Nobody does excellent work under duress. You gotta care.

For the last 13 years since the the Financial Crisis I have been relentlessly haranguing my friends, (good people who are very skilled Architects, planners, and urban designers) to take up the craft of small scale development. I have to admit that I have largely failed at this effort with some of my most capable colleagues and friends. I figure this comes from my sincere belief that in a world slouching toward waste and mediocrity, somebody has got to be committed enough to be an asshole in the service of meaningful and important work. Some folks are just not suited to being an asshole, or would prefer not to take on work that requires that kind of activity.

I keep coming back to the need to get more good places built/rebuilt. Who is realistically going to implement a robust and excellent plan and urban design?

The municipal staff and the dedicated local volunteer activists and elected officials? Seriously? Come on. The deck is perversely stacked against the best of them on a good day. I have yet to see those folks be able to get it done. On some occasions they may actually interfere with the proper implementation (— often with the best of intentions). I have had senior planning staff argue with me about the intent of the drafters of the locally adopted TND code, when I was the sole drafter of the TND code in question.

Urban Design + Development is a both/and, not an either/or proposition. Who has the most impact upon what gets built in the private realm and public realm? The urban designer or the party responsible to install and pay for the utilities, streets and squares? A competent developer understands how an enhanced public realm adds functionality and value to private parcels and buildings. I have spent a good portion of the the last 25 years fighting with municipalities to get them to allow me to build a better public realm and to not waste my budget for building stormwater management measures, streets, squares and other public amenities on dumb but orderly nonsense. There are plenty of unfortunate standards that do not provide any increase in function or value. Building the wrong stuff with greater predictability at huge expense is not a skill we need. As an urbanist developer, I have to train every local civil engineer and utility design office touching our projects on how to create a decent public realm. In the end, the developer also has to wrestle with the fire marshal to keep their unfortunate formulas and shortsighted standard worship from screwing up the public realm and jeopardizing public health and safety.

If urban design consultants and planners are successful in crafting good codes and good plans and they are successful in training and coaching the municipal staff who will be charged with administering the codes, in spite of incursions from the utility companies, the fire marshal and the public works department, then the public realm may be delivered competently. But for all the good intentions of elected officials, Community Development Directors, Planning Directors, architectural review boards, and senior planning and urban design staff, as the developer I end up having to push to get a decent public realm built I have to fight against the endless forces of entropy, the swirling gumbo of lousy habits, comfortable conventions, arbitrary parking standards, lousy management of the public parking resource, outdated peer reviewed standards and standards that never really existed (--but everyone involved seems to believe they must be written down somewhere...)

Urban design skills are essential to becoming a competent and solvent developer because otherwise you cannot deliver the decent and necessary public realm.

Developers have to know the current versions of the IRC and IBC, the International Existing Building Code, the manuals of the Fire Department, ASHTOE, ITE, the local Public Utility Commission's Green Book of accepted typical details and engineering protocols. They should know them better than the front line staff they encounter from all the various silos and better than the department heads.

In my view, an urban designer or Architect who has the vision of what a place can be should not just work for an hourly fee or a completion bonus. If you know how great the place can be, that it will be so much better than the sum of the parts, the pieces of the public and private realm being discussed, then you should develop and build.

You should own the buildings that will hold some of the value you helped create. Own buildings that produce passive income so that you can pass on some wealth and security to your family or your favorite local cause. Own assets that generate cash flow, so that you can be more selective about the clients you agree to work with. Own buildings that produce cash flow regardless of your day to day activity, in case there is a crushing financial crisis and you can't find clients to send an invoice to so you can pay your own rent or mortgage and feed your household in lean times.

Own some buildings in the place you care about building/rebuilding so that you can have time to mentor and coach the next generation, to travel and learn, to take long walks without having to take a client's phone call and scurry back to the office to make yet another round of dumb changes you don't agree with....

The developer has to be the active ingredient, the yeast, the leavening agent that makes bread possible out of water, salt, and flour. If all you have is lots of flour, water, and salt, no matter how much you add of any of these ingredients, you will not produce great bread.

End of rant. Contact me if you are ready to make the move from Planner, Architect, or urban designer to developer. I will introduce you to people from your tribe who made the pivot.

janderson@andersonkim.com

Five over 1 Podium Explainer from Base 4 Architects & Engineers

I am working with Cary Westerbeck one of my favorite Architect/Developers to put together a design challenge for the Neighborhood Development Facebook Group I administer. We want to tackle the problem of the Five over One Podium Building. The illustration above shows how the guts of these buildings can comply with the International Building Code. Massing and proportions of these buildings can be unfortunate. The least expensive exteriors are often vinyl window applied to the surface of the sheathing and cement board panels. The result is a very flat elevation. Recessing windows requires extra effort and extra cost.

If you can’t get the rent to justify the hard and soft costs of a building then you shouldn’t build it. That math is relentless. Given the rents in some places, vinyl fin windows and Hardie Panel may be all the budget can handle after building structured parking and installing a couple of elevators.

I think that much of the heartburn folks have with the scale and massing of McPodium buildings can be remedied by coding the public and private frontage competently. We will see what the developers and Architects in the Facebook group come up with.

I also think municipal staff should not have the burden of guessing how much off-street parking is going to be required for all possible buildings with all possible uses. They tend to perform this duty quite badly. It is reasonable for the municipality to regulate where parking can be placed on the private parcel relative to the public building frontage.

Environments where horse trading between the developer, their Architect and the planning staff or committees of city staff or planning commissioners are terrible to work in. It can be difficult to figure out what you will be allowed to build in some jurisdictions, especially the first time around.

More often then not we end up trying to get public officials and staff to tell us what is actually intended with the Comprehensive Plan, since the Zoning Ordinance has not been revised to provide specific metrics for implementing the vision of the Comprehensive Plan. It is extremely frustrating to learn that I have to go through some elaborate and extended negotiation to deliver the kind of modest project envisioned in the guiding policy document but prohibited by the technical legal requirements.

Many of the recent McPodium buildings are conceived at the intersection between the zoning code with its bogus parking requirements, the building code, local impact fees, the cost of construction and the likely rents available in the local market. Developers have figured out how to navigate that territory with what has become a familiar building type. The 5 over 1 podium building.

When parking requirements drive the program the building footprint starts with an efficient parking garage layout carried into the layout of column bays in the podium structure. A 24' drive aisle serving 9' x 20' yields a minimum garage dimension of 64 or 128 feet allow for perimeter walls and the small foot print is going to be around 70' wide or deep. If there are zoning requirements for ground floor retail or other active uses, add that to the footprint.

Lose the parking requirement and building footprints become more flexible. Structured parking spaces here in the Atlanta market cost $20,000 to $30,000 each. If you have to provide one space per apartment, that adds $200 to $300 a month to the rent needed to support the hard and soft costs of the construction and operating expenses of the building.

It is reasonable for municipalities to ask for attention to architectural detail. Unfortunately many public design review bodies these days are still requiring that the materials on the exterior of the building change every 40 feet or some silly notion to make the building jump forward and back and up and down. The adopted guidelines are frequently lousy and the design review board may not be receiving the kind of training needed to do the work.

Attention to detail starts at the scale of the buildings massing and proportions. There are plenty of rather spare buildings that are beautifully composed.

Ivy with 8 gallon stock pot for scale

Here is a guest blog post from one of my favorite humans. Ivy Van is a what many would describe as “a handful”. She is a small developer in New Hampshire just completing the conversion of a former bed and breakfast into a tri-plex. She is the chair of her local planning board and serves in the State Legislature. She is a recovering daily newspaper reporter, elementary school teacher, and driving force behind her village’s Community Dinner. She is currently working with the Congress for the New Urbanism’s Project for Code Reform. I think she is a mensch, —in spite of her questionable decision to quote me in the beginning of this piece. Here’s Ivy Vann:

“People tend to think that building and real estate are a mysterious black box. Specifically a Mysterious Black Box full of money and jerks. If how money is made building and operating buildings is mysterious it is so easy to identify the builder, developer, or the landlord as the "Other" and then proceed to question their character, motivation, and business practices.

We don't have empathy for someone alien to our experience. Once we vilify them or hear about what a bad person they are by virtue of their line of work, we are not inclined to get to know them or acquire any empathy or understanding of their reality.

While building and housing math is certainly relentless and unforgiving, some folks figure the best solutions will come from someone else's pocketbook.”

R. John Anderson

People make some fancy shoes, other people spend a lot of money on them, but I don't think I've ever heard anyone complain about the shoe store or the shoe manufacturer making a profit. People build some houses, sell them, maybe make a little money, and everybody complains that they're making money, that they're greedy, they're only in it for themselves.

Why is it okay for the shoe manufacturer to make money but not okay for the builder to make money?

You can argue that building houses is a riskier business and that the builder should maybe make a little more money because of taking that risk rather than blaming them for earning a living.

"It's all about the money," people say.

Yeah, it is about the money. It's about buying a piece of land, borrowing money to build a building, carrying the interest until you can sell the house, hoping that you can sell it for what you put into it, hoping that steel prices don't go up, and that there isn't a hurricane that pulls all the carpenters away from your job, hoping the weather lets you finish on time so you don't lose your shirt.

I know a lot of builders and I don't know even one that hasn't gone bust at least once. There is real risk involved. And people deserve fair compensation for their time and talent and risk.

Towns don't get to tell builders that they have to build things that are not going to make at least some money. We can't demand that builders take a loss to produce what we would like to have built. We can structure our regulations so that we have a fighting chance of getting something that doesn't make our place worse, but we can't demand something that a builder can't deliver in today's economic world.

We have to do the math, both from the builder's perspective and from the town's perspective.

Brand new single-family houses which cost $200 a square foot to build are never going to be affordable on an entry-level salary. Let's work to make other housing choices readily available so that more people have a chance to live here.

New houses on two acre lots on new streets will never pay enough in taxes to cover their services.

Let's use the infrastructure we already have when possible so we don't create more expenses for the town.