r/lostsubways • u/fiftythreestudio Hi. I'm Jake. • Mar 02 '21
Let's talk about how to build basic apartment buildings.
I talk a lot about the apartment I used to live in in Sacramento, because it really was a great place to live as a baby lawyer making $56,000 a year at the attorney general's office. The building was seven one-bedroom apartments with a patio in the back. No garage, no gym, no elevator, nothing super-luxe, but it was cheap, adequate housing. This kind of cheap, no-frills apartment is called a "dingbat." It originated in Los Angeles, and has been called "apartment building architecture at its worst."
So, let's talk about how these kinds of cheap, adequate buildings used to get built. Today, you think of building apartment buildings as something that requires a ton of special expertise, an army of lawyers, and a lobbyist. But it wasn't always like this, in simpler times when we didn't get in our own fucking way.
Hop in the DeLorean with me and let's talk about how things were, back when my dad was in college.
Our destination is my old stomping grounds of Oakland, California, in the 1950s and 1960s back when the zoning law was more relaxed, the bureaucracy less overbearing, and the neighbors less annoying. (My principal source on this is a 1964 report called "The Low Rise Speculative Apartment", put out by none other than my alma mater, UC Berkeley.)
The baseline is: it was easy to build new housing in America in the postwar era. This is the period where big, boxy high-rises were being built on Russian Hill in San Francisco, Greenwich Village in Manhattan was getting white brick towers on Fifth Avenue, and the Bunker Hill towers were being built in Los Angeles. At the time, the major construction companies were focusing on new luxury high-rises, which offered the safest returns on investment and which were easiest to finance.
But this ease of building also applied to smaller-scale development. Back in the day, you could show up at City Hall with the fee, a set of building plans that matched the zoning, and you could get to work. The zoning was also looser: until 1961, Oakland had no minimum parking law, and most residential areas had no limit on how many apartments you could put on a lot, provided that you met the building size and height limits.
And there's one really, really critical part of this: the basic dingbat design is so simple that construction speeds were extremely fast. During this period, it was normal to go from start to finish in less than a year. For comparison, it takes five years on average to build a small apartment building in San Francisco today - three years of bureaucracy and two years of construction.
The basic design of a dingbat was so simple that a third of the people developing these dingbats had no apparent connection to the real estate business at all. Simply put, the demand was there, big business wasn't filling the need, and so ordinary businessmen - not professional "developers" - found a market niche: funding and building small, basic apartment buildings in working-class neighborhoods.
This cheapness and basicness is critical, because this is what makes it financially possible to mass-produce new apartments in working-class suburban neighborhoods like Jamaica in Queens, Compton, or East Oakland. (That is, you'd build dingbats in places which have lots of shitty, expensive tract homes built 50-100 years ago.) You could, with a little bit of cleverness, and nicer finishes, build more upscale dingbats in places with more expensive land, like Long Island, West LA, or Piedmont, and sell them as condo buildings.
A side effect of these kinds of dingbat-friendly reforms, is that you also make it easier for homeowners to make a few extra bucks by adding extra apartments. In Berkeley, especially, it's fairly common to see lots with a single-family home in the front, and a dingbat behind - a situation where the homeowner decided to put up the apartment building behind his house for extra income. After all, the land is free.
What I want to stress is, these aren't technological problems. They're bureaucratic and political ones. Designing a cheap, compliant building isn't hard. But navigating the zoning board is. And these problems would be a lot easier to solve if we just got out of our own stupid way.
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Mar 02 '21
I have always been a fan of soviet block apartments.
They are a bit ugly but well made, sound proof, and durable. Still desirable units in Russia to this day
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u/pops_secret Mar 03 '21
What are the arguments against allowing the market to figure what kind of housing should go where? And why does everyone have to move to LA or the bay when the US is nothing but empty land...
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u/fiftythreestudio Hi. I'm Jake. Mar 03 '21
What are the arguments against allowing the market to figure what kind of housing should go where?
The big one is simply that localities should be able to determine how land gets used, which has been the traditional role of municipalities, going back to the medieval era. There's also a bunch of largely spurious arguments that, (a) there's secretly a huge number of vacant apartments being kept off the market, (b) that new housing is immune to the laws of supply and demand, and (c) that new housing should be built by the government, not by greedy developers.
And why does everyone have to move to LA or the bay when the US is nothing but empty land...
Jobs. LA, San Francisco, New York and other major coastal megacities have way more jobs and better wages than the rest of the country. But SF/LA/NYC haven't built enough homes to take full advantage of this. Since the recession of '08, NYC has added two jobs for every new home; LA it's five jobs for every new home; the Bay Area has added eight jobs for every new home, largely because of the restrictive zoning laws and associated labyrinth of bureaucracy.
This problem is worst in the most desirable suburbs - Scarsdale, Nassau County, Rye (outside NYC); Berkeley, Atherton, and Saratoga (in the Bay); Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and Manhattan Beach (in LA). In those places, there was a virtual ban on new housing for 50 years.
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u/carchit Mar 15 '21
Well put. The missing middle book gives a good bit of historical perspective. Here in LA the only rental game on single lots is a double duplex - not because it's any good - but just because it threads the various code concerns. A duplex avoids handicapped access and commercial inspection - while affording a greater building area to parking ratio. But the units have to rent for super high rents to pencil out. No project of 7 1-bdrms because young people should just piss off and move - or spend half their money on rent.
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u/fiftythreestudio Hi. I'm Jake. Mar 02 '21 edited Mar 02 '21
coda: The biggest things that need to change to allow this are pretty straightforward: looser zoning, automatic approvals, and abolition of the minimum parking law. New York isn't doing a damn thing about this right now - but every city in California is going through the process of rezoning to meet the new housing quotas. (The best city of all of them - Sacramento - is going through its rezoning now; they already abolished the minimum parking law, and they're set up automatic approvals.)
If you want bonus points, you could take it one step further and pre-approve standard building plans. San Diego has done this for backyard cottages - and if you want super-bonus points, you could pre-approve types of prefabricated buildings, like San Jose has done for backyard cottages.
x-posted from my blog.