This week on Talking Headways we’re joined by Mike Eliason of larch lab to discuss his new book Building for People: Designing Livable, Affordable, Low-Carbon Communities. We chat about single-stair buildings, development on arterials, building back after climate disasters and the problem with RFPs.
Scroll down below the audio player for an edited excerpt of our conversation, or click here for an unedited, AI-generated transcript of the entire conversation.
Jeff Wood: Moving from the building form to, kind of, the regional, or at least the district, aspect of things. You’ve written a bunch lately about the focus on arterial streets. And I’m curious about that thinking and the idea of putting residential units off and away from the arterial streets versus on them, which is what a lot of zoning codes are doing these days and a lot of focus is because of the land that’s available. Basically, that, you know, isn’t NIMBY'd.
Mike Eliason: I think a big part of it is it’s easier politically for a lot of places to say, look, we’re going to up zone these places.
On arterials, maybe there’s like one story commercial strips alongside of them. If we don’t go too deep into the existing residential neighborhoods, there won’t be any kind of, you know, extended fight with the people who live there. And so from like a political standpoint, I totally understand why this is happening.
But from like a quality of life standpoint, from a livability standpoint, public health standpoint, like, it just blows my mind that we would limit so much development to this narrow swath of the city [with] air pollution and noise pollution and, you know, unsafe streets, because oftentimes these tend to be, you know, four, six, even eight-lane roads. And so there’s this aspect in the US where we’re kind of focusing all of our development on these kinds of places.
In Seattle, we already kind of limited our housing to arterials and corridors and freight routes. And the city through the comp plan update is going to increase the amount of density and housing that you can build on these places, but we’re keeping like that narrow swath, right? At most, it’s a half block for most of the city. There are a couple of places where it might extend just one block. But when the city first published their maps of what this could look like they were showing residential buildings going almost a quarter mile off of that arterial. And so, for me having to spend time working and living abroad where you have, you know, Berlin, with dense residential neighborhoods that aren’t strictly limited to that corridor that arterial, the quality of life in those neighborhoods is radically different than, like, in the US when you’re living on that corridor, that arterial.
And with the way our building code interfaces with the zoning code, right, if you’re in a housing unit on a building on an arterial, let’s say you’re facing that arterial, you’re likely in a studio or maybe a one bedroom. You’re in this big, massive double loaded corridor. You can’t open your window because it’s going to be loud. You’ve got pollution coming in from the tires and everything else. If there’s a lot of diesel, you’ll have to deal with that as well. And so just, like, fundamentally, from, like, the combination of all of these things, it just blows my mind that this has kind of become the default mode for dense urban housing.
And, and then like thinking about like how we layer in like, okay, if affordable housing is only limited on the street, well, it’s not great from like a spatial justice issue. It’s kind of a different form of segregation than what we’ve had in the past with the red lining and other things, and just zoning in general. But it is kind of this form of just this bifurcation, right? Where it’s, like, these dense corridors, you know, if you want to cross the street, you’ve got to wait several minutes for the light to change. And you’ve got 30, 40 seconds to cross maybe. And then if you have to go to the other corner, it’s the exact same thing.
So thinking about extending the zoning and the density, you know, and it doesn’t have to be super dense, right? But just moderate levels of density, you know, a couple of blocks off of those arterials improves the amount of housing that’s supporting transit, it makes for better walkable, more walkable neighborhoods and a higher quality of life for the people who will be moving into those places.
Jeff Wood: When I was reading that section of the book, I was thinking about how all of the things that we do in the driving culture kind of lead to this, because the arterials are the place where the businesses want to set up because that’s where the cars are, which is where the customers are, etc. I know in San Francisco and Seattle, a place like that, where you can walk to places and the shop owners or whatever are frustrated if they can’t park there.
But at the same time, I was just thinking, all of this is set up for, you know — the banks control where a retail chain can put their building. And so they put their building on an arterial. And if, you know, a city wants to build like a dense development, they also want to put it on that arterial. So people, if they want people to walk, they’ll walk to those retail spaces.
And so I’m wondering what the difference is between the retail spaces and locations in places like Europe versus In the United States where everything’s set up around — everything’s set up around these the bankers being able to finance these buildings and things like that. And so, you know, it’s connecting more of the car culture than just, you know, where we’re putting our housing.
Mike Eliason: I think one of the key differences that I’ve noticed, especially working and living in Germany, is residential multi-family buildings off of the arterial, some of them have like a retail component or an office component, but a lot of them don’t, they’re just like purely multi-family residential buildings and, you know, they’ll have different ways of engaging, you know, with the ground level, you know, sometimes there’ll be a couple of steps up. So you’re not looking directly into it. Oftentimes they’ll just be at grade and it’s not a big issue, but there’s this aspect where, you know, we focus like all of our retail density on this arterial, on this one heavy, loud street. And for a number of reasons, the financing of these buildings really wants large retail spaces.
So we lose the opportunity for like micro retail spaces and, you know, these smaller kind of more intimate places. And so, you know, when we see development in a lot of the US you have this huge five over one that’ll go in on the block, it’ll be a bank or, you know, some other, you know, kind of chain restaurant. There’s not a lot of diversity in what goes in, you know, maybe we’re lucky in Seattle. I feel like some of the developers work with existing tenants and buildings that are going to be redeveloped to bring them back in as like an anchor tenant for their building, which is a really, it’s, it’s not the greatest way of redeveloping a city, but it is a much better way of redeveloping the city.
We’re at least keeping those businesses within the city. And so there are ways to kind of do that. But I think that there are also ways to kind of introduce, you know, some of these aspects into like the residential neighborhood, right? Like corner stores, we used to be common, you know, a hundred years ago and a lot of our streetcar suburbs and the grocery store that we go to is on a very minor two lane arterial for most of our day to day needs, right?
Our neighborhood is almost like Germany in that regard to still like way more cars and way more car priority and none of the buildings here for the most part are over three stories too. Even at that intimate scale, there’s enough density in the neighborhood to support a small grocery store. We’ve got a couple of breweries, a ton of coffee shops.
I posted online the other day, a really small street in the city of Freiburg. I think the right of way was maybe 45 feet. And the businesses off of that street were a restaurant, a bike repair shop, some home offices and art gallery. It’s on this quiet street and you’re on the corner, it’s like a pleasant place to eat outdoors. You’re not eating exhaust with your beer or whatever your coffee that you’re having.
For me, it goes back to that quality of life is just so fundamentally different when we’re not prioritizing the car and car access on every single street.
