This Experiment Undid Our Cities. How Do We Fix It?

between 1840 and 1890 Chicago Grew From a town of under 5,000 people to a booming Metropolis of over 1 million 40 years later it would reach 3.3 million people this period of Chicago's history is home to some iconic building types but the process that built these might just hold the key to how we can develop our places moving forward to not just meet our needs but the needs of our kids and our kids kids [Music] what did people in Chicago know more than a century ago that we don't now how did they manage to create a thriving messy City that despite its issues seemed to work at its most basic level simple answer the traditional development pattern long answer Starts Now the traditional development pattern can be summed up in six words a City built by many hands subdivisions may be designed in offices to today but neighborhoods evolved through Millennia of trial and error building cities didn't imply permanence it was a continuous process moving to a new place meant making a bet often starting with a simple wooden home built from local materials success allows for upgrades replacing Shacks with sturdier buildings adding extensions or second stories in Chicago ongoing population growth enabled the gradual expansion of thriving Cor block by block most great cities share this humble origin including New York you can check out Time Square here remember Chicago's population growth between 1890 and 1930 is wild we're talking over 2 million people in 40 years you've probably heard of Austin and Phoenix as exploding in population Austin's grown by 615,000 people in 40 years Phoenix has grown by 820,000 somehow Chicago was still able to meet housing needs though the first years weren't pretty but the solutions that emerged created the Chicago that we know today people's needs fresh air nearby amenities and the ability to afford a home these were met with mixed use neighborhoods filled with various housing options depending on wealth and there are a lot of different ways you could purchase a bungalow um for one they were less expensive to purchase because the attics were always unfinished as were the basements and the idea was like as you get money surely you'll want to finish this attic you also at the same time same Architects same Builders uh you know same contractors building Two Flats and three flats and multi-unit Corner buildings in Bungalow neighborhoods so um because you had all the same materials and the same people doing it those were being built at the same time for people who wanted to save even more money none of these options were supposed to be permanent even the single family home of these options was built for change this this gets at a key principle of the traditional development pattern expansion through duplication this is what makes mature and resilient cities even in the midst of a boom tweaking the approach Year bye to adjust and find Solutions so why did the traditional development pattern work in the death and life of Great American cities Jane Jacobs discusses the kind of problem a city is the problem she says is of organized complexity a city is a complex adaptive system in which the individual actions of countless people all influencing each other in both direct and indirect ways result in patterns of life and activity that work ones that we can't predict and control a good way to Invision this is by picturing a rainforest and a corn field the rainforest is a chaotically diverse environment where all kinds of species have developed symbiotic relationships with each other a mild disruption just means the ecosystem adjusts but doesn't collapse the cornfield is a scientifically calibrated environment with predictable inputs and outputs it's highly efficient at producing one thing and it's created other systems completely dependent upon it it's complicated but not complex a new disease a drought a flood any of these things can completely destroy the crop another way to visualize how the traditional development pattern works is by looking at historical fire maps of Chicago a typical block can be tracked over time going from Shacks to a beautiful mishmash of three Flats Courtyard Apartments and single family homes every parcel represents a need met in the past all of these were the next logical iteration of Chicago's development so why did we stop iterating why did the US and Canada ditch what had worked for booming cities like Chicago well we stopped because of money and restrictions zoning evolved out of a well-meaning impulse laws to restrict unhealthy and unsafe conditions in overcrowded tenements but it transformed into something much larger let me show you in Chicago the 1923 zoning code separated uses with hierarchical zoning basically residential homes can exist in all the categories below but industrial zones can't exist in any of the zones above it this is common throughout the rest of the world around the same time though many cities took a different approach using exclusionary zoning some cities were passing zoning laws that separated every possible use into separate zones Chicago adopted these in 1957 and you can see the overreach Beyond protecting people from rough living conditions to now protecting things like morals Comfort convenience character order congestion and parking we started to micromanage our cities we divided them into strict separate zones for residential and Commercial activity and for houses versus apartment buildings but we also imposed rigid rules on how dense buildings could be how tall how far back from the street how much parking they had to have and so much more we promised homeowners a sense of permanence and this meant losing the many forms of gentle density that we've had for as long as we've had settlements it also means that when a neighborhood becomes more desirable it can't adapt quickly enough to provide options for residents to stay here in Chicago the pilson neighborhood has been changing rapidly but unfortunately for residents it wasn't in the form of more housing being built but it was full of examples of Two Flats and walk-ups being deconverted into single family homes you've got again about a quarter of our housing stock is um Two Flats two and three Flats so you have a lot of people buying those now and turning them into single family homes and you're losing losing an entire unit of housing when you do that so imagine thousands of those conversions it's thousands of units of housing you're losing um and then whoever buys that when you know those owners sell it has to have a lot of money as well right this article by Alex nitkin in Black Club Chicago shows this glaring issue in Chicago's over complicated codes the former commissioner of the city of Chicago's Department of Housing said if you want to increase density on a given parcel you have to go through a process process to receive approval to do so we've had no structure in place though to provide that same Safeguard if one wants to lessen density while the ordinance is doing its job it kind of feels like a can kicked down the road if we don't actually change the zoning code that made it harder to build multif family units in the first place as we were strangling this traditional pattern of development we were massively subsidizing a radically new one we did this in two main ways by subsidizing mortgages and by building freeways post World War II we had a concern that if we did nothing to continue our economic momentum from the war we might fall back into a depression what would we build if we weren't building tanks we channeled all of this wartime capacity into Building Homes we subsidized mortgages with the FHA and by building freeways these highways opened up tons of new land for development and this drastically cut costs for Suburban developers we left the cash upfront payments that encouraged homeowners to build Dependable things like the two flat where they could have a renter providing an income stream and now you had a 30-year mortgage on a new Suburban house with low money down and monthly payments and the government would ensure it for you or at least some Americans we Redline neighborhoods according to racon income and neighborhood covenants were able to last for 10 or 20 years keeping minorities out this onew punch of regulating away the tradition traditional development pattern and subsidizing this new Suburban experiment boxed us into one option The Cult of strip malls strads and suburbs by the end of the first life cycle of this huge experiment our older core neighborhoods were hemorrhaging population to the suburbs by getting away from the tried and true pattern of development we created some major issues the Suburban experiment felt too good to be true because it was a life cycle of maintenance on this new development Style reveals a growth Ponzi scheme seeing this shiny new subsidized way as meaning we were doing well financially we were unable to grasp that it couldn't pay for itself so we kept doubling down we committed to a pattern that we can't maintain we also created a housing crisis people can only commute so far so we don't have the cheap land we used to and we've made it illegal to build the many types of homes that we need in the places people want to be the only two kinds of housing we seem to build are large single family homes homes in the exurbs and 5 over one apartments in a handful of trendy neighborhoods we need more options we also created car dependency this new development pattern meant creating places that are extremely inconvenient to accomplish daily needs without one when the suburbs were brand new the car was a source of Freedom now it's like a mandatory tax kids are losing Independence and parents are stuck as chauffers the link between these three is fragility we've become dependent on systems that aren't holding up over time and are showing their cracks to return to the traditional development pattern all we have to do is get out of the way and let these small adaptations happen again so what happens when we get out of the way in Houston HOAs aren't enforcing rules and people are doing things at hoc again this works because while they don't have official zoning their famously strict deed restrictions apply lot by lot as opposed to entire neighborhoods so in the most Texan way people are defying these old archaic rules that no longer serve them Houston with its 19.6 billion in debt is in no place to fight all of these deed restriction battles when people add gentle density the results are pretty great and City nerd has an awesome video about what this looks like adus or backyard Cottages or granny flats are a great way to add gentle density in places everywhere these backyard Cottages are awesome because they're compatible with the idea of a single family neighborhood in people's minds while allowing for incremental growth and many hands change in places that have legalized them they're becoming really popular as a way for regular old homeowners to create more housing we can also bring back some small scale mixed uses in our neighborhoods by allowing front yard small businesses and making corner stores legal again Urban Arium hosted a mixing middle competition with this goal in mind and the winning examples are inspiring UT Le from about here made two fantastic deep dives into these Concepts and you bet they'll be in our suggested playlist what 1890s Chicagoans and residents of most cities understood is that if there's a need you should be allowed to take steps to meet it you should be able to walk into City Hall and get a permit you shouldn't have to go to an entire Community hearing to add a cottage to your backyard and to convert the basement to an apartment for your nephew if you want a small garage photography studio or to cut hair on the weekends in the spare bedroom you should be able to do that this is is just one small segment of an even larger problem that will take many many hands to fix but that's the point that's the most immediate way for us to start solving our issues the problem with the Suburban experiment wasn't that it tried something new it's that it prevented anything else from following it by freezing any opportunity to make small scale adaptations we've adopted a process that is financially insolvent we laid the groundwork for a housing crisis and we made ourselves dependent on cars and top down solutions to fix our problems we made the best parts of our cities illegal to replicate and we forgot how we created them in the first place parcel by parcel future cities will look different from the cities of today which is why we need to get back to the way that they've always developed I hope you're not discouraged strong towns wouldn't exist if we thought this was unsolvable all of the things that we advocate for are meant to be done by many hands by you we would love for you to join the thousands of others who are doing this work where they live we're a 501c3 nonprofit and are completely supported by donations and we use these to create content to bring people together and to empower people like you to do the next smallest thing they can to make their Town better you can see what that entails below keep doing what you can and we'll see you next time just wanted to say a quick thank you to Carlo bruny of the Chicago bungalow Association for being willing to answer my questions about Chicago's building styles and periods and to wonder City studio for allowing me to use their art you can buy their prints here and I actually have one hanging behind me right now we've also got a playlist of related videos if you want to check out the many videos I referenced cheers

Channel: Strong Towns

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Id: Q1G_bda3o1o

Length: 14min 30sec (870 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 17 2023