Episode Summary

  1. Building permits can be used as a metric for estimate growth and can also be used historically to show the gap in housing development in your community. Maybe you can skip that expensive market research study and look back at some permit data...
  2. Affordable housing is a supply and demand issue. If you're not building housing, and the population grows, and the economy grows, you don't have enough supply. Which mean prices are going to go up.
  3. Density affords cities and citizens too get economies of scale for services provided like public transportation, it provides affordable housing (see above) and it can be better for the environment.

Record number of apartments being built in the 5th largest US city. (3 min read)

Car free zone in Berlin. (4 min read)

New zoning in Massachusetts. (4 min read)

Episode Transcript

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

I hope this show provides value by giving you case studies and examples of the work happening in our built world. Through repetition we can figure out if there's any patterns or ideas that we can apply and practice in our own backyards.

First up this week, just wrapped up spending some weekend time with friends by a bonfire. We were playing a little trivia and trying to guess the biggest cities in the US, according to 2020 census data. Nerds, right?

New York, LA, Chicago - Easy. 1,2,3.

Coming in at 4/5?

4 - Houston
5 - Phoenix

The sunbelt showing out there. Then at #6 we get back to the east coast...ish...Philadelphia.

Philadelphia grabbed by eye because developers could build a record number of rental units in Philadelphia in 2022.

According to Aaron Moselle's article on why.org, "based on the volume of building permits approved by the city’s Department of Licenses and Inspections in 2021, the final figure for the year could balloon to 10,000 — more than triple the average annual total of 3,000 to 4,000 new apartments.

This is an indication of developers in Philly being bullish on the urban vibrancy. Good for the city of brotherly love.  Quick side note - city of brotherly love because that is it's Ancient Greek translation to "love brother." Something like that.

I like the measure of building permits to estimate progress, it makes sense. And it's related to the next article I read, "New State Rule Would Force Suburbs to Legalize Thousands of New Apartments Near T Stops" by Christian MilNeil.

Quoted in the article is Michael Kennealy, Massachusetts Secretary of Housing and Economic Development,

“From 1960 to 1990, Massachusetts permitted about 900,000 new homes. From 1990 to today, it’s been about half that,” said Kennealy. “So in a single generation, while our economy has grown, our population has grown, and our workforce has grown, our level of housing production has been cut in half. We estimate today we’re short by about 200,000 housing units… We’re in a housing crisis.”

This is Kyle again, so not only a forward looking metric, but historically you can take economic progress measure that relative to the creation of new permitted homes and you've got a pretty compelling story as to how your community's doing on housing. I'd love to see that data for my town.

And it does bring us back to a common pattern, affordable housing is a supply and demand issue.

Back to Massachusetts, and I'm summarizing here, the state’s new guidelines will require most cities and towns in eastern Massachusetts to include a multifamily district of at least 50 acres near MBTA stations.

This regulation is hoping to add density, and avoid some problems that other cities have faced with their public transportation. Every journey you make starts and ends on foot. If at any moment you need a car, you're more likely to use a car for more of your journey.

The strategy behind this regulation is that if we build density around transit stations people can easily walk to those stations and take transit to other walkable places.

Clark Ziegler, executive director of the Massachusetts Housing Partnership was quoted saying, “There’s a reason why there’s so much interest in getting this law successfully implemented. Building multifamily housing and walkable neighborhoods near transit is good housing policy, it’s good transportation policy, and it’s good climate policy.”

Last up this week, an article in Fast Company by Adele Peters. Berlin is taking their turn implementing a large car free area. The group, "Volksentscheid Berlin Autofrei" or People’s Decision for Auto-Free Berlin is looking to limit cars within the space inside the Ringbahn, a huge circular train line in the city. The space is larger than Manhattan—and if the plan can succeed, it would be the largest car-free area in any city in the world.

Last April, they started gathering signatures in support of the campaign, ultimately getting 50,000 people to sign. The Berlin Senate, the city’s governing body, is now considering the idea. In February, the city will decide whether to adopt the new law; If the idea is rejected by the Senate, the group can gather signatures again. If they get 175,000 people in support, the proposal would then go on the ballot in 2023, and citizens will decide if it should become law.

I love the contrast of these two stories. The US is trying to add density near public transportation to add more housing, make public transit more accessible, and reduce carbon footprints of citizens. In this particular neighborhood in Berlin, they've got the density, they've got the transit and people see the removal of vehicles as the next progression of their communities development.

Maybe you're thinking to yourself, "well all the major cities in Europe were destroy in world war 2 so they were able to build their cities in a different way to accommodate this type of change."  You are partially right. A major war did provide cities with a clean planning slate. But it's well documented how some communities started to accommodate the automobile and then quickly worked to remove it.

That's all for this week, which leads us to our patterns:

  1. Building permits can be used as a metric for estimate growth and can also be used historically to show the gap in housing development in your community. Maybe you can skip that expensive market research study and look back at some permit data...
  2. Affordable housing is a supply and demand issue. If you're not building housing, and the population grows, and the economy grows, you don't have enough supply. Which mean prices are going to go up.
  3. Density affords cities and citizens too get economies of scale for services provided like public transportation, it provides affordable housing (see above) and it can be better for the environment.

That's all for this week. Talk to y'all soon.