of basic corporate profit seeking. A railroad company bought worthless acreage in a brittle patch of prairie on the edge of town, carved up the territory into a neat grid, and sold off vacant lots for cash. The railroad provided transportation in order to make money flipping real estate. Selling train tickets was merely a means to an end. The real money was in land speculation. Individuals then built whatever they could afford in the cheapest way possible in an era of all cash construction and short term high interest loans. These places needed to be productive and cash flow immediately or they failed.
The end result delivered simple bungalows and grand mansions next to each other. Shops mix with single family homes and small apartment buildings. Kids walk to school and public parks. Shopping can be done on foot. It’s all very pleasing to me. These neighborhoods are also fabulously economical to maintain long after the railroad company dissolves and dismantles its infrastructure. What I see is evidence that imperfect people fueled by greed, frugality, and necessity can converge to create pretty good places that hold up over time. We don’t need saints to build respectable towns that endure. This stuff isn’t complicated. But it does require consensus.
But times have changed. I want to describe what isn’t possible anymore. Or more accurately, what’s highly unlikely given prevailing dynamics. If I’m going to live in an apartment I’d prefer one that exists within a walkable neighborhood where I can manage without the expense of a car. I’d like basic necessities like employment, grocery stores, and entertainment close at hand. And I’d really rather have a human scaled atmosphere rather than a massive tower block along a highway. One of the benefits of apartment living, at least for those who enjoy it, is having convivial neighbors nearby rather than anonymous corridors and desolate landscapes.
These century old courtyard apartments have the look and feel of cottages and blend in with the adjacent single family homes. They’re inexpensive to build and deliver real value to the owner, the occupants, and the larger community. They work beautifully for young people just starting out, older people who have fewer needs in retirement, and people on tight budgets. This kind of market rate housing stock was once normal. But it isn’t anymore and it’s not coming back in a meaningful way.
Next door is what we get instead. The social, regulatory, and market context mandates off street covered parking spaces for each unit. That means the housing is bumped up to the second floor. Engineering considerations set in that aren’t necessary in a smaller single story building. To absorb those added costs it makes sense to build a larger taller structure to spread out the extra expense. But there are height restrictions to navigate. Economically the builders are compelled to occupy a larger plot of land and built out horizontally which adds more costs. Larger buildings typically require an elevator for handicapped accessibility, multiple stairwells for fire egress, fire sprinklers, and emergency fire access lanes around the entire complex, et cetera.
Of course, all that bulk triggers resistance from surrounding property owners who fear the character of the neighborhood will change, excessive traffic, blah, blah, blah. Community engagement efforts and political horse trading must be deployed. All that costs more money. So the finished product is obliged to cater to an upper income clientele. What could have been straightforward moderately priced yet profitable accommodations becomes “gentrification.” I don’t dislike these buildings so much as I wish they were one of many other options. At the moment it’s this or nothing.
This is the post Word War II landscape Americans have inherited. It’s what’s legal and possible to duplicate. It’s what institutional funds are willing to finance. It meets all the codes and conforms to all the zoning parameters. It even meets environmental strictures, believe it or not. And the general voting public accepts it, more or less. I don’t particularly like it, but it’s what exists almost everywhere today. The driving force – the new social consensus – isn’t the unified whole of a town, but the component parts. Are the individual homes and apartments comfortable with the right internal features? Is there ample free parking? Are the roads wide enough to accommodate peak traffic demand at rush hour? Are the schools good, meaning… do the right kinds of people send their kids there? As long as people are satisfied with the separate parts, the stuff in between is irrelevant.
I’ll paraphrase my friend Steve at Rational Urbanism. For every wee tad success at building a new barber shop with an apartment above it on a narrow tree lined street there are seven hundred century old existing versions bulldozed to make way for a road widening project, a parking lot, and a storm water retention pond. We’re not going to build more Main Street towns. That realization made me sad. Then I got over it. I can only bother with things I have some control over. This ain’t it. Next!
Since my belle reve of Main Street urbanism is no longer an option I now focus on adaptation. What can ordinary people do within this environment that makes sense without breaking the rules or going so deep in debt that they risk personal financial ruin? Turns out… quite a lot really.
Many ordinary single family homes can be repurposed with minimal effort as de facto multi-family homes by taking on a room mate or accommodating extended family. An ensuite bedroom with an exterior patio door that opens out to the garden provides a granny flat without the pain of administrative drama. A “luxury wet bar” in the master suite transforms the room into a quasi studio apartment within the larger home. It’s not ideal among strangers, but it works between family and good friends.
My goal is to have a resilient life that allows me to ride out unexpected rough patches. It’s hard to retrofit a rented apartment or a condo with group ownership. But a single family home can be super insulated and fitted with cost effective alternative energy systems without begging for special permission. I think of it as suburban homesteading. That means I don’t want to take on excessive debt. I’d like diversified sources of income. And I’d prefer a generous buffer against supply chain disruptions.
The key is to identify areas with the least institutional friction. If there’s a private home owners association I’m out. If the local municipality has outlawed drying laundry in the sun or growing vegetables in the front yard I’m unlikely to be simpatico with the prevailing neighborhood culture. It’s easier to identify more accommodating areas than fight the status quo. While property is generally expensive the economy has some predictable boom and bust cycles. Wait. Save. Plan. Then buy low after a crash. Every bubble is in search of a sharp pin.
Car ownership might be mandatory in many locations, but going car-lite with one vehicle per household instead of three or four is possible in some spots. While I’d prefer a bungalow in an older walkable neighborhood there’s a far more generous supply of low grade post war auto-dependent suburbs. Many are affordable and within a bicycle ride of civilization. Some even have dedicated bike paths. This is the low hanging fruit. It’s not perfect. It’s not what I really want. But it’s what’s possible these days. I’m embracing it in my own life and encourage others to explore the possibilities. The beautiful dream is just slightly modified.
Granola Shotgun 
The transition from tent cities into shantytowns seems to be well under way in many US cities. These could be the new example of urbanism. As more and more people live in this arrangement, I wonder how authorities will continue to justify the plethora of codes and ordinances that keep official new housing from being built. The camping tents there are being replaced by slightly more permanent structures made from pallets. Will these be replaced by those sheds sold at Home Depot?
You’re on to something here. I’ve got all sorts of examples of the American favela or gecekondu in the works. The key element is always a confluence of official and unofficial needs. A city requires a generous supply of low wage workers that are intentionally excluded from proper municipal services. But the middle and upper classes don’t want that segment of the population anywhere near them.
Eventually a form of detente sets in. The steep hillsides and soggy floodplains are quietly allowed to go feral so the maids, gardeners, busboys, construction grunts, and call girls are close enough to commute, but far enough away to be out of sight.
One problem is the concentration of jobs. One need only look to the frostbelt, from Upstate NY cross the Midwest, to find many places with the idea characteristics you love. But without enough income to replace major building systems — roof, HVAC, electric, plumbing, not to mention the infrastructure — when they fail.
So not only are we not building more of them, we are losing the ones we have. Here is a small city distant from a any major metro area, unlike the metro Denver example. And located in a place where you are much better off being able to walk to work from December to March.
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.5300295,-75.5236239,3a,75y,340h,100t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1suGKn5FkOS37gb3eZ1WdICQ!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo2.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DuGKn5FkOS37gb3eZ1WdICQ%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D340%26pitch%3D-10%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656?hl=en
With regard to rebooting the inner suburbs, the question is what kind of collective cost are you buying into, as a result of past pillage of state and local government?
I came across a house in a semi-suburban neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut. Probably mid-20th century.
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.2529467,-72.8966,3a,75y,356.53h,88.14t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s_D8sQ-IpmI5bv6JG_kJKlg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?hl=en
It was somewhere along this block. Unlike the rest of CT, it is a diverse neighborhood. A short walk brings you to a city park with a beach on the Long Island Sound. There is a bus to Downtown New Haven, and to an arterial with a wide range of shopping. Or, if you prefer, a 30 minute bike ride. Yale University and its affiliates provide more leisure amenities and quality health care than one would usually find in a place of comparable size. There is Amtrak to Boston, and Amtrak or a long ride on a commuter rail line to New York. For someone who could work from home, with an occasional visit to the employer in Boston or New York, what a great, affordable place, right?
Someone had bought one of these and rehabbed it, and was trying without success to sell it for $250,000. There are lots of foreclosures around. The problem is New Haven, and Connecticut, are broke after decades of pension underfunding and inadequate infrastructure investment. What will happen to that park, that bus, that rail line, and how high will taxes have to go? You don’t know.
What I do know is despite all those problems, the state just decided to exempt Social Security income, and retirement income up to $100,000, from state income taxes, to benefit the self-interested generations that comprise a rising share of the population. It was bi-partisan. So how much do you want to pay for their house so they can move to Florida? Bottom line, in many places that bubble popping has to drive prices low enough to offset all of these costs, but somehow now so low that you fear the whole neighborhood is going to collapse.
Australian here with a quick comment re: the fires–definitely agree with Johnny’s friend’s take. i had to evacuate a holiday town in NSW on NYE myself. it’s very bad, tragic in many ways. That written, the fires have happened/are happening outside of major urban and suburban centres, primarily in and around small holiday towns (the fires immediately around Sydney are largely in national parks). Alot of the places that have been destroyed or are near the fires are small towns with maybe some high street shops and a few homes scattered around; the larger of these towns (Eden, for example) are already very walkable/liveable (if you can find work in them). i don’t see the fires starting a conversation around how we build out towns, mostly for the reason that these places are already predominantly small-scale. though it has also been somewhat morbidly fascinating to watch the current government here doggedly defend the status quo in all things, at all costs; so, any progressive conversations are unlikely to happen anytime soon.
“imperfect people fueled by greed, frugality, and necessity can converge to create pretty good places that hold up over time”. This is Johnny, in a shot glass.
I don’t deny a word you said here, except “sturdy”. All through the first third of the post I, a Californian who lost a chimney in ’89, was thinking, “unreinforced masonry, unreinforced masonry…” One little shock above Richter 4 and those sidewalks would be knee deep in loose brick.
Sturdy means different things in different situations. Denver doesn’t have earthquakes so unreinforced masonry buildings aren’t a problem. The same buildings in California would be bad.
That bike path would make an excellent vagrant camp. Up here, vagrants have siezed 3 linear miles of bike trail and seceded calling it their “Rebel Camp.” There have been pitbull attacks, violence, explosions, and needles. Given the rat explosion, there will soon be pestilence. Perhaps cholera will accompany the human excrement.
I really enjoy your posts and thoughts on this site. This post is the reality of the situation in virtually all places in the USA. People need to be practical and pragmatic when considering what can be done in an existing urban environment. There are many thousands of square miles of the “low grade post war auto-dependent” development that would be far too expensive to demolish and start over with. With the thought on adapting and infilling in this environment, I’m wondering if you have ever come across or had any thoughts on whether a modern take on the boarding house concept would be possible. Perhaps 200 sqft rooms with small bathroom facilities, hot plate, microwave, dorm fridge but have the laundry and main meals handled by boarding house staff as it was back say in the early 1900s in mining areas, etc. There are many more single person households in this day and age than in prior decades that do not necessarily need a full apartment.
That concept probably worked better in large Foursquare houses from the 1920s-1940s adapated postwar to accommodate returning servicemen.
A small first-ring suburban ranch is probably no more than 1200sf, and many are closer to 1000sf, with a single full bath and maybe a half bath. If on a slab, adding drains would be prohibitively costly.
One of my uncles once told me that after graduating from college around 1950 he accepted a job with an oil company that brought him to San Francisco, where he initially lived in a boarding house. When I was that age right out of college I don’t think they existed. I certainly never heard of anyone living in one but apparently they were still around in the ’50s.
In 1950 there was still a very real housing shortage due to war rationing. Nowadays boarding houses are called hacker houses. My 24 year old niece just spent the summer living in one.
I remember the story of your niece starting the summer. An update would be very interesting.
I observed the same set of conditions, coming to the realization that 4-over-1 podiums are probably going to be the preferred tool of urban growth for the next couple decades. So I might as well find a neighborhood where that type of growth is fairly coherent.
“The beautiful dream is just slightly modified.” Wise words. Our dreams and narratives about the Good Life drive these decisions.
I would that say that most Americans are striving for “Beverly Hills” of one regional flavor or another. A cousin of mine recently built her dream house on the outskirts of Pluegerville, TX, walk score 21. Subjects like incremental development are so far out of her mental model of the Good Life that it might as well be a foreign language and a suspect one at that. She pities my little house in California.
My idea of the Good Life is more “Florence, Italy.” This vision kept me tethered to the Bay Area as it requires some combination of weather, lifestyle and a historic urban core. I’m not exactly living the Dolce Vita. Instead, I’m in one of those 1950s inner ring suburbs, within a bike ride of civilization, making do. And because of my biases, I’d be more likely to move to Australia than the plentiful urbanism on tap in the Midwest.
My point is that these narratives are really important in driving land use decisions over long periods of time. Short of gas and/or electricity prices shooting to the moon, I’m doubtful that even a small fraction of the inner ring suburbs will get the stealth urbanism treatment you describe. Portland, for sure. Denver, probably. St Louis though? With American’s preference for “New” at all costs, it seems more likely we’ll build from scratch – https://culdesac.com/ and https://www.daybreakutah.com/ -and let the old stuff rot back into farmland.
Florence is pretty but I’m not sure how liveable it is with the crush of tourists and students and all the Medieval streets. My idea of liveable would be a more modern northern European city like Copenhagen or Oslo with world-class public infrastructure and spaces along with modern buildings. And that is a more attainable model for American cities anyway.
You may be right, but what I’m saying is that people have some kind of meme in their mind about the ideal home/neighborhood. Yours is “Copenhagen”, a city I visited once and loved, but most folks don’t even think about it consciously or rationally.
Another one is “Soho Loft”, which 80s NYC artists pioneered out of necessity. This meme was so strong, however, that practically every urban development since then has aped the NY warehouse loft, totally out of context. It’s kind of dumb if you think about it, to have a drafty exposed space as your template for luxury living, but that’s the power of narrative.
Johnny’s a great storyteller and it seems that “Walkable Main Street” is his template, with these post war neighborhoods as the attainable dream, given that said Main Streets are an endangered species. His writing has influenced me; Previously I was more of a “Skyscraper” promoter but I never thought about where that story came from, nor about the fragile and inhumane systems that make high rise living possible…
imperfect people fueled by greed, frugality, and necessity can converge to create pretty good places that hold up over time.
Unfortunately, the same people will tear them down on a regular basis. Oh well.
When the rebuilding begins in Australia in towns burnt out 2019/20, I hope it’s used as an opportunity to rethink it all. Realistically it’s probably unlikely as local councils still have too much power and influence. Love to see some of the short-term housing solutions brought in such as in Paradise CA. Tiny houses and/or multiple dwellings on larger blocks. Can dream about it….
One thing I noticed about the fires in CA, as bad as they were, were blown out of proportion by the media. How bad is it really in Australia? Is there serious talk of building differently (e.g. NOT single family homes down winding roads full of combustible fuel)? We certainly haven’t had an adult conversation about it here yet.
I just picked up a friend from the airport. She was back in Australia visiting family for a month. She said the fires were worse than anything we saw here in California and worst than anything Australia has ever experienced. Her brother’s family had to evacuate from in New South Wales. All their neighbors’ homes burned for miles around. And the fires were only twelve miles from her parents home in Victoria.
I asked her what the national conversation was like. She shrugged. There is no national conversation. Nothing is going to change….
Yep, that definitely sounds worse than ours, and I was in the evac zone both times.
What does it say about our consensus and cooperation when we’re unable to even discuss catastrophes?
My standard line is simple. We aren’t going to address the structural problems in society. Instead we’re going to absorb the consequences of not addressing them. Having half your country on fire is one such consequence… Is it the end of the world? No. Change will come one way or another. It just won’t be voluntary or intentional.
Thanks for getting me to the “acceptance” phase!
Adult conversations??? You have to be kidding!
I thought I recognized your shots of Denver. Our daughter, Veronica, moved into an apartment on S Pearl Street with her fiancé about 8-9 blocks (other side of freeway) from some of your shots. These are wonderful old neighborhoods. Small ‘main streets’ within the larger context of big city urbanism. Preserving these current ‘built’ environments should be a priority across America. Perhaps some new urban developments can replicate these walkable neighborhoods on a slightly denser scale.
While I like the idea of preserving existing older neighborhood I’m much more interested in creating new ones with the same qualities. What I see all over the country are communities where people fight tooth and nail to trap the existing building stock in amber while simultaneously forbidding identical new construction in the same form.
Exactly – I am living this. Everyone loves our historic downtown so much that they hesitate to allow any change at all (including filling in parking lots…) but we have regulations (minimum lot sizes, more parking requirements, maximum number of units per acre, setbacks) that prevent the beloved pattern from being replicated anywhere else.
Yep. Don’t expect this dynamic to change anytime soon. Enjoy the old existing stuff, and roll your eyes at the big new khrushchyovka buildings that infill the area. That’s the scale that’s now required. Sometimes they’re pretty good. Sometimes they aren’t. But that’s what’s possible.
It will be interesting to see how CA’s newly enacted laws to encourage ADUs (or at least disallow their prohibition) change the post WWII picture.
I’m not counting on substantial improvement with the housing market in California. But we’ll see.
Honestly I think the best hope for what you are talking about is immigrants. In areas with substantial waves of recent immigrants I see lots of imaginative use of suburban spaces and revitalization of abandoned inner city spaces that were left for dead by the last waves of white flight. The white hipster urban pioneer types are MUCH MUCH fussier about the types of cities and urban landcapes they are willing to move to and invest in than are immigrants. I think immigrants are the only hope for much of suburban that isn’t conveniently located next to high priced and desirable urban areas.
I lived for a decade in Waco TX where Hispanic immigrants have been moving in for decades and slowly bringing back to live older urban corridors that were left for dead by suburban white flight a generation ago. Without Hispanic immigrants there are large swaths of Waco that would probably today look like the abandoned parts of Gary Indiana.
Now that I live across the river from Portland in the suburban Vancouver area it is a more eclectic mix of Asian, Hispanic and Russian/Ukranian immigrants who are bringing corners of suburban sprawl back to life in creative ways. They are also the first to repurpose large suburban McMansion homes into more creative multigenerational compounds. It just happens, no one asks for approval. And as long as there is no HOA to create hassles it is mostly tacitly ignored. My daughter’s best fried is the daughter of an Afghan immigrant family in the next subdivision over. They have at least 3 different families related living in their 3500 sf suburban home and have enclosed in a porch to add additional living space without getting into permits and raising questions.
Yep.
In addition to overseas immigrants, the immigrants could also be domestic. Like people who can’t get a foothold in the more expensive housing markets. After all, this is how Americans also used to live – multigeneration households with higher occupant/square-foot ratio than we do today.
What are some of the trade-offs to importing immigrants? Your post sounds like they’ll solve all our problems. You mentioned one: they don’t care about permits. How about consensus and cooperation? How will they be achieved with this ‘eclectic mix of Asian, Hispanic, and Russian immigrants?’
The new consensus may very well be that rules are observed mainly in the breach, leaving the orderly rules-loving residents fuming and sputtering about newcomers.
Part of the reason they can work around the permits is by doing so in a way that is considerate of the community.
Many of these immigrants are, after all, coming from places where there is little trust in authorities, where they relied almost entirely on the trust of the community.
Consensus is often really not consensus but rigid conformity enforced by a certain older mainly white subgroup who are the only ones with the time, energy, and interest to engage in HOAs and town zoning meetings and all that sort of thing. As Johnny points out so frequently, nothing is ever static and change is constant. All that happens when you “freeze” a neighborhood in place is that you start the countdown to decay.
Immigrants won’t “solve all our problems” but they will bring new energy and economic activity into many declining areas if allowed to. Not because they are necessarily far-sighted urban pioneers or anything. But more simply because those are (1) the areas they can afford, and/or (2) those are the areas where they are allowed to engage in commerce and small business.
If you want to open up a Russian bakery or Chinese laundromat or Thai grocery you are going to do it in a nondescript suburban strip mall because that is what you can afford.
It sounds to me that the older, “whiter” subgroups (I’ve noticed we all get ‘whiter’ as we get older) are going to see less and less support for their ideas as time goes on. What might that mean for our nation-state system of laws and social welfare assumptions? Will these immigrants want to pay into a System they so frequently circumvent? For example, are they likely to file 1040s or pocket the money owed in taxes? You seem unable to come up with any downsides or trade-offs to bringing immigrants here. Change! can be good, it can also be bad depending on the sign of the change. You seem to take only the absolute value of change. Economic activity! can be good or bad. Have you seen The Big Short? There were many examples of bad economic activity on display in that movie. I see myself as more than Homo Economicus so I’m skeptical of economic arguments which seem to be made to bless the desires and assumptions of the elites. Economists seem to serve the same function of the astrologers and priests of old.
Great idea. Let’s continue to populate this country. More people. More roads. More sewage and thus more sewage treatment plants. More landfills.
I would prefer a stable population without the inevitable encroachment on our rapidly shrinking green spaces.
That looks like Old South Gaylord. Congress Park is similar in spots, specifically 12th & Madison. And old Denver streetcar map:
https://denverurbanism.com/2017/08/the-history-of-denvers-streetcars-and-their-routes.html
Yep.