Adam Milsap has a column over at forbes.com asking whether or not housing is too durable:
Housing in America typically lasts a long time. In 2015, 13% of all housing units were built prior to 1940 and 56% were built prior to 1980—compared to 40% in Japan—according to American Community Survey data.
This durability has benefits: Durable housing is resistant to extreme weather, can serve as a store of wealth, and makes the filtering process—when older housing filters down to people with lower incomes through market transactions—a viable source of low-income housing. But durability also has drawbacks that may be harming the U.S. economy.
Economists have linked urban decline to the durability of housing. When cities experience a large negative productivity shock—e.g. Detroit and the automobile industry—a lot of the shock is manifested in the form of declining home prices rather than population loss.
This happens because homes disappear slowly. As employment opportunities disappear and home prices decline, those most able to move—often higher-income, more educated people—do so. They leave their homes behind, but the still-livable-but-now-much-cheaper homes attract lower-skill people who are less connected to the labor market. This changes the skill composition of the city’s workforce and contributes to further decline.
There’s a sort of implicit bias in thinking about structures that more durable is better. We see this in statements like, “They don’t build them like they used to.” Clearly the high quality and durability of prewar housing and commercial architecture contributes to their being incredibly in demand.
Yet we see that a lot of postwar is in a sort of “sour spot”. It’s durable enough to be around, but flimsy enough that it’s hard to justify investing in fixing it up. It’s sort of the difference between masonry structures vs. wood frame. The latter are more likely to end up demolished in my experience – though large numbers of high quality brick buildings have met the wrecking ball in places like St. Louis.
Also, with changing tastes over time housing and commercial typologies have tended to fall into disfavor and wander in the wilderness. Some ultimately find new fans – say the mid-century “Atomic ranch” style homes – but many do not and end up as costly redevelopment liabilities.
Perhaps a better way to think about housing the 21st century is a fixed lifecycle design. I’ve floated this idea before. Why not have some cradle to cradle type design where the end of life removal and recycling of the building is built into the initial design and construction, with the end of the building lifecycle as planned as the beginning. Right now if you need to demolish an old house, it can be an expensive proposition.
Perhaps, as with things like waste motor oil, the people who sell houses up front should also be responsible for their end of life disposal and recycling if it comes to that.
This would fit with our shorter product lifecycles for things like technology. Unlike grandmother’s old console TV or that brown AT&T telephone handset, we don’t expect things to last forever anymore.
It would be interesting to see some creating thinking and development in this regard.
Imagine thinking the the crisis in housing isn’t a lack of affordability, but that houses are built to last too long, thereby preventing MORE gentrification from displacing poor people; aka: what the market is designed to do.
This is a problem that houses built after 1990 won’t have. Houses built since then seem to be made of nothing but Styrofoam and plywood.
I’m not sure that many people want to treat their homes as disposable, as there’s a hugely significant psychological, cultural and physical relationship embedded into them.
Japan’s building behaviours are also driven by long term economic problems, and their development attitudes in terms of treating buildings as products need handling with care IMHO.
More important is to recognise that buildings are renewed in cyclical layers on different timescales – refer Stewart Brand’s “How buildings learn”, which contains this useful schematic: http://www.skmurphy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/PeterMe6S.gif
This reality better reconciles ability to finance with durability and environmental consumption.
More importantly, buildings that need disposing of regularly represent poor design that doesn’t are well and doesn’t build cultural depth…
Whoops. “Doesn’t age well”.
At present, I am involved in serious upgrades of two apartments in a 13 unit building dating from 1928. Several iterations of changes have occurred over the years, but as we have stripped much of these units to the framing, this will be a major change. This was a quality building when put up, and when we are done it will be improved.
As I watch the current crop of quick boxes being slapped together with the shoddiest materials legal to use I am more than ever in favor of renovating solid older buildings.
I’m concerned about a lot of the new glass-box buildings going up in Chicago with huge windows and modern systems. Most of the places I’ve lived are sturdy brick buildings with “normal” windows and radiator heat, with people who want it opting for window-unit air conditioning, and run as turnkey investments for a hundred years or so. In the particular neighborhoods I’ve lived in, they survived several decades of being down-and-out because they could be maintained at low rents and with minimal maintenance, and now have the budget for upgrades and things like restoration of ornamentation that had been deferred.
Imagine in 20 years Chicago finally runs itself into the ground and/or the post-Millennial demographic bust collapses value in some of the more far-flung neighborhoods like Edgewater, and you have to keep buildings like this heated, cooled and maintained at a lower-income price point again: http://www.edgevillebuzz.com/news/two-renderings-released-development-replace-edgewaters-historic-woodruff-arcade. I think a lot of the new buildings would get pulled down and the 100-years-older buildings next door would soldier on. Not to mention the later entries are unimaginative and ugly as sin.
What will finally run Chicago “into the ground” in your scenario? Why would a place that had value to many suddenly not have value to any?
I hate to be counted among the people who say this about Chicago, but ask Detroit.
The imposition of a massive, finally unbearable tax burden to fund public liabilities, or truly draconian cuts to services. Idiotic decisions to attack the city’s assets with another round of urban renewal and ripping out L lines. A spike in violent crime on a truly citywide basis. Flight of employers, or a massive downturn in Chicago’s professional services industries. Aggressive targeting by the federal government. The Supreme Court overturns Chicago’s right to impose a residency requirement as a condition for employment in city government, and tens of thousands of middle-class households of city workers yank their taxpayer-funded wealth out of the city. Chicago lives on the edge, some of these have happened before and the rest are on the verge of happening. (Milwaukee’s residency requirement was overturned, but that was by the state Supreme Court and based on interpretation of the state Constitution.)
I think my second scenario is a lot more likely, though – Millennials start moving out of the city as they age and the next generation isn’t big enough to replace us, and some neighborhoods that were last to gentrify and farthest from downtown start backsliding. Edgewater, which I used as an example, is probably safe because we’ve become a well-established gayborhood, have a medium-sized university in our backyard and also have a strong senior community (there’s going to be no shortage of seniors). Some place like Albany Park or Avondale? We’ll have to see. There’s always the possibility that nascent gentry/”hipster” neighborhoods in places like Milwaukee and Detroit will no longer have enough young people to sustain themselves, and we’ll make up some of the smaller crop of local post-Millennials when people who might have stayed in those towns when they were at critical mass start moving here again.
You have the cause and effect relationship backwards. Detroit failed because it stopped innovating and investing in itself, not because of any political conspiracies or spontaneous unexplainable economic deindustrialization. Racial division and deindustrialization in Detroit were the effects of it’s fall as a metro economy and society, not the cause. Chicago’s success proves that Detroit’s decline was not inevitable. What “edge” is Chicago on? Read The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Thomas Sugrue.
If you think American homes are “built to last,” visit Europe sometime.
Japan is a bad example. Its home building practices (for single family homes) are very inefficient and wasteful. The cultural norm is to buy a perfectly good home and tear it down to build a new one.
The reasons for doing this appear to be more due to tradition than anything else.
here is a good podcast I listend to a few years ago.
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-are-japanese-homes-disposable-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast-3/
Homes should be durable, as should city/state/national economies.