"In other words, the old buildings that survive and remain in decent condition are probably disproportionately the higher-end buildings with higher-end conceptions of design. It’s basically the survivorship-bias problem: we imagine the artifacts we see from the past are the average, while they’re actually exceptional, because the low-quality junk from the past didn’t survive."
I'm not sure this is true, though.
E.g. our neighborhood in the Twin Cities was always a workingman's neighborhood that was visibly distinct from the middle class neighborhood south of it (well, what was left of it--it was predominantly black and mostly got bulldozed for the midcentury highway, but the remaining homes were larger). And it was *very* different from the run of Victorian mansions (plus fancy four- and six-plexes and even a few townhouses accommodate your wealthy bachelors and maiden aunts) south of that.
Our neighborhood had a little modern infill, but it was mostly where corner stores had been demolished after going out of use. The housing stock was easily 95% intact and still cheap, but also still fairly solid, especially for how much neglect, bad flips, and foreclosure many of these houses had endured over 100 years.
People are 100% mad at YIMBYs for not myth making about the past. In a lot of ways.
The most concrete one is that yimbys aren’t sentimental about what’s being torn down. The commonest story in the world is this – a diner or a bar or a bowling alley or an ice skating rink that was very popular 20-30 years ago has since lost almost all of its customers (because they got older or moved away) and the owner is old or dies. No one wants to run the business so it closes and is proposed for redevelopment.
The myth making the nimby neighbors want is the myth that this business should be saved. They say, “I used to go there all the time!” and the local Yimbys say, “but when were you there last?” And inevitably the answer is that it’s been at least a decade.
The irony is that in other ways YIMBYs do tons of myth making about the past, the pre-1910 past when we imagine zoning hadn’t been invented yet and also no one owned cars.
This is a great comment and yeah, I think both of those ring true. I wrote a piece here once called "Stores You Like To Walk Past," because a friend of mine asked what kind of businesses I like to know exist or see, but never actually spend money at. I kind of thinking NIMBYism is psychologically correct, but like, a wrong theory of how human settlements work.
It’s certainly psychologically normal to have status quo bias, and to feel nostalgia, and to feel sad when time is passing.
Many if not most people can or would overlook the negatives of neighborhood change and appreciate the new if they had a way of mourning the old.
Unfortunately, for a person who intellectually could be OK with some neighborhood change, but wants to get together with other to process their grief, the only available place is in the group that is organizing to stop the change. That’s where you’ll find neighbors who want to reminisce and validate your sadness.
If we had unlimited resources, we would organize neutral neighborhood change grief circles, or some other kind of way for people to get together and just feel sad and move through it.
So, I live in one of those "townhouses." It is indeed not traditional, but it is affordable and mostly functional, though too small for entertaining at any scale. There is no dog poop on the lawn (that is not about housing form!). Yesterday when I needed AA batteries, I was able to walk to get them (even though it was -7 outside). That isn't a possibility in some similar developments here, but I think we must be careful in pointing out these design distinctions and looking back to the past not to make people feel judged. That's not how you recruit for your cause.
We also have to have real historical perspective instead of cherry-picking. When it was built in 1984, this project was high density (the adjoining lots are half-acre, this is about 5 per acre) and offered a housing type that wasn't available anywhere else in this town at that moment. It was a response to a perceived market (a correct response as it turned out), not the result of a YIMBY campaign, but at least in this particular context (and all housing markets are particular), it was aa good enough answer to sprawl.
The only real issue I have with them is how the location is often not walkable to anything. The ones around here are, sometimes, but not always, and we’re pretty dense as counties go. Most involve crossing a main road, too. My wife’s friend lives in one, without a car, and she can walk to a shopping center. That one is pretty good.
The new buildings in New York City tend to be three dimensional (for 3D windowed new builds in my neighborhood in Brooklyn check out 319 Prospect Ave, 311 Bergen Street, 450 Warren Street, 280 St Marks). From what I've heard from developers that's partially because stick frame construction, which is not allowed in NYC, makes the flat wall assemblies much easier and cheaper, and partially because the asking prices on new construction in NYC are so extortionate that developers can pay a lot of money for good architects and good architecture. Also, potentially more of the new construction is allowed by right. Most of those things are unlikely to change in the rest of the country outside of New York.
Yeah, my understanding is that the stick frame stuff is difficult to give a textured or “articulated” look. The nicest ones I’ve seen are often the vintage-warehouse-look all-brick ones. But ironically a lot of design codes mandate all the different materials to break up the facade, which makes them look worse, probably
Agree, that's what I meant with by right - you don't have a planner making it uglier. You would get much better looking buildings if you just made a rule saying not to clad your building in petroleum products. Really anything to let architects design your building rather than city planners or building code officials.
Stewart Hicks on YT has some videos on the architectural reasons for this. The short is that the “3D” look of older homes was a necessary part of waterproofing while modern building techniques (eg modern sealants, zip sheathing, etc) let you get the same function cheaper, easier, and a lot flatter
Interesting. I remember a Catholic housing advocate I met at event said something like "modern construction is ugly because people don't have God." Kind of the same line of critique as modernist churches vs. the old cathedrals, etc. I guess I wonder what you do with something like that feels kind of right - things aren't as beautiful as they used to be - but for which the explanation is really boring and nothing to do with meaning or values.
It's kind of disquieting to think of culture as just a set of practices that made sense and got done a lot, or as a saying goes, a tradition is an old innovation. And there's enough of a conservative in me that hears that as saying "Culture and tradition are junk, the past is worthless," and makes me want to reject it on that count. I know that's wrong, but what I'm trying to do in my work is find a pathway for people with my predispositions to get on board with housing/urbanism/etc.
No worries on the reply length, but he does touch on similar ideas, though not about Catholicism. His video on the tartaria conspiracy folk can be summarized as “people would rather believe in a lost civilization than we stopped building beautiful things because it’s cheaper and easier not too.”
What I think of with the second paragraph is the work needed to keep traditions alive. Forgetting why a tradition arose from some innovation is also why they can be so easy to stop doing
I grew up in a trailer and my parents built a modest house by themselves as they had time/money to do it. Mostly they put in some time evenings and weekends. We finally moved in when I was in junior high. It had just one bathroom. My dad told me recently that it had never occurred to him or my mother to put in another one. They’d never known anybody with two bathrooms!
Of the four houses I’ve bought, two had one bathroom. One had a full bath, a 3/4 master bath and a half bath in the finished basement.
My daughter just bought a place with three full baths.
This made we want to jump up and down going "YES! THIS!" Those townhouses out in the suburbs have always seemed so bizarre and depressing to me - they seem to combine the worst of city living with the worst of suburban living. You can hear your neighbor through the wall, you've got hardly any windows, but you can't walk to a metro station, or really anywhere. It doesn't make sense.
I am confused though by your remark "Design is not aesthetics; quality is not aesthetics." Yes they are? If that's not aesthetics, what do housing advocates mean by that word? As an amateur observer of this discourse I have never understood why the common wisdom seems to be that we should dismiss aesthetics. There is no reason the housing that we need has to be ugly and if design and quality aren't part of aesthetics, what is?
Oh, what I mean is, even granting that we shouldn’t be fussy about aesthetics, we should have higher standards for design. By aesthetics I mean finishes/appearances/materials/architectural elements. Like some of the old-school New Urbanists want cornices on buildings, or whatever. That to me is a different category of complaint from floorplans/layouts/durability of construction. So I’m arguing against people who reduce almost all critiques of new construction to aesthetics critiques.
I think this may be one of those distinctions that only make sense to specialists - which is fine, everyone's specialty has those. Sometimes you come into a thing in the middle of a decades-long argument that refers to cornices all the time and you just have to accept that you have no time to catch up with the whole history :)
"The less affluent folks lived in less well-built (and less well-appointed) buildings that were farther out and likely demolished decades ago."
Absolutely true. My mother grew up in the 1930s and 1940s in Canton, Ohio, in an area that was on the edge of town (but within walking distance to the steel mill where my grandfather worked). Their house was built in 1920, and is actually still standing, in pretty close to its original configuration - the only major change is someone added an accessibility ramp to the front door. It is 1100 SF, 2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom (which my grandfather built himself; the original house did not have indoor plumbing). My grandparents raised six children in it, plus my grandparents' unmarried brothers lived with them for a few years in the 1920s. The six children shared a bedroom, if you can imagine that. But, this seemed perfectly reasonable to my grandparents who were Eastern European immigrants. Most peasant homes in the old country were two or three rooms; only the patriarch and matriarch had an actual bed. Everyone else slept on mattresses on the floor; these were stacked up on the bed during the day.
The only reason that my grandparents' neighborhood has remained in pretty much its original state is that the steel industry went into a steep decline. Subsequent generations couldn't afford to renovate and build additions; and since the neighborhood was adjacent to a derelict steel plant and other industrial areas it has not been attractive to gentrifiers.
(continued) My parents moved to a town in the NYC metro area and bought a house in 1960, in what had been an affordable-housing development for WWII veterans. The houses were 760 SF, 2 BR, 1 B, and were constructed without central heat (the owners had to add that themselves). However, the development was in a wonderful location, adjacent to a river and within walking distance to the commuter rail. Many of the original homeowners lived in their houses for the rest of their lives - the majority of our neighbors when I was growing up were the veterans who had bought their homes in 1947 when they were first built.
My neighborhood has gentrified dramatically since I was a child in the 70s; almost all of the houses have either been renovated with additions added, or else torn down and McMansions constructed on the lots instead. Most of the original homeowners were blue-collar workers, but some went to college on the GI bill; and our town was primarily a white-collar bedroom community for people who worked in NYC. Over time, the neighborhood morphed from a blue-collar affordable-housing area to a white-collar professional neighborhood, and it became gentrified due to its location which was attractive to 1980s upwardly-mobile professionals (aka the yuppies).
I recently saw a listing for one of the homes that still has the original 760-SF footprint but has been renovated and the interior upgraded with high-end finishes, plus it has a river view - it sold for over $1 million.
My question is why a “modern look” is even a priority. Shouldn’t architects be choosing materials and designs for practicality and letting an aesthetic emerge organically from those decisions rather than trying to impose some arbitrary “modern” style?
I don't know if it's a priority, per se, as much as just the way things look typically now. You see it with cars, consumer goods (electronics with woodgrain and clacker switches vs. clean black look), etc. Plus brick is expensive.
"In other words, the old buildings that survive and remain in decent condition are probably disproportionately the higher-end buildings with higher-end conceptions of design. It’s basically the survivorship-bias problem: we imagine the artifacts we see from the past are the average, while they’re actually exceptional, because the low-quality junk from the past didn’t survive."
I'm not sure this is true, though.
E.g. our neighborhood in the Twin Cities was always a workingman's neighborhood that was visibly distinct from the middle class neighborhood south of it (well, what was left of it--it was predominantly black and mostly got bulldozed for the midcentury highway, but the remaining homes were larger). And it was *very* different from the run of Victorian mansions (plus fancy four- and six-plexes and even a few townhouses accommodate your wealthy bachelors and maiden aunts) south of that.
Our neighborhood had a little modern infill, but it was mostly where corner stores had been demolished after going out of use. The housing stock was easily 95% intact and still cheap, but also still fairly solid, especially for how much neglect, bad flips, and foreclosure many of these houses had endured over 100 years.
People are 100% mad at YIMBYs for not myth making about the past. In a lot of ways.
The most concrete one is that yimbys aren’t sentimental about what’s being torn down. The commonest story in the world is this – a diner or a bar or a bowling alley or an ice skating rink that was very popular 20-30 years ago has since lost almost all of its customers (because they got older or moved away) and the owner is old or dies. No one wants to run the business so it closes and is proposed for redevelopment.
The myth making the nimby neighbors want is the myth that this business should be saved. They say, “I used to go there all the time!” and the local Yimbys say, “but when were you there last?” And inevitably the answer is that it’s been at least a decade.
The irony is that in other ways YIMBYs do tons of myth making about the past, the pre-1910 past when we imagine zoning hadn’t been invented yet and also no one owned cars.
This is a great comment and yeah, I think both of those ring true. I wrote a piece here once called "Stores You Like To Walk Past," because a friend of mine asked what kind of businesses I like to know exist or see, but never actually spend money at. I kind of thinking NIMBYism is psychologically correct, but like, a wrong theory of how human settlements work.
It’s certainly psychologically normal to have status quo bias, and to feel nostalgia, and to feel sad when time is passing.
Many if not most people can or would overlook the negatives of neighborhood change and appreciate the new if they had a way of mourning the old.
Unfortunately, for a person who intellectually could be OK with some neighborhood change, but wants to get together with other to process their grief, the only available place is in the group that is organizing to stop the change. That’s where you’ll find neighbors who want to reminisce and validate your sadness.
If we had unlimited resources, we would organize neutral neighborhood change grief circles, or some other kind of way for people to get together and just feel sad and move through it.
So, I live in one of those "townhouses." It is indeed not traditional, but it is affordable and mostly functional, though too small for entertaining at any scale. There is no dog poop on the lawn (that is not about housing form!). Yesterday when I needed AA batteries, I was able to walk to get them (even though it was -7 outside). That isn't a possibility in some similar developments here, but I think we must be careful in pointing out these design distinctions and looking back to the past not to make people feel judged. That's not how you recruit for your cause.
We also have to have real historical perspective instead of cherry-picking. When it was built in 1984, this project was high density (the adjoining lots are half-acre, this is about 5 per acre) and offered a housing type that wasn't available anywhere else in this town at that moment. It was a response to a perceived market (a correct response as it turned out), not the result of a YIMBY campaign, but at least in this particular context (and all housing markets are particular), it was aa good enough answer to sprawl.
The only real issue I have with them is how the location is often not walkable to anything. The ones around here are, sometimes, but not always, and we’re pretty dense as counties go. Most involve crossing a main road, too. My wife’s friend lives in one, without a car, and she can walk to a shopping center. That one is pretty good.
I had to dash across an arterial to get my batteries, but it was Sunday afternoon (and I could have walked to a signalized crossing if I needed to).
The new buildings in New York City tend to be three dimensional (for 3D windowed new builds in my neighborhood in Brooklyn check out 319 Prospect Ave, 311 Bergen Street, 450 Warren Street, 280 St Marks). From what I've heard from developers that's partially because stick frame construction, which is not allowed in NYC, makes the flat wall assemblies much easier and cheaper, and partially because the asking prices on new construction in NYC are so extortionate that developers can pay a lot of money for good architects and good architecture. Also, potentially more of the new construction is allowed by right. Most of those things are unlikely to change in the rest of the country outside of New York.
Yeah, my understanding is that the stick frame stuff is difficult to give a textured or “articulated” look. The nicest ones I’ve seen are often the vintage-warehouse-look all-brick ones. But ironically a lot of design codes mandate all the different materials to break up the facade, which makes them look worse, probably
Agree, that's what I meant with by right - you don't have a planner making it uglier. You would get much better looking buildings if you just made a rule saying not to clad your building in petroleum products. Really anything to let architects design your building rather than city planners or building code officials.
Stewart Hicks on YT has some videos on the architectural reasons for this. The short is that the “3D” look of older homes was a necessary part of waterproofing while modern building techniques (eg modern sealants, zip sheathing, etc) let you get the same function cheaper, easier, and a lot flatter
Interesting. I remember a Catholic housing advocate I met at event said something like "modern construction is ugly because people don't have God." Kind of the same line of critique as modernist churches vs. the old cathedrals, etc. I guess I wonder what you do with something like that feels kind of right - things aren't as beautiful as they used to be - but for which the explanation is really boring and nothing to do with meaning or values.
It's kind of disquieting to think of culture as just a set of practices that made sense and got done a lot, or as a saying goes, a tradition is an old innovation. And there's enough of a conservative in me that hears that as saying "Culture and tradition are junk, the past is worthless," and makes me want to reject it on that count. I know that's wrong, but what I'm trying to do in my work is find a pathway for people with my predispositions to get on board with housing/urbanism/etc.
Sorry for the long reply!
No worries on the reply length, but he does touch on similar ideas, though not about Catholicism. His video on the tartaria conspiracy folk can be summarized as “people would rather believe in a lost civilization than we stopped building beautiful things because it’s cheaper and easier not too.”
What I think of with the second paragraph is the work needed to keep traditions alive. Forgetting why a tradition arose from some innovation is also why they can be so easy to stop doing
I grew up in a trailer and my parents built a modest house by themselves as they had time/money to do it. Mostly they put in some time evenings and weekends. We finally moved in when I was in junior high. It had just one bathroom. My dad told me recently that it had never occurred to him or my mother to put in another one. They’d never known anybody with two bathrooms!
Of the four houses I’ve bought, two had one bathroom. One had a full bath, a 3/4 master bath and a half bath in the finished basement.
My daughter just bought a place with three full baths.
This made we want to jump up and down going "YES! THIS!" Those townhouses out in the suburbs have always seemed so bizarre and depressing to me - they seem to combine the worst of city living with the worst of suburban living. You can hear your neighbor through the wall, you've got hardly any windows, but you can't walk to a metro station, or really anywhere. It doesn't make sense.
I am confused though by your remark "Design is not aesthetics; quality is not aesthetics." Yes they are? If that's not aesthetics, what do housing advocates mean by that word? As an amateur observer of this discourse I have never understood why the common wisdom seems to be that we should dismiss aesthetics. There is no reason the housing that we need has to be ugly and if design and quality aren't part of aesthetics, what is?
Oh, what I mean is, even granting that we shouldn’t be fussy about aesthetics, we should have higher standards for design. By aesthetics I mean finishes/appearances/materials/architectural elements. Like some of the old-school New Urbanists want cornices on buildings, or whatever. That to me is a different category of complaint from floorplans/layouts/durability of construction. So I’m arguing against people who reduce almost all critiques of new construction to aesthetics critiques.
I think this may be one of those distinctions that only make sense to specialists - which is fine, everyone's specialty has those. Sometimes you come into a thing in the middle of a decades-long argument that refers to cornices all the time and you just have to accept that you have no time to catch up with the whole history :)
"The less affluent folks lived in less well-built (and less well-appointed) buildings that were farther out and likely demolished decades ago."
Absolutely true. My mother grew up in the 1930s and 1940s in Canton, Ohio, in an area that was on the edge of town (but within walking distance to the steel mill where my grandfather worked). Their house was built in 1920, and is actually still standing, in pretty close to its original configuration - the only major change is someone added an accessibility ramp to the front door. It is 1100 SF, 2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom (which my grandfather built himself; the original house did not have indoor plumbing). My grandparents raised six children in it, plus my grandparents' unmarried brothers lived with them for a few years in the 1920s. The six children shared a bedroom, if you can imagine that. But, this seemed perfectly reasonable to my grandparents who were Eastern European immigrants. Most peasant homes in the old country were two or three rooms; only the patriarch and matriarch had an actual bed. Everyone else slept on mattresses on the floor; these were stacked up on the bed during the day.
The only reason that my grandparents' neighborhood has remained in pretty much its original state is that the steel industry went into a steep decline. Subsequent generations couldn't afford to renovate and build additions; and since the neighborhood was adjacent to a derelict steel plant and other industrial areas it has not been attractive to gentrifiers.
(continued) My parents moved to a town in the NYC metro area and bought a house in 1960, in what had been an affordable-housing development for WWII veterans. The houses were 760 SF, 2 BR, 1 B, and were constructed without central heat (the owners had to add that themselves). However, the development was in a wonderful location, adjacent to a river and within walking distance to the commuter rail. Many of the original homeowners lived in their houses for the rest of their lives - the majority of our neighbors when I was growing up were the veterans who had bought their homes in 1947 when they were first built.
My neighborhood has gentrified dramatically since I was a child in the 70s; almost all of the houses have either been renovated with additions added, or else torn down and McMansions constructed on the lots instead. Most of the original homeowners were blue-collar workers, but some went to college on the GI bill; and our town was primarily a white-collar bedroom community for people who worked in NYC. Over time, the neighborhood morphed from a blue-collar affordable-housing area to a white-collar professional neighborhood, and it became gentrified due to its location which was attractive to 1980s upwardly-mobile professionals (aka the yuppies).
I recently saw a listing for one of the homes that still has the original 760-SF footprint but has been renovated and the interior upgraded with high-end finishes, plus it has a river view - it sold for over $1 million.
My question is why a “modern look” is even a priority. Shouldn’t architects be choosing materials and designs for practicality and letting an aesthetic emerge organically from those decisions rather than trying to impose some arbitrary “modern” style?
I don't know if it's a priority, per se, as much as just the way things look typically now. You see it with cars, consumer goods (electronics with woodgrain and clacker switches vs. clean black look), etc. Plus brick is expensive.