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From Market Urbanism writer Emily Washington: “Earlier this week I attended an Urban Land Institute event about DC’s new development, The Yards.  This is a 42-acre area that was formerly a manufacturing center for the Navy.  In 2003, Forest City Washington purchased the site from the General Services Administration for residential, retail, and office redevelopment.

“During the presentation, I was reminded of Ronald Coase’s 1937 paper, ‘The Nature of the Firm’.  He explains that firms exist, rather than each worker serving as his own contractor, because firms reduce the transaction costs of contracting for individual projects:

“‘In economic theory we find that the allocation of factors of production between different uses is determined by the price mechanism.  The price of factor A becomes higher in X than in Y.  As a result, A moves from Y to X.  Yet in the real world, we find that there are many areas where this does not apply.  If a workman moves from department Y to department X, he does not go because of a change in relative prices, but because he is ordered to do so.’

“In the case of The Yard, this means that Forest City Washington is saving money on development expenses…and giving up the price system which would better direct firms developing individual parcels to know what their customer want.  This tradeoff is represented above.  Firms will increase in size until the cost of not being able to rely on the price system is equal to the transaction costs of contracting work out.

“During her presentation, Deborah Ratner Salzberg stressed her firm’s objective of creating a ‘complete neighborhood’ with a balance of residential development and a mix of retail.  By one firm developing this entire small neighborhood, they had the advantages of knowing which tenants were likely to sign leases in which buildings and controlling the vision for development within one company.  However, they were not bidding against other developers to determine the highest-value buildings for each parcel, meaning that planning, rather than the price mechanism, shaped the definition of a ‘complete neighborhood.’”  Full article here.

From Atlantic Cities writer Mark Bergen: “BANGALORE, India — Ascend to the top floor of the UB Tower downtown, and you can nearly see the city’s full expanse from all sides.  The skyscraper, the centerpiece of the five-year-old luxury shopping mall UB City, is one of the city’s tallest structures.  It stands 420 feet.

“More than 100 buildings rise higher in both New York and Hong Kong, though each is less populous.  Cities in China and southeast Asia rise high, but Indian ones did not.  Most grew like Bangalore: outwards and compact.  It leads to a natural question: Why aren’t Indian cities that tall?  But there are others who pose a very different query: Why should they be?

S. Vishwanath, an urban planner, lives in Vidyaranyapura, a neighborhood in the city’s far northwest with rows of squat, single-family homes and buzzing shops.  He would like every neighborhood to resemble his.  India, he claims, is best suited for ‘poly-nodal’ urbanism — a bunch of self-contained cities within the city.  ’People won’t have to travel outside of two or three kilometers,’ he explains.

“That vision is a relief for anyone who has braved Bangalore rush hour. But he is less concerned with traffic than resources, particularly water.  Tall buildings, where water has to move up several stories, can have wider ecological footprints.  ’While the low-rise consumes more land, the high-rise consumes more energy,’ says Sathya Prakash Varanashi, an architect who has worked in the city for two decades.

“Both men do, however, wield judgment on the impact vertical growth has on society.  They see shorter, dense structures as more conducive to public life.  ’The strength of India has always been that there is mixed land use in every part of town,’ argues Vishwanath.  Residents dwell alongside shop owners, street vendors and the legions of working poor.”  Full article here.

From Decoist writer Sherry Nottingham: “A couple in Singapore decided that they would try and bring back their childhood days by converting an old book shop in the historic Joo Chiat Place in Singapore.  With the help of CHANG Architects a careful restoration and renovation project was embarked on.

“The building purchased by the couple was a book store called ‘Lucky Book Store’ and was originally built way back in 1920.  The idea of the owners was to convert the main structure of the book shop into a spacious dwelling area, while a single-story modern home would be constructed on an empty plot right behind the shop, and linking both these areas and surrounding the newly added home with a beautiful garden.

“The interiors of the book shop were made less congested by removing all the existing non-structural parts.  This created large and flowing spaces, while it also showcased the historic past of the edifice.  ”  Full post with several images here.

From a press release from Keenan/Riley: “K/R’s recently completed Garden Building is a two-story mixed-use building with an intensively landscaped green roof in the heart of the Miami Design District.  The original site served as an expansive garden for private and public events.  The new Garden Building expands on this vision, incorporating retail space on the ground floor, a mixed-use second story space and a green roof garden.”  On the building’s facade, “just above street level, a series of jewel-like glass ‘vines’ are suspended within finely crafted frames.”  Full press release here.

For designing small, attached urban buildings, what  wisdom can Terry Riley share?  From an email from Mr. Riley:  ”Starting out as a young architect in New York City, I became very used to the idea that the facade defines the structure — in many more ways than in suburbia where buildings tend to be free-standing.”  You heard it here first, folks: focus on the facade.  Congrats on an attractive, exemplary building!

From Urban Indy writer Graeme Sharpe: “Have you ever been to an old downtown and marveled at the historic buildings? Have you ever wondered how they could create such beautiful buildings on such small budgets, compared to the placeless architecture we are told is barely affordable today?”

“The truth is that those multi-story, mixed-use buildings lining the street were built by a different culture.  But that old American culture was a very clever one, and we can profit from studying what they did right, and how they did it.

“The typical traditional urban building is between 20 to 40 feet wide, and between 60 to 200 feet deep.  This small width was a product of structural engineering limitations.  A traditional building with masonry walls and wooden floors could not span further without significant cost increases

“Perhaps even more importantly, the small sizes encouraged ordinary citizens to become developers.  Many buildings were financed directly by business owners or residents, who would offset building costs with lease income from unused spaces.  These self-developing streetscapes ensured that no single developer or architect controlled the evolution of the city.  It would reflect a social, shared history instead.

“Traditional buildings, and traditional streetscapes by extension, never happened overnight. They evolved over time, as each small plot was filled in and then raised upwards.  The neat thing about masonry walls is that they can support an incredible amount of weight if they are braced at each floor level, so adding a new floor on top was usually a simple process.

“Minimum Parking Requirements, whether for permitting compliance or loan approval, have been the single greatest enemy of the traditional building technique.  The key lessons here are to create a development environment where buildings can start small, expand gradually, and create mutually beneficial relationships with their neighbors.”  Full post here.

From Old Urbanist blogger Charlie Gardner: “Do front-loading garages truly present an insoluble design problem for the rowhouse format?  A quote from Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk’s The Second Coming of the American Small Town illustrates this common point of view: ‘When housing achieves a certain density but parking remains a necessity, the car’s house (the garage) overwhelms the human’s house. No architect is skillful enough to make human life project itself on the façade of a house when 60 percent of it is given over to garage doors.’

“Taking the 60 percent figure as a rule of thumb, we’ll then say that no more than 50 percent of a façade can be occupied by a garage door before the aestheticsbecome intolerable.  Using this figure, we get, for single-car garage rowhouses, a width of no less than 16′ [and] for two-car garage homes, a width of no less than 32′.

“Now, 16 feet is an extremely common width for rowhouses in the older neighborhoods of Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., but contemporaryattempts to integrate standard 8′ garages on these lots usually have not, in my opinion, succeeded.  What if we were to widen the lot a bit more?  These early 20th century rowhomes in the Sunset neighborhood in San Francisco, at 25 feet across, lessen the visual impact of the garage doors.

“Once we take a look at models beyond the United States, however, we see that far better street level results can be achieved using the same dimensions.  These Mexico City homes, at around 25 feet wide, present a friendlier face to the street.  The garage door itself, stylistically integrated with the window bars and iron balcony railing, is relatively inconspicuous.”  Full post here.

ULI recently started a Small-Scale Development initiative, including a series of 2-day meet-ups around the country, special events at larger ULI conferences, and an online community. From the website: “Join other entrepreneurial developers who are focused on infill and smaller-scale projects for this exclusive ULI members only program.  The result is an intimate alliance of professionals engaged in an ongoing exchange of best practices in the niche area of small-scale and infill development.”

I went to the 2nd meet-up (last year in DC) and enjoyed it, and more importantly the program is going in the right direction, strengthening small-increment infill developers individually and as a community.  The next meet-up will be Feb 28 to March 1 in New Orleans. I’ll be attending, and I encourage you to consider and fwd this invitation to anyone who may be interested.  Below is the program outline, and you have to apply at the link above.

• Thurs, Feb 28, 3 PM: Registration followed by panel discussion, reception, and dinner.
• Fri, March 1, 8:30 AM to 5 PM: Panel, project tour, skills instruction, and deal sharing.
• Panel Discussion: Lessons from the Worst Deal I Ever Did
• Panel Discussion: New Normal, New Opportunities
• Project Tour & Case Study: Adaptive Use, Infill
• Skill Instruction: Entity Formation for Small Developers
• Skill Instruction: Capital Structure Options and Implications
• Skill Instruction: Finding the Best Consultants
• Skill Instruction: Deal Presentation Tips
• Attendee Deal Sharing: What Can I Do Differently

From Better! Cities & Towns writer Joe Nickol: “Recently I have been working in Nashville, Tennessee, meeting with, among many others, representatives from the visual arts, music, and business communities to discuss ways that new downtown development can reinforce Nashville’s legacy as one of the most creative cities in North America.

“The central question of this exploration is what about this city allows Nashvillians to use it to develop explosive musical talent generation after generation while developing brains at an equally impressive rate?  If not for key physical attributes, Nashvillians could not have used their city in a highly adaptive and productive manner.  These attributes include:

“Affordable, hyper-adaptive buildings that age well.  Nashville has a diverse stock of buildings that were practically constructed and whose simplicity has allowed them to adapt to changing market needs through time.  Although, like most other cities, newer buildings largely fail to abide by this pattern, they have pulled uses out of the aging stock to allow creative reuse at price points that allow musicians and startups to access and afford them.  This flexibility in use affords great resilience to economic changes and positions the city well to take take advantage of unforeseen opportunities.

“Compression, Connectivity, and Inter-Mixing.  Practical, well-constructed buildings are not enough.  Cities such as Nashville thrive on compression and interconnectivity between buildings, places, and users.  This allows strangers and acquaintances to come together comfortably and organically to perform and exchange ideas.  This is the birthplace of technology (in the classic sense of the word) and the hotbed of innovation where new ideas are constantly emerging from old ones.

“But not all cities are like the music industry.  Many are like corporations.  They tend to tense up as they grow and age.  This generally tilts policy and behavior toward protecting largeness at the expense of the more resilient scale of the tinkerers, innovators, and startups.  The effects of doing so can be seen in our urban landscapes when many small parcels and buildings get assembled into creating super-blocks and mega structures.”  Full article here.

The writings of Nassim Taleb inspired this post more than a year ago, and recently inspired Strong Towns writer Charles Marohn: “Today, after being able to read the Patron Saint of Strong Towns Thinking Nassim Taleb’s new book Antifragile, I am able to more fully grasp, and explain more succinctly, the concept I was struggling so hard to develop.

“A city built in the traditional development pattern — the human settlement approach used for millennia across geographies and cultures — has high upside and low downside.  In periods of robust growth, it will prosper.  In periods of stagnation and decline, it will not fall apart or implode but actually experience innovation and undergo renewal.  This is beyond resilience; it is antifragile.

“In Taleb’s book he has a chart where he lists fragile and antifragile approaches across a broad spectrum of social endeavors, from finance to medicine.  The last entry is ‘urbanism’ where he lists: ‘Fragile: Robert Moses.  Antifragile: Jane Jacobs.’

“We have come to see the stagnation and decline of our blocks and neighborhoods as a normal part of the development process.  It is not.  The normal course of human development is for successful cities to mature incrementally over time.  When that occurs, they become financially resilient.  That is what literally thousands of years of human history tells us is the ‘normal’ pattern for cities; an incremental maturing process where prior investments are built on, expanded and enhanced over time.”

“As James Howard Kunstler wrote, so many American cities simply committed suicide.  It was self-inflicted damage, but injury was not the intention.  The goal was growth.  A community’s emphasis needs to shift from creating growth quickly and easily to building value in a broad and incremental way.”  Full post here.

From Atlantic Cities writer Emily Badger: “Dan and Ben Miller began tugging two years ago at a simple question they believe is central to the failings of the American real estate industry.  The brothers – sons of a well-known Washington, D.C. developer – had begun acquiring properties themselves in the city’s emerging neighborhoods where traditional capital seldom goes.

“This model – with its broken connection between a neighborhood’s desires and its investors’ bottom line – seemed to the brothers illogical.  Most American cities as we know them today weren’t built this way.  Historically, hotels and restaurants and shops were built by local people investing in their own neighborhoods.

“The Millers have invested the last two years and nearly a million dollars in trying to answer this question: Why can’t small-time investors put their money in their own communities?  You can’t buy into a true real estate deal unless government regulators believe you’re wealthy enough to know how to handle your own money.  Until now, the Millers themselves have been restricted to raising funds from accredited investors they personally know.

“Then, finally, in August, they successfully took a single property on H Street public.  Under a new company called Fundrise, the Millers invited anyone in the area – accredited or not – to invest online in this one building and its future business for shares as small as $100, in a public offering qualified by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“When the Millers first started mulling this, they had no idea if what they wanted to do was logistically possible.  The SEC does, however, have a little-used mechanism – Regulation A – that permits small offerings to unaccredited investors in exchange for time-consuming and financially costly scrutiny by both federal and state regulators.  In 2011, 19 such offerings were filed with the SEC.

“Ben remembers sitting in the conference room with a real estate lawyer, explaining that he and Dan wanted to raise money from small-time investors for small, local projects.  ’He looked at me,’ Ben says, ‘and he said, “Why would you bother with the little people?”‘  In all, the Millers went through half a dozen law firms, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars along the way, before finally landing in the summer of 2011 at O’Melveny & Myers.  Every one of the 3,250 shares the Millers offered was taken, with the average investor putting in close to $2,000.

“While the Millers were trudging through their Regulation A filing, Congress unexpectedly took up crowdfunding and baked a new regulatory exemption for it into the JOBS Act, allowing unaccredited investments by most people of up to $2,000 a year.  In the meantime, the Millers have already submitted another Regulation A filing for a different property they own on H Street (byzantine SEC rules forbid them from admitting that they have another public sale in the works, but we just looked it up in a public database).

“Tech entrepreneurs keep telling him we don’t get you guys, and he takes this as a compliment. They always want to know, bemused, ‘what’s in it for you?’ And it’s a good question. ‘For us, God,’ Ben says, leaning back in his chair as if to take in something massive in front of him, ‘imagine if we become the platform for how people participate in and build and invest in their environment.’” Full article here.