Most of Our Best Neighborhoods Would Be Illegal Today

[Pictured: A block of Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island.]

Did you enjoy the book “Abundance” by Derek Thompson & Ezra Klein? If so, I recommend you also read “Stuck: How the Privileged & the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity” by Yoni Appelbaum.

The book covers the history of all the different ways in which people have chosen to situate their home lives in the US, all the way back to the founding of the nation. It’s fascinating, and it really opened my eyes to how we need to be a bit more humble about the breadth of “living situations” that we allow to be built.

Most of our “ideal” areas would not even be allowed to exist if they appeared out of thin air today. The areas are “grandfathered in”, and I’m thankful for that.

The book had so many good takeaways that I thought I’d write up some of my favorites.

Most urbanists (like me!) are not saying “No single-family homes should be allowed to be built anywhere in the US. There should only ever be apartments built from now on.”

Instead, what we’re saying are things like…

When there’s a single-family home, let’s let people build an ADU in their backyard.
Let’s not require a bunch of parking spaces for every single apartment unit. If people insist on having a ton of reserved parking, they can choose to live elsewhere, and that’s okay! When apartments open that don’t have a ton of reserved parking, they don’t just sit empty, because there are plenty of people who are fine living in units like that during that stage of their life. (Also: Not requiring tons of parking makes it less expensive to build apartments, which is a good thing, since we have a shortage of housing units where people want to live.)
Let’s allow some businesses to exist within residential areas [eateries, small retail, small offices], as was allowed for years in much of the US. As you said, a neighborhood of single-family homes can be “walkable” if the lots are a reasonable size, but there also has to be somewhere to walk to. (My neighborhood in Los Angeles was built out in the late 1940s, and it conveniently has some businesses at the end of our block, unlike the house I grew up in in TX, which was built in the 1970s, and had nothing but single-family homes for miles. Not a single “corner shop” of kind anywhere nearby, not even a gas station
Are new single-family homes being built? Consider allowing some of them to be duplexes.
Are new duplexes being built? Consider allowing some of them to be triplexes. (I would never want to live in one at this stage in our lives, but in our childless 20s, we lived in a triplex, and it suited our needs just fine for that stage of our lives.)
Are new two or three-story apartments being built? Consider allowing some of them to be six stories tall, and consider allowing them to have retail on the ground floor. (Case in point: A 6-story apartment building with ground-floor retail was recently proposed for a vacant lot in my neighborhood and people lost their shit. But here’s the thing, we already have a 6-story apartment building with ground-floor retail just 4 blocks away. It was built in the 1980s, and no one even notices it now. It’s just a normal part of our neighborhood. Never any complaints about it at all.)

In the big picture, for me, it’s all about allowing a mix of housing types that meet people’s needs and give them choices for the different stages of their lives.

Childless 20-somethings don’t want (or need) the same types of housing as 40-somethings with kids, just like how 70-somethings don’t want the same things either.

We need to allow for an “ALL of the above” approach if we want to ever come anywhere near meeting the demand for housing that exists in the parts of the nation that people actually want to live in. Our unwillingness to do this is part of the reason why housing costs are so insanely high in the places where most people want to be (near jobs!)

We should not tailor our housing policies purely to meet the desires of highly educated immigrants. There’s nothing wrong with those folks; they contribute a lot to a tax base (etc), but they’re a very small slice of Americans. In fact, foreign‑born, college-educated, white‑collar professionals make up only 5% of the entire US adult population.

Of course, all of these housing policies would have a lot more of an effect if we lived in a country where the federal govt had the power to implement things of this nature, but sadly, that’s not the country we live in, and that’s a conversation for another day.