Can Townhouses and Front-loading Garages Work Together?

The Philadelphia Real Estate blog recently ran a post on local opposition to a very modest rowhouse infill project in the city's East Kensington neighborhood.  Driving the objections of nearby residents are three planned garages that open onto the street, which occupy approximately half of each of the three façades, and which are apparently prohibited under the city's new zoning code.

Do front-loading garages truly present an insoluble design problem for the rowhouse format?  A quote from Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk's The Second Coming of the American Small Town illustrates this common point of view in arguing for the reintroduction of rear service alleys:

"When housing achieves a certain density but parking remains a necessity, the car's house (the garage) overwhelms the human's house. No architect is skillful enough to make human life project itself on the façade of a house when 60 percent of it is given over to garage doors."

Taking the 60 percent figure as a rule of thumb, we'll then say that no more than 50 percent of a façade can be occupied by a garage door before the aesthetics become intolerable (this is debatable, and I'd wager it's not what Duany and Plater-Zyberk meant to imply, but it sounds like a more or less reasonable estimate).  Using this figure, we get:

• For single-car garage rowhouses, a width of no less than 16'.
• For two-car garage homes, a width of no less than 32'.

Now, 16 feet is an extremely common width for rowhouses in the older neighborhoods of Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., but contemporary attempts to integrate standard 8' garages on these lots usually have not, in my opinion, succeeded in making "human life project itself" on rowhouse façades, nor do they provide much in the way of eyes on the street. I'm not convinced that it can't be done, but successful examples seem to be the exception rather than the rule. 

Contemporary rowhouses, South 19th St., Philadelphia.

What if we were to widen the lot a bit more?  These early 20th century rowhomes in the Sunset neighborhood in San Francisco, at 25 feet across, lessen the visual impact of the garage doors, although the street level experience is not much improved:

18th Ave., San Francisco.

Once we take a look at models beyond the United States, however, we see that far better street level results can be achieved using the same dimensions.  These Mexico City homes, at around 25 feet wide, present a friendlier face to the street.  The garage door itself, stylistically integrated with the window bars and iron balcony railing, is relatively inconspicuous. Success is dependent on there being a single-car garage only, although use of a two-car garage can be difficult to resist when the space is available. 

Colonia Condesa, Mexico City

Lengthening the frontages of rowhouses in order to admit more light and increase privacy was one of the many urban "patterns" set out by Christopher Alexander in A Pattern Language (available online here).  The primary anticipated objection to this change – that it would decrease the density of new developments by reducing the number of rowhouses that could be accommodated on a single street – he addressed by introducing a seven-foot pedestrian-only right-of-way between homes, which would, at intervals of every six to eight houses or so, intersect with wider automobile roads running perpendicular to the rowhouses. (Alexander advocated separate networks of auto and pedestrian streets in most cases, although not necessarily requiring each lot to have access to both, and proposed shared space streets on low-traffic routes).

Under Alexander's plan, rowhouses would not have garages, but instead any cars would be stored in small parking lots or garages along the automobile roads.  With 1000 sq. ft. rowhouses 30' wide on lots of 30' x 35', Alexander estimated a density of at least 30 units per acre, a figure which stands up to scrutiny.

This compares to the above examples as follows (using for reference a typical block, with fronting streets included):

Under the assumption that dense rowhouse streets will be low-traffic, we could instead adopt the Mexico City format, but with narrow, shared space streets with no sidewalks, and garages opening onto them directly.  On-street parking would be prohibited, although temporary access for drop-offs would remain possible.  Using lots of 25' x 35', it would again be possible to achieve around 30 units per acre. An additional benefit of the wider lots is that they seem to be more conducive to redevelopment as small apartments (visible in the Mexico City neighborhood).

Although examples of this precise format are very rare or perhaps nonexistent in the United States, California does have a number of places that come close, such as Manhattan Beach (note the unpleasant street-level effect of two-car garages, though).  Newer developments have begun incorporating shared space, narrow streets even closer to the model suggested here.  The bottom line, though, is that front-loading parking, even in high-density attached housing formats, need not be an aesthetic disaster, or without a watchful street presence.

Related reading:

• Nathan Lewis' definitive take on the subject, "Townhouses with Parking," is available here.
• To get your Philadelphia rowhouse fix, Townhouse Center covers an architectural review of 26 new rowhouse designs in that city, some which appear to integrate parking quite well within the context of 16-foot wide lots.
• A photo collection of very narrow houses, including an image of Tokyo homes with front-loading garages on 10-foot lots.