Episode Summary

  1. Don’t treat your Ed’s and Med’s different from other developments. The case can, and should be made, that form based zoning on your cities anchor tenants can lead to stronger urban fabric, and healthier, happier cities.
  2. Housing sales are estimated to reach a 15 year high in 2021. If you do that math that takes us into the same volume of activity that led up to the ‘08 crash.
  3. Design for lower experience velocity. By doing this you can unlock more affordable transportation options for your community, save commuter time, and eliminate traffic congestion. And I’d speculate that your public spaces will likely become more active as well. A win, win, win.

Should "Eds and Meds" get special zoning treatment? (3 min read)

U.S. Home sales are up. On track for the biggest year in 15 years. (paywall, 4 min read)

A case for lower experience velocity. (6 min read) My definition of experience velocity. (4 min read)

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone. I’m Kyle Gulau and on this show, patterns of development, we take less than 10 minutes each week to deconstruct what's going on in real estate, architecture, and urban planning.

I hope this show provides value by giving you case studies and examples. Through repetition we can figure out if there's any patterns, ideas, thoughts that we can apply in our own backyards.

There’s no time for small talk on this podcast, so we’ll get right after it. An article in planning.org by David Morley titled, “Is campus zoning due for a shakeup?”

I’ll be honest, I don’t know much about zoning for the “Eds and Meds” but it sounds like there are two common approaches (according to David)

  1. Cities can require or allow anchor institutions to submit master development plans which once approved govern land-use and development on the institutions campus.
  2. Cities may establish special base or overlay zoning districts for campuses that include building design and performance standards.

And of course you can do some sort of hybrid, or combination of the two. Typically zoning is use-base. This is sim city approach to zoning. We put our residential the green over here, then we put our blue commercial over here, then we put our yellow industrial zoning over there and we watch our city grow. A pattern of development is to move away from that model and move into form-based code, with the idea of focusing on what the buildings look like and how they’re spaced rather than the use of the buildings.

Mr. Morley makes that argument to apply form-based code to college campuses. This could be beneficial for a couple of reasons: it helps make the buildings match the surrounding community and if the anchor institution ever chooses to sell off land or buildings there’s the opportunity for reuse and redevelopment that helps connect the campus to the fabric of the community.

Let’s apply this theory to real life. Think about campuses you’ve been to. Now think about which ones you’ve liked and which you didn’t that you like. Maybe there’s a specific part of campus. Maybe the iconic Ivy League campus comes to mind.

In my own home town there’s a very big difference between our liberal arts college and our public college. One feels like it’s nestled into the community and the other just keeps dropping space ships designed in the latest fashion that you can only get to by car. I’ll let you guess which one is which. I’ve always wondered if a cohesive pattern language of campus design would correlate to academic success or even some level of organizational success… but that is probably correlation without causation and an entirely different show.

Quick hit from the Wall Street Journal. We love data. And this will probably come as no surprise to anyone that, according to the National Association of Realtors the housing market is on pace for it’s strongest sales in 15 years. That takes us right up to 05-06. The housing market has plateaued in recent months but the market still remains strong. Low-interest rates combined with supply chain and labor issues continue to affect the market. Listen to last weeks episode about Zillow and their struggles predicting such a turbulent market.

I’ve been tinkering over the last year with a term I call experience velocity. All the greats have their own framework so this is my effort to create my own. People hang out, spend time and money in places with low experience velocities. In the show notes, I’ve included a link for how to calculate experience velocity. An article from Brookings supports this way of thinking.

Titled, “We should design cities for shorter distances, not speed” by Adie Tomer and Joseph Kane argue that solving congestion doesn’t solve our bigger transportation problems.

The authors analyzed travel patterns in 6 us metro areas and found that the average trip was 7.3 miles and lasted 15.5 minutes. But what became clear was that less congested communities forced longer distance trips onto residents. Drivers in Kansas City, MO where less likely to encounter traffic (saving 2.5 mins) but also traveled 1,600 extra miles a year.

If you’re going faster, you’re probably going further, incurring more costs, and spending more time traveling. The authors then give the example of Logan Square, Chicago vs. Roselle. Ill. Where satellite imagery clearly shows a more dense urban environment and a rural one.

What does this have to do with experience velocity? If you design for lower experience velocity, you can unlock more affordable transportation options, save commuter time, and eliminate traffic congestion.

All of this leads to our patterns of the week:

  1. Don’t treat your Ed’s and Med’s differently from other developments. The case can, and should be made, that form-based zoning on your cities anchor tenants can lead to stronger urban fabric, and healthier, happier cities.
  2. Housing sales are estimated to reach a 15 year high in 2021. If you do that math that takes us into the same volume of activity that led up to the ‘08 crash.
  3. Design for lower experience velocity. By doing this you can unlock more affordable transportation options for your community, save commuter time, and eliminate traffic congestion. And I’d speculate that your public spaces will likely become more active as well. A win, win, win.

That’s all for this week and I’ll talk to you soon…