Everything You Think You Know About Housing Is Probably Wrong
Date Posted: January 28, 2020
Posted In: Ideas,
From The New York Times: Poised on a cliff above First Avenue, Tudor City was conceived during the 1920s by the storied developer Fred F. French as a high-rise community for thousands of middle-class residents. A century later, it remains a throwback to the early glamour days of skyscraper living: a dozen brick towers fancifully decorated with half-timbered lobbies, stone crests and other mock-Tudor details.
I gather from “Housing Density,” a timely and thought-provoking show now at the Skyscraper Museum in New York, that the density of Tudor City is 463 people per acre.
What does the number mean? The answer gets to the heart of some of the biggest problems facing American cities today.
Density is a concept that may dredge up memories of middle-school science class. In an urban context it is simply a measure for quantifying people or buildings or housing units in a given space. There is no universally accepted methodology for calculating density. “Housing Density” measures the average number of residents in a project like Tudor City divided by the project’s footprint, and also considers how much area the buildings occupy on the site.
However you calculate it, the word “density” sounds a lot like a synonym for overcrowding and congestion, for too-tall buildings and greedy real estate developers, unwanted neighbors and lost parking spaces. Such associations make the mere mention of the term a Molotov cocktail that opponents of housing initiatives can lob at community board meetings.
This is a big problem. To address the country’s monumental housing crisis and also become less automobile- and carbon-dependent, America needs to densify its job-rich metro areas so that more people can afford to live there and walk, bike and take public transit to get to work and back. According to a much-cited report by the McKinsey Global Institute, California is 3.5 million houses short. Housing shortages exacerbate home prices and homelessness and cause all sorts of other ripple effects on commute times, economic productivity, health and family life.
But opposition to density has only stiffened as the gulf widens between the 1 percent and everyone else. Well-to-do NIMBYs, congenitally opposed to new developments, have lately been joined by anti-displacement tenant activists — advocates for poor and working-class residents who might ordinarily want more housing but have come to fear that nearly all development brings gentrification that prices the most vulnerable out of neighborhoods. In cities like New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston, this new alliance means even initiatives promising some subsidized housing have become lines in the sand.