“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”
When an old person plants a tree they know well that they will likely not live to see the plant grow up to bear fruits or enjoy its shade, still, they do it so that future generations will benefit from it.
Trees are a key component of any sustainable and resilient community.
They provide us with many practical benefits like:
Food, like nuts and fruits
Shade to cool our homes and cities, mitigating the impact of the urban heat island effect. Transpiration from trees further cools the atmosphere like giant swamp coolers.
Trees make our streets safer by changing the scale of the street, influencing driver perception, and slowing them down.
Trees hold lots of water in a rain event, slowing stormwater run-off and the potential for flooding.
Forests and other nonagricultural lands absorb a net of 13 percent of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions.
Trees sequester carbon from the atmosphere, reducing the greenhouse effect, all while releasing oxygen.
Stress relief-researchers have found that certain works of art or natural scenes are visually appealing and stress-relieving – and one crucial factor is the presence of the repetitive patterns called fractals. Exposure to natural patterns & fractals like trees can reduce stress by up to 60%.
People have a sense of history in old trees. Mature trees instill a sense of establishment and security. They are stately and have withstood the test of time, often for generations. The Banyon tree in Lahaina is an excellent example.
The average lifespan of a newly constructed house is 70–100 years, assuming exceptional maintenance. The lifespan of trees can be as much as 300 years or more, depending on the species. The growing conditions we provide for them will dramatically impact lifespan. Given the right conditions to thrive, trees can outlive many of our homes by generations, providing all the benefits listed above for decades and even centuries.
Trees should be considered a critical part of future urban infrastructure development and the design of our cities, towns, and neighborhoods. They cannot be an optional item, planted when all other needs, real or perceived, are met.
Those of us who work in community development or “city building”, as we often refer to it at Consilium
Design, understand that the noted Greek proverb applies to much more than the planting of trees. The work we do to create great places for living should focus on more than a flashy branding campaign to get the sale of a new home to the first homeowner. It should be focused on how we build places that will be “home” for generations to come.
When we advocate through our designs for narrower streets, it’s not just to save our client money. It’s to reduce the amount of impervious asphalt and concrete we introduce into the environment, the pollution created by its manufacture, and the expense of perpetual maintenance. It’s because narrower streets are safer streets. It’ because land not used for streets can be land for homes, open space, and biodiversity within the community.
When we design and advocate for higher density, It is not just for the bottom line. It is to give people more opportunities to be less automobile-dependent and have better access to transit and other community resources. It is to make housing more attainable and closer to employment.
When we integrate public spaces as the focus of our designs, we advocate for a fundamental right of a free society- freedom of movement and public assembly, in all its forms.
We are creating a backdrop for the growth of healthy and free communities.
As “city builders”, we will never live in most of the places we create, but the “trees we plant” both literally and figuratively, will provide shelter and shade for our children and many future generations.
Innovative approaches to neighborhood and community planning and design can significantly contribute to housing attainability. The following are ways to achieve attainability with innovative neighborhood and community planning and design.
Low Impact Design
Successful low impact neighborhood and community design is more than just building ever bigger houses on ever smaller lots. Low impact design reduces infrastructure costs while maximizing open space and protecting vital habitat, historical, and cultural features of the site. Thereby, creating a sense of place-an amenity valued more than ever by homebuyers and community stakeholders.
Low impact design contributes to attainability by:
Reducing the overall development footprint and increasing density. A great example of this is at Leyden Rock in Arvada, Colorado, where low-impact site design resulted in 40% higher density than conventional development in the surrounding area while preserving 3 times as much open space.
Reducing the linear feet of street and utility improvements per home, resulting in lower infrastructure costs.
Using shared drives, loop lanes, and “Woonerfs” (living streets) for access to homes reduces the number of streets needed for access and the impervious surface area, providing both economic and environmental benefits.
Reducing the amount of impervious surface in streets, walks and drives reduces the extent and cost of stormwater infrastructure required and leaves more area in the landscape leading to increased infiltration and reduced runoff.
Planning compact lots and xeric landscape design, which reduces the expense of water and maintenance costs to the homeowner.
Design For All Life Stages
Attainability is an issue for all homebuyers, not just first-time buyers. Designing communities for all life stages contributes to housing attainability by broadening the type of homes and range of costs available to homebuyers. People at different life stages have different housing needs, financial goals, and resources. The needs and finances for a first-time homebuyer may be significantly different than an active adult move-down buyer.
Simplify the Landscape and Preserve Open Space.
Preserving the existing landscape whenever possible ensures it is the most affordable and resilient landscape in a community. Restoring disturbed areas with native landscape whenever possible promotes affordable installation and maintenance.
Be judicious with amenity improvements. The most important and desirable amenity for neighborhoods and communities is space, but it doesn’t need to be filled with all the latest trends. Create simple, cost-effective spaces that will continue to benefit the community and a wide range of users as time passes and resident demographics change.
Light Touch Density
The most affordable homes, neighborhoods, and communities in the United States are the ones we already have. We cannot build our way to attainability solely by building large single-family home communities within greenfield development or with high-density development in the urban core. New home and infrastructure construction costs are the highest they have ever been, and it is highly unlikely they will go down anytime soon. It is counterintuitive to think we can use the most expensive construction costs, often combined with significant political resistance (Nimbys) to meet our attainable housing needs.
LTD is a naturally affordable and inclusionary pattern of development that was commonplace 100 years ago. It’s the triple-deckers of Boston, the row houses of Philly and San Francisco, the brownstones of New York, and the various larger (but still generally walk-up) apartment buildings interspersed into that fabric. Moderately higher density and use by right zoning allows the free market to add substantially to supply. It drives smaller incremental investments by thousands of owners, developers, builders, and others, which allows for flexibility, resiliency, and mid-course correction based on feedback as opposed to relying on fewer, expensive mega projects, often in suburban or exurban locations.
LTD does not require subsidies, inclusionary zoning, income limits, rent caps, or complex plans.
LTD housing promotes filtering down, which does not happen when expensive housing projects built in limited quantities dominate the market. Instead, it works best when masses of homes are produced at or below the middle of the price spectrum.
LTD homes can have substantially lower prices and rents than single-family detached homes or large multifamily projects and adds more supply, diversity in form, and size choices for lower income households. LTD allows for more efficient use of existing and new infrastructure and generates higher tax yield per acre.
Light-Touch Density is useful in modestly increasing density in multiple ways:
In-fill: providing additional units such as an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) or adding a second unit to an existing single-family detached lot.
In-fill: tearing down an existing unit and replacing it with duplexes, triplexes, quadraplexes, or townhouses.
In-fill: a lot-split to allow increased density.
Greenfield: increasing as-built density.
Greenfield and Infill: increasing density by adding additional floor(s) or reducing the size of the units in a planned new apartment or condo building.
All these LTD strategies would moderately increase the as-built density of the land, thereby enabling owners/builders to construct smaller, less expensive units that are more naturally affordable & inclusionary without requiring subsidies.
Overdependence on high density housing can be counterproductive to affordability. Mid and high-rise construction technology is generally the most expensive construction form used in home building, and it is often built on the most expensive residentially zoned property in the marketplace, yet many communities focus their housing goals solely on this housing form. Most missing middle homes use basic construction techniques and doesn’t require features like elevators, steel-frame construction, or structured parking that add expense and complexity.
On the opposite end of the supply spectrum is the single-family home. In most parts of the country, new single-family homes are constructed in suburban conditions. Land may be more affordable, but water and infrastructure expansion costs add significantly to land cost, and ultimately, home cost. Exorbitant tap fees and other impact fees further drive up the per-home cost of building which then pushes builders to build larger homes to offset these costs. Adding supply at the high end yields few new homes and fewer move-ups from less expensive housing. Think of it this way: Imagine if car manufacturers could only legally build Ferraris. Filtering down would be limited as few new cars would be sold, existing car prices would sky-rocket, and few could afford new or used cars.
The sweet spot for affordability is in “Missing Middle” housing, in all its forms from duplexes to small apartment buildings, as well as other arrangements like cottage courts.
It can fit on a regular urban lot, without the developer needing to buy up multiple lots to combine them, and can be done by a relatively small-scale, semi-amateur developer without a huge amount of capital. LTD adds to supply in the middle and yields a greatly increased number of move-ups from less expensive existing housing—making the most affordable housing we have attainable for new homeowners or renters. It offers many more ownership opportunities, helps close the socio-economic status wealth gap, and reduces homelessness.
Low impact design, design for all life stages, simplifying the landscape and preserving open space, and light touch density all can play a part in providing more attainable and sustainable homes, neighborhoods, and communities.
