Lot Dimensions: Past, Present and Future

A while back I devoted an entire post to lot sizes, one that despite its subject matter was fairly well-read.  Another related topic, which I did not address in much detail, is lot dimensions, a subject which in some ways is just as important as the overall sizes of lots.

Let's start with some basic principles.  In general, those lots which are easiest and cheapest to build on would be expected to be the most valuable.  Approximately rectangular lots are easier and cheaper to build on than lots in irregular shapes, and within those constraints approximately square lots are easier and cheaper to build on than narrow and elongated ones.*  We should therefore expect to see the residential areas of most cities composed of roughly square lots, and in fact this is exactly what can be witnessed in, for instance Japanese cities, with lots in the Tokyo development shown below of 32' x 38' (all images from Bing Maps):

To maintain a favorable ratio of private to public land, the roads in such a scenario must be quite narrow, as I mentioned in the previous post, and that is what is generally seen in Japanese cities.

In American cities, by contrast, the common historical pattern has been both wide blocks and streets.  In order to respond to high demand for housing, therefore, the solution has been to slice lots thinner and thinner.  Although this does increase the number of lots per block, it adversely affects their utility, leaving the builder to construct a very long and narrow house.  An example is from an older neighborhood in Buffalo, NY -- a neighborhood more than a century older than the one above -- with lots of 30' x 175':

Why, it could be asked, were these blocks made so wide? What sort of development was anticipated?  Why were the blocks not subdivided with additional streets, as famously happened in Philadelphia?  Instead of any of these options, it appears most lots were densified vertically, through the construction of two and three-family wooden houses.

And yet, even were each lot built out as a three-story, three-unit home, the density would be less than in the Japanese example, and without one single-family detached house.  Not all blocks in Buffalo are so wide, but few are much narrower.

For comparison, let's examine the blocks of Detroit, a city long known for its prevalence of single-family detached housing.  Lots here (a neighborhood of the 1910s or 1920s) are 34' x 125', a more reasonable dimension that's helped the city maintain its high share of single-family housing.  Note also the presence of alleys here through the center of the block.

As the development of American suburbs progressed during the 20th century, the width-to-depth ratio continued to moderate.  Here, in Levittown, from circa 1950, lots are 60' x 110' with no alleys. The blocks are visibly narrower than in the Detroit example:

Finally, in some of the developments of the 1960s and 70s we see what are approximately square residential lots.  Here, for example, is Herndon, VA, with lots of 90' x 105'.  Interestingly, the ranch houses still "sprawl" across the wide lot, continuing to create the visual effect of a more or less solid wall of houses to a person going past:

Having the distance between the side walls of houses as a fraction of that between the fronts and backs of houses is a common feature of American residential developments in all eras, it seems.

There appears to have been a reversion to Levittown dimensions in the subdivisions of the 1990s and 2000s, with the New Urbanism even reintroducing deep narrow lots in the pre-1950 style in its more recent developments.

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I'd posed the question above of why the earliest lots were made to be so inefficiently long and narrow.  Land values obviously compelled the narrow widths, but why had blocks been made so wide in the first place?  Were the surveyors of the 19th century under the impression that American homeowners, like the villagers of Tsarist Russia or medieval western Europe, would be tending to "dacha"-style backyard gardens for sustenance?

Perhaps.  John Reps, in his The Making of Urban America, confirms that some of the earliest planned settlements in North America intended individual house lots to be used for gardening purposes:

"If it can be tentatively concluded that the New Haven [Connecticut] plan, with its generous provision for open space, was no sudden inspiration of the moment, there is no ready explanation for the source of its form or dimensions. ... The large residential blocks did not long retain their original form.  Intended to provide generous garden plots adjacent to residences, these deep squares were eventually divided into four smaller blocks by new streets running at right angles from the midpoints of their sides. . . ."   The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States, p. 130.

Were the blocks of a city like Buffalo, laid out as early as 1804 by a man from rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania, similarly designed to provide an urban facsimile of the rural farmstead in what was then wilderness of Western New York?  Whatever the reason, the blocks were poorly-suited to the industrializing city that emerged a few decades later.  The legacy of these blocks with their very narrow lots was only gradually discarded over the next century or more.

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Rather than building very narrow multifamily structures on these narrow lots, which in general have not fared well in Buffalo and which have simply vanished from large swathes of the city (as have, to be fair, many of Detroit's single-family houses), what other options are available?  There are a few related possibilities, assuming we limit ourselves to single-family structures.  For example:

• As in New Haven and Philadelphia, build new streets into the blocks to create new, smaller blocks with more reasonable dimensions.
• Allow condominium development to stretch back from the street in rowhouse and/or detached form, which would allow numerous owner-occupied units on each lot.
• Where alleys exist, allow new houses (i.e. ADUs, accessory dwellings, "granny flats," etc.) to be built along them.

The first of these was historically the most common option for cities, but which appears almost entirely absent in Buffalo for reasons that are not clear.  In any event, given the abandonment of large sections of certain Buffalo neighborhoods, it is easy to visualize how the first option might work.  Consider, for instance, combining three of the above lots and building on them like so:

Where three lots once hosted perhaps three duplexes with two two bedroom units each (the Buffalo "2/2"), there are now eight fairly large (1800 sq. ft.) single-family homes, or, if homes were divided by floor, as many as sixteen one and two-bedroom units.  A small lane (or really narrow street if you prefer) runs in between the homes, and cars can be parked alongside houses.  The backyard is heavily truncated, but there is enough space for a small patio.  If the above design were extended to another three lots on the opposite side of the block, the lane would become a small through-street, helping to open up the large blocks.  Further, if the houses were made slightly smaller, I think it would be possible to fit in ten rather than eight.  You can do the math.

This style is largely what Nathan Lewis has called "single-family detached in the traditional style."  As an infill strategy, it is uncommon in the older cities of the Eastern US, but may have promise in circumstances like those in Buffalo where deep lots leave a large amount of unusable land.  A condominium development would look much the same, similar to what can be seen here in Stamford, CT on similarly deep lots:

Houston, in particular, has countless examples of this sort of townhouse or compact single-family infill development, especially in and around the Montrose neighborhood.  A Google maps tour of the area will reveal the various ways such developments can be planned and arranged.

The ADU approach is so well-known I need not provide any examples of it here, but it is obviously less practical in situations where there are no alleys, as in Buffalo, which if lots were to be legally separated would require either complex shared driveway arrangements or the use of flag lots, impractical where the lot is already so narrow.

There is much more that could be done with multifamily housing, but that will need to wait for another post.

*As Nathan Lewis has noted, long, elongated houses are inefficient users of resources, requiring more wall length per square foot than a square house.  These dimensions are also less favorable for energy conservation, as there are more points for heat to escape.

Related posts:

• Single Family Zoning: It's All About the Lot Sizes
• Lot Sizes: Regional Trends and Causes

American Zoning as an Expression of Nativism

It's possible to advance many explanations for the rise of zoning in the United States in the 1920s: classism, resurgent racism, reaction to rising vehicular traffic, the failure of restrictive covenants and many more.  While all of these reasons, among others, have some explanatory power, for me they fail to adequately account for the unique and distinguishing features of American zoning as described by author Sonia Hirt, namely, the establishment of exclusively residential zones as well as the creation of single-family detached zones.

A possible alternative explanation is that these specific features were motivated by and in reaction to many of the same conditions that gave rise to the immigration restriction movement which came to prominence at nearly the exact same time.  For example, the village of Euclid's zoning ordinance, which led to the Supreme Court case of the same name, was adopted in November 1922, slightly more than a year after the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 was enacted.  Restrictionist currents were running very strongly throughout the nation at the very time that cities busied themselves passing zoning laws.

Now, one fact that may surprise is that immigrants at the turn of the century actually had higher homeownership rates than the native population.  This chart, compiled by economist Richard Sutch in a recent paper, depicts homeownership by city size in 1900 among the native-born and foreign-born, showing that the foreign-born had substantially higher homeownership in virtually all cities and city sizes apart from New York (the entry point for many immigrants), where the difference was nonetheless small:

How, or why, did the foreign-born achieve relatively high rates of ownership? Sutch speculates that immigrants valued property ownership due to "the importance of acquiring a life-cycle stock of wealth because of an inability to rely upon distant family members, the larger community, or co-ethnic neighbors for protection in old age."  Contrarily, in From Cottage to Bungalow, Joseph Bigott writes about ethnic savings and loan entities in turn-of-the-century Chicago and how these offered greater financial flexibility, in some sense, to new immigrants.

What seems to be generally agreed on is that immigrants, more so than natives, embraced small multifamily dwellings and home commercial uses, whether as simple as a chicken coop in the backyard or as elaborate as an entire storefront added onto a single-family home.  Jacob Wegmann, writing in What Happened to the Three Decker, quotes a developer as noting that the small multifamily dwelling provides "a way for working class folks with no established assets to obtain an owner-occupied residence." Additionally, he writes:

"[I]mmigrant families, many of them already the owners of small businesses, were likelier to be undaunted by the extra risks and work posed by being small landlords, such as the need to build up cash reserves to cover loan payments in the event of vacancy of the rental apartment. Additionally, partially due to Chicago’s characteristic clustering by nationality, many immigrant families have an extensive network of acquaintances from the same ethnic group to draw upon as a pool of potential tenants, and for whom credit and character checks can be undertaken in a verbal, informal manner via social contacts."

The small business and the multifamily dwelling were, in that sense, the gateway to prosperity for many immigrants, as well as a gateway to homeownership, around 1900 and continuing even today.  Given that reality, I think the observer of history should find it very odd how central a position American zoning gave to the exclusion of commercial uses from residential areas and the banning of multifamily uses from large areas of entire cities, particularly when other countries not so well-known for their elevation of so-called property rights embraced neighborhood commercial as a desirable and positive social good. 

Small SF and multifamily housing with added restaurant/retail, Port Chester, NY.

I do not know what the position of Edward Murray Bassett, the father of American zoning, was on immigration.  His autobiography is virtually impossible to obtain.  His writings available online do not directly mention it.  I would perhaps give him the benefit of the doubt.  The motives of many of his contemporaries, however, are not in doubt, as Seymour Toll wrote in 1969 in Zoned American:  

"The [laundry] controls were an expression of the hatred and antipathy which San Franciscans were directing against the Chinese, trying to force them to quit the city. The immigrant is in the fiber of zoning.  He first appeared as an Oriental.  In early twentieth-century New York he is seen as a southeastern European, the lower East Side garment worker who presence in midtown Manhattan created one of the decisive moments in the history of zoning."

None of this is terribly new or controversial.  A connection that hasn't been made as clearly is how single-family zoning and the total exclusion of commercial uses were specifically targeted at the immigrant businesses and housing options described above.  A newly-arrived immigrant (and most people in general) did not have the capital to construct an entire "mixed use" building.  After some time, though, he might be able to add a very small commercial addition onto an existing building, as shown in the photo above, or convert the first floor into a storefront.  Zoning would forbid this development in two ways: first, by instituting setbacks, and secondly by eliminating commercial uses altogether.  Even native residents needed commercial uses in close proximity, but these were to be relegated to special corridors where competition would be greater and immigrants would have more difficulty gaining a toehold.  

With respect to residential buildings, the banning of small multifamily buildings from much of the city foreclosed the route to homeownership previously mentioned.  A century after New York's zoning code was adopted, the numbers have flipped, and the native born are much more likely to be homeowners than the foreign born (67% to 52%, according to the Census).  The financial benefits of homeownership, moreover, have been concentrated in the hands of the upper middle class, the original backers of zoning.

It is only antipathy to immigrant populations that I think can explain these dual features of almost all American zoning codes, and their absence from the codes of most other countries.  The apparent trauma of early 20th century immigration led Americans, or at least a vocal portion of them, to shred their traditional respect for individual property rights and institute special zones which reflected native middle-class values and conceptions of proper living conditions.  The loss of neighborhood shops, or affordable rentals, were unfortunate but necessary casualties of this process.  Elsewhere in the world, the process of commercial conversion can still be watched unfolding, as below in Mexico.

Shopfront in setback, contemporary Guadalajara suburbs, Mexico.

I am not certain, though, that the alliance against shops and multifamily dwellings was ever as unified as it was made out to be.  Then, as now, the loudest and shrillest voices probably carried the day.  Many natives would have liked to have run businesses out of their homes as well, although the importance of multifamily housing a means to ownership waned with the arrival of new forms of mortgage finance in the 1920s and especially 1930s.  

While times have changed, the rolling back the restrictive laws of the 1920s would pay dividends even today.  

Related posts: 

• Where Zoning Went Wrong
• Single-Family Zoning in Seattle and the Limited Logic of Euclid

When the Market Built Housing for the Low Income

In a recent post, Daniel Kay Hertz examines residential filtering, the process by which housing units depreciate and therefore become available to lower-income buyers or renters over time.  In particular, Hertz examines a Stuart Rosenthal article on the phenomenon which I have examined critically here and here. Although he makes the very good point that the filtering process is not operating in unhindered fashion in many large American metros, he also makes the claim, which I have seen in many other contexts and by other authors, that "very little private housing in the United States was originally built for low-income people."

Although this may be somewhat accurate so far as it only applies to formal housing developers, throughout the history of American cities and indeed most other cities in the world, a large portion of the housing stock came from the informal economy, most of it purpose-built for indigent migrants or very poor laborers.  This was the case even in some of the largest and wealthiest cities in the Western world until fairly recently.

In the typical city, such housing would (and is) either be found on the outskirts or on very low-value urban sites, such as floodplains, rocky ground or steep slopes.  Infrastructure was poor and public services were minimal or nonexistent.

American Favela: The "Dutch Hill" area of midtown Manhattan in 1863.  Source here.

Rather than filtering down, these rudimentary settlements had and have a tendency to "filter up" internally, as residents gained a foothold economically and improved their dwellings.  For most Americans, the best-known of these types of areas are the so-called "Hoovervilles" of the Depression era, when the unemployed and rural migrants occupied low-value or underused land near city centers:

Seattle, WA in the 1930s. Source.

These crude shacks offered little more than shelter from the elements, but they were the result of people in dire situations doing the best they could with what they had available.  Governments then and now refused to accept this reality and, rather than trying to improve the conditions within these settlements, generally favored mass eviction and demolition.  In an interesting twist, this style of development has been rediscovered by contemporary American cities (particularly Seattle), and, without apparent irony, has been rebranded as the "tiny house village."

Beyond housing for the very poorest of the poor, American cities through at least the 1920s built in bulk for the lower end of the income scale.  This housing took several forms:

• As noted above, shanty housing built by those with little or no experience in construction.
• Small, temporary and/or transient housing, such as flophouses, boarding houses and other manner of SRO rentals.
• Small multifamily housing wherein a person of some means would build a home with one or two attached apartments which could be let out at low cost.  Often these apartments would be sub-let to boarders who might occupy a single bedroom.
• Self-built housing of a higher quality, which might be built from a Sears housing kit, or by a person with some background in construction.  One study estimates as many as 1 in 5 American homes were self-built in the 1920s.
• As noted in the comments, company towns and other housing built by large businesses for their workers to inhabit. 

The first, second and third of these options were virtually outlawed starting in the 1920s and in the decades following.  What changed during and after the 1920s was not the market's willingness or ability to continue constructing such housing, but society's tolerance for housing of perceived low quality or of profitable use.   The Housing Act of 1937, for instance, was not so much concerned with ensuring affordable housing for the poor, but rather with "the provision of decent, safe and sanitary dwellings for families of low income and the eradication of slums."  Single-room rentals did not fit into this well-meaning but upper middle-class vision.

The "eradication of slums" element of this strategy was more faithfully carried out then the provision of dwellings, and in the process much of the evidence of the low-income neighborhoods of the pre-1950 period was obliterated.  Municipal archives may contain photographic documentation of the condemned neighborhoods, as in the case of Nashville, below, showing a street of tin-roofed shotgun houses and very modest bungalows built in the early 20th century for lower-income tenants.  All were "eradicated" in the 1960s along with much of the surrounding neighborhood and their residents dispersed elsewhere.  That many of these neighborhoods were demolished or saw demand for them fall to near zero, with resultant abandonment, should not cause us to forget they ever existed.

Nashville houses circa 1960; all demolished in urban renewal.  Courtesy MDHA.

It might not be going to far to say that the traumatic process of urban renewal instigated an involuntary filtering, as residents of the poorest areas were literally displaced -- cast out of condemned homes -- and forced to seek new housing from among a diminished housing stock.  These people probably did move into somewhat higher-quality housing, but at higher cost and possibly in more crowded conditions as well.

But what of the fourth type of housing, the proper self-built house?  As it turns out, there was a crackdown on this type of housing as well for reasons that seem to have had less to do with ensuring decent and sanitary housing and more to do with disreputable and exclusionary motives.  The impetus for these changes may have been the mobility provided by the automobile.  I'll quote from one book at length which describes one town's legislative action against black self-builders in Ohio, including one Eddie Strickland:

"In 1946 ... in a series of irregular meetings, the council [of the town of Woodmere, Ohio] passed a building code aimed at restricting do-it-yourself builders, among whom blacks were a prominent group. The code mandated a maximum one-year time limit for the construction of new homes, forbade secession of work for any period longer than forty-eight hours, and prohibited the use of secondhand building materials. Finally, the code required builders to post a $1,000 bond to ensure compliance..... 

"By lifting construction standards (and allegedly enforcing regulations in a discriminatory manner), Woodmere officials raised the cost of home building in the village and substantially limited settlement by working-class blacks. Moreover, the passage of similar building restrictions throughout the county helped limit the number of African American suburbanites in the Cleveland area. The trend had an apparently chilling effect on the attendance of blacks at the weekly land auction in Cleveland, where a number of families had formerly purchased suburban land for delinquent taxes.... 

"Far from being an isolated event, Strickland's confrontation with authorities in Woodmere reflected a national trend toward regulation of the suburban fringe that hastened the decline of working-class suburbanization in the postwar decades. In Cleveland and other metropolitan areas, the proliferation of suburban municipalities led to the extension of land-use regulations to formerly unregulated areas. Zoning and building codes curtailed informal home building and inflated the cost of a suburban home. Racist application of these regulations closed the door on development for blacks, and the enforcement of sanitary regulations led to the demolition of existing black housing and restrictions on domestic production. 

Excerpt from Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century by Andrew Wiese

Disputes over self-built homes continue to arise today in remoter regions, as seen in the recent lawsuit brought on behalf of Amish homebuilders in upstate New York who were being required by local codes to submit architectural plans and install other expensive features in their self-built farmhouses.  The elimination of the self-built home as an affordable option in much of the country, in conjunction with zoning regulations limiting small multifamily housing, setting minimum lot sizes and imposing other similar restrictions, completed the elimination of the lower rung of prior housing options.  Left were only the newer mobile/prefab home, which partly stepped in to fill the gap that had been left, and the filtering process, which though demonstrably effective was not always rapid enough to insure a sufficient quantity of housing nor sufficiently cheap housing, especially in cities with high residential demand.

Of these two options, mobile homes were heavily restricted in where they could be located, and urban renewal destroyed huge quantities of filtered housing, i.e., "blighted" homes.  The result is a market which appears, artificially, not to create low-income housing options.

Is this article a call for the return of flophouses, then?  Not in the sense of the negative and unsanitary associations of that term and other like it, but in the sense of a government which recognizes that these older types of housing represent the market's effort to meet vital needs, and that regulation can help meet these needs in a safe and sanitary way without taking an adversarial approach toward them.  These market approaches can be complementary to public housing investments and other public assistance programs, as well, rather than being seen as inferior alternatives.  The tiny house village movement mentioned earlier is one such manifestation of this approach, and shows that the political obstacles need not be insurmountable.

Other and related reading:

• Daniel Kay Hertz, The immaculate conception theory of your neighborhood’s origins
• Friday Read: Affordable Housing, Filtered, not Subsidized
• Note on Gentrification and Preservation
• Tiny house village for homeless taking shape in Seattle, 12/24/15

The Old(er) Way of City Planning

I've been reading through the 1912 "Plan of the City of Hartford" by the legendary firm Carrère and Hastings, a document which encapsulates some of the best conventional wisdom of that or any era in terms of planning, but which also foreshadows some of the profession's darker moments later in the century.

An ambitious comparison: Saxony's Dresden
as model for Hartford, CT's Capitol area.

There are many noteworthy aspects of the report, most prominently the heavy influence of European
laws and physical plans, and in particular plans of the cities of the German and Austrian Empires, an influence which would permanently fade after 1914.  Many of the cities featured in photographs as models for American cities to be followed were, only three decades later, obliterated in bombing campaigns, resulting in a physical destruction to complement the ideological and academic shifts in focus.

Although the laws of foreign countries provide as much to learn from as ever, as highlighted in Sonia Hirt's latest book, the report is significant to me for its focus on what was once called the street plan, a plan of such antiquity that it preceded zoning plans by millennia, going back to the Romans and further, and which was famously employed by American planners in such cities as New York, Savannah and Washington, D.C.  Rediscovering these plans has been a research focus of planner Paul Knight, who has devoted a website to the subject (I highly recommend his presentation on the subject, along with co-contributors available in PDF here).

The street plan, in antiquity and down nearly to the present day, was considered part and parcel of infrastructure along with sewer needs, fresh water and other necessities.  Not only major arteries, such as the old Roman inter-city roads, were considered as an object of central planning, but minor residential streets as well.  The 1912 plan explains the main rationale for this apparent micro-management as follows:

Reasonable enough?  One can read evidence of the practice of street development in the municipal proceedings of the era in a time before the existence of subdivision regulations, here as it turns out from Hartford's own Common Council Board in August, 1912:

In other words, while the developer would propose a street alignment, this was considered by the city planners in the context of the city plan itself, which at the time would have included a street plan.  Thus, for a developer to obtain approval of his proposed street, it would likely be to his benefit to have it agree with the city's pre-existing plan.  Thomaston Street, which exists today, fits seamlessly into Hartford's irregular, but generally continuous and interconnected, street pattern.  The street would also be a public one, but the plan was in conformity with the city's own plan for growth, and with such extensions happening incrementally, the city was unlikely to be overburdened with long-term maintenance obligations by such a development process.  Note also that Mr. Thomas named the street after himself, or so it seems -- apparently naming rights were vested in the developer, as a sort of added incentive.

Paul Knight's illustration of street-plan led vs. zoning led urban development.

But what of Carrère and Hastings' own plans?  A picture is worth a thousand words in this context, and fortunately the authors left us with some detailed renderings for street grid expansions.  Here the city "general plan," which as can be seen is a street plan, is presented in its entirety:

There is no zoning here, and no historic preservation overlay, although the heights of buildings were automatically limited relative to street width.  Notably are the large ring boulevard, cast as the Ringstrasse or Unter Den Linden of Hartford, but which equally appears to anticipate a grade-separated highway encircling the city.  Overall, the map delineates the public realm of the city: the streets, parks and certain public buildings, those things which were considered appropriate objects for planning.

Note also the newer planned areas to the corners of the map.  In contrast to the irregular grid of existing Hartford, these areas are drawn in a style which is clearly influenced by German neo-medievalist planning fashions of the day, but which again are also anticipating the curvilinear, limited access suburban developments of the late 20th century.  Nonetheless, the areas are drawn in in complete detail, with all, or at least most, subsidiary streets represented.

The planners note that Hartford was undergoing a period of small multifamily development, but are disappointed at the limited options for ownership under current laws.  One wonders whether they had pondered a condominium style of ownership, which at the time was still many years in the future.  In the absence of such laws, the only realistic option was for the freestanding house (common in Hartford) or the rowhouse (very uncommon in the city).

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What is sobering to realize from the vantage point of a century later is how utterly the City Beautiful movement, as represented by this crowning document, failed in its efforts to ape the grandeur of the European city, and how thoroughly it succeeded in anticipating the primacy of the car and the rash of road-widenings and "stroad" construction that would follow in its wake.  After 1914, in fact, much of even the desire for inhuman-scale grandeur would fade, to be replaced by cold engineering and mechanical precision.  Dresden was never again to appear as a serious model for Hartford or, most likely, any other American city, and certainly not after 1945.*  And the street plan?  It was eliminated, either folded into "comprehensive plans" or dissolved into subdivision regulations that, using 1930s FHA standards, encouraged the excessively wide streets that the Hartford planners warned of.  In most cities, only the zoning plan survives, with no separate street plan at all.  Streets, many of them private, take selfish, non-connected forms, with the result that greater and greater volumes of traffic are channeled onto fewer and fewer roads which must therefore take on ever-increasing dimensions to handle the load.

In a few fast-growing American and Canadian cities, such as Toronto and Dallas, something of a street-plan led growth pattern is visible, and in most Mexican cities such a process continues today.  But in other cities, there still may be something to take away from these old plans despite their failures.

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*Dresden's historic center is currently undergoing a major rebuilding project, indicating that Dresden may be built again, from scratch, before the original City Beautiful plans are fully realized in Hartford.

Single Family Zoning in Seattle and The Limited Logic of Euclid

I'd wanted to write a few words about the recent controversy over single-family zoning Seattle, but that debate has been addressed so well and thoroughly by other writers that I'm not going to rehash the details.  Apart from the local politics of that debate, one thing that it has accomplished is to assist in highlighting exactly what single-family zoning means in an American context.

Although it sounds self-explanatory, the term "single-family home" has a distinct perception and legal meaning that goes well beyond the mere physical form of a dwelling.  Through a series of court cases, including the Euclid v. Ambler decision, American courts have gradually allowed the enshrinement of this perception into law with hardly so much as a dissenting opinion.

Many of those debating single-family zoning in Seattle (and in other cities) take these various legal incidents for granted as an integral part of an area devoted to standalone houses, although they are conceptually and legally separable.

The American Conception of the "Single-Family Home"

The typical American single-family home, and the zone within which it lies, are defined by (at least) five key legal elements which I've laid out below.  I call this conception "American" in line with Sonia Hirt's analysis in her recent book, Zoned in the USA, where she discusses how the single-family zone, as defined below, is a century-old American invention, and is rarely found in the land use codes and regulations in other countries.

Although the the debate generally focuses on the third of these (limitations on units), and sometimes the fourth, each of these supporting elements are essential to sustaining the American ideal of the single-family zone.  Remove any of them and the concept breaks down.

That allowing some non-residential uses would transform single-family areas seems too obvious to mention, although the consequences of doing so are often greatly exaggerated.  Many residential streets are simply not economically viable sites for commercial activity, and certainly not those which depend on a high volume of customers.

An abolition of minimum lot sizes, in fact, might be even more transformative.  On the typical housing lot of 6,000 square feet bordering street and alley, three or more detached homes might be built.  On Twitter,  Mike Eliason provided a photo of how this very result was feared by the incumbent homeowners of the 1920s (at right).  These were single-family detached homes, to be sure, but they violated the perception of what a proper single-family home should be (aside from stirring up various other anxieties and prejudices).

Setbacks and FAR limitations predated limitations on units, and in conjunction with minimum lot sizes were used to achieve the same result, as well as to enforce aesthetic preferences (specifically, for large front lawns).  With their intention of making impractical and uneconomical all but detached, one-family houses, they incidentally also forbid other types of single-family housing, including the ancient typologies of courtyard homes and rowhouses.

Limitations on units are the the essence of the single-family designation, and lend the category its name.  This limitation often tests the bounds of rationality and common sense: on what ground, for instance, could one permit single-family homes on lots of 5,000 sq. ft. but prohibit a two-unit structure on 10,000 square feet?  Occupancy limits, covered thoroughly by Alan Durning in a series at the Sightline website, are a means of closing a final loophole and preventing detached, single-unit homes from being adapted to multi-household use as dormitory-style SRO housing with shared kitchen or bathroom spaces.

Zoning Ideology and Housing Prejudice

As should be clear from the above, the single-family zone, far from the straightforward concept that it it pretends to be, is a complex and artificial legal construct with many interlocking parts designed to forbid any deviation, no matter how slight, from the ideal.  Nor is some universal concept which is simply given recognition in law: in many or most countries, the idea of regulating housing in such a manner is not even conceived of. In Japanese zoning law, for instance, only bulk and height are regulated, and no attempt is made to restrict how the space within the building envelope is divided into living quarters.

The phantom triplex: using the language of interior spatial
division to imply differences in outward form.

At the dawn of American zoning, there was some concern that this sort of regulation -- one which specified that having more than one unit in a structure was sufficient to make that structure a different type of use --  would be found to exceed a city's legislative power (this from Edward Murray Bassett's Zoning):

At the time of Bassett's writing, courts had already upheld lot coverage maximums and height limits, which together could be deployed to greatly restrict net buildable square footage on any given lot.  The question remained whether within this building envelope a city could restrict the number of units (kitchens, essentially).  Bassett, a lawyer who always seemed to worry more as to whether courts would uphold his ideas than whether the ideas themselves were sound, was concerned that this would go beyond the legislative purposes for which zoning had been authorized by the states.

By the time the Euclid decision was issued by the Supreme Court in 1926, however, rhetoric was already triumphant over meaning, so much so that it rendered specious nearly all of the court's reasoning with regard to the exclusion of multi-unit structures.  That reasoning, casually tacked on to the court's primary analysis regarding use-based zoning, is set out below:

"With particular reference to apartment houses, it is pointed out that the development of detached house sections is greatly retarded by the coming of apartment houses . . . . Moreover, the coming of one apartment house is followed by others, interfering by their height and bulk with the free circulation of air and monopolizing the rays of the sun which otherwise would fall upon the smaller homes, and bringing, as their necessary accompaniments, the disturbing noises incident to increased traffic and business, and the occupation, by means of moving and parked automobiles, of larger portions of the streets . . . ." (Emphasis added).

All the court is doing here is recapitulating its decision in Welch v. Swasey in which it upheld restrictions on height and bulk (essentially, the establishment of a three-dimensional building envelope).  It does not squarely address whether a city could restrict the number of units in buildings constructed within existing height and bulk limits.*  It does not address whether a city could ban multi-unit buildings even where they are no denser, in units/acre, than single-unit structures.  It does not address whether parking concerns are valid in an area where on-street parking is prohibited or where parking and traffic is managed by some other means than the one imagined by the court.  In other words, Bassett's primary concern regarding the constitutionality of single-unit structures, as a separate use, goes entirely unaddressed. 

Without a concrete controversy before it, the court had no need to utter the notorious words in the passage above, which as noted above were largely irrelevant to the actual issues in controversy surrounding multi-unit buildings.  It would have sufficed to note, as the court actually did later in the opinion, that zoning ordinances must be assessed in detail rather than in generality.  The court realizes this toward the very end of the opinion: "In the realm of constitutional law especially, this Court has perceived the embarrassment which is likely to result from an attempt to formulate rules or decide questions beyond the necessities of the immediate issue."  This humble admission appears in the same opinion in which the highest court in the land slanders apartment buildings as "mere parasites."

The court did issue one opinion two years later striking down a zoning law in detail, in the slightly less well-known Nectow v. Cambridge case, but afterwards fell largely silent on zoning.  Bassett's question was not and has not ever been addressed by the Supreme Court, a fact which has been appreciated by a few authors going back at least as far as attorney Richard Babcock's 1983 article The Egregious Invalidity of the Exclusive Single-Family Zone. 

New Jersey's Reaction and the Final Triumph of Single-Family Zoning

A little-known postscript to Euclid, as described in William Fischel's recent Zoning Rules! book, is that the pro-property rights New Jersey Supreme Court refused to be swayed by the decision, instead adopting the narrow reading of it that I have suggested above.  Prior to the issuance of Euclid, the lower court, following New Jersey precedent, had done the following in a process reminiscent of the Mount Laurel doctrine's "builder's remedy" from many decades later:

"The Oxford Construction Company [applied] for a permit granting permission to erect four brick apartment houses upon a plot of ground located at the corner of Highland and Lincoln avenues, in that city. The application was refused upon the sole ground that the zoning ordinance of the municipality prohibited the erection of such buildings in that locality, no suggestion being made that their presence there would constitute a menace to the health, safety or welfare of the public. Thereupon, the construction company moved before the Supreme Court for the allowance of a writ of mandamus to compel the inspector to issue the permit applied for. Upon the final hearing of the cause, it appearing to the court that the presence of the proposed apartment houses in that locality would not endanger the public welfare, health or safety, a peremptory writ was directed."

The city appealed the decision claiming that this reasoning was invalidated by Euclid, but the New Jersey Court of Errors and Appears disagreed and upheld the lower court's result.  In response to this decision, Fischel explains that the New Jersey constitution itself was amended to permit single-family residential as a zoning category.  The text of that initial amendment, which seems to no longer appear in the constitution, is difficult to locate, but in any event the question at issue was not and has never been passed upon by the US Supreme Court.  With New Jersey's pro-property rights judiciary having been outflanked by the people themselves, single-family zoning seemed triumphant.

The Ongoing Debate

Ninety years after the Euclid decision, land use debates in the United States continue to be distorted by this same dichotomy between "single-family zoning" and "multifamily" areas.  Rather than talking about housing in terms of units/acre, or total floor area, or some other similar metric, we tend to use purported building types -- whether single-family, duplex, triplex, ADU or other such classification.  Yet these classifications are in a sense illusory.  Whether a builder puts up three detached homes on a lot, three stacked units in a triplex, or three side-by-side units in rowhouse form really shouldn't matter a great deal to the regulator.

The court's confusion on this point may have stemmed in part from the lack of a concrete controversy.  The respondent, Ambler Realty, was seeking to use its property for industrial purposes, and had no intention of constructing any residential buildings, much less apartments.  The dispute was an abstract one which only pertained to the value of the land.  Had the court been confronted with a scenario in which an individual builder sought to construct a two-unit building conforming to height and bulk regulations within a single-family zone, it could not have evaded the question so easily.

Writing in 1983, Babcock assessed the situation as follows: "Today, there can be no justification under the police power for compelling the construction of single-family houses.  The daring trial lawyer who chooses to litigate this issue will undoubtedly lose in the trial and intermediate courts.  But he should prepare his record with the Supreme Court in view.  Using as witnesses builders, demographers, engineers, planners, environmentalists, and land economists, he should build a record that once and for all demolishes the notion that the single-family detached house is to be forever isolated and protected."

Has this question been posed to any American court in the recent past?  Perhaps not as directly as this, but there have been small victories here and there against unreasonable minimum lot sizes and minimum home sizes in the courts of various states.  Victories have also been won, on occasion, under a fair housing rationale.  A combination of the reasoning from these victories, in the proper context, might yet succeed in the courts of one state or other.

--------------------

*As Alex Cecchini astutely notes in a recent post at Streets.mn, if we assume that the preservation of natural light is a valid purpose under the police power, it is not clear why these concerns are better addressed in a scheme where single-unit structures and multi-unit structures are segregated then where, by contrast, multi-unit buildings are scattered among single-unit structures.  In the former scenario, the multi-unit structures receive abundant light while shadowing only a small number of houses, whereas in the latter the multi-unit buildings all cast each other in shadow, resulting in a net loss in well-lit units.
   

Fall and Rise of the "Euro Block"

In a recent post, Urban Kchoze's Simon Vallee discusses the traditional "Euro block," that characteristic urban form of European cities from the late 18th to the mid-20th century.  He makes the observation that although the earliest urban development in North American cities adhered somewhat closely to the European pattern, it gradually diverged over time, such that by the wave of industrial-era urbanization in the mid- and late-19th century, the form that apartment blocks took (where they were built at all) was quite different.

Since he focuses mainly on the process that produced these buildings, I wanted to instead examine the form of these various European and American block styles, looking at the particulars of design, density and scale, partly out of curiosity, and partly to see if it is possible to discern any design trends over time.  A good starting point for comparison is a typical Euro block, in this case a Berlin apartment block from the Gründerzeit era, showing the characteristic form that prevailed throughout many of the larger cities of Europe from the late 1700s to the mid 20th century.

I can't pretend to know the exact process that went into the construction of these mietskaserne, but in general, the focus seems to have been on providing for spacious but enclosed courtyards as part of an integrated, block-wide plan.  Although minimum courtyard sizes were established by German building laws in the late 1850s, these were regularly exceeded by the housing associations or cooperatives that built the structures.  Apartment buildings take interlocking forms, with each leaving a blank party wall for future neighbors to build against.  The apartments have good access to natural light, and there are no narrow airshafts.  They were unsanitary and massively overcrowded in the late 19th century, just as the tenements of Manhattan were, but seem to have avoided some of the worst design failings of the New York apartments.  Moreover, the density and integrated nature of the design, combined with the lack of residential-only zoning, was such that each block was capable of establishing small businesses to serve its own residential population.  The specifics are set out below.

Berlin Block
Block Area: 2.23 acres        Block Length: 482 ft.
Stories: 5.5                             Building Depth: 45 ft          
Block Coverage: 78%         F.A.R.: 4.3                              

For contrast, let's examine a typical block of the same era from New York City, in this case from the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn:

Bushwick Block
Block Area: 2.07 acres        Block Length: 468 ft.
Stories: 3                                Building Depth: 70 ft.         
Block Coverage: 81%         F.A.R.: 2.4                             

Although the Bushwick block is much lower density than the Berlin block due to a lesser number of stories, it actually has greater lot coverage and significantly inferior natural illumination.  As the building depth is so much greater than in the case of the Berlin block, the architect has punched airshafts (approx. 8'x13') at intervals down the middle of the row in order to avoid a large number of completely windowless rooms.  Although these airshafts collectively take up over 3,000 sq. ft., that space is inaccessible and unusable.  The long, narrow interior courtyard is sectioned off into small fenced parcels that appear to have little recreational value.

Overall, despite the lower density, the Bushwick block must feel denser and more cramped than the Berlin block due to lack of natural light and paucity of common space.  It is a design that cannot be scaled upwards, either, as much above three stories the airshafts will become useless for the lower floors.  This block design, despite its obvious flaws, was replicated many hundreds of times over Brooklyn and Queens.  Other common approaches included narrowing building depth, which further reduced F.A.R., or breaking up the block into duplexes and their variants, which again left a large amount of airshaft-like unusable space in between buildings.

New York's city planners were well aware of these issues in the late 19th century, as I've written about before, and attempted to address them through the "New Law" building mandates of 1901.  Included among these regulations were minimum dimensional requirements for light shafts of 24', a dimension larger than that set by German building codes, yet still much smaller than the typical Berlin courtyard of 80'x38'.  These dimensions appear to have been designed for purposes of admitting light, rather than for creating usable spaces.

Washington Heights Block
Block Area: 2.06 acres        Block Length: 458 ft.
Stories: 5-6                            Building Depth: 75 ft.         
Block Coverage: 72%         F.A.R.: 4.1                             

The result of these regulations is in some ways even worse than the Bushwick block.  The central courtyard space has shrunk to a narrow corridor which, while it might make a reasonably pleasant narrow street, is here relegated to being a concrete-surfaced no man's land.  Interior open space constituting 28% of the block area, more than in the Berlin block, has been entirely squandered.  This block represents the culmination of a half century of regulations purportedly intended to improve the arrangement of residential quarters, and yet the quality of mid-rise apartment design could hardly fall any lower.  Richard Plunz, in A History of Housing in New York, summarizes the efforts of New York architects and builders, as compared to those of Europe:

"In Europe by the turn of the century, the development of new prototypes for reduced [lot] coverage had reached a level of sophistication unknown in New York until the 1920s . . .  In all cases, the European efforts far surpassed the scale and quality of anything that could be found in New York."  History of Housing in New York, p. 138.

Plunz' assertion is a bold one, and could be quibbled with in the details, but one which seems essentially accurate.  Compared to even the mietskaserne, the sullen apartment blocks of Washington Heights and the Bronx inspired little affection and did not retain middle-class residents or entice new ones.  Following the failure of the New Law regulations to create blocks that rivaled the quality of even the average Euro block, New York planners and indeed the entire planning profession gradually abandoned the concept of the enclosed block, instead adopting either the garden apartment or the tower-in-the-park concept (the first such plan being drawn up in 1917, according to Plunz). Although both of these featured large quantities of landscaped space, very little of it was private and enclosed.

In most American cities, apartment blocks of either the European or New York types were rare, and apartment buildings outside central city areas tended to adopt garden apartment forms.  The dense industrial cities of the northeast, for instance,  accommodated virtually all of their population growth in the 1860-1920 period in cottages and three-deckers, or in slightly larger, but standalone, apartment buildings.  Oddly enough, the Euro block form was very well known and used in these cities at the time, but only for manufacturing plants, as shown in these old illustrations:

The Winchester Arms factory in New Haven, CT, top, and
factories on the east side of Bridgeport, CT, via BIG Map Blog. 

The suitability of this form for residential use was belatedly discovered some one hundred years later.  The Winchester Repeating Arms Factory, shown in an 1879 illustration above, is undergoing conversion to an apartment block that would not look out of place in contemporary Berlin.  Bridgeport itself did eventually discover the cooperative ownership form for apartment complexes using a somewhat similar design, but not until almost a century later.

Revival of the concept is not limited to loft conversions of former industrial facilities, as the form has lately begun to proliferate throughout the Sunbelt cities.  Simon notices this in his post, too, but I think the form-based similarities are worth exploring.  Below is an apartment "complex" in Dallas, Texas, that is representative of a type found throughout Sunbelt cities.  Even a glance at the overall layout immediately tells us that the form here is much closer to the 19th century Berlin block than to any of the New York examples shown previously: the building uses interior wings to define enclosed but spacious courtyards which serve recreational purposes.

Dallas Block
Block Area: 2.42 acres        Block Length: 330 ft.
Stories: 3                                Building Depth: 75 ft.         
Block Coverage: 81%         F.A.R.: 2.4                            

Very often, decked parking garages are incorporated within these buildings in the familiar "Texas doughnut" configuration, but using a ground level parking area, with courtyard placed over it, seems to also be popular.  Were the buildings made taller and somewhat narrower, as in Berlin, an even better result could be obtained, but this might not be as economical in light of modern construction mandates for fireproof construction above a certain number of stories.

Are there any editorial comments to make in closing?  The American experience with apartment-building seems to have been characterized by planning interventions that were about mitigating perceived shortcomings or excesses rather than pursuing any clear idea of good design.  The Euro block form, in the absence of large developers or cooperatives with access to capital and who are able to design entire blocks from scratch, relies on top-down and forward-looking coordination of a sort which was generally absent in 19th century American cities.  Its complete absence from the wealthy industrial cities of the northeast and midwest is conspicuous.  In spite of that, the Euro block, with its restrained density, generous interior spaces and focus on harmony and aesthetic unity, is a form of urbanism well-suited to American sensibilities.  Its rediscovery in the late 20th and early 20th shouldn't come as a great surprise.

Related links:

• Mixed-Income Housing: Prussian Style
• Blocks of New York
• City Blocks: The Spaces In Between

Auto Costs and Housing Costs, or, One Reason the Suburbs are So Appealing

Simon Vallee has a post from some time back about filtering vs. gentrification in which he analogizes the process of gentrification, in North America, to the car market in Cuba, noting that restrictions on supply will tend to boost prices and limit availability of a desired good.  Although the comparison is intended to be illustrative, I think it also highlights a substantive difference which, in effect, subsidizes automobiles at the expense of housing.  First, though, some background.

Going back for a moment to the subject matter of a Nathan Lewis post, we can note that, land costs aside, the sticker price of manufactured housing as compared to a new vehicle is not as different as one might think.  A two-bedroom manufactured home, for instance, of about the size of the average new home of the 1950s, costs only around $41,500 as compared to the price of a popular new sedan (I chose the Altima, one of the best-selling cars in the United States) at around $27,000:

However, when car costs are compared to overall home values, including site-built as well as manufactured homes, a different story emerges.  In 1940, the median home was valued at only 2.3 times the retail price of the average new car.  By 2010, in spite of the crash in home prices, this ratio had risen to 6.4.  Car operating costs have also generally fallen as fuel efficiency and vehicle reliability have improved.  Median rents, not shown here, have grown at an even faster rate than home values.

In short, over the last seven or so decades, car ownership (or leasing) has become dramatically less expensive relative to home ownership or tenancy.  Partly this must be due to labor-saving technologies that have affected car production more than homebuilding: even manufactured homes still require extensive human labor, which has become much costlier (though more productive) since 1940, whereas the formerly labor-intensive car assembly process has been heavily automated and accelerated.  The process of robotically assembling houses, or even apartment buildings, remains in its infancy.

Are long-term, over-inflation increases in home values also linked to increases in land values caused by general urban population increase and restrictive zoning?  It goes without saying that rural land values are lower than urban land values, and the Census homeownership figures show that housing values are lower, and homeownership higher, in more rural states in spite of lower incomes.  Relatively poor and rural West Virginia has the nation's highest homeownership rate, while 100% urbanized Washington D.C. has had its lowest in every Census since 1930.  As Luis Bettencourt writes:

"There are several important consequences for general land use in cities. First, the price of land rises faster with population size than average incomes. This is the result of per capita increases in both density and economic productivity, so that money spent per unit area and unit time, i.e. land rents, increases on average by 50% with every doubling of city population size! It is this rise in the price of land that mediates, indirectly, many of the spontaneous solutions that reduce per capita energy use and Carbon emissions in larger cities. Cars become expensive to park, and taller buildings become necessary to keep the price of floor space in pace with incomes, thus leading to smaller surface area to volume."   The Kind of Problem a City Is.

Urbanization in the era of the automobile in turn causes frictions which lead to pressure for zoning.  American municipal zoning, in its initial formulation and as is still practiced today, is fundamentally a device to politically manage these frictions by restricting the intensity of residential land use.  Though not its stated purpose, it has the effect of increasing land scarcity that is already inherent in the urbanization process, and thereby provides a positive feedback mechanism that puts additional pressure on housing values.

What does this all have to do with cars?  As noted above, the cost of a manufactured home, in isolation, is only slightly more than that of a typical sedan.  As urbanization increases, however, the increasing value of land makes cars, which do not have their land storage cost bundled into the sticker price (unlike Japan does, effectively), seem like a relative bargain.  Some time ago, Cap'n Transit wrote a fascinating series on how New York came to tolerate and eventually permit free overnight on-street parking in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  We would find it ludicrous if someone were to purchase a manufactured home and to drive it into Manhattan on a flatbed expecting the city to provide free land on which to site it, but that was how the story went with cars:

"This [middle-class] conception of the benefits of car ownership has always had a huge bait-and-switch component to it. In New York City in the 1940s it was no exception. When people looked at the price of a car, they didn't figure in $20-35 per month in garage rental. When they got their cars, many couldn't afford to pay and took their chances on the street. Garage owners now had to compete with free street parking and lowered their rates accordingly, which meant that they didn't have enough income to expand their facilities, and resorted to bribing the police. 

"These social-climbing drivers felt cheated, but they didn't take their anger out on the car dealers. No, they felt that the city owed them the free parking necessary to make their cars as affordable as they thought." The right to free parking in 1940s New York

There are therefore two clashing trends: as cities grow in size, the cost of a buying a car declines relative to increases in income and housing cost, yet the actual cost of storing a vehicle is, or should be, increasing rapidly, since cars, like houses, occupy a significant amount of valuable space.  Rather than taking the common-sense Japanese approach of the shako shomeisho (proof of parking), however, American states and cities have engaged in onerous mandatory inclusionary zoning for cars (parking minimums), zoning exemptions (e.g. not counting garages toward FAR limits and allowing parking, but not housing, in mandated setbacks), tax exemptions (only 16 states maintain a personal property tax that covers automobiles) and fringe benefits (the commuter parking benefit), in addition to rent-free public housing for cars (overnight on-street parking).  Whereas in 1940, buying and operating a car to escape urban housing costs simply shifted the balance of expenses, with a car costing almost half as much as the median home, in 2010 the prospect of doing so was much more economically feasible.  No doubt many of those New Yorkers of the 1940s and 1950s eventually drove those cars out of their subsidized parking spaces and off to the far reaches of Nassau, Bergen and Westchester Counties, and who could blame them?

Perhaps the biggest effect of all though, going back to the beginning of the post, relates to the obvious but important point that while housing production, and particularly in-city housing production, is subject to political constraints, car production is not (well, mostly not).  There even seems to be a difference in Americans' moral characterization of those who build homes and cars for profit: while a search for the phrase "greedy developers" returns over 60,000 hits, "greedy automakers" returns only 1,000.  From that perspective, the so-called "drive 'til you qualify" phenomenon, much questioned and criticized, is an entirely reasonable response to this economic reality, particularly given widespread lack of highway tolls. 

Making a full accounting of the political choices that have been made with regard to both housing and transportation is a daunting task, but it does help illuminate the residential patterns we see without the need to resort to moral judgments about those choices.

Related posts: Was the Rise of Car Ownership Responsible for the Midcentury Homeownership Boom in the US?