Housing Starts to Look the Same

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/20/realestate/housing-developments-city-architecture.html

by lxm • 3 years ago

24 60 3 years ago

xnx• 3 years ago

Some amount of repetition is a small price to pay for plentiful quality housing. We probably need about as much variety in housing as we do in cars. There are hundreds of currently produced car models (and thousands more available used) with enough variety and options to suit almost every need.

sokoloff2• 3 years ago

We need (and fortunately have) vastly more variety in housing than in cars. A car is much more practical to have multiple of, where a house is less so. Some people will want theater rooms, workshops, a studio space, 4+ garage spots, extra sound-proofing, an office (or multiple), a yard, master and laundry on the first floor, an in-law or nanny apartment, and the list goes on and on. Some of those are simple preferences; others are practical necessities for some.

If your daily driver doesn’t do something you need weekly, buy a second one. If your house doesn’t do something you need weekly, you’re far more likely really stuck.

TulliusCicero5• 3 years ago

Agreed, which is why the mandatory single family home zoning that dominates most of America's residential land is such a disaster.

Mandating that anyone who wants to live in an area must living in a detached house on a big lot is terrible. Anyone who would rather pay less for less home is completely left out, by government decree no less.

Upzone and let the market cater to what people are willing to pay for, same as cars.

burlesona• 3 years ago

Yawn. This has been the case forever as different construction methods and architectural styles come and go. With a small bit of architectural education you can walk around just about any city and guess the decade any building was built at a glance… or the century if we’re taking pre-industrial era.

The subhead, does it matter given the housing shortage, can be answered in a word: no.

api• 3 years ago

I assume they are talking about all this mid rise mixed use stuff. In general I like it. It’s no more bland than single occupant suburban development or ultramodern or brutalist high rises.

asebold3• 3 years ago

Preach. Walking through any new subdivision in the burbs or more rural areas is so depressing. Cheap, cookie cutter houses squeezed on top of each other as far as the eye can see. At least there's a big push to make most of these mid-rise developments mixed use, making the area more dense and walkable. The benefits out weigh the cons.

loser777• 3 years ago

It gets exhausting seeing the same NIMBY talking points trotted around every once in a while. I guess the "new developments are just luxury housing" talking points have started to smell so we're back to the good old "character of the neighborhood."

Taking a look at the "character of the neighborhood" in South Bay and I couldn't be more thrilled that developers are putting up inoffensive boxes rather than some rehash of "Spanish/Mediterranean revival" that seemed to dominate circa 2000-2015. I have a little more hope that these "bland boxes" won't look garishly outdated in a generation. And that's neglecting the irony entirely of "European" styling applied to single family sprawl.

EDIT: Spoke too soon, "For many people, 5-over-1s have come to symbolize the most painful aspects of today’s housing crisis — stand-ins for gentrification, corporate landlords and excessively high rents." Do better, NYT.

willnonya3• 3 years ago

Speaking of tired talking points, do better... I'm sure that won't be cringe any time soon.

calt• 3 years ago

What is this supposed to mean?

Why is the post cringe?

girafffe_i• 3 years ago

And yet it's still an valued point. Some things can be trite and true, why spend energy entertaining contrairianism.

Being bold and out of character may inadvertently build character (brutalism). Movies have done the same: appeal to the masses by not being noticeably placeable.

Chicago has this many (show 1 finger) new floorplans replacing the brown/graystones which were themselves ubiquitous, and it's soul crushing. Every year I live in this city adds to the bane of noticing all the "misses" on long term investments and diversity (housing, minimal investment in public spaces, say "bike lane" as many times as you can in one sentence.)

Keep contention high by being noticeable and trying. not bland by contrast.

2h• 3 years ago

Can you please speak English? I can even understand this where the sarcasm begins and ends anymore.

brailsafe• 3 years ago

Agreed. Seems like you cut deep with the crowd on here who lives in those repulsive suburban spanish revival style mcmansions or w/e

comte7092• 3 years ago

The frustrating thing is that these units aren’t even luxurious, they are just new and relatively expensive. Having lived in and visited other who live in this type of construction, you consistently see that these are slapped together to look nice in photos, while the laminate floors, sinks, etc are poorly installed, and the wear shows pretty quickly.

It says a lot about the state of America that in unit laundry and ~500 sq ft is “luxury”.

frogpelt• 3 years ago

Those "inoffensive boxes" look to me, like stuff I would expect to see being built in Russia. I'm offended by them.

Retric4• 3 years ago

Same as it ever was. Cities largely get their look from when various booms and busts occurred which links up to when specific styles were popular.

For example old NYC skyscrapers look just like other skyscrapers built at the time. The difference is few cities built significant skyscrapers during that time period, and NYC avoided losing building in WWI/WWII etc.

molsongolden• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/83yb5

onewheeltom• 3 years ago

The results of our broken zoning systems and NIMBYism. If we had done 20 years ago what we are doing now (drastically reducing single family zoning) the shortage would not be as severe.

dublinben• 3 years ago

Exactly. There’s a shortage of housing that will take many years to remedy. We can’t afford to nitpick about architectural aesthetics until we’ve built enough houses for everyone.

irrational• 3 years ago

Has anyone done the math on when we will have too much housing? With the boomers dying off and the much smaller following generations, I presume at some point in the next 50-100 years we will have way more houses than people to fill them. Surely some statistician has done the math.

steveBK123• 3 years ago

In the US it's almost all immigration dependent now.

So the answer could be anywhere from "1-2 generations" to "never", depending on our immigration policies & relative desirability for people to come here.

TulliusCicero5• 3 years ago

Germany has had a relatively stagnant population for some time now and they still have housing price problems, especially for buying real estate.

Western countries have somehow managed to develop learn helplessness on housing. It should be easier than ever to make safe, high quality housing, and yet it's become absurdly difficult and expensive instead.

It's common to hear anecdotes from homeowners merely trying to do an extension or add an ADU on the kafkaesque nightmare of bureaucracy that we've managed to create.

mikeyouse• 3 years ago

Houses aren't fungible either. Some places have dirt cheap homes, many places don't. The number of buildings is only important so far as they are located where people want to live.

rawgabbit2• 3 years ago

They actually did studies and predictions. It is not pretty. The story is that when we were an agricultural society, huge families lived in teeny tiny houses for generations. As we become more industrialized, we first saw the nuclear family (2 parents and 2 children), then single families (1 parent and 2 children and the dad living by himself, and then finally digital nomads (1 dude living by himself or shacking up with 3 other dudes). We may need the same number of housing units as families split up and everyone becomes a digital nomad. The long term strategy is that everyone lives in an RV and we just move city to city and live in an RV park. When I was growing up, we called people who lived in RV parks "trash". I guess we will become trash.

dashundchen• 3 years ago

Who are "they" and what is this study?

conductr2• 3 years ago

Not so long ago all our ancestors lived in a cave down by the river.

kwere• 3 years ago

its really convenient and by refurbishing older buses can be really price competitive if you do the conversion yourself[0]

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1L53KMj-xY

jwsteigerwalt• 3 years ago

Tons of bland housing is the current need.

fullsend• 3 years ago

Intellectually these internet bloggers that work for the major outlets these days are just shy of the bottom of the barrel. It shows.

TulliusCicero5• 3 years ago

Housing of X time period tends to look similar.

That's fine, what gives cities character is when a) styles are mixed up by virtue of having been built in different time periods, and b) as the fronts/facades get gradually transformed over time.

Tiktaalik• 3 years ago

I live in a 120 year old house and it looks the exact same as a bunch of other 120 year old houses around here because they were all obviously either done by the same builder or straight up bought out of a sears catalogue.

The working people that built my house didn't give a shit that it wasn't unique then and working people don't care now. Folks want an affordable place to live.

Aesthetic "concerns" around new apartment housing is a desperate attempt by the rich to keep the poor out of their exclusive neighbourhoods.

onlyrealcuzzo2• 3 years ago

By definition, being rich is somewhat exclusive.

The majority of nimbys aren't rich - they're pretty average. They're not trying to "keep the poor out."

In typical American fashion, they're trying to pull the lader up from under them to keep anyone else from having what they do.

The easiest way to Keep Up With The Joneses is to make sure there's never anymore of them to keep up with.

This isn't to say the rich are innocent.

I'm just tired of everyone pretending like American society is perfect except for a teeny tiny portion of rich people that ruin everything.

We have many systemic problems.

Retric4• 3 years ago

Nimby’s are statistically wealthier than average for the area. Renters simply have less money on average and don’t care as much about such issues because they are more mobile.

We normally think of the top 0.1% as rich, but even the top 1/3 is much better off than average.

wahern• 3 years ago

I always liked this bit of lore from the Sunset District of San Francisco:

It is not surprising that Doelger was a great admirer of Henry Ford, and in some ways, the Sunset rowhouses were the "Model T's" of housing. [...] It was not uncommon for the framing crews to race one another down two sides of one street to see which crew could complete framing their side first.

https://www.outsidelands.org/sunset-developers.php

kevin_thibedeau• 3 years ago

This is really the result of the massive skills loss in the construction industry. Everything has to be cheap to purchase and installable by low skilled labor. The whole point is to maximize profit with minimal quality. This is most evident in masonry construction. You basically can't get brick work of a quality comparable to what was done 100 years ago any more.

piyh• 3 years ago

I worked for the biggest building supply/manufacturing company in the US. It's not a loss of skill, it's the economies of scale that comes with prefab. It's not only faster to build with, it's cheaper to the builder, and it's a higher margin product to sell. It's the right choice for a majority of homes, and a majority is what you see.

It's at the point now where you can build your house out of a catalog then do VR walkthroughs. That's a great sell to the customer and something you can't do the old way.

conductr2• 3 years ago

Was going to echo this. There has been an explosion of building products/systems/technologies that make comparing to even just 20+ years ago difficult. A focus on energy efficiency and air quality also means that some old methods have been demoted from their status quo position of the past. Other products actually enable low skilled workers to do things that once required high skilled craftsmen.

syntheweave• 3 years ago

It's a combination of prefab cost meeting regulatory constraint. The most generic of the new builds have been optimized for cost while also working within legal requirements for many states and cities.

Overall I welcome it, because there's a herd strength in having a generation of homes all built the same way, with the same kinds of known caveats.

SECProto• 3 years ago

This is really the result of the massive skills loss in the construction industry

The skills weren't lost, just no one wants to pay for them. If ten people can build ten houses in a year, but to do decorative houses they can only do five, hey suddenly the masonry costs on your house have doubled.

You basically can't get brick work of a quality comparable to what was done 100 years ago any more.

Bricks were mostly used structurally a century ago. In about the late 1930s, most brickwork started being veneer (non-structural). Combined with dramatically increase labour costs as a proportion of overall building cost, it's pretty clear why.

If you want some decorative brickwork done, order a pallet of brick and some bags of mortar and learn how to do it yourself. Anything else is reserved for those with money to burn.

65• 3 years ago

One thing that drives me nuts is architects using asymmetrical window placements. It's hard to look at a building with windows randomly placed here and there. I don't care if it's a Philly Shit Box™ or some other hastily constructed building, it's the asymmetry of the window placements that I can't stand.

pfdietz• 3 years ago

One reason to make the buildings all look the same is so that some decades down the road it's less likely to be stolen from the owner by being designated a "landmark".

HyperSane• 3 years ago

This is like worrying about the flavor of the water being used to put out a house fire.

cafard• 3 years ago

And the song "Little Boxes" is now sixty years old.

dublin• 3 years ago

Though there are several things that drive it, the real problem is that today's "modern" architects have no vision and imagination - they produce soul-crushing dreck that incorporates all the worst features you'd expect from really bad copies of 100-year-old modernism, cubism, and brutalism. This is a problem with single-family "modern" homes, but especially, with the newer mixed While density is always best avoided, it can be done well: The Scots showed how you can have uniformity of design with character, warmth, and function in their architecture of 200 years ago.

The result is what we see virtually mandated now in cities like Austin: A modern rehash of Soviet/Eastern Bloc housing projects, recast as "vertical mixed use" developments. Mid-rises that are invariably too tall and too close to the street, blocking out the sky and leaving just a strip of concrete to the road, which is now rendered even less useful by the copious bike lanes that no one uses because it's way too damn hot most of the year. They have only minimal windows on the exterior walls, and if there's a balcony, it's usually either a completely non-functional decorative appendage a foot deep, or it's too small for even a cafe table set. Green space and lawns (even though grasses are the most effective plants for cleaning the air), or even big trees, are discouraged.

Worse, no one wants to live in them unless they have to: First of all, they have mandated "low income housing", guaranteeing a resident population of thugs and criminals, second, the real estate is so incredibly expensive that no commercial or retail businesses can survive in the first floor locations that are supposed to provide some aspect of "community". (Austin's preferred housing model is deliberately family-hostile.)

I'll take suburban single family homes ANY day over that - this kind of "modern" architecture will crush your soul - people should be free and kings and queens of their own castles, not proles in a pod eating bugs with Big Brother on the viewscreen.

Housing Starts to Look the Same

Related Stories