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What Will Save the Suburbs?
Allison Arieff, By Design (blog), New York Times
For a long time now I’ve been obsessed with suburban and exurban master-planned communities and how to make them better. But as the economy and the mortgage crisis just seem to get worse, and gas prices continue to plunge, the issues around housing have changed dramatically. The problem now isn’t really how to better design homes and communities, but rather what are we going to do with all the homes and communities we’re left with.
… As I learned in artist Julia Christensen’s new book, “Big Box Reuse,” when a big box store like Wal-mart or Kmart outgrows its space, it is shut down. It is, apparently, cheaper to start from scratch than to close for renovation and expansion, let alone decide at the outset to design a store that can easily be expanded (or contracted, as the case may be).
So not only does a community get a newer, bigger big box, it is also left with quite an economic and environmental eyesore: a vacant shell of a retail operation, tons of wasted building material and a changed landscape that can’t be changed back.
The silver lining in Christensen’s study are the communities she’s discovered that have proactively addressed the massive empty shells they’ve been left with, turning structures of anywhere from 20,000 to 280,000 square feet into something useful: a charter school, a health center, a chapel, a library. (And, in Austin, Minn., a new Spam Museum.)
… exurban communities are a unique challenge. The houses within them are big, but not generally as big as, say, Victorian mansions in San Francisco that can be subdivided into apartments. So they’re not great candidates for transformation into multi-family rental housing.
(11 January 2009)
The ‘McMansion’ trend in housing is slowing
Patrik Jonsson, Christian Science Monitor
Economic hard times, plus shifting neighborhood and urban values, are key factors.
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But the plight of this [$9.88 million mini-White House] also marks a major shift in the transformation of American neighborhoods – perhaps the end of the McMansion era. Indeed, it may allow thousands of communities from Pasadena to Pittsburgh to more accurately balance the living requirements of modern Americans with a widespread desire to maintain older neighborhoods.
“We’re advising communities to take advantage of this slowdown and use it as a cooling-off period,” says Adrian Fine, a regional director for the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington. “It gives them a little more time to have a less heated and less controversial discussion to protect a specific neighborhood and balance that with the need for growth and development.”
With housing prices off by 18 percent in 20 US cities in the last year and new home starts at a 26-year low, bulldozers have slowed their march across American cities and towns.
(6 January 2009)
US Housing and the Passive Home Standard
Majorian, The Oil Drum
An overview of how much energy can be saved by building passive solar homes.
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US Housing and the Passive House Standard
In 2000, almost 20 quads of primary energy, about 20% of US total energy consumption, was used for US residences. This is approximately the same amount of raw energy as was produced by all US coal mines in that year. About 1/3 of the 20 quads used is US residential construction came from coal via electricity.
In 2000, 60% of all US households lived in single family detached houses, serving almost 70 million households. By contrast, 20 million households (17%) lived in apartment buildings of 5 or more units and 10.5 million (10%) lived in apartment buildings of 2-4 units. The remainder were located in townhouses (single family attached) and mobile homes. At the 2005 peak the industry was producing over 2 million units per year.
These facts suggest that regardless of falling home prices and wages, the need for housing continues to grow. It is also apparent that the age of the housing stock is growing particularly in urban areas; as much as half of the housing stock in a typical city is over 40 years old. Older buildings can be more than 33% less energy efficient than a new buildings of the same size.
How can we make up the shortfall?
People could rent rooms assuming there aren’t zoning conflicts. More multifamily apartment buildings can be built though these are restricted by zoning ordinances as well. There’s also the fact that people prefer single unit housing over apartment living. Therefore the amount of new single family housing units is certain to grow in the near future.
There is also Stuart’s hypothesis that people will tend to live in larger families, reversing the move from people living alone or in small nuclear families to more extended family co-habitation.
(10 January 2009)
