Damn, they don’t make ’em like this anymore
A westian take on the state of American places.
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In 2007, Kanye released what has become one the most recognized and celebrated songs of the 21st century: Stronger. It earned him a Grammy for Best Rap Solo Performance, and has been played at weddings, pre-games and bar mitzvahs incessantly since its release. Don’t worry, I’m humming “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” as I re-read this too. The question no one thought to ask, until now, is if it had anything to do with architecture and cities? Probably not. Actually, almost certainly not. But for the sake of an eye-grabbing headline and a compelling lede, let’s roll with it! It’s not as ill fitting of square peg in a round hole as it might seem at first, though. After all, Kanye’s given speeches on his architectural manifesto at Harvard, is reshaping a community in Wyoming into his own company town, and is building his vision for a city of the future in Haiti.
West, his vision, and this smooth transition aside, America doesn’t make cities like it used to. There are effectively two eras of American development: pre-Great Depression, and Post-World War II.
Pre-Depression, cities grew incrementally according to their wealth and population. This growth was dictated by how far one could walk on foot, comfortably ride on a carriage, or eventually, take a train or a streetcar. If a city is limited to where the majority of people can walk to, as has been the case for all of human history pre-Depression, everything one needs is definitionally a close walk away. This modal limitation privileged a dense, fine-grained and mixed-use fabric — the exact kind of neighborhoods that have become so desirable today.
Though we can look back with our 2021 goggles in envy at how lucky people were for not having to live a car-dependent lifestyle, this was far from a perfect world. At the turn of the 20th century, masses packed into tenements with little light, air or space. For immigrants, newcomers, and the most impoverished, the places we romanticize today were slums of the most insalubrious order.
Those who could take carriages or trains to escape the squalor of the city, did. The pattern we’d recognize today as suburban (or even exurban) development began in the late 19th century. Suburban life was limited to the wealthiest classes, those who provided services to them, and those who tended to the land. Once in one of these proto-suburbs, people still mostly clustered around the main hub unless they had a carriage to get out to their home. They were still limited by how far they could walk to the train if they commuted, or how far around town they could go if they stayed in the suburb. If you visit the downtowns of the older East Coast suburbs in Westchester, Philly’s Main Line or along Boston’s elevated railways, you’ll see many older buildings clustered around train stations with a network of fine grained streets beyond them, supporting mixed-use buildings and a diversity of housing options.
This all changed Post-World War Two. In the time between Black Thursday & VJ Day, not much happened on the domestic development front. The Great Depression saw little building as the country was, well, depressed. With our entry into Europe in 1941, the nation mobilized all hands and materials towards the war effort. By the time the war ended, demand for new and improved housing had been building for nearly two decades. This demand clashed with a crumbling infrastructure of homes and roads, and a shortage of desperately needed new housing.
Mass suburbanization was turned to as the solution for the needs of new and improved housing & infrastructure. By decentralizing out to the urban periphery, builders could provide more light, air and space to city-dwellers who previously had little access to all three. Through equal parts mythology and asphalt, suburbanization helped to build the country into the pre-eminent superpower of the world. A national consciousness grew around fulfilling this pattern, a mid-century Manifest Destiny. We’re all familiar with it today; The American Dream. The dream of owning a home with a white picket fence and a yard to look out to with pride. It’s what every person wants after all, right?
Not necessarily. Key to the story of mass-suburbanization is that it was built on a foundation that privileged growth & the values of a specific vision for post-war America. This limited choice. With the advent of Euclidean zoning (i.e. only homes are allowed here, and only offices are allowed over there, and only strip malls and Walmarts are allowed along arterial roads just yonder), and the widespread implementation of single-family zoning layered on top of it, American towns & cities effectively adopted a de facto mode of building.
Far from the walkable and mixed-use communities of the pre-Depression era, the Post-War pattern mandated a car to participate in a place. This has had serious consequences across nearly every facet of life. Post-War development more easily enables segregation by class (and race indirectly), promotes inequity, destroys the environment (through the razing of natural sites & emissions from cars), and fosters anti-social places that have no differentiated identity. It has taken the consolidated gains that cities made in the early 20th century, and stretched them out into an amorphous suburban & exurban sprawl. It’s a ticking time bomb.
Spearheaded by generous federal subsidy and mass-produced cars, our places have been built faster through copying & pasting, and harder through asphalt. But that doesn’t mean they’re better or stronger. In fact, a majority of people find them worse, with 60% preferring to live in a walkable, mixed-use environment. I can only imagine this proportion would be higher if more were exposed to truly walkable places, beyond a once-in-5-year trip to Times Square. Post-War cities are also weaker than their predecessors, as they are not able to easily adapt to changes. There is little flexibility in a place that mandates precisely what can be built and where. Simple code changes can take years or decades to implement — far longer than the whims of people.
Damn, they don’t make ’em like this anymore. This isn’t because of shifting preferences, but because it’s actually impossible to build the way we used to. Thanks to the rules our cities are based on, pre-Depression patterns would not be legal to be rebuild if they were torn down today. Not only have we systematically changed our building pattern to one that’s destructive and unsustainable, but we’ve locked it in so that moving towards a more desirable way of living is immensely difficult.
Pre-Depression neighborhoods like the West Village in New York, Georgetown in DC, and Back Bay in Boston are among the most sought out places to live in America precisely because of their development patterns. Apartment buildings are next to town homes, which are next to corner stores. Mid block restaurants are next to second floor offices, which are below residences. It’s easy to go anywhere and do anything, without planning one’s day around a trip to the park or grocery store, as is often the case in suburbia.
These neighborhoods are also among the most expensive in the country. According to Zillow, the average home value at the time of writing in the West Village is $1.06 million, $1.34 million in Georgetown, and $1.22 million in Back Bay. Single-family homes in these neighborhoods are valued at $5.91 million, $1.78 million and $3.23 million, respectively. This is outrageously expensive. The price tags can only partly be explained by their proximity to jobs and cultural life, because even further afield pre-Depression neighborhoods like Carrol Gardens ($1.39 million median & $2.55 million single family home) and Bloomingdale ($942k median & $992k million single-family home), are still prohibitively expensive to most.
A majority of America’s homes have been built in the Post-War era. By my count, only 12% of America’s building supply is from the pre-Depression era. A small portion of these buildings exist in each major city (and hardly any in places that predominantly developed past 1950). Because of this limited supply, the cost to live in areas with the most desirable patterns are bid up ad-infinitum. Those searching for an affordable place will either have to squeeze in somewhere with limited light, air or space, or drive until they qualify for more affordable housing in the exurbs, without getting the benefits of city life.
If the most desirable places are also the most expensive, (a classic low-supply, high demand state), let’s simply increase the supply to allow more desirable (and sustainable) places to be built.
How can we do this? We take down the institutions that formed and continue to bind American places to the Post-War Development pattern:
- Loosen up zoning codes. It’s absurd to think that having an apartment building with a coffee shop on the ground floor next to a single-family home will make all parties worse off. A key pretext for zoning was to separate noxious factories from residential neighborhoods — something we need worries little about today. In reality, the modern equivalent of heavy industrial factories are the highways that stretch out to sprawling areas and dump emissions and pollutants onto the innocent people they pass.
- End parking minimums. Minimums often render dense, fine-grained development impossible because so much land must be allocated to cars on infill sites. These rules presume that everyone wants a car. This is no longer the case. We don’t need to mandate car ownership & all of its associated burdens. Instead, let’s make it easier to bike and walk.
- Reign In Lot Size Minimums. This is one of the more pernicious, but least talked about regulations. If the majority of a neighborhood is coded for one use, it can still be successful (as in Brownstone Brooklyn or Toronto’s laneway neighborhoods). But when codes restrict how much land buildings can take up on a lot, development stretches out. Nature is destroyed, roads, utility & service lines become too expensive to maintain, and the need to own a car is reinforced. This comes at a large price to cities and people.
- Abolish Single Family Zoning: Single-family zoning is the building block of Post-War Development patterns. From it, all other philosophies radiate out. People should be free to live in a single-family home if they want, but they shouldn’t be restricted from living in any other type of housing.
As people have moved back to cities over the last two decades, many disenchanted with the promise of the suburban dream, demand is surging for a third era in American development. Unfortunately, we’re being held back by the regulations laid out in the second. These restrictions might have made sense in the 50’s, but not so much today. It’s time for an update, and there’s no better place to look than before 1929.
This isn’t a nostalgia-trip nor a regressive call to wind the clocks back to 1921. This doesn’t mean that older buildings are inherently better, but pre Great Depression development patterns certainly are. It also doesn’t mean life was better then. It’s better in almost every quantifiable way today than a century ago. What is does mean is that while we have new problems our ancestors could never have anticipated, and have transformed the world beyond their recognition, remarkably, the framework our forefathers left us seems to be the perfect template to solve the greatest challenges of our day. By modifying the restrictions imposed on creating better & stronger places, we’ll be able to reset and imbue them with the lessons we’ve learned since we went off course.
We can create better places by making it possible to live without a car; stronger places that are resilient enough to rise to meet whatever challenges present themselves. Harder & faster places though? Sorry Kanye, I think we’ll have to leave those behind. Don’t act like I never told ya. To make em like we used to, we have to be allowed to return to the way we used to build.
