The single-family home, disfavored by many Smart Growth advocates, is a key part of “The greatest real estate turnaround ever”, according to CNNMoney today.
Charlotte Street was an apocalyptic nightmare version of urban life.
Weed-choked, junk-filled lots flanked the three-block stretch. Burned out tenement buildings punctuated the sky, and abandoned cars littered the landscape.
The street, like much of the rest of New York City’s South Bronx, had fallen to epic lows by the late 1970s…
One of the primary catalysts [in the turnaround] was [Genevieve] Brooks…
…she formed a tenants association. Then she helped form a block association to lobby the city to pick up trash and abandoned cars, and to crack down on crime…
“There was a tremendous amount of community action,” says former Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer. “That was the secret ingredient. The community refused to give up. They needed allies. They needed people who took the decline of the South Bronx as personally as they did.”
Brook’s and [urban planner Ed] Logue’s vision was to go to the rotted core — Charlotte Street — and work outward. But most everyone advised them to rebuild starting from the healthy fringes. They wanted single-family homes; critics wanted density and multi-family dwellings, saying it would promote a lively, safe neighborhood and attract merchants…
Homeownership was made possible by discounting the houses: Each property sold for between $50,000 and $59,000 even thought it cost an average of $110,000 to build. The difference was funded through federal dollars, but the City of New York and various foundations also helped subsidize buyers…
…succeed it did. Original buyers invested and stayed; fewer than a dozen homes out of the 92 have ever been sold. Plus, while the rest of the country is being wracked by foreclosures, Charlotte Gardens has lost just one home to the plague…
Property values, too, have soared. Homes that originally went for $50,000 now sell for ten times that — when one is available…
See also:
Salem, Oregon Analysis: Balanced Land Use Key to Balanced Municipal Budget, Quality of Life
…single-family, commercial/office, and industrial uses contribute more in revenues to the general fund than they generate in service costs. Multi-family and government uses have service costs in excess of revenues…
…one might conclude that the City should aggressively pursue commercial and industrial development to strengthen its fiscal position. However, an exclusive focus on these activities would not be sustainable in the long run. Indeed, a non-residential focus with little accompanying housing would produce a community with traffic congestion and long commutes. Moreover, were the City to shun multi-family housing to foster its budget, the policy would have impacts on neighboring communities and would deprive Salem businesses of access to workers, not to mention conflicts with other City and state goals and policies.
These differential impacts do, however, underscore the importance of balanced growth.
Energy Intensity Less in Single-Family Homes Than High-Rises
So why might this be? The San Francisco Bay Guardian explains (10/31/07):
…high-rises use energy in ways that single-family homes don’t — for example, in thousands of elevator trips from top to bottom every day. According to a study found on the US Department of Energy’s Web site, elevators consume up to 10 percent of the total energy used to maintain tall buildings. Furthermore, these buildings are usually climate controlled (in part to counteract the heat created by their elevators), whereas opening and closing windows can more effectively regulate temperatures in single-family houses and low-rise units. High-rise buildings also include common areas that often leave lights burning 24 hours a day.Other reasons for higher energy intensities in residential high-rises can include “parking garage fans and a building code requirement that building air must be completely exchanged every three hours – air that must be heated in winter and cooled in summer.” (Energy Solutions Alberta)
We also speculate that costs that are borne by an entire complex, such as lighting and heating common areas, may be less closely monitored than costs that fall on a single household. Since turning down your personal thermostat is simple and will directly save you money, you’re more likely to do it than lobby your building managers to make the common areas colder.
Maybe John and Jen Homeowner who like a house with a yard aren’t such bad folks after all.
Knoxville Infill Housing Design Guidelines: Lessons from Experience
As the Zoning Revisions Committee gears up to implement the vision of the Sustainable Northampton Plan, there are useful lessons to be drawn from other cities that have traveled the infill path…
“Following World War II, many single family neighborhoods were rezoned to permit apartments. This was done under an urban development theory that the highest density housing should be close to the central business district. The results have been mixed. In some instances the design of multi-unit buildings are completely out of context to older neighborhoods with apartment buildings looking like they should have been part of suburbia. In places where multi-unit housing is permitted (such as areas with R-2 or R-3 zoning), it is essential to neighborhood stability that new apartment buildings be designed in scale and context with the early architectural features of the neighborhood…
Houston Chronicle: “Density hasn’t been kind to Cottage Grove…”
Density hasn’t been kind to Cottage Grove, a small neighborhood with narrow streets, few sidewalks, poor drainage and scarce parking for the owners of its many new homes and their guests.
Like many neighborhoods inside Loop 610, Cottage Grove in recent years has experienced a flurry of construction of large townhomes that loom over 80-year-old cottages next door. Two or three dwellings crowd sites where one house stood previously. Streets are cluttered with vehicles parked every which way. Water stands in the streets after heavy rains.
“It was shocking to see this jewel of a neighborhood in this condition,” said former Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy, a senior fellow with the nonprofit Urban Land Institute who toured Cottage Grove two years ago. “It was about the ugliest thing I’d ever seen, to be honest with you.”
Metro Portland’s Long Experience with Smart Growth: A Cautionary Tale
The notion that potential homeowners would prefer to pay the higher cost of high-density housing as an alternative to the traditional home/yard/neighborhood environment style of raising families is wrong. The percentage of families moving to the Portland area that buy or rent within the UGB [Urban Growth Boundary] has fallen dramatically since site restrictions were implemented…
“Broken-Windows” Theory Validated in Study
A place that is covered in graffiti and festooned with rubbish makes people feel uneasy. And with good reason, according to a group of researchers in the Netherlands. Kees Keizer and his colleagues at the University of Groningen deliberately created such settings as a part of a series of experiments designed to discover if signs of vandalism, litter and low-level lawbreaking could change the way people behave. They found that they could, by a lot: doubling the number who are prepared to litter and steal…
The researchers’ conclusion is that one example of disorder, like graffiti or littering, can indeed encourage another, like stealing. Dr Kelling was right. The message for policymakers and police officers is that clearing up graffiti or littering promptly could help fight the spread of crime.
The Atlantic: “Broken Windows”
…at the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)
…In Boston public housing projects, the greatest fear was expressed by persons living in the buildings where disorderliness and incivility, not crime, were the greatest. Knowing this helps one understand the significance of such otherwise harmless displays as subway graffiti. As Nathan Glazer has written, “the proliferation of graffiti, even when not obscene, confronts the subway rider with the inescapable knowledge that the environment he must endure for an hour or more a day is uncontrolled and uncontrollable, and that anyone can invade it to do whatever damage and mischief the mind suggests.”