Fine Grained

[MonkeyRonin]

Came across this article in the 1950 vs. today comparisons posted by Steely Dan. Makes a good case for the economic benefits of the type of urbanism that I think most of us here are big fans of:

Fine Grained

December 1, 2014
by Andrew Price

The problem with modern capitalism is that there are not enough capitalists. We need a system that encourages diverse ownership of capital if we want to build and support the middle-class. My worst fear is that we are transition towards a polarized economy - an economy where you have a small group at the top that owns most of the capital, and a large low-skilled, low-paid working class. For example, replacing a family owned grocery store with a chain store would be polarizing as the capitalist that owns the store and the building is no longer the local grocer, but a parent company in a far off city. The parent company pays a manager, but that manager is merely a salaried position, not an owner - their wealth does not include the business and the premises - so the mean wealth may be the same in both scenarios, but the median wealth shrinks as the wealth accumulates in the hands of a few.

...

A fine grained economy is contrasted with a polarized economy that takes a lot of upfront capital (or a lot of high risk debt) to start a business, so those that start a business (to build their wealth) will tend to be those that already have a lot of wealth. The wealth and capital ends up accumulating in the hands of the already wealthy, rather than being distributed more evenly. An extreme example of this is the story on Strong Towns that mentioned you need a net worth of half a million dollars to open a Dunkin Donuts.

...

Great cities are incubators of capitalism - where everyone has a fair chance to move up the economic ladder, not just the ones that started out at the top. How easy it for someone that likes cutting hair to open their own barber shop or salon? What does it take to start selling groceries in your area? What about some light manufacturing (such as making dolls or bird houses?)

Cities are the physical manifestation of the economy. A fine grained city represents a fine grained economy. Early American towns and cities have a lot of buildings and streets that are very fine grained - in that each building itself is narrow and small - and I can imagine that a century ago the average person within their lifetime could afford to buy a plot of land about 20 feet wide and open a shop or lease out the bottom while they lived upstairs.

Read more: http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2...9/fine-grained

[mhays]

Some problems with recreating that row of narrow buildings...

The ADA for starters. Putting an elevator in every little tiny building would be expensive. Unless it's a single unit on top, or every unit had direct separate access to the ground, in which case you don't need it. Or something like that. Commercial would need an elevator per building.

Parking is another. Parking garages are dramatically more expensive and use far more space per space the smaller you go. It takes about 55' to 60' width to have room for even a single double-loaded aisle, and that's without ramps.

Fire walls too. Standards are much higher now.

And windows. With larger floorplates, you can be 40' from a window but still see it. With these, there might be a common wall in the way. So the buildings are shallow and have windows on two sides, and only the end one has a third side window. That translates into shallower buildings as well, particularly for housing which can't have a lot of rooms without windows.

I'd love to fill ciites with rowhouses and not include elevators or parking. But the ADA wouldn't allow it, and much of the renting public needs at least some parking.

[Nouvellecosse]

I've lived in and visited many lowrise apartment buildings that were just walk up and didn't have an elevator. It's really not an issue if it's a maximum of 3 or 4 floors. Besides, the article mentions how it was once common for an entrepreneur to start a business on the ground floor and live about it. In that sense it wouldn't be much different than a multi story house.

As far as parking, to question the large scale viability of this type of development due to the lack of parking is like questioning the viability of email due to a computer's inability to lick a stamp. This is so far beyond the auto centric BS it isn't even worth mentioning.

[muppet]

most of the streetrows in Europe (UK aside) function with small elevators around the central stairwell



Which is how they manage to get residential and commercial density that blankets uniformly like this, for old and new:


http://barcelonaprojects.gatech.edu

www.france-for-visitors.com, www.www.visualphotos.com

www.beefly.com.ua


In terms of parking public infrastructure must be good enough for vehicular demands to be largely ignored. It's not so much parking but the loading bays for deliveries that are a prerequisite, at certain times of the day or evening.



They are often accessed round the back from a network of alleys

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.51...RQXAFYBYgg!2e0





or form part of the bottom floor frontage

[mhays]

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

I've lived in and visited many lowrise apartment buildings that were just walk up and didn't have an elevator. It's really not an issue if it's a maximum of 3 or 4 floors. Besides, the article mentions how it was once common for an entrepreneur to start a business on the ground floor and live about it. In that sense it wouldn't be much different than a multi story house.

As far as parking, to question the large scale viability of this type of development due to the lack of parking is like questioning the viability of email due to a computer's inability to lick a stamp. This is so far beyond the auto centric BS it isn't even worth mentioning.

By "ADA" I'm referring to a US law, not Canadian. Yes it goes way too far.

I doubt that stairwell elevator would be ok under US law. The pull door and the small dimensions.

I'm a big advocate of buildings without parking, and they're common in core districts of many cities. But outside those districts parking is still almost universal. Buildings that don't handle that efficiently are at a big market disadvantage, which is a recipe for being very scarce.

[memph]

It seems like this sort of housing could benefit from the use of hydraulic parking systems, maybe putting them in back alleys instead of ground level garages.

Or maybe you could have one bigger building with excess parking to be used by a few dozen smaller ones.

[Nouvellecosse]

Automobiles are the solution to the problem of people living in low density areas that are difficult to serve with public transit and are therefore difficult to otherwise get around in without driving. You don't need to go to great lengths to include a solution to the problem of the difficulty of including the solution to a problem that doesn't exist. That is crazy...

My suggestion for cities so car obsessed that even developments that are impeccably dense, walkable and urban need to be altered to include parking spaces would be to simply forget the whole thing and build suburban developments with surface lots. I suspect such cities are simply beyond hope.

[memph]

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

Automobiles are the solution to the problem of people living in low density areas that are difficult to serve with public transit and are therefore difficult to otherwise get around in without driving. You don't need to go to great lengths to include a solution to the problem of the difficulty of including the solution to a problem that doesn't exist. That is crazy...

My suggestion for cities so car obsessed that even developments that are impeccably dense, walkable and urban need to be altered to include parking spaces would be to simply forget the whole thing and build suburban developments with surface lots. I suspect such cities are simply beyond hope.

You're from the North American role model for small walkable cities though, only a couple % of North America is that walkable... The Halifax Peninsula has 57% non-car commute mode share, whereas a comparably size section of central Kitchener-Waterloo has only 27% non-car commute mode share.

Saint-John for another example in your area comes in somewhere in at 40% non-car commute mode share for the central part of the city (smaller in population that what I used for Central K-W/Halifax but similar in terms of % of the Urban Area pop).

Victoria is the other highly walkable small Canadian city, the city proper (similar size to Halifax Peninsula) has 50% non-car commute mode share.

The least car oriented part of the Halifax Peninsula, the census tract around Spring Garden in Downtown has 79% non-car commute mode share. For K-W it's 47% non-car commute mode share for the student dominated Northdale census tract between UW and WLU followed by 39% for the Downtown Kitchener census tract. Uptown (Downtown) Saint John has 58% non-car commute mode share.

I don't think building urban in a place like K-W is futile, it still has walkable downtown areas, but there will be more challenges than in Victoria or Halifax.

And of course, while virtually all people who commute by car own a car, there is probably a decent number of those who don't commute by car that still own one, especially in cities like Halifax, Vancouver, Washington, etc where you have a lot of people who choose to walk or take transit but still have a car for trips to places outside the urban core.

And even if an individual development is very urban, a single development typically isn't going to radically transform how walkable a certain neighbourhood might be.

[mr1138]

It's not hopeless... it just will take time. It took decades for cities to un-do walkable urban environments, and will likely take just as long to re-do them (an argument Jane Jacobs famously made). If parking is needed to make a project viable; so be it. This is exactly what is happening in my hometown of Denver with our infill projects, and there is plenty of griping by local infill enthusiasts about the number of parking spaces per unit. But I feel like this will correct itself in time as these urban neighborhoods grow their own critical mass of services, and eventually a walkable environment is re-established. There will still be plenty of slivers of land left to build smaller buildings later, there always are in just about every city I know.

My hope is that someday way down the line, these parking garages will loose their value as the neighborhoods become urban once again. But I have no doubt creative architects will then turn them into the adaptive-reuse projects of the future. Oftentimes better constructed than the building itself, they could easily be framed in for new occupied space, or if they are a "bunker-style" garage, could be used for storage or even stuff like switching stations for telecommunications etc. Bottom line, if we need massive parking entitlements to entice people to live in a mixed-use environment in a place like Denver, then oh-well... that's just what we have to do for now.

I too would love to see a return to historic fine-grained patterns though. It's something I have spent a lot of time thinking about since my study abroad trip to Rome a year and a half ago.

Sometimes I wonder if some sort of adaptable-townhome model would work in our current real estate market, since there is still a strong market for townhomes in cities like Denver that don't have the car-free thing figured out yet. Design them so that additional stories could be added later, or the ground floor converted to retail, and it wouldn't be so much different from those fine-grained European patterns. It could even add an organic quality over time as each landowner would grow and adapt their properties at different times and each according to their own needs.

[MonkeyRonin]

Originally Posted by mhays

By "ADA" I'm referring to a US law, not Canadian. Yes it goes way too far.

I doubt that stairwell elevator would be ok under US law. The pull door and the small dimensions.

I'm a big advocate of buildings without parking, and they're common in core districts of many cities. But outside those districts parking is still almost universal. Buildings that don't handle that efficiently are at a big market disadvantage, which is a recipe for being very scarce.

But what's the cutoff for the ADA requirements? Under the Ontario Building Code for example, new buildings are only required to be accessible if they're over 600 sqm and/or 4 floors or above. So this scale of building could still be built today to the same, elevator-free standards:




Get much beyond that size and the capital required to build it would be out of reach to the type of individuals and small businesses outlined in the article anyway (with or without elevators). As for parking, it's easy enough to fit in a couple spots or a garage so long as there's a back lane:

[memph]

Originally Posted by mr1138

It's not hopeless... it just will take time. It took decades for cities to un-do walkable urban environments, and will likely take just as long to re-do them (an argument Jane Jacobs famously made). If parking is needed to make a project viable; so be it. This is exactly what is happening in my hometown of Denver with our infill projects, and there is plenty of griping by local infill enthusiasts about the number of parking spaces per unit. But I feel like this will correct itself in time as these urban neighborhoods grow their own critical mass of services, and eventually a walkable environment is re-established. There will still be plenty of slivers of land left to build smaller buildings later, there always are in just about every city I know.

My hope is that someday way down the line, these parking garages will loose their value as the neighborhoods become urban once again. But I have no doubt creative architects will then turn them into the adaptive-reuse projects of the future. Oftentimes better constructed than the building itself, they could easily be framed in for new occupied space, or if they are a "bunker-style" garage, could be used for storage or even stuff like switching stations for telecommunications etc. Bottom line, if we need massive parking entitlements to entice people to live in a mixed-use environment in a place like Denver, then oh-well... that's just what we have to do for now.

I too would love to see a return to historic fine-grained patterns though. It's something I have spent a lot of time thinking about since my study abroad trip to Rome a year and a half ago.

Sometimes I wonder if some sort of adaptable-townhome model would work in our current real estate market, since there is still a strong market for townhomes in cities like Denver that don't have the car-free thing figured out yet. Design them so that additional stories could be added later, or the ground floor converted to retail, and it wouldn't be so much different from those fine-grained European patterns. It could even add an organic quality over time as each landowner would grow and adapt their properties at different times and each according to their own needs.

And you could have ground floor garages converted to shops, or maybe back alley parking redeveloped into smaller row houses.

Garages at first
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=1764715
https://www.google.ca/maps/@37.57331...x2fb3Xb4dg!2e0

Then retail
https://www.google.ca/maps/@13.74272...0Fteej0f3A!2e0
https://www.google.ca/maps/@37.57390...AnCAZadtJg!2e0

[mhays]

I don't know the ADA's cutoffs for elevators. But one unit accessed by exterior stairway won't need it, there's some sort of dividing line for apartments, and anything commercial will need an elevator. Also multiple stairs depending upon floor area etc.

[brickell]

Same holds true in the suburbs too. Fine grain development is much easier to urbanize and redevelop than the large lot subdivisions we see being built today.

Have to agree with the economic arguments also. There's no room for mom and pop specialty olive oil stores in the polarized economy

[sbarn]

Originally Posted by mhays

Some problems with recreating that row of narrow buildings...

The ADA for starters. Putting an elevator in every little tiny building would be expensive. Unless it's a single unit on top, or every unit had direct separate access to the ground, in which case you don't need it. Or something like that. Commercial would need an elevator per building.

Parking is another. Parking garages are dramatically more expensive and use far more space per space the smaller you go. It takes about 55' to 60' width to have room for even a single double-loaded aisle, and that's without ramps.

Fire walls too. Standards are much higher now.

And windows. With larger floorplates, you can be 40' from a window but still see it. With these, there might be a common wall in the way. So the buildings are shallow and have windows on two sides, and only the end one has a third side window. That translates into shallower buildings as well, particularly for housing which can't have a lot of rooms without windows.

I'd love to fill ciites with rowhouses and not include elevators or parking. But the ADA wouldn't allow it, and much of the renting public needs at least some parking.

I don't believe that ADA requires an elevator or full accessibility in every unit of every multiple-family residential building (I am not sure if this is what you were alluding to). For instance, if those buildings from the Netherlands were hypothetically built in an American city, they would not need an elevator to comply with ADA. From what I understand, if a building is 4 or more dwellings with no elevator, the ground floor unit(s) is required to be accessible. Bottom of Page 3 HERE in PDF of ADA guidelines. If there is an elevator in a multiple-family dwelling with 4 or more units, than the upper floors would need to have units that comply with accessibility requirements. I believe if a building exceeds a certain number of units than a certain percentage of those units need provide full accessibility. The catch however, is most new multiple unit residential buildings with 3+ floors probably have an elevator. You are right though about a commercial use: nearly all multi-story commercial buildings require an elevator with almost no exceptions.

Parking requirements would be completely driven by the municipality. In an urban environment with decent walkability however, I see no reason to require parking - particularly in smaller sized multiple unit buildings. I know most American cities zoning codes don't allow this condition, but it is something that could easily change with a shift in attitude. New York would be the exception, where parking is actually prohibited in its core (without special permit) and parking requirements in large areas of the outer boroughs are far below those of most American cities.

I don't see fire standards as a barrier to dense small scale construction. A rated fire partition isn't that thick. For example a stud wall with 2 layers of 5/8" of gypsum board on either side and proper firestopping is a 2-hour rated wall - which is generally more than adequate. A sprinkler can also go a long way if fireproofing a structure.

Finally, I don't see window requirements as a barrier either. You're right that residential has pretty high light and air requirements which generally lead to shallower / narrower floor plates, however this doesn't prevent dense infill from happening in many U.S. cities. I can think of plenty examples of new construction infill in New York that is integrated into the fabric of old tenement districts. Architects can creatively design unit layouts to comply with light and air requirements only utilizing front and rear windows - combined open kitchen / living spaces and duplex / loft arrangements come to mind.

Anyway, just my 2 cents. I don't see any reason that they U.S. couldn't build "fine grained" urbanism other than its not what the market generally demands.

[mhays]

I bow to you on the ADA stuff. A big gray area I don't understand.

Parking, true. A lot of cities at least don't require parking in core areas. Seattle doesn't, and many buildings go up with little or none. But most buildings do include it because the market demands it, at least at moderate ratios like 0.6 or 0.8. For those buildings it's far more cost effective to have a larger site.

Fire barriers are just one cost. Even small costs tend to multiply on a square foot basis. More stairs per unit and so on. The window point is a very big driver of what gets built...maybe the cost/risk/price equation is different in New York, but additional exterior area per interior square foot will be expensive.

[memph]

Originally Posted by mhays

I bow to you on the ADA stuff. A big gray area I don't understand.

Parking, true. A lot of cities at least don't require parking in core areas. Seattle doesn't, and many buildings go up with little or none. But most buildings do include it because the market demands it, at least at moderate ratios like 0.6 or 0.8. For those buildings it's far more cost effective to have a larger site.

Fire barriers are just one cost. Even small costs tend to multiply on a square foot basis. More stairs per unit and so on. The window point is a very big driver of what gets built...maybe the cost/risk/price equation is different in New York, but additional exterior area per interior square foot will be expensive.

Could it be that in certain cities the lot dimensions (combined with regulations on built form) are such that you can't build very large floor plates anyways?

I think Vancouver's zoning limits the size of high rise floor plates for instance.

Anyways if you have shared walls on either side the exterior area per interior area is pretty good. Which is more expensive? A wall with fire barriers or an exterior wall with windows?

There's quite a lot of detached 3-7 storey student oriented buildings with about 30x75ft floor plates that have gone up recently in my college town (Waterloo, ON).

[mhays]

Do they have light wells? I can imagine how they fill each end, but what's in the middle that doesn't need windows? Bathrooms and kitchen for 40'? Fairly small light wells would solve that.

I don't know the cost of shared wall vs. outer wall with windows, and both vary a lot anyway. But a lot of exterior wall per square foot is expensive by itself. And if every building needs elevators and stairs it's a huge waste.

But the real issue is that a lot of functions have to have windows, or at least want windows, and that affects depth. A hotel for example will always be the width of whatever is in the middle (sometimes just a hallway) plus a hotel room on each side, hence a lot of 55' and 60' slabs, while offices are usually much wider. Most things in a living unit need windows, so the really deep floorplans tend to be very open rather than family units, which tend to be shallow.

[memph]

Originally Posted by mhays

Do they have light wells? I can imagine how they fill each end, but what's in the middle that doesn't need windows? Bathrooms and kitchen for 40'? Fairly small light wells would solve that.

I don't know the cost of shared wall vs. outer wall with windows, and both vary a lot anyway. But a lot of exterior wall per square foot is expensive by itself. And if every building needs elevators and stairs it's a huge waste.

But the real issue is that a lot of functions have to have windows, or at least want windows, and that affects depth. A hotel for example will always be the width of whatever is in the middle (sometimes just a hallway) plus a hotel room on each side, hence a lot of 55' and 60' slabs, while offices are usually much wider. Most things in a living unit need windows, so the really deep floorplans tend to be very open rather than family units, which tend to be shallow.

If you're asking about the buildings in Waterloo, they are as I said detached so there are windows on the sides of the buildings. I brought them up as examples of recent construction with small floor plates (i.e. high ratio of exterior walls to interior space).

The more traditional style attached buildings in older cities were usually at most 50' without air shafts, courtyards, which fits your argument.

Anyways though, are those extra elevators and stairs really that bad when you consider these smaller buildings tend not to need hallways?

[mhays]

The average townhouse has a ton of room for circulation. I'm thinking both the new kinds in my area and the older British kinds for example. Sometimes the room at each end would be the full width, and the room in the middle would have a hallway next to it. Today that sort of place might be more open-concept, but there might still be a walkway in the same place.