February 11, 2025 • 35 mins
In this episode we sit down with Michael Eliason, the architect behind "Building for People: Designing Livable, Affordable, Low-Carbon Communities." Michael unveils the potential of eco-districts as a transformative alternative to the all-too-often car-centric and monotonous transit-oriented developments found in the U.S. Drawing from his extensive research in Europe and China, he casts a spotlight on how cities prioritize ecological orientation and community vibrancy, offering a path to creating sustainable, affordable, and engaging urban spaces.
Show Notes:
- Transit cost project referenced: https://transitcosts.com/about/
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- Further Reading:
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Episode Transcript
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Stephanie Rouse (00:00):
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(00:47):
You're listening to the Bookedon Planning podcast, a project
of the Nebraska chapter of theAmerican Planning Association.
In each episode, we dive intohow cities function by talking
with authors on housing,transportation and everything in
between.
Join us as we get Booked onPlanning.
Welcome back, bookworms, toanother episode of Booked on
(01:15):
Planning.
In this episode we talk withMichael Eliason about his
Building for for PeopleDesigning Livable, affordable,
low-carbon Communities.
Michael moved to Germanybecause he wanted to be in the
heart of where passive housedesign was being implemented and
the ideas from his bookrealized.
These examples are largely fromoverseas, but there are a few
US examples sprinkled throughoutthe book highlighting the
(01:36):
concepts this book had a lot ofnew and interesting
architectural types that citiesin Europe are regularly using.
Jennifer Hiatt (01:42):
that I found quite interesting and, while I
can already hear people sayingthat the United States isn't
Europe, we need to startexpanding our housing options.
Large mega-block apartmentbuildings just aren't doing it
anymore.
Stephanie Rouse (01:53):
I agree, and there's some really interesting
housing models like the Bagrubinthat I think would be a great
idea to pilot in American cities.
But, as we discussed in theepisode, the current high costs
in the building industry andoverly restrictive building
codes make testing new modelslike this challenging at best.
Jennifer Hiatt (02:09):
The eco-district is definitely a different way
of looking at sustainabilitydevelopment.
So I hope you enjoyed theconversation.
Let's get into our conversationwith author Michael Eliason on
his Building for for PeopleDesigning Livable, affordable,
low-carbon Communities.
Stephanie Rouse (02:26):
Well, michael, thank you so much for joining us
on Booked.
On Planning, we're happy tohave you on to talk about your
book Building for PeopleDesigning Livable, affordable,
low-carbon Communities.
To start off, your book isfocused on the idea of an
ecodistrict, similar totransit-oriented development but
more intentional.
Can you talk about what anecodistrict is and what sets it
apart from a standard TODdistrict?
Michael Eliason (02:51):
Yeah well, first off, thank you very much
for having me on today.
There are a couple ofdifferences in my opinion.
So transit-oriented developmentin the US tends to still be
incredibly auto-centric.
We don't really put in parkingcaps.
Some places we don't even haveparking minimums.
We're putting in TOD.
There's not really a lot ofeconomic and social mix of
residents, it's generally marketrate housing with a couple of
affordable housing projects atbest.
There's not a lot of places forchildren to play.
(03:13):
We're not being cognizant ofissues around climate adaptation
and mitigating the urban heatisland effect.
And in European cities, chinesecities they've kind of taken
another tack where they'retrying to prioritize places that
are ecologically oriented,community oriented and have a
higher degree of affordablehousing than we tend to see in
the US, and so in the Europeancontext these tend to be called
(03:37):
eco-couriers or eco-districts.
We have some history ofeco-districts in the US, but it
hasn't been very broad.
I think one of the biggestthings for me that
differentiates ecodistricts andgreen TOD some folks have kind
of talked a little bit aboutecodistricts being is just the
concept around place andcommunity is much higher in the
(03:57):
European context than it is here.
So, as an example, the city ofHamburg is redeveloping massive
districts, still within the city, but kind of in the outer
reaches of it.
It's adjacent to transit.
There's this green loop thatgoes all the way around the
district.
It's green space, it's part ofthe urban sponge of the district
, right.
So when there's this delugethat happens, they'll be
flooding there instead of inneighborhoods and in houses.
(04:19):
That green loop, not only is itlike a way for kids to play
right, there's playgrounds andthere's brooks and other things
alongside it but it also offersan ability to get around the
entire district, to go to thedifferent neighborhoods without
interacting with cars altogether, right.
And so there's this concept oflike living in a place that is
really more about people andquality of life to just
(04:40):
everything is just kind of tunedto a much greater degree than I
think we really look into ortry to do in the US.
Stephanie Rouse (04:47):
I think one of the biggest distinctions reading
your book and you mentioned ithere is that the eco-districts
are adjacent to transit, versusthe way we do it here, where we
plop the intersection andtransit right through the middle
of a district and build all theway around it.
So it's very still, as youmentioned, car heavy and has
some of those environmentalissues that the eco-districts
don't because of the way theylay them out.
Michael Eliason (05:08):
Yeah, it's really interesting.
So we don't take noise planninginto account for the most part
in a lot of the TOD planningthat we do in the US, but that's
not the case in a lot of othercountries.
Germany has requirements aroundnoise levels for residential
districts, and so when they'replanning a new district they'll
actually model the noise andthey'll look at the shape of new
buildings that are coming in,how that can deflect the noise,
(05:31):
other things that they can do tomake it so that when people are
living in their homes it'squiet, they're not inundated
with the noise of traffic.
And in so much of the US weprioritize putting TOD and
transit stations, like you said,on a highway or directly
adjacent to a highway or at theintersection of two major
arterials, and so so much ofthat district is focused on like
(05:53):
having to deal with eithercrossing those two arterials or
one arterial several times a dayto do like even basic tasks,
and so getting around withoutinteracting with cars is almost
impossible, or you're justinundated with, like the noise
and the pollution that comesfrom highways and those kinds of
roads, and so it's a reallyradically different way of
thinking about how we can planplaces, like I said, that
prioritize quality of life, thatprioritize public health as
(06:15):
well.
Jennifer Hiatt (06:17):
And you struck upon one of my pet peeves that I
have working in redevelopment,which is that in the US, we try
to create depth and dimensionwith the push-pull exterior
walls and too many colors andmaterial variations all on one
building.
Instead, you offer the Ilistened to this on Google the
Baugruppen.
Michael Eliason (06:36):
Yeah, Baugruppen.
Jennifer Hiatt (06:37):
Baugruppen no, thank you.
Or building a group model.
So can you explain why the Uaway from it?
We used to kind of have thatmodel historically.
Why have we moved away from itand why should we return to it?
Michael Eliason (06:51):
Yeah.
So the facade modulation thing.
As an architect and as apassive house architect, I find
something that just totallydrives me crazy because we're
playing a game with the facade.
Our buildings are gettinglarger and larger and there's a
number of reasons related tothis.
One is our building codesmandate two means of egress.
In most of the world you can dosingle stair buildings I call
them point access blocks to six,seven, eight stories easily.
(07:14):
We're limited to three in theUS, we can do six in Seattle,
but there's a lot of otherconditions.
So this requirement for twomeans of egress, two stairs,
kind of draws larger and largerdevelopment and then a lot of
times cities will come in andramp up the FAR, the floor area
ratio, the amount of buildablearea on commercially zoned or
multifamily lots, and in a wayit kind of induces these larger
and larger buildings so thatwhen you have redevelopment
(07:36):
let's say it's a historic stripin a neighborhood with like five
, six, seven different buildingson it Maybe they're like
one-story commercial buildingseveryone loves right when that
gets redeveloped it becomes thishuge, massive project and part
of it is related to buildingcode, land use code.
It's also related to how wefinance projects and so we play
these really ridiculous gamesright.
We modulate the facade, changethe colors, maybe change the
(07:56):
materials or setbacks, like froma passive house standpoint.
Every one of those moves is aweakness in our building.
That's a point of durabilityissues and maintenance issues.
In the long term it increasesthe amount of energy that a
building will use.
It increases the embodiedcarbon of a building, and so one
of the ways that, like Europeancountries and other countries,
have gotten around this isthey're allowed to do these
(08:17):
single stair buildings, thesemore fine-grained urban
buildings that you see in theurban context, and so, as that
six or seven parcels on thatblock face get redeveloped right
, they can become, you know, sixseparate entities, six separate
buildings, or they can make sixbuildings that are effectively
all separate single stairbuildings, but you know it's
connected as one cohesive wholeand they can do little things to
kind of make it not be so large.
(08:39):
But our codes really don'tallow this, and so I think any
kind of model that would help usmove away from that is good.
In the European context,baugruppen could be one means of
doing this.
Baugruppen are self-developedurban co-housing, and so it's a
bunch of people coming togetherand planning and developing
their own urban multifamilyhouse right.
So it could be like co-housing,it could be cooperative, the
(08:59):
legal structure isn't quite asimportant, but in a lot of sense
it's really just about peoplecoming together, prioritizing
their values in the development.
So you could come in and say,look, we're all car light
families.
This isn't a neighborhood.
We're going to develop a placethat has a family size housing,
because that's another issue westruggle with in development in
the US.
We're going to have car freedevelopment, we'll have a huge
(09:19):
bike room, we'll have maybe aworkshop or a music room for
kids and some open space forthem to play in.
The point access block kind ofenables a lot of these things to
happen, because in the Europeancontext they use height as the
moderator of density, and so alot of these buildings are going
in in places where three, four,five, six stories are fine.
The lots tend to be a littlebit differently proportioned as
(09:40):
well, but in a lot of respectssimilar to the US narrow on the
street frontage and deep, but nosetbacks, right.
Not having setbacks is a greatthing for avoiding this, and it
just opens up more opportunitiesfor more livable homes in
Balgrip as well.
Stephanie Rouse (09:56):
You've been talking about how the code
issues are really driving designand good design in our
communities, and plenty ofdevelopments in other countries
have proven that many of ourcodes are unnecessarily
restricting good development,like the single stair.
We have a lot of cities orindividual states trying to
tackle these code issues withgetting single stair approved.
Nashville's been successful.
Minnesota, as an AmericanPlanning Association chapter, is
(10:18):
really trying to take on thisissue With examples of good code
revisions working elsewhere.
Why is it so challenging tochange our codes to match?
Michael Eliason (10:27):
So this is a really excellent question.
I think part of the problem inthe US is our codes are written
by a private corporation they'renot written by a government
entity and there's a board forthis entity.
Many of the seats of the boardare held by organizations that
maybe don't care aboutaffordable housing or dense
urban housing or even cities ingeneral.
It's also a long process, likethe process of getting code
(10:48):
changes through.
You know, there's severalrounds of hearings.
It's a multi-year process.
If it gets accepted which is awhole other discussion then it
takes years for it to getadopted into the next code.
Not all states are even usingthe same building code, right?
So some are on the 2018, someare on the 2015, some are even
on like 2012.
Some states don't even havestandardized building codes,
(11:10):
which kind of blows my mind, andso there's like a lot of
variability.
If the code council were toallow it now and they wouldn't
allow it as something that candirectly be adopted, right, it
wouldn't go into the codewriting process.
So the next book until 2027,and then those codes don't get
really adopted until 2028, 2029,2030.
And so we're looking at like adecade out from when we start
(11:30):
seeing buildings like this.
So the process is very long.
It's also in some ways capturedby industry.
So we saw this a little bitwith the push for mass timber in
the building codes.
Like the concrete industry cameout and was like, oh, building
with wood is dangerous, buildingwith mass timber is going to
cause people to be burned.
And it's just kind of mindblowing, right, that we have
this quote unquote democraticprocess but we're not really
(11:52):
using facts, we're using emotionand other things to dictate it.
So I think that's part of it.
In Seattle our building code isover 3,000 pages long, right,
and that's not even referencestandard.
So it's already like everythingis just it's so complex and
technical in ways that I thinklimit a lot of really good
development, or like alternativematerials that you would see in
other multifamily housingabroad.
(12:14):
The single stair one is kind ofthe one that comes up to mind
the most, but also like elevatorcosts.
So I don't know if you sawStephen Smith's elevator report
that was summarized in the NewYork Times.
For a number of differentreasons, elevator costs in the
US are substantially higher thanother countries.
Part of it's related to littlecompetition.
We don't have standardizedcodes.
Even within the same state,different jurisdictions can use
(12:35):
different elevator codes.
So it's kind of the same issueas the building code, right.
Like there's just not a lot ofstandardization and so it's kind
of death by a thousand cuts andall of these other things just
really working to prevent notjust code changes that can
happen in like a rapid or atleast more streamlined way of
adopting things, but also likewe also introduce all of these
other things that othercountries don't have.
(12:56):
So like in Europe, almost nocountries require sprinklers
until you get to about 10stories for multifamily housing.
In the US, two-storymultifamily building we're going
to require sprinklers.
Some jurisdictions require itfor townhomes, right, and so in
a lot of ways we're alreadygoing much further than a lot of
other countries are.
We're not really gettingmassive gains with that right.
So we've got two means tobegress no-transcript, based in
(13:46):
science, I think would be reallygreat.
Jennifer Hiatt (13:48):
You state the US has not really engaged in city
building in decades, and I keptcoming back to how difficult it
feels to city build when most ofthe developable property in the
United States is privatelyowned.
So how should cities begin tothink about overcoming this
obstacle as they start thinkingabout actually engaging in city
building again?
Michael Eliason (14:06):
So I used to think that form-based codes
would be the way that we kind ofwork around all of this.
But there's this interfacebetween the building code and
zoning codes or land use codesthat it doesn't really align
very well, and form-based codeskind of brought that to the
forefront in my thinking evenmore so.
And then a lot of it is reallyjust driven by aesthetics, right
, like if you had a reallysimple form-based code kind of
(14:26):
dictating like where a buildinggoes maximum number of stories,
roof slopes, things of thatnature, like you're starting to
get closer to how, like Germanyplans in their cities, but what
we start seeing is likerequirements on window
orientation All windows must bevertically oriented and X feet
wide, or something and so itjust becomes this like aesthetic
game.
All buildings must have acornice, right, and so it's.
(14:47):
I think you know all of this isreally kind of driven in the
opposite direction that itshould be going.
But many cities are going tohave larger sites strip malls,
malls, airports, whatnot where Ithink we should be starting to
think about mixed-use,ecodistricts and places that
prioritize people and ecology.
One option is and I talk aboutthis in the book the Netherlands
has this process called theurbanisator, where they're
(15:10):
redeveloping a district.
Let's say it's a bunch ofsingle-family homeowners.
They effectively collate all ofthose parcels and go through
the process of replanning andbuilding the infrastructure and
then giving those owners theequivalent value land in what
they do, and so it's a processto work with existing privately
owned property to develop moreurban places.
(15:31):
So that's a really interestingone.
Whether that's something thatwould even be legal in the US is
a question, but I think that ifthere's processes for something
like that, it can producesomething really interesting.
Another option is that the cityitself takes on the role of the
project initiator.
This is really common in a lotof European cities, asian cities
as well.
A lot of German cities have adevelopment agency or department
within the city.
(15:51):
This department will handle theplanning of the district, the
contracts, they'll generallydeal with management of
installation of theinfrastructure, and then what
they'll do is they'll spin offthe sites, and they typically
try to do it in a way that it'slike at cost right, so it's a
zero cost district for the city.
But what they get is theycontrol the land so they can
reserve more sites foraffordable housing.
(16:12):
They can just give those sitesaway, or they could reduce the
price of parcels for morecommunity-oriented or
non-speculative forms of housing, like Baugruppen or
cooperatives or other forms ofaffordable housing, and maybe
elevate the market rate ones alittle bit higher to offset that
.
Even in Munich, when they'reworking with private owners for
land that they're going torezone let's say it's a big
(16:33):
industrial area they're going torezone it for this big
mixed-use place the city'sapproach is like look, we're
rezoning your lands, you'regoing to make a ton of money.
You're going to have to reservesome of that land for
affordable housing.
You're not going to have tobuild it.
We have entities that we workwith to do it.
And so in a way they're able toinduce these large districts
that have 30, 40% affordablehousing.
(16:53):
Another 20 to 30% is likemiddle-class housing, and so
they're able to induce thesedistricts that just have a much
more varied economic and socialmix than we get.
But even at the small scale thisis possible.
And Kirchheim Unterteck, whichis a small village near
Stuttgart, the city redevelopedthis nine-acre parcel using this
process right, they did theplanning, they did the
infrastructure and sold it to abunch of entities.
(17:14):
I think about 50% of theparcels were sold to Baugruppen,
these self-developed urbanco-housing or affordable housing
entities, and so, in the end,what they got was this
cost-neutral district, they gotmore affordable housing, they
got a strong community, and thenthey got a tax base that's
going to remain in that cityrather than flee for the suburbs
, and it just ends up being,like this, really kind of great
(17:35):
place to live.
So, even at the small scale, Ithink this is something that is
totally feasible if we havethings oriented in that
direction.
Stephanie Rouse (17:43):
So if a community has large tracts of
land and they're able to doredevelopment on their terms.
Often in the US we'reaccustomed to using the request
for proposal process versuscompetitions, which seems to be
more common in Europeancountries.
What's the benefit of using acompetition approach and why
don't we use it here in the US?
What's the benefit of using a?
Michael Eliason (18:00):
competition approach and why don't we use it
here in the US?
So it is used a little bit inthe US.
It tends to be for kind oftoken projects, so the GSA, the
General Services Administrationof the government, will use it
for some of their buildings.
The Seattle Public Library usedthe design competition as well.
So I think part of it is likewe just we tend to think of it
as something that's reserved for, like these, jewel boxes of a
building rather than otherthings.
(18:22):
The RFP process in the US issomething that I find to be
really lacking in terms ofinnovation or driving even
sustainability.
You can try to write aspectsinto the RFP, the request for
proposal, that prioritizesustainability or prioritize
innovation, but a lot of timesyou don't really get it and in
the end what ends up happening alot with the RFP process is the
firms that kind of do the samething over and over again.
(18:44):
May not be the greatest, maynot look the great, but they
have all of their costscontrolled.
You know, and they've beendoing it for a long time tends
to get the projects In Europe.
They'll do design competitions,whether that's on the urban
planning side as well as thearchitecture side.
It's generally a blind judging,right.
So you don't know the firmsthat are designing the projects.
You have a sense of what thatdistrict is going to look like
(19:05):
almost immediately, right.
What you see is what you get,and your judging team is
generally a mix of experts,architects, planners, people who
are working for the city ormaybe politicians that are able
to kind of understand what thatprocess will look like and what
the urban form will look likeand how people will get around
in the district and percentagesof open space and all of those
(19:27):
things.
I also think that one of thethings that we struggle with in
the US is we'll do outreach Alot of times.
The outreach process andplanning is really a way for
people to come together and sayno to something Like we don't
want this change, we don't wantthat.
In Germany, when they're goingthrough an urban planning
competition, there's a lot ofleg work that happens at the
beginning.
They'll find out, like, whatthe neighborhood needs.
(19:47):
If, like, a new district isgoing in, maybe there's going to
be a lot of family homes in thedistrict, and so the city will
need to put in a school.
They'll need daycares for thekids, they'll need space for
community and so the city kindof takes all of this stuff,
writes it into the program forthe competition, and then the
planning teams, the architects,urban planners, will incorporate
that into their designs, and soit's, I think, an opportunity
(20:08):
to kind of get more people tocome along.
In the end, right Like peopleare engaged, saying, okay, if
something's going to change, atleast we're getting this, rather
than in the US it's like, well,I don't want anything to change
in my neighborhood, right, sowe're not going to change the
zoning, or multifamily housingis bad, and it kind of becomes
the outreach, becomes kind of abully's veto rather than the
process to incorporate actualpublic participation in the
(20:30):
design process and even thecompetition process in Europe
now is changing a little bit.
France has a very lowqualification threshold that
they'll do for firms, and soit's a way to allow younger
firms, more diverse firms, tohave an opportunity to win a
project, and then they'll alsooffer a stipend for the firms
that are selected.
So it's not free labor, which is, I think, a big issue that a
(20:51):
lot of people have with thecompetition process, but the RFP
process is also a form of freelabor, right Like.
I've worked on massive RFPs andyou know, had to go through the
interview process for this andon a project that we didn't win,
and you don't get anything outof that right, and so there's a
lot of free labor that goes intothe RFP process as well.
I think it would be reallybeneficial for cities to look at
(21:12):
changing their procurementpolicies to move in this
direction.
I think especially around urbandevelopment and how we're
thinking about new neighborhoodsaround transit, instead of,
like, doing all of this stuffthat's kind of a little bit
piecemeal.
Maybe we'll have an urbanframework or a policy framework,
but even I find those tend tobe fairly rare and limited, and
so finding a way to do somethingthat's more comprehensive and
(21:32):
taking all of these other thingsinto account in the long run, I
think would be prettybeneficial.
Jennifer Hiatt (21:37):
And once we get those proposals, however, they
come to us RFP, for the mostpart for American cities.
We often hear halfway into theprocess that, well, we can't do
what we proposed anymore becauseeverything has become so
expensive and we talked a littlebit about this with, like, the
high cost of elevators.
But what makes building in theUnited States so much more
(21:59):
expensive?
What's the root issue here thanin Europe?
Michael Eliason (22:03):
So I think it's like 100 little things and I
moved to Germany in 2019.
And part of the reason I movedwas because I wanted to be close
to the central heart of likemass timber and passive house
and Baugruppen and socialhousing.
But I also wanted to understand, like why you know, german and
Swiss housing is of such ahigher quality for lower costs
than we get here, and I thinkit's a combination of things.
(22:23):
One is salaries are lower,material prices are lower, labor
costs are lower, profit marginsare lower as well.
There's socialized insurance.
I think it's like a hundreddifferent things that really
drive down the cost of whatthey're doing.
I don't know if you've read anyof Alain Levy's work around
transportation costs in the US.
Lévy looked at transportationcosts for infrastructure in the
(22:49):
US and looks at what's going onin other countries and almost
everywhere else.
Construction costs are whetherit's tram, light, rail, bike
lanes, whatever are a fractionof the cost that they are here.
So in some ways, it's almostlike they're able to do more for
significantly less.
But also part of it, too, is, Ithink, that Europe has a long
history of leaning into cities.
In the US we don't right.
(23:10):
In the 20s, we bannedapartments in most of the land
area of cities and adoptedsingle family zoning widespread
throughout most of the USHighway infrastructure went in
sprawl.
We've kind of reached thelimits of sprawl, and so now
people are returning to citiesbut like we forgot how to build
in cities.
Urban building is difficult andexpensive, and so we don't have
(23:30):
that.
You know 200 year history thatyou know Berlin or Vienna or
London or other cities have of.
You know building densely inthese compact urban places, and
so a large part of it too isjust we don't have the
construction infrastructurethat's really been able to ramp
up to do this.
So this goes back to the pointaccess block discussion.
So most housing in the US endsup being a double-loaded
(23:52):
corridor because of ourtwo-stair requirement.
This drives buildings that aregoing to be deeper and deeper,
and cities kind of respond tothe lack of housing by just
opening up far more on existingparcels that are already
multifamily or commercial,rather than distributing it more
broadly.
And so the only way for a lotof development whether it's
affordable housing or marketrate to use that far is to build
(24:14):
deeper and deeper buildings,and so we have these hotel-like
buildings.
In Seattle we're seeingbuildings that are approaching
90, 100 feet deep, and so thatmeans you're living in a studio
that's maybe 10 feet wide by 50feet deep.
It's inducing a lot ofwindowless bedrooms and dark
places, but like it's not theway other places develop right
In Germany, point access block asingle-stair building.
(24:36):
The depth of that building isgoing to be somewhere between 40
to 50 feet.
They can easily fit in the samenumber of people in a much
smaller footprint.
So it's not just like that thelabor costs are different, but
the way that we're building kindof induces these very expensive
buildings, and so it'sdifficult to get a lot of the
quality aspects that you find inthat right.
Like it's difficult to findthree-pane windows that are
(24:57):
affordable, and that's not thecase in Europe, where there are
500 window manufacturers and youknow, once you get window
certification in Germany, youcan sell it to Poland or the
Czech Republic or Spain orwhatever right, and so there's
just a lot more competition andoptions for some of these things
as well, and so I think it'snot one thing, it's just so many
things that are all lining uptogether to make everything here
(25:18):
just so much more expensive andso much more difficult.
Stephanie Rouse (25:21):
Your book is filled with examples of concepts
, most of them coming fromEuropean countries.
Why do you think innovation andcreativity with green building
approaches is so prevalent therebut so hard to replicate here
in the US?
Michael Eliason (25:34):
I think a big part of this is just they never
walked away from cities, right,like low mid-rise urban housing
buildings, right, it's been thenorm for cities, whether it's
affordable housing or luxuryhousing, for a long time.
I think also, just the planningprocess itself induces more
innovation and creativity.
Right, we talked about this alittle bit.
With urban planning,competition kind of allows for
(25:55):
people to try out new ideas ornew concepts.
A really interesting example ofthis is Henning Larsen's Fallen
Bee Project in Copenhagen.
It's kind of in this green areathat's not quite urban city but
not quite village, and so theytook it as this opportunity to
create this new hybrid wherethere's blocks that are all kind
of focused on the centralsquare.
The parts of the block, thebuildings that are facing that
(26:17):
central square, are much moreurban, and then it kind of
devolves into more village-typebuilding typologies and then
back to nature, right, and soit's offering different ways of
even thinking about developingplaces.
So, part of it is the planningprocess.
Part of it is just the costissue.
And the cost issue is reallyfunny.
In the US, single-family housesare built under a separate
(26:39):
building code, the IRC, theInternational Residential Code.
That is a much easier code tobuild to than the International
Building Code, and so we havethis cost disparity, this
bifurcation, where low densitysprawl is inexpensive to build
and, like low rise to mid riseto high rise, it keeps going up
in cost.
And that's not really the casein other countries.
(27:00):
Right, in Germany, even Spain,italy, the single family house
is like the most expensive tobuild, like, if you're looking
at it on a cost per square footbasis, by the time you go to
like low rise, mid rise, thecosts kind of drop and they
level out a little bit, and sothere's not this huge cost
increase associated withbuilding density.
Right, it's like you'reactually seeing the benefits of
density and that the costs arecoming down rather than up, and
(27:22):
so it's.
You know, I don't know how weget around to this cost issue,
but, like I said, it affectstransportation, it affects
everything from bike lanes tobuildings.
I think it's something that wereally have to get our head
around.
Jennifer Hiatt (27:34):
I would agree and changing course just a
little bit.
One of the concepts youmentioned in your book is called
a sponge city, so I waswondering if you could talk
about what that concept is andhow cities can incorporate these
principles for betterstormwater management.
Michael Eliason (27:48):
So the sponge city is an urban planning
principle or concept aroundflood and stormwater management
that's generally associated withblue-green infrastructure.
The concept originated in Chinaand is increasingly being
adopted in a lot of German andDutch cities, increasingly, with
the effects of climate changeas well.
We are starting to see it inthe US.
(28:09):
Pittsburgh, la, new York Cityare also expending pretty
significant sums of money to tryto mitigate flooding and future
deluge and rain events.
What I find so fascinatingabout this is that it's not just
flood mitigation, right Like.
It's an opportunity to re-greenour cities.
A kind of common example fromDenmark, from Copenhagen, is
(28:30):
depaving a street, putting ineffectively this large park
space that you know when there'sa flood event, it floods, it
absorbs the rainwater so thatthe houses and other things
don't flood, but when it's notflooding, it's urban heat island
mitigation.
It's a play space, it's a placefor pollution to kind of go and
filter out instead of ending upin the air.
(28:50):
It's really a way of kind ofbringing together a lot of
concepts right Adapting toclimate change, prioritizing
public health, prioritizingquality of life and access to
nature in a way that I think ismuch more comprehensive and
cohesive, and it can be anythingfrom like tree wells to
bioswales at the small scale.
Just rethinking our courtyardsright to have spaces where water
(29:13):
can go and where we can collectit during deluge events.
Thinking about blue roofs onstructures as well.
So our green roofs work as well, but the blue roof is kind of
like a rainwater containmentsystem on a roof that slowly
percolates back down in thesystem, the sewage system, so
that it doesn't overwhelm andcause flooding down the line.
But you know, with climatechange, we're going.
We're already seeing theeffects of increased rain events
(29:35):
, deluges, and so I think we'regoing to be having to think a
lot more about how to mitigateand adapt to these things in the
long term.
So many US cities are just nowstarting to think about this and
we're probably, you know easilya decade behind where we need
to be to even start to move onthis.
And then there's, you know,significant questions about
funding.
And you know, if we're depavingstreets for blue-green
(29:55):
infrastructure, are people goingto fight that because they want
space for private car parking?
Stephanie Rouse (30:07):
And it's just this ongoing conversation in the
US.
So eco districts are one waythat we can start building
towards sponge cities in the US.
What are some of the firststeps that our city should start
taking to incorporate ecodistrict concepts in our
communities?
Michael Eliason (30:15):
I think a big one is just understanding that
building depth can play a bigrole in limiting the amount of
space for this, and so we'reseeing this in Seattle and areas
where we allow density, most ofthe lot is going to be consumed
by the building.
We don't regulate floor platedepth and so, like I said, we're
seeing buildings that averagebetween 80 to 90 feet deep.
It's almost twice as deep asyou would see in the European
(30:35):
context.
On the West Coast, this numberis only going up because the
housing crisis, I think, is sosevere.
I've seen a floor plate inDenver that's 120 feet deep it
just blows my mind.
And then it's got like threewindowless bedrooms in it, right
, and so it just blows my mindthat this is kind of the types
of places that we're building.
But when our buildings are thisdeep, if you think about a
block, if there's a courtyard,it's going to be really small.
(30:58):
If your building is eventwo-thirds of that, if it's 70
feet deep at least, you havemore space for nature, you have
more space for trees, you havemore space for blue-green
infrastructure, space forcommunity, there's more privacy.
So I think a big part of it isjust cities don't understand
this interface between buildingcode and land-use code.
That's a big one.
But also just the effects ofthe land-use code at a broader
(31:19):
level is not really studied tothe degree that it should be.
And so if you look at likehistorical perimeter blocks in
Hamburg or Berlin, new districtsare kind of replicating that.
You know taller buildings, thinfloor plates, a lot more green
space.
New districts are doing that.
They're just doing it indifferent ways.
Maybe they're taller or thebuildings are a little bit
different, but there's still,like this, ample space for
(31:42):
community, ample space forclimate adaptation, and in the
way we're doing our planning inthe US, so much of it feels like
okay, our land use code is justgoing to give X amount of FAR,
we're not going to limit thefloor plate depth, architecture
team, developer team, go.
And we see this a lot in Seattleright now.
If you have a lot that's narrowand deep, we can do an
apartment on it.
Let's say it's 60 feet wide,we'll do a 50-unit apartment,
(32:03):
double-loaded corridor.
Well, you've got 25 units onone side of the corridor, 25
units on the other, and thenthat exact same building goes
down next door.
Well, instead of having unitsthat are oriented towards the
street and open space.
You now have 25 units in onebuilding looking directly at 25
units in another building, right, and that issue becomes even
more problematic in a lot ofcities where, like those
(32:24):
multifamily zones start tointeract with the single family
zones, right, because that edgecondition becomes so much
greater, right, all of a sudden,the single family homeowner
went from like having oneneighbor who couldn't really
look into his yard to like thisbig building with like 50 units
looking into his yard.
And so the way we're planningour cities, we're not taking a
lot of these things into accountand I think it's not allowing
space for climate adaptation,it's not allowing space for even
(32:45):
people to feel like they'recomfortable.
You know, I have a daughter.
The building next door had, youknow, 25 units looking directly
at us and it's only 10 feetaway, like.
That's like a differentcondition than what we had
before, and so I think it'sunderstanding that the effects
of our land use codes have, likethese long-term effects that if
we're not really taking intoaccount, can be kind of negative
towards not just developingplaces that are better, but also
(33:06):
I think it can induce moreresistance to urban development.
Jennifer Hiatt (33:11):
So, on top of your book, which we recommend
everyone go out and pick up acopy of, what books would you
recommend our readers check out?
Michael Eliason (33:18):
David Simms' Soft City.
David's book was actually thebook I originally wanted to
write, but his book is so muchbetter.
It was so well written.
If you haven't read David'sbook, I highly recommend it.
I'd like to think that his bookand my book are like a good
one-two punch on how and why tobuild better cities and
buildings in the US.
We were also a car-free familyfor six years two kids so the
(33:41):
subject of mobility is reallyimportant to us, as well as
climate adaptation and trying tobe living some of the values
that we talk about, and soanything related to street
transformations, deprioritizingcars very high on our list.
Veronica Davis's InclusiveTransportation, marco
Tebromostrot's movement, wesMarshall's Killed by a Traffic
Engineer is next in my queue,and I'm also currently reading
(34:06):
Kristen Godsey's Everyday Utopia, which is about just the
history of collective urbandevelopment as well, which is
really interesting.
Stephanie Rouse (34:13):
All great books .
A couple Island Press in therethat we've covered.
Michael Eliason (34:16):
Yeah, I think most of them are.
Yeah, I have way too manyIsland Press books.
Jennifer Hiatt (34:20):
No, you can't have too many Island Press books
Otherwise, like the wholebookshop behind me is too many
books.
Michael Eliason (34:26):
Yeah, no, I was really excited when they agreed
to publish my book because Ifelt like it was the place that
it would land best, and so it'sjust been great to be working
with them.
Stephanie Rouse (34:36):
Well, michael, thank you so much for joining us
on Booked On Planning to talkabout your book Building for
People Designing Livable,affordable, low-carbon
Communities.
Michael Eliason (34:44):
Thanks again.
Jennifer Hiatt (34:46):
We hope you enjoyed this conversation with
Michael Eliasson about hisBuilding for for People
Designing Livable, affordable,low-carbon Communities.
You can get your own copythrough the publisher at Island
Press, or click the link in theshow notes to take you directly
to our affiliate page.
Remember to subscribe to theshow wherever you listen to
podcasts and please rate, reviewand share the show.
Thank you for listening andwe'll talk to you next time on
(35:08):
Booked on Planning.
Thank you.
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Diverse in knowledge andexperience, they are united in
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(00:47):
You're listening to the Bookedon Planning podcast, a project
of the Nebraska chapter of theAmerican Planning Association.
In each episode, we dive intohow cities function by talking
with authors on housing,transportation and everything in
between.
Join us as we get Booked onPlanning.
Welcome back, bookworms, toanother episode of Booked on
(01:15):
Planning.
In this episode we talk withMichael Eliason about his
Building for for PeopleDesigning Livable, affordable,
low-carbon Communities.
Michael moved to Germanybecause he wanted to be in the
heart of where passive housedesign was being implemented and
the ideas from his bookrealized.
These examples are largely fromoverseas, but there are a few
US examples sprinkled throughoutthe book highlighting the
(01:36):
concepts this book had a lot ofnew and interesting
architectural types that citiesin Europe are regularly using.
Jennifer Hiatt (01:42):
that I found quite interesting and, while I
can already hear people sayingthat the United States isn't
Europe, we need to startexpanding our housing options.
Large mega-block apartmentbuildings just aren't doing it
anymore.
Stephanie Rouse (01:53):
I agree, and there's some really interesting
housing models like the Bagrubinthat I think would be a great
idea to pilot in American cities.
But, as we discussed in theepisode, the current high costs
in the building industry andoverly restrictive building
codes make testing new modelslike this challenging at best.
Jennifer Hiatt (02:09):
The eco-district is definitely a different way
of looking at sustainabilitydevelopment.
So I hope you enjoyed theconversation.
Let's get into our conversationwith author Michael Eliason on
his Building for for PeopleDesigning Livable, affordable,
low-carbon Communities.
Stephanie Rouse (02:26):
Well, michael, thank you so much for joining us
on Booked.
On Planning, we're happy tohave you on to talk about your
book Building for PeopleDesigning Livable, affordable,
low-carbon Communities.
To start off, your book isfocused on the idea of an
ecodistrict, similar totransit-oriented development but
more intentional.
Can you talk about what anecodistrict is and what sets it
apart from a standard TODdistrict?
Michael Eliason (02:51):
Yeah well, first off, thank you very much
for having me on today.
There are a couple ofdifferences in my opinion.
So transit-oriented developmentin the US tends to still be
incredibly auto-centric.
We don't really put in parkingcaps.
Some places we don't even haveparking minimums.
We're putting in TOD.
There's not really a lot ofeconomic and social mix of
residents, it's generally marketrate housing with a couple of
affordable housing projects atbest.
There's not a lot of places forchildren to play.
(03:13):
We're not being cognizant ofissues around climate adaptation
and mitigating the urban heatisland effect.
And in European cities, chinesecities they've kind of taken
another tack where they'retrying to prioritize places that
are ecologically oriented,community oriented and have a
higher degree of affordablehousing than we tend to see in
the US, and so in the Europeancontext these tend to be called
(03:37):
eco-couriers or eco-districts.
We have some history ofeco-districts in the US, but it
hasn't been very broad.
I think one of the biggestthings for me that
differentiates ecodistricts andgreen TOD some folks have kind
of talked a little bit aboutecodistricts being is just the
concept around place andcommunity is much higher in the
(03:57):
European context than it is here.
So, as an example, the city ofHamburg is redeveloping massive
districts, still within the city, but kind of in the outer
reaches of it.
It's adjacent to transit.
There's this green loop thatgoes all the way around the
district.
It's green space, it's part ofthe urban sponge of the district
, right.
So when there's this delugethat happens, they'll be
flooding there instead of inneighborhoods and in houses.
(04:19):
That green loop, not only is itlike a way for kids to play
right, there's playgrounds andthere's brooks and other things
alongside it but it also offersan ability to get around the
entire district, to go to thedifferent neighborhoods without
interacting with cars altogether, right.
And so there's this concept oflike living in a place that is
really more about people andquality of life to just
(04:40):
everything is just kind of tunedto a much greater degree than I
think we really look into ortry to do in the US.
Stephanie Rouse (04:47):
I think one of the biggest distinctions reading
your book and you mentioned ithere is that the eco-districts
are adjacent to transit, versusthe way we do it here, where we
plop the intersection andtransit right through the middle
of a district and build all theway around it.
So it's very still, as youmentioned, car heavy and has
some of those environmentalissues that the eco-districts
don't because of the way theylay them out.
Michael Eliason (05:08):
Yeah, it's really interesting.
So we don't take noise planninginto account for the most part
in a lot of the TOD planningthat we do in the US, but that's
not the case in a lot of othercountries.
Germany has requirements aroundnoise levels for residential
districts, and so when they'replanning a new district they'll
actually model the noise andthey'll look at the shape of new
buildings that are coming in,how that can deflect the noise,
(05:31):
other things that they can do tomake it so that when people are
living in their homes it'squiet, they're not inundated
with the noise of traffic.
And in so much of the US weprioritize putting TOD and
transit stations, like you said,on a highway or directly
adjacent to a highway or at theintersection of two major
arterials, and so so much ofthat district is focused on like
(05:53):
having to deal with eithercrossing those two arterials or
one arterial several times a dayto do like even basic tasks,
and so getting around withoutinteracting with cars is almost
impossible, or you're justinundated with, like the noise
and the pollution that comesfrom highways and those kinds of
roads, and so it's a reallyradically different way of
thinking about how we can planplaces, like I said, that
prioritize quality of life, thatprioritize public health as
(06:15):
well.
Jennifer Hiatt (06:17):
And you struck upon one of my pet peeves that I
have working in redevelopment,which is that in the US, we try
to create depth and dimensionwith the push-pull exterior
walls and too many colors andmaterial variations all on one
building.
Instead, you offer the Ilistened to this on Google the
Baugruppen.
Michael Eliason (06:36):
Yeah, Baugruppen.
Jennifer Hiatt (06:37):
Baugruppen no, thank you.
Or building a group model.
So can you explain why the Uaway from it?
We used to kind of have thatmodel historically.
Why have we moved away from itand why should we return to it?
Michael Eliason (06:51):
Yeah.
So the facade modulation thing.
As an architect and as apassive house architect, I find
something that just totallydrives me crazy because we're
playing a game with the facade.
Our buildings are gettinglarger and larger and there's a
number of reasons related tothis.
One is our building codesmandate two means of egress.
In most of the world you can dosingle stair buildings I call
them point access blocks to six,seven, eight stories easily.
(07:14):
We're limited to three in theUS, we can do six in Seattle,
but there's a lot of otherconditions.
So this requirement for twomeans of egress, two stairs,
kind of draws larger and largerdevelopment and then a lot of
times cities will come in andramp up the FAR, the floor area
ratio, the amount of buildablearea on commercially zoned or
multifamily lots, and in a wayit kind of induces these larger
and larger buildings so thatwhen you have redevelopment
(07:36):
let's say it's a historic stripin a neighborhood with like five
, six, seven different buildingson it Maybe they're like
one-story commercial buildingseveryone loves right when that
gets redeveloped it becomes thishuge, massive project and part
of it is related to buildingcode, land use code.
It's also related to how wefinance projects and so we play
these really ridiculous gamesright.
We modulate the facade, changethe colors, maybe change the
(07:56):
materials or setbacks, like froma passive house standpoint.
Every one of those moves is aweakness in our building.
That's a point of durabilityissues and maintenance issues.
In the long term it increasesthe amount of energy that a
building will use.
It increases the embodiedcarbon of a building, and so one
of the ways that, like Europeancountries and other countries,
have gotten around this isthey're allowed to do these
(08:17):
single stair buildings, thesemore fine-grained urban
buildings that you see in theurban context, and so, as that
six or seven parcels on thatblock face get redeveloped right
, they can become, you know, sixseparate entities, six separate
buildings, or they can make sixbuildings that are effectively
all separate single stairbuildings, but you know it's
connected as one cohesive wholeand they can do little things to
kind of make it not be so large.
(08:39):
But our codes really don'tallow this, and so I think any
kind of model that would help usmove away from that is good.
In the European context,baugruppen could be one means of
doing this.
Baugruppen are self-developedurban co-housing, and so it's a
bunch of people coming togetherand planning and developing
their own urban multifamilyhouse right.
So it could be like co-housing,it could be cooperative, the
(08:59):
legal structure isn't quite asimportant, but in a lot of sense
it's really just about peoplecoming together, prioritizing
their values in the development.
So you could come in and say,look, we're all car light
families.
This isn't a neighborhood.
We're going to develop a placethat has a family size housing,
because that's another issue westruggle with in development in
the US.
We're going to have car freedevelopment, we'll have a huge
(09:19):
bike room, we'll have maybe aworkshop or a music room for
kids and some open space forthem to play in.
The point access block kind ofenables a lot of these things to
happen, because in the Europeancontext they use height as the
moderator of density, and so alot of these buildings are going
in in places where three, four,five, six stories are fine.
The lots tend to be a littlebit differently proportioned as
(09:40):
well, but in a lot of respectssimilar to the US narrow on the
street frontage and deep, but nosetbacks, right.
Not having setbacks is a greatthing for avoiding this, and it
just opens up more opportunitiesfor more livable homes in
Balgrip as well.
Stephanie Rouse (09:56):
You've been talking about how the code
issues are really driving designand good design in our
communities, and plenty ofdevelopments in other countries
have proven that many of ourcodes are unnecessarily
restricting good development,like the single stair.
We have a lot of cities orindividual states trying to
tackle these code issues withgetting single stair approved.
Nashville's been successful.
Minnesota, as an AmericanPlanning Association chapter, is
(10:18):
really trying to take on thisissue With examples of good code
revisions working elsewhere.
Why is it so challenging tochange our codes to match?
Michael Eliason (10:27):
So this is a really excellent question.
I think part of the problem inthe US is our codes are written
by a private corporation they'renot written by a government
entity and there's a board forthis entity.
Many of the seats of the boardare held by organizations that
maybe don't care aboutaffordable housing or dense
urban housing or even cities ingeneral.
It's also a long process, likethe process of getting code
(10:48):
changes through.
You know, there's severalrounds of hearings.
It's a multi-year process.
If it gets accepted which is awhole other discussion then it
takes years for it to getadopted into the next code.
Not all states are even usingthe same building code, right?
So some are on the 2018, someare on the 2015, some are even
on like 2012.
Some states don't even havestandardized building codes,
(11:10):
which kind of blows my mind, andso there's like a lot of
variability.
If the code council were toallow it now and they wouldn't
allow it as something that candirectly be adopted, right, it
wouldn't go into the codewriting process.
So the next book until 2027,and then those codes don't get
really adopted until 2028, 2029,2030.
And so we're looking at like adecade out from when we start
(11:30):
seeing buildings like this.
So the process is very long.
It's also in some ways capturedby industry.
So we saw this a little bitwith the push for mass timber in
the building codes.
Like the concrete industry cameout and was like, oh, building
with wood is dangerous, buildingwith mass timber is going to
cause people to be burned.
And it's just kind of mindblowing, right, that we have
this quote unquote democraticprocess but we're not really
(11:52):
using facts, we're using emotionand other things to dictate it.
So I think that's part of it.
In Seattle our building code isover 3,000 pages long, right,
and that's not even referencestandard.
So it's already like everythingis just it's so complex and
technical in ways that I thinklimit a lot of really good
development, or like alternativematerials that you would see in
other multifamily housingabroad.
(12:14):
The single stair one is kind ofthe one that comes up to mind
the most, but also like elevatorcosts.
So I don't know if you sawStephen Smith's elevator report
that was summarized in the NewYork Times.
For a number of differentreasons, elevator costs in the
US are substantially higher thanother countries.
Part of it's related to littlecompetition.
We don't have standardizedcodes.
Even within the same state,different jurisdictions can use
(12:35):
different elevator codes.
So it's kind of the same issueas the building code, right.
Like there's just not a lot ofstandardization and so it's kind
of death by a thousand cuts andall of these other things just
really working to prevent notjust code changes that can
happen in like a rapid or atleast more streamlined way of
adopting things, but also likewe also introduce all of these
other things that othercountries don't have.
(12:56):
So like in Europe, almost nocountries require sprinklers
until you get to about 10stories for multifamily housing.
In the US, two-storymultifamily building we're going
to require sprinklers.
Some jurisdictions require itfor townhomes, right, and so in
a lot of ways we're alreadygoing much further than a lot of
other countries are.
We're not really gettingmassive gains with that right.
So we've got two means tobegress no-transcript, based in
(13:46):
science, I think would be reallygreat.
Jennifer Hiatt (13:48):
You state the US has not really engaged in city
building in decades, and I keptcoming back to how difficult it
feels to city build when most ofthe developable property in the
United States is privatelyowned.
So how should cities begin tothink about overcoming this
obstacle as they start thinkingabout actually engaging in city
building again?
Michael Eliason (14:06):
So I used to think that form-based codes
would be the way that we kind ofwork around all of this.
But there's this interfacebetween the building code and
zoning codes or land use codesthat it doesn't really align
very well, and form-based codeskind of brought that to the
forefront in my thinking evenmore so.
And then a lot of it is reallyjust driven by aesthetics, right
, like if you had a reallysimple form-based code kind of
(14:26):
dictating like where a buildinggoes maximum number of stories,
roof slopes, things of thatnature, like you're starting to
get closer to how, like Germanyplans in their cities, but what
we start seeing is likerequirements on window
orientation All windows must bevertically oriented and X feet
wide, or something and so itjust becomes this like aesthetic
game.
All buildings must have acornice, right, and so it's.
(14:47):
I think you know all of this isreally kind of driven in the
opposite direction that itshould be going.
But many cities are going tohave larger sites strip malls,
malls, airports, whatnot where Ithink we should be starting to
think about mixed-use,ecodistricts and places that
prioritize people and ecology.
One option is and I talk aboutthis in the book the Netherlands
has this process called theurbanisator, where they're
(15:10):
redeveloping a district.
Let's say it's a bunch ofsingle-family homeowners.
They effectively collate all ofthose parcels and go through
the process of replanning andbuilding the infrastructure and
then giving those owners theequivalent value land in what
they do, and so it's a processto work with existing privately
owned property to develop moreurban places.
(15:31):
So that's a really interestingone.
Whether that's something thatwould even be legal in the US is
a question, but I think that ifthere's processes for something
like that, it can producesomething really interesting.
Another option is that the cityitself takes on the role of the
project initiator.
This is really common in a lotof European cities, asian cities
as well.
A lot of German cities have adevelopment agency or department
within the city.
(15:51):
This department will handle theplanning of the district, the
contracts, they'll generallydeal with management of
installation of theinfrastructure, and then what
they'll do is they'll spin offthe sites, and they typically
try to do it in a way that it'slike at cost right, so it's a
zero cost district for the city.
But what they get is theycontrol the land so they can
reserve more sites foraffordable housing.
(16:12):
They can just give those sitesaway, or they could reduce the
price of parcels for morecommunity-oriented or
non-speculative forms of housing, like Baugruppen or
cooperatives or other forms ofaffordable housing, and maybe
elevate the market rate ones alittle bit higher to offset that
.
Even in Munich, when they'reworking with private owners for
land that they're going torezone let's say it's a big
(16:33):
industrial area they're going torezone it for this big
mixed-use place the city'sapproach is like look, we're
rezoning your lands, you'regoing to make a ton of money.
You're going to have to reservesome of that land for
affordable housing.
You're not going to have tobuild it.
We have entities that we workwith to do it.
And so in a way they're able toinduce these large districts
that have 30, 40% affordablehousing.
(16:53):
Another 20 to 30% is likemiddle-class housing, and so
they're able to induce thesedistricts that just have a much
more varied economic and socialmix than we get.
But even at the small scale thisis possible.
And Kirchheim Unterteck, whichis a small village near
Stuttgart, the city redevelopedthis nine-acre parcel using this
process right, they did theplanning, they did the
infrastructure and sold it to abunch of entities.
(17:14):
I think about 50% of theparcels were sold to Baugruppen,
these self-developed urbanco-housing or affordable housing
entities, and so, in the end,what they got was this
cost-neutral district, they gotmore affordable housing, they
got a strong community, and thenthey got a tax base that's
going to remain in that cityrather than flee for the suburbs
, and it just ends up being,like this, really kind of great
(17:35):
place to live.
So, even at the small scale, Ithink this is something that is
totally feasible if we havethings oriented in that
direction.
Stephanie Rouse (17:43):
So if a community has large tracts of
land and they're able to doredevelopment on their terms.
Often in the US we'reaccustomed to using the request
for proposal process versuscompetitions, which seems to be
more common in Europeancountries.
What's the benefit of using acompetition approach and why
don't we use it here in the US?
What's the benefit of using a?
Michael Eliason (18:00):
competition approach and why don't we use it
here in the US?
So it is used a little bit inthe US.
It tends to be for kind oftoken projects, so the GSA, the
General Services Administrationof the government, will use it
for some of their buildings.
The Seattle Public Library usedthe design competition as well.
So I think part of it is likewe just we tend to think of it
as something that's reserved for, like these, jewel boxes of a
building rather than otherthings.
(18:22):
The RFP process in the US issomething that I find to be
really lacking in terms ofinnovation or driving even
sustainability.
You can try to write aspectsinto the RFP, the request for
proposal, that prioritizesustainability or prioritize
innovation, but a lot of timesyou don't really get it and in
the end what ends up happening alot with the RFP process is the
firms that kind of do the samething over and over again.
(18:44):
May not be the greatest, maynot look the great, but they
have all of their costscontrolled.
You know, and they've beendoing it for a long time tends
to get the projects In Europe.
They'll do design competitions,whether that's on the urban
planning side as well as thearchitecture side.
It's generally a blind judging,right.
So you don't know the firmsthat are designing the projects.
You have a sense of what thatdistrict is going to look like
(19:05):
almost immediately, right.
What you see is what you get,and your judging team is
generally a mix of experts,architects, planners, people who
are working for the city ormaybe politicians that are able
to kind of understand what thatprocess will look like and what
the urban form will look likeand how people will get around
in the district and percentagesof open space and all of those
(19:27):
things.
I also think that one of thethings that we struggle with in
the US is we'll do outreach Alot of times.
The outreach process andplanning is really a way for
people to come together and sayno to something Like we don't
want this change, we don't wantthat.
In Germany, when they're goingthrough an urban planning
competition, there's a lot ofleg work that happens at the
beginning.
They'll find out, like, whatthe neighborhood needs.
(19:47):
If, like, a new district isgoing in, maybe there's going to
be a lot of family homes in thedistrict, and so the city will
need to put in a school.
They'll need daycares for thekids, they'll need space for
community and so the city kindof takes all of this stuff,
writes it into the program forthe competition, and then the
planning teams, the architects,urban planners, will incorporate
that into their designs, and soit's, I think, an opportunity
(20:08):
to kind of get more people tocome along.
In the end, right Like peopleare engaged, saying, okay, if
something's going to change, atleast we're getting this, rather
than in the US it's like, well,I don't want anything to change
in my neighborhood, right, sowe're not going to change the
zoning, or multifamily housingis bad, and it kind of becomes
the outreach, becomes kind of abully's veto rather than the
process to incorporate actualpublic participation in the
(20:30):
design process and even thecompetition process in Europe
now is changing a little bit.
France has a very lowqualification threshold that
they'll do for firms, and soit's a way to allow younger
firms, more diverse firms, tohave an opportunity to win a
project, and then they'll alsooffer a stipend for the firms
that are selected.
So it's not free labor, which is, I think, a big issue that a
(20:51):
lot of people have with thecompetition process, but the RFP
process is also a form of freelabor, right Like.
I've worked on massive RFPs andyou know, had to go through the
interview process for this andon a project that we didn't win,
and you don't get anything outof that right, and so there's a
lot of free labor that goes intothe RFP process as well.
I think it would be reallybeneficial for cities to look at
(21:12):
changing their procurementpolicies to move in this
direction.
I think especially around urbandevelopment and how we're
thinking about new neighborhoodsaround transit, instead of,
like, doing all of this stuffthat's kind of a little bit
piecemeal.
Maybe we'll have an urbanframework or a policy framework,
but even I find those tend tobe fairly rare and limited, and
so finding a way to do somethingthat's more comprehensive and
(21:32):
taking all of these other thingsinto account in the long run, I
think would be prettybeneficial.
Jennifer Hiatt (21:37):
And once we get those proposals, however, they
come to us RFP, for the mostpart for American cities.
We often hear halfway into theprocess that, well, we can't do
what we proposed anymore becauseeverything has become so
expensive and we talked a littlebit about this with, like, the
high cost of elevators.
But what makes building in theUnited States so much more
(21:59):
expensive?
What's the root issue here thanin Europe?
Michael Eliason (22:03):
So I think it's like 100 little things and I
moved to Germany in 2019.
And part of the reason I movedwas because I wanted to be close
to the central heart of likemass timber and passive house
and Baugruppen and socialhousing.
But I also wanted to understand, like why you know, german and
Swiss housing is of such ahigher quality for lower costs
than we get here, and I thinkit's a combination of things.
(22:23):
One is salaries are lower,material prices are lower, labor
costs are lower, profit marginsare lower as well.
There's socialized insurance.
I think it's like a hundreddifferent things that really
drive down the cost of whatthey're doing.
I don't know if you've read anyof Alain Levy's work around
transportation costs in the US.
Lévy looked at transportationcosts for infrastructure in the
(22:49):
US and looks at what's going onin other countries and almost
everywhere else.
Construction costs are whetherit's tram, light, rail, bike
lanes, whatever are a fractionof the cost that they are here.
So in some ways, it's almostlike they're able to do more for
significantly less.
But also part of it, too, is, Ithink, that Europe has a long
history of leaning into cities.
In the US we don't right.
(23:10):
In the 20s, we bannedapartments in most of the land
area of cities and adoptedsingle family zoning widespread
throughout most of the USHighway infrastructure went in
sprawl.
We've kind of reached thelimits of sprawl, and so now
people are returning to citiesbut like we forgot how to build
in cities.
Urban building is difficult andexpensive, and so we don't have
(23:30):
that.
You know 200 year history thatyou know Berlin or Vienna or
London or other cities have of.
You know building densely inthese compact urban places, and
so a large part of it too isjust we don't have the
construction infrastructurethat's really been able to ramp
up to do this.
So this goes back to the pointaccess block discussion.
So most housing in the US endsup being a double-loaded
(23:52):
corridor because of ourtwo-stair requirement.
This drives buildings that aregoing to be deeper and deeper,
and cities kind of respond tothe lack of housing by just
opening up far more on existingparcels that are already
multifamily or commercial,rather than distributing it more
broadly.
And so the only way for a lotof development whether it's
affordable housing or marketrate to use that far is to build
(24:14):
deeper and deeper buildings,and so we have these hotel-like
buildings.
In Seattle we're seeingbuildings that are approaching
90, 100 feet deep, and so thatmeans you're living in a studio
that's maybe 10 feet wide by 50feet deep.
It's inducing a lot ofwindowless bedrooms and dark
places, but like it's not theway other places develop right
In Germany, point access block asingle-stair building.
(24:36):
The depth of that building isgoing to be somewhere between 40
to 50 feet.
They can easily fit in the samenumber of people in a much
smaller footprint.
So it's not just like that thelabor costs are different, but
the way that we're building kindof induces these very expensive
buildings, and so it'sdifficult to get a lot of the
quality aspects that you find inthat right.
Like it's difficult to findthree-pane windows that are
(24:57):
affordable, and that's not thecase in Europe, where there are
500 window manufacturers and youknow, once you get window
certification in Germany, youcan sell it to Poland or the
Czech Republic or Spain orwhatever right, and so there's
just a lot more competition andoptions for some of these things
as well, and so I think it'snot one thing, it's just so many
things that are all lining uptogether to make everything here
(25:18):
just so much more expensive andso much more difficult.
Stephanie Rouse (25:21):
Your book is filled with examples of concepts
, most of them coming fromEuropean countries.
Why do you think innovation andcreativity with green building
approaches is so prevalent therebut so hard to replicate here
in the US?
Michael Eliason (25:34):
I think a big part of this is just they never
walked away from cities, right,like low mid-rise urban housing
buildings, right, it's been thenorm for cities, whether it's
affordable housing or luxuryhousing, for a long time.
I think also, just the planningprocess itself induces more
innovation and creativity.
Right, we talked about this alittle bit.
With urban planning,competition kind of allows for
(25:55):
people to try out new ideas ornew concepts.
A really interesting example ofthis is Henning Larsen's Fallen
Bee Project in Copenhagen.
It's kind of in this green areathat's not quite urban city but
not quite village, and so theytook it as this opportunity to
create this new hybrid wherethere's blocks that are all kind
of focused on the centralsquare.
The parts of the block, thebuildings that are facing that
(26:17):
central square, are much moreurban, and then it kind of
devolves into more village-typebuilding typologies and then
back to nature, right, and soit's offering different ways of
even thinking about developingplaces.
So, part of it is the planningprocess.
Part of it is just the costissue.
And the cost issue is reallyfunny.
In the US, single-family housesare built under a separate
(26:39):
building code, the IRC, theInternational Residential Code.
That is a much easier code tobuild to than the International
Building Code, and so we havethis cost disparity, this
bifurcation, where low densitysprawl is inexpensive to build
and, like low rise to mid riseto high rise, it keeps going up
in cost.
And that's not really the casein other countries.
(27:00):
Right, in Germany, even Spain,italy, the single family house
is like the most expensive tobuild, like, if you're looking
at it on a cost per square footbasis, by the time you go to
like low rise, mid rise, thecosts kind of drop and they
level out a little bit, and sothere's not this huge cost
increase associated withbuilding density.
Right, it's like you'reactually seeing the benefits of
density and that the costs arecoming down rather than up, and
(27:22):
so it's.
You know, I don't know how weget around to this cost issue,
but, like I said, it affectstransportation, it affects
everything from bike lanes tobuildings.
I think it's something that wereally have to get our head
around.
Jennifer Hiatt (27:34):
I would agree and changing course just a
little bit.
One of the concepts youmentioned in your book is called
a sponge city, so I waswondering if you could talk
about what that concept is andhow cities can incorporate these
principles for betterstormwater management.
Michael Eliason (27:48):
So the sponge city is an urban planning
principle or concept aroundflood and stormwater management
that's generally associated withblue-green infrastructure.
The concept originated in Chinaand is increasingly being
adopted in a lot of German andDutch cities, increasingly, with
the effects of climate changeas well.
We are starting to see it inthe US.
(28:09):
Pittsburgh, la, new York Cityare also expending pretty
significant sums of money to tryto mitigate flooding and future
deluge and rain events.
What I find so fascinatingabout this is that it's not just
flood mitigation, right Like.
It's an opportunity to re-greenour cities.
A kind of common example fromDenmark, from Copenhagen, is
(28:30):
depaving a street, putting ineffectively this large park
space that you know when there'sa flood event, it floods, it
absorbs the rainwater so thatthe houses and other things
don't flood, but when it's notflooding, it's urban heat island
mitigation.
It's a play space, it's a placefor pollution to kind of go and
filter out instead of ending upin the air.
(28:50):
It's really a way of kind ofbringing together a lot of
concepts right Adapting toclimate change, prioritizing
public health, prioritizingquality of life and access to
nature in a way that I think ismuch more comprehensive and
cohesive, and it can be anythingfrom like tree wells to
bioswales at the small scale.
Just rethinking our courtyardsright to have spaces where water
(29:13):
can go and where we can collectit during deluge events.
Thinking about blue roofs onstructures as well.
So our green roofs work as well, but the blue roof is kind of
like a rainwater containmentsystem on a roof that slowly
percolates back down in thesystem, the sewage system, so
that it doesn't overwhelm andcause flooding down the line.
But you know, with climatechange, we're going.
We're already seeing theeffects of increased rain events
(29:35):
, deluges, and so I think we'regoing to be having to think a
lot more about how to mitigateand adapt to these things in the
long term.
So many US cities are just nowstarting to think about this and
we're probably, you know easilya decade behind where we need
to be to even start to move onthis.
And then there's, you know,significant questions about
funding.
And you know, if we're depavingstreets for blue-green
(29:55):
infrastructure, are people goingto fight that because they want
space for private car parking?
Stephanie Rouse (30:07):
And it's just this ongoing conversation in the
US.
So eco districts are one waythat we can start building
towards sponge cities in the US.
What are some of the firststeps that our city should start
taking to incorporate ecodistrict concepts in our
communities?
Michael Eliason (30:15):
I think a big one is just understanding that
building depth can play a bigrole in limiting the amount of
space for this, and so we'reseeing this in Seattle and areas
where we allow density, most ofthe lot is going to be consumed
by the building.
We don't regulate floor platedepth and so, like I said, we're
seeing buildings that averagebetween 80 to 90 feet deep.
It's almost twice as deep asyou would see in the European
(30:35):
context.
On the West Coast, this numberis only going up because the
housing crisis, I think, is sosevere.
I've seen a floor plate inDenver that's 120 feet deep it
just blows my mind.
And then it's got like threewindowless bedrooms in it, right
, and so it just blows my mindthat this is kind of the types
of places that we're building.
But when our buildings are thisdeep, if you think about a
block, if there's a courtyard,it's going to be really small.
(30:58):
If your building is eventwo-thirds of that, if it's 70
feet deep at least, you havemore space for nature, you have
more space for trees, you havemore space for blue-green
infrastructure, space forcommunity, there's more privacy.
So I think a big part of it isjust cities don't understand
this interface between buildingcode and land-use code.
That's a big one.
But also just the effects ofthe land-use code at a broader
(31:19):
level is not really studied tothe degree that it should be.
And so if you look at likehistorical perimeter blocks in
Hamburg or Berlin, new districtsare kind of replicating that.
You know taller buildings, thinfloor plates, a lot more green
space.
New districts are doing that.
They're just doing it indifferent ways.
Maybe they're taller or thebuildings are a little bit
different, but there's still,like this, ample space for
(31:42):
community, ample space forclimate adaptation, and in the
way we're doing our planning inthe US, so much of it feels like
okay, our land use code is justgoing to give X amount of FAR,
we're not going to limit thefloor plate depth, architecture
team, developer team, go.
And we see this a lot in Seattleright now.
If you have a lot that's narrowand deep, we can do an
apartment on it.
Let's say it's 60 feet wide,we'll do a 50-unit apartment,
(32:03):
double-loaded corridor.
Well, you've got 25 units onone side of the corridor, 25
units on the other, and thenthat exact same building goes
down next door.
Well, instead of having unitsthat are oriented towards the
street and open space.
You now have 25 units in onebuilding looking directly at 25
units in another building, right, and that issue becomes even
more problematic in a lot ofcities where, like those
(32:24):
multifamily zones start tointeract with the single family
zones, right, because that edgecondition becomes so much
greater, right, all of a sudden,the single family homeowner
went from like having oneneighbor who couldn't really
look into his yard to like thisbig building with like 50 units
looking into his yard.
And so the way we're planningour cities, we're not taking a
lot of these things into accountand I think it's not allowing
space for climate adaptation,it's not allowing space for even
(32:45):
people to feel like they'recomfortable.
You know, I have a daughter.
The building next door had, youknow, 25 units looking directly
at us and it's only 10 feetaway, like.
That's like a differentcondition than what we had
before, and so I think it'sunderstanding that the effects
of our land use codes have, likethese long-term effects that if
we're not really taking intoaccount, can be kind of negative
towards not just developingplaces that are better, but also
(33:06):
I think it can induce moreresistance to urban development.
Jennifer Hiatt (33:11):
So, on top of your book, which we recommend
everyone go out and pick up acopy of, what books would you
recommend our readers check out?
Michael Eliason (33:18):
David Simms' Soft City.
David's book was actually thebook I originally wanted to
write, but his book is so muchbetter.
It was so well written.
If you haven't read David'sbook, I highly recommend it.
I'd like to think that his bookand my book are like a good
one-two punch on how and why tobuild better cities and
buildings in the US.
We were also a car-free familyfor six years two kids so the
(33:41):
subject of mobility is reallyimportant to us, as well as
climate adaptation and trying tobe living some of the values
that we talk about, and soanything related to street
transformations, deprioritizingcars very high on our list.
Veronica Davis's InclusiveTransportation, marco
Tebromostrot's movement, wesMarshall's Killed by a Traffic
Engineer is next in my queue,and I'm also currently reading
(34:06):
Kristen Godsey's Everyday Utopia, which is about just the
history of collective urbandevelopment as well, which is
really interesting.
Stephanie Rouse (34:13):
All great books .
A couple Island Press in therethat we've covered.
Michael Eliason (34:16):
Yeah, I think most of them are.
Yeah, I have way too manyIsland Press books.
Jennifer Hiatt (34:20):
No, you can't have too many Island Press books
Otherwise, like the wholebookshop behind me is too many
books.
Michael Eliason (34:26):
Yeah, no, I was really excited when they agreed
to publish my book because Ifelt like it was the place that
it would land best, and so it'sjust been great to be working
with them.
Stephanie Rouse (34:36):
Well, michael, thank you so much for joining us
on Booked On Planning to talkabout your book Building for
People Designing Livable,affordable, low-carbon
Communities.
Michael Eliason (34:44):
Thanks again.
Jennifer Hiatt (34:46):
We hope you enjoyed this conversation with
Michael Eliasson about hisBuilding for for People
Designing Livable, affordable,low-carbon Communities.
You can get your own copythrough the publisher at Island
Press, or click the link in theshow notes to take you directly
to our affiliate page.
Remember to subscribe to theshow wherever you listen to
podcasts and please rate, reviewand share the show.
Thank you for listening andwe'll talk to you next time on
(35:08):
Booked on Planning.
Thank you.
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