Ep. 97: Single-Stair Buildings and Eco-Districts with Michael Eliason (Incentives Series pt. 1)

This is the first episode of our series on misaligned incentives in housing policy. Michael Eliason shares insights from his book, Building for People, on building code reforms and eco-district redevelopment projects throughout Europe.

Show notes:

• Eliason, M. (2024). Building for People: Designing Livable, Affordable, Low-Carbon Communities. Island Press.
• Youtube video of Vauban, an eco-district in Freiburg, Germany.
• City of Paris website on the Clichy-Batignolles eco-district, with photos.
• Episode 59 of UCLA Housing Voice, on the Costs of Discretion with Paavo Monkkonen and Mike Manville.
• Google Maps view of the Confluence eco-district in Lyon, France and the neighborhood directly to the north.
• Episode 14 of UCLA Housing Voice, on Family-Friendly Urbanism with Louis Thomas. 
• Check out Stephen Smith’s single-stair and elevator reform tracker at the Center for Building in North America website.

Transcript

Shane Phillips  0:05
Hello! This is the UCLA Housing Voice Podcast, and I'm your host, Shane Phillips. This week we're joined by Michael Eliason to discuss his recent book, Building for People, with a focus on single-stair building code reform and eco-district redevelopment. More on that in a moment. First though, this is a special episode because it's the start of our series on misaligned incentives in housing policy, which we're producing with the support of UCLA's Center for Incentive Design. If you know just one thing about economics, it's probably something related to supply and demand. If you know a second thing, it's that people respond to incentives. We switch to bananas when the price of apples go up, and we save more money when retirement accounts are tax advantaged. Those are simple, harmless examples. But incentives are misaligned when they push us to act against our values and our stated goals. Housing policy is full of these misalignments. Local officials may prefer office or retail development because these uses generate more tax revenue and need fewer services, so homebuilding loses out. Homeowners often fight apartments to protect their property values, in part because home equity is their biggest asset. Planning processes grant many people veto power over housing, with no one really empowered with the singular authority to approve the homes we need, leading to obstruction, delay, and chronic shortages. Far too often, the gap between what we say we want and what our policies deliver reveals a deep, deep misalignment. Throughout this series, we'll be investigating where these incentives come from, who benefits and who is harmed, and how to better align policy with our priorities. Here's another example. Building code changes, intended to improve safety in multifamily housing, can increase the cost of development, pushing more people into unsafe older buildings and into less walkable neighborhoods, where driving more every day probably increases someone's risk of death or injury a hundred times more than that code change helps reduce it. That's our topic for today, or at least one part of it. Yes, the omnipresent single-stair reform. We are finally talking about it. Sometimes building code updates are important and necessary. Other times, as we will hear in this episode and a few to come, we change the code so that firefighters can get to a fifth-floor apartment just the tiniest bit easier once every year or two, if that, and residents pay the price in the form of higher rents, worse design, and higher utility bills every day of the year for the entire life of their building. We all pay in the form of homes that never get built and the hundreds or even thousands of empty parcels that pockmark our cities. I decided to start the incentive series with this interview because it covers a lot of the ground we intend to go over in the coming months. The series starts with what seems like the smallest technical issue, and it'll end with us looking at the bigger picture, at how we plan and how we engage the public in planning, and the behaviors and outcomes we incentivize by doing things in this way. Our conversation here with Mike really captures both ends of this spectrum, and I hope it leaves you excited for more because there is a lot more to come. I also like the idea of starting here because there's already been a lot of amazing work getting this specific problem fixed, and we really want to focus on solutions throughout this series. We'll be sharing more about where we're headed as the series continues. Just a quick note, I ended up having to record this interview from a Dallas hotel, so the quality on my end is a little spotty. I did my best to clean it up, but it's not all the way there, so I do apologize. The Housing Voice podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies with production support from Claudia Bustamante, Brett Berndt, and Tiffany Lu. We're still planning to celebrate episode 100 by answering listener questions, so send them my way at shanephilipsatucla.edu. We're also still taking suggestions on what to read for a book club, so again, that's shanephilipsatucla.edu. With that, let's get to our conversation with Michael Eliason.

Shane Phillips  4:37
Michael Eliason is an architect and the founder and principal of Larch Lab, described as a part architecture and urbanism studio, part think and do tank. He's also the author of the new book, Building for People, and on today's show, we're going to talk about a few of the topics featured there and in his research and advocacy in recent years. Michael, thank you for joining us and welcome to the Housing Voice podcast. Yeah, thank you very much for having me. And my co-host today is Paavo, who is back in the States in California. Welcome back, Paavo.

Paavo Monkkonen  5:08
Indeed. Thank you, Shane. It's great to be back, I guess. At least I'm happy to talk about the better multifamily living that I was experiencing in Europe in this podcast with you, Mike. Your book's very cool and I'm happy to dig in. Although it's such a visual book that I recommend people buy it and look at it as well.

Shane Phillips  5:26
Well, Mike, we start every episode by asking our guests for a tour of a place they want to introduce to our audience. Your book walks us through a lot of different cities and neighborhoods across Europe, especially. So I'm guessing we're headed to one of them, maybe Freiburg, where you start the book?

Michael Eliason  5:43
Yeah, Freiburg is kind of the, I feel like it's my heart and soul. So in 2003, I was in my fourth year at Virginia Tech and they kick everyone out and I somehow ended up in an internship in Freiburg for a year. Incredible city, very dense and lively pedestrian core at the heart of the city. I think it's about a mile square, maybe a little bit less. Car free living, very bike friendly, trams going every which way. It was radically different than anything I had ever experienced before. It's also where I met my wife. It's where I was exposed to passive house, to mass timber, to Baugruppen, to eco districts. So in a lot of ways, Freiburg is like the genesis of so much of the stuff that I talked to. Like if I hadn't lived in Freiburg, I don't know what I would be talking about.

Shane Phillips  6:29
Yeah. Sounds like you would have a very different life in almost every respect.

Michael Eliason  6:33
In every respect. Exactly. It's really funny. And we took our kids there because we wanted to show them kind of what car light living and car light cities could be when we went to Europe this summer. And they were just absolutely floored. Not only is it walkable, but it's quiet. We actually stayed in one of the eco districts in Vauban, which is car light and super family friendly. And it's this district of three, four, five story multifamily buildings. It aren't a lot of car spaces. It's very bike friendly. There's a tram that goes directly from the center of the district to the center of the city. And that neighborhood was quieter than the single family neighborhood where the apartment that we live in is located in Seattle, right? And so this concept of public health and quality of life is really kind of rooted in our experiences there.

Shane Phillips  7:21
Paavo, did your kid have the same experience? I'm a little surprised on his...

Paavo Monkkonen  7:24
I thought you were going to ask about my Roman comment, but...

Shane Phillips  7:28
No, no. When Mike said that his kids loved it, I was almost expecting him to say they didn't fully appreciate it, but I'm glad to hear that they really did.

Paavo Monkkonen  7:39
Oh no, that's not true. Yeah, my daughter loved living in France and especially the thing, the independence of a teenager there compared to now we're back and it's like, even if we live in a walkable neighborhood, but the friends that she's reconnecting with, they're all just getting driven around by their parents and stuff. And yeah, I mean the freedom to take the bus places and walk around is really, she loved it. She hates cars now. It's great.

Shane Phillips  8:05
Welcome to the war on cars. Yeah, exactly. So this is our first episode of the Housing Voice podcast series on misaligned incentives in housing, which we're doing with the financial support of the UCLA Center for Incentive Design, for which we are very appreciative. Like our earlier eight-part series on homelessness, Pathways Home, we've got a solid idea of what this series is going to look like, but we're also leaving some room to be flexible and explore new ideas as they come up. Our first few episodes are going to be mainly about technical standards and regulations in housing. Sounds very fun, I know. Especially standards relating to safety in fires and other potentially life-threatening circumstances. A theme we're going to return to again and again is how a narrow focus on certain issues, things like egress requirements and elevator standards, can not only lead to less affordable housing and worse design, but can even make us less safe when we account for these policies' indirect effects. In later episodes, we plan to talk about some of the policies that are nominally for the benefit of homeowners, but may make it harder to buy a home or build owner-occupied housing, some of the ways we tax real estate that make housing scarcer and more expensive, and how our systems of governance and public engagement are often designed to produce these kinds of bad outcomes, even if that was not ever their intent, though it certainly sometimes was. While these may sound like very different issues, our hope is that the connections between them will get clearer as we go forward episode by episode. What's going to unite nearly all of these episodes is an emphasis on solutions, not just on policy solutions, but also in terms of process and politics too, wherever appropriate. This series will continue through the end of the year and into 2026, though we may take a few detours along the way. So with that background out of the way, Mike, let's get back to you and your book. The full title is Building for People Designing Liveable, Affordable, Low-Carbon Communities, and it came out at the end of 2024. It's published by Island Press, the same as my book, The Affordable City, and lots of other great work on urbanist topics. Shout out to our editor, Heather Boyer, and the rest of the great team there. This is a book about creating more livable, affordable, sustainable, and climate-adaptive places, and it covers a lot of different approaches and examples, but we're going to focus mostly on two things here. Eco districts, which are larger scale neighborhood level efforts, and single stairwell code requirements, which affect design at the building level, but are really integral for the kind of urban design that makes eco districts and lots of other great things possible. I thought your book was a good place to start this series, Mike, because even though it is not explicitly about incentives, it tackles a lot of the issues we're planning for the upcoming episodes. There's the exploration of policies at both the building level and the community level, which I already mentioned, and single stair policies are a very technical code issue, while eco districts are largely about changing how we plan, including how we engage the public. You also talk a lot about promoting a better mix of ownership and rental housing, so you've got almost our whole incentive series in this one book in one way or another. So let's start here. Many of our listeners are probably unfamiliar with the idea of an eco district. You write that you prefer them conceptually to something we're more accustomed to here, which is transit oriented development, or TOD. Tell us about the distinction you're making there and why you prefer eco districts to TOD, or at least TOD as it is typically practiced in the US.

Michael Eliason  11:47
Yeah, so this is a really interesting question. Let's start with what transit oriented development is in most of the US, right? These are places that are being developed generally near transit, sometimes BRT, sometimes light rail, a little here and there, trans as well. But the way that we plan these, there's very little open space. They're very auto centric. We might keep a high density of roads dedicated mostly to cars, and we'll add a bike lane or two, maybe there's a bus lane. But it's really designed around living with a car, which is really kind of contradictory to the whole transit oriented aspect of it in my mind. More like transit adjacent. Yeah, exactly. Or there's not a lot of open space. Typically, sometimes there'll be a park or a common, which I think is great, except they'll be surrounded by car parking and roads. And so if you have families in this district, which is like a whole separate issue, kids when they're going to the park, we'll have to cross one, two, multiple lanes of roads just to get there. We aren't very good at integrating a lot of community amenities into this space. Schools, healthcare are sometimes really difficult to get into these kinds of neighborhoods. The issue of affordable housing and family sized housing, I think is also even more paramount. So oftentimes when we're doing TOD projects in the US, maybe there's like a token affordable housing project or two. If a place has inclusionary zoning, maybe that's how they get a couple of units of affordable housing. But by and large, these are market rate housing in districts. And because of our land use codes, because of our building codes, invariably these end up being largely studios or one bedrooms. You might get a handful of two bedrooms. It's rare that you would see three bedrooms. And I can't even remember the last time I saw a four bedroom apartment in any US multifamily housing. And the eco district kind of takes this idea of transit oriented development compared to what we're doing in the US and just flips it on its head. It's car light, it's car free. You can navigate the districts without interacting with cars whatsoever. There's a large focus on not just having access to nature, access to open space, but affordable housing, a high quality public realm. In the planning of these, there's much more community engagement. What do you want to see in this neighborhood for the existing residents around it? What do you need in this kind of neighborhood? And then the process itself of how we plan this is also radically different. The process in Europe is very, very intensive in the beginning phases for outreach, education, getting an understanding of what the community's needs and desires are. And then they'll have a planning competition that gets into more of the, what is the reality of this going to be? And so it's fundamentally very different than in the US where we'll typically do requests for proposal, RFP, maybe a firm or two that is kind of shepherding this project, but it's a very different process and it's much more, I would say it's also much longer. And so the people who are living around the district aren't going to be engaged with what it's going to look like, probably to the same degree.

Shane Phillips  14:41
Something that I think is worth underlining too is just how, from what I understand of these eco-district plans, they're not just saying like, here's what you are allowed to build here. They're kind of combining the planning and the production of the whole thing where it's not just, we're going to wait and hope that someone buys each of these individual parcels and chooses to redevelop it according to the plans we've made. It's kind of a more integrated process, right?

Michael Eliason  15:11
Yeah, it's much more integrated and I would say intentional as well. And so if it's a government redeveloping a brownfield, so maybe it's like the city of Freiburg or the city of Zurich or Paris or whatever, they'll have a list of things that they have to get into this. Okay, we'll need a school, we're planning for this number of families, we'll have this many homes for families, and so we need a school that has space for X number of students or something. They're very, very much engaged in ensuring that these neighborhoods are much more integrated in their planning so that people don't have to walk far to go to things. There's space for grocery, there's space for cultural amenities, there's space for maybe even affordable workspaces, right? And so if they take all of these things and see how many things you can cram into a box, right? In the US, it's very different. They let the market kind of dictate here in Seattle, South Lake Union is a really, really good example of this. The city basically rezoned all of South Lake Union to be this mixed districts adjacent to downtown, adjacent to Lake Union. They let the market kind of dictate where housing could go or commercial could go. They weren't very intentional in saying, okay, maybe these portions are commercial or these portions are primarily mixed use. And so the end result is a district that is almost entirely commercial, there's very few housing. And so at night, it's dead. It was this opportunity to create something similar to like Clichy Bethanyolus in Paris or Confluence. And we kind of, we whiffed big time, right? There's a ton of parking. We didn't reconfigure any of the streets really when we were rezoning it and building all of this new district, new neighborhood. And so it's fundamentally, I think, a low quality place where we had a really great opportunity to do something and there wasn't any foresight to how, you know, what we're doing now and what we allow to go where can or cannot help us, you know, in the development of a neighborhood.

Paavo Monkkonen  16:57
Yeah. Just to add maybe some visual references for people at home, if you want to look on your Google maps. I mean, if you look at a, I mean, you could look at the Vauban in Freiburg or Clichy Bethanyolus and then you compare it like the most equivalent thing I can think about in LA in my lifetime is the Playa Vista development kind of west of Culver City. And you can look at the building layout there compared to, you know, this is like a big brownfield redevelopment of Howard Hughes' old land. I mean, the irony of that Playa Vista is it's kind of like what a US TOD would be like except there's no transit. But yeah, I was just looking at the map, I mean, look at the layout and it gets at some of the things, right? There's a school, there's a grocery store, but then at the, what we'll get into later, kind of at the block level, the design of those multifamily buildings are much worse, I think, than what you see in the European cases.

Shane Phillips  17:49
So the way that we initially conceived of this episode, we were really just going to focus on single-stair reform. It's a topic many of our listeners have heard of by now, something we've wanted to talk about and that you probably have done more than anyone else to popularize here in the US, Mike. It's this compelling combination of a substantively very important issue, relatively simple and straightforward to fix. And it's, again, wrapped up in this incentive problem of siloed institutions that prioritize one goal, often safety, without accounting often in any way for impacts on other important priorities like affordability, livable design, accessibility, and so on. While reading the book, though, it really struck me how the way we plan for growth is its own incentive problem with bad outcomes naturally following from the policies and processes that we have in place. In a previous episode, we talked about Lewis Center research on the project approval process and how by right approvals compared to discretionary approvals can reduce the time and uncertainty involved in building housing, lowering costs along the way. I've said many times that cities should spend more time on public engagement at the community planning stage and less on hearings for individual projects. And that's something you endorse in building for people too, I think. You note that it's much more of the standard practice in other wealthy countries and you highlight the use of design competitions as a way of operationalizing that approach to community engagement, at least for larger scale redevelopment efforts. Tell us how these design competitions work and why you prefer them to our more common practice of either issuing requests for proposals, RFPs, or just the kind of more purely market driven approach. As you're explaining, help us understand when and where design competitions make the most sense. And maybe you could also introduce our listeners to the International Building Exhibition or IBA.

Michael Eliason  19:45
Yeah, the planning competition in largely European countries is actually mandated by EU law, right? So contracts over a certain amount of dollars or euros are required to have a procurement process that generally uses the design competition. It's been the de facto norm for probably much of Europe for the last century, plus or minus. We do have some experience with design competitions in the US as well, although it's pretty limited and it's generally on the building scale, the Seattle Library, the Vietnam Memorial in DC. And so we do have a little bit of experience with architecture and planning competitions, but by and large, most of what we do in the US is driven by RFPs. And RFPs aren't necessarily terrible. In my experience, they tend to be gamed. The firms that are winning RFPs tend to be older firms, established firms. They're not doing very innovative or great work, but they can hit those budget numbers and there's not a lot of uncertainty maybe with the way that they're going to work on something through their process. In the design competition, that's not necessarily the case, right? You can have young firms, firms that are relatively inexperienced to have good ideas and are smart and if they need assistance, can team up with other firms to produce the neighborhoods that are being sought out or asked for. But the process allows for much more variability. It allows for the public to have a lot of engagement on the front end, like I said earlier. So the city or the agency that's doing the competition, they'll have this front end process, lots of outreach. The city of Hamburg is really, really good about this. They'll actually hold symposia with professionals and experts and they'll come in and talk about, okay, this is why we're planning to have less parking in this district or this is why we need to accommodate climate change and adapt to those things in this district. And so the neighbors, the residents have a pretty good sense of what the conceptual ideas are and they'll have a lot of reference or input on the programmatic aspects of the competition as well. But during the process of the competition, you almost have an instantaneous feeling of what that district is going to be like years before it even gets started, right? So this is planning competition, this is very conceptual stuff. You get a sense of the mobility connections. How are people going to get around on bike, on foot, rolling, by transit? How much open space is there? What is the urban flavor and character of the district, right? This is like a radically different way of process that we see in the US where we'll maybe take a little bit of community engagement, we'll put out the RFP and then some firm will slowly over time kind of work out some kind of framework. We don't also hold to that framework oftentimes and so what we're planning on the planning side for the RFP may not be feasible from the development side and so things will change pretty dramatically after that. And so the whole process with the competitions, what you see is what you get, right? You have a pretty immediate sense of how that development is going to look over time as it gets redeveloped. And then generally the firm that wins that planning competition will then go on to do like the framework plan which gets into more detail, street level, public realm, trees, landscaping, general heights, widths, depths, kind of the meets and bounds of the buildings in the district because that's how they do their planning. It's more form-based than it is in the US and so on the planning side while that's going through the jurisdiction, the agency that's holding the competition or the owner will start to parcel out some of that land and if it's a governmental agency often at lower costs, right? They're trying to do some more affordable housing or some other means of incentivizing a better tenant mix or resident mix in the district, a good social and economic mix. They'll have individual building competitions then that other architects generally will win for those parcels and so you get a lot of variability at the block level at that point, right? Like it's going to be radically different than we see in the US where we have the RFP process, it's generally driven by the developer, the developer is going to be developing most of the buildings on site and then we have these huge massive buildings that will take up like an entire block, right? These massive double-loaded corridors and most blocks in Europe are made of either single-loaded corridors which I don't know if you want to get into the egress issue at this point. We can come back to it, but yeah. Okay, we'll come back to it, right? So most blocks in Europe are either single-loaded corridors or single-stair buildings, point access blocks and so the buildings end up being thinner, there's a whole other range of other things as well that go along with this.

Shane Phillips  24:15
I did want to jump in here actually and just point out or highlight something about planning a whole neighborhood and giving a picture of that to the community that might be nearby or surrounding it. It's something that we just, it feels like we almost never see that in the US. It's always individual buildings and I don't think presenting a prettier picture of a whole neighborhood changing is going to necessarily appease many people, but I do just think there is value there and it's qualitatively different to show like this is how the entire community is going to look at the end of 20 or 30 or 50 years as this all kind of progresses versus here's this building that's going to go in this neighborhood. And often because it might be one of the first bigger buildings, kind of the next phase of development of a neighborhood, it's going to look really out of place, but you're kind of missing the fact that other buildings are going to come in and kind of make it feel like more of a part of that neighborhood, all cohesive whole and it's something I feel like we very rarely do and why would any architect or planning firm do that when everything is just so driven by individual projects.

Michael Eliason  25:32
I think this is a part of a larger conversation that we need to have in the US that we aren't really broaching yet and this is the issue of comprehensive planning. Well, we have a comprehensive plan in Seattle, it's being updated, but it's not looking at things comprehensively, right? We're not even incorporating transit to a large degree, there's very little integration or thought about open space and public health or climate. It's really just kind of taking a path to rezoning existing areas that already have existing multifamily or commercial buildings and so we induce this process, I like to use the term urban cannibalism, right? Where maybe we have a very wonderful arterial with businesses and so we're going to rezone that area, but only on the arterial, right? Everything behind it is detached houses and we want to protect those from the encroachment of big bad renters in multifamily housing and so we'll just drastically rezone that narrow stretch of land and so you do get this process where it's like the transformation of the block is really, really radical and I've seen this a lot in Toronto where they do have these wonderful arterials, it's like 66 foot wide right of way, very walkable with two three story buildings, but their redevelopment basically induces new construction that's going to wipe out all of those businesses on the arterial, right? And so when we're redeveloping places and rezoning places, we lose that sense of community flavor, right? That fine grained urbanism that everyone talks about loving and it's partially related to land use codes, it's partially related to building codes, it's partially related to finance, but I think that there needs to be this sense towards like getting to a better place in planning in the US and that's not like the sole inspiration for my book, but I think it's definitely part of it is like how do we start to think about creating neighborhoods where people want to stay, where they can afford to stay, where they'll be protected from climate, where they'll be able to access most of their needs without having to get into a car and drive somewhere to see their friends or go get groceries and I think fundamentally like so much of how we do planning in the US is just exacerbating so many issues, right? So we drastically rezone these areas for more housing, but we don't provide open space. Maybe we provide transit, but the place that's being redeveloped is on this, you know, four or five, four or six, eight lane, basically highway, right? This massive arterial and it's not the kind of place that anyone wants to live. It's not super walkable because we limit that density and so I think we really need to step back and take like this wider view of, you know, how do we deal with redevelopment and also make sure it's taking all of these other kind of things into account that, you know, looking forward with climate change, you know, we were talking about air conditioning in Seattle before we started recording, right? All of these things are going to have to start playing a more prominent role in how we engage in the planning of these places.

Paavo Monkkonen  28:17
So just to play devil's advocate for a second, I mean, I'm very curious in kind of the variation in success of different eco districts, like in Paris, I know there's some older ones that people consider much less successful. The one in Lyon, the Confluence, like I think it's not that great of a result. I mean, obviously still better than Playa Vista and I've, you know, I've stayed in, I visited a bunch of them in like Finland, for example, in Helsinki, that they're really good in a lot of ways, but they just don't have like the nice street level environment than some others do. So I mean, I'm curious first, do you have any sense of why some work out better than others? And then second, like if you think about a range of public powers, you know, Helsinki municipality owns most of the land and they have a bunch of old port side dock lands they can just redevelop and they own it already. And so like, that's like the, you know, they have a lot of well-trained civil servants that are highly paid and can like execute projects. And then you go from there to a context like Los Angeles, where, you know, in all the urban areas, the parcels are already privately owned, totally subdivided. And so, you know, obviously it's going to be much more difficult. So two questions and within European context, like why do some eco districts or some new redevelopment areas work out better than others? And then is it possible, do you think in the US given our constraints, I mean, you could think about achieving a similar result with zoning and building code regulation, right? You could rezone a whole neighborhood in a way that ultimately when it's redeveloped, it would look like a perimeter block having eco district, and then just wait for that to be privately built out over the next 50 years.

Shane Phillips  29:55
I think my follow-up was very similar to that. I guess it's just, or it's kind of restating the last question about where do these design competitions make the most sense? Because even in Europe, it's not as though all new housing or commercial or anything is coming through these projects. Oftentimes it is just an individual project being redeveloped by the owner or someone who buys it and just build something that's taller and in compliance with zoning and building code and everything. So where are these appropriate and where are they not as appropriate or not really necessary? And then, yeah, as Pablo was saying, how does that fit in the US context in particular? Easy question, Mike.

Michael Eliason  30:35
Easy question. No issues here. So I'll start with the European one. So I think that there is a lot of variation in the successes and what is successful in a lot of European eco districts. Vauban quality of life is probably far superior to many other neighborhoods or eco districts that I've ever seen, but it's not super urban. There aren't a lot of commercial spaces. There's kind of one street that has a couple of commercial things on it, but they're not open very late. It's not super dense neighborhood as well. And so I think maybe that is kind of part of the issue as well. It's more of a residential, it's almost, I mean, it's at the edge of the city. It's suburban in nature. Another district that they completed at around the same time actually is Rieselfeld, which was built on a former swamp, which has like actual blocks. It still has a ton of open space. It has a very activated core with cultural spaces and schools and daycares. And there's even like a church that's there by a fairly prominent architects in Germany. And it offers like a very different contrast, I think, to Vauban, like Vauban does a lot of things right. And I think Rieselfeld doesn't do a lot of things well. And somehow if you combine these two, I think it would be perfect. The ones in Helsinki are super fascinating. And I'm not even going to try to pronounce the names because they're kind of complicated and they like to use lots of vowels in their writing.

Paavo Monkkonen  31:56
Yes, we do.

Shane Phillips  31:57
Monkkonen with two Ks. What the hell?

Paavo Monkkonen  31:59
Crazy people.

Michael Eliason  32:02
Two Ks. So I think a lot of these districts are, they'll have successes in certain areas, right? They'll have a ton of affordable housing. They'll have a ton of open space. They'll be connected to transit maybe. But it's, I think you nailed it, Paavo, that at the street level, a lot of these places start to really fall apart. I would argue that it's not that much different here in the US. I think maybe a contrast, though, is we try to do strictly commercial kind of spaces or spaces on the ground floor. And so we don't really get the right level of activation. And those also end up being kind of dead in a way because it ends up only being affordable because they're like large tenant spaces to large conglomerates and banks and things of that nature. And so it's, I think that that's almost one of the harder issues to successfully address in a lot of eco districts. I will say that this goes back to the issue of single stair and fine grained development. There are a number of eco districts, there's a couple in Tübingen, in Hamburg, there's a new one under development in Freiburg, where they have regulations on the number of buildings on a block, right? So you can't just have two massive buildings covering a block, they have somewhere between like five and 15 buildings on a block. And so it induces these smaller buildings, and smaller buildings invariably have a wide kind of array of commercial spaces or cultural spaces. And so you do get kind of this, I think, better mixing. And because they're smaller, hopefully they're more affordable spaces as well. In some of these districts that really allow these places to be much more activated and lively than either the TOD that we see in the US or some of the more kind of suburban or residential eco districts in Europe.

Paavo Monkkonen  33:40
Yeah. I mean, I feel like it maybe has something to do with how quickly the master developer wants things to be built out. Because I feel like you were saying some of the problems with the ones in Helsinki and even Confluence, like the buildings are bigger individually. And there's like a big little, instead of a bunch of small supermarkets, and then that means that it's farther away from your apartment. And I mean, even like if you look in Confluence, we can put a picture. If you compare like the 19th century perimeter block neighborhood right above it to the new redevelopment, the buildings are just so much bigger. You lose a lot of the nice courtyard stuff, and then all the shops are bigger. So there's fewer of them, they're farther away, and it just kind of kills the street level vibe. I don't know. I'm not an architect, clearly.

Michael Eliason  34:27
No, but I think that there's something to that, that these larger buildings with huge tenant spaces, also some of these districts in the US or abroad also have very wide right of ways, huge streets. And so it's just, it's walkable-ish, but it's not like a great pedestrian environment, right? Like it's not that downtown neighborhood street that has the block face with like 20 different stores on it. It'll have like two or three, and we need processes to bring back more of those smaller places, right? Those third places that honestly I think we are needing at an even greater scale today than maybe in the past. And so on the question of like how we could incorporate it in the US, I think there may be a couple of approaches. One is there are often large parcels, whether they're owned by private developers or public developers where a city could engage in the kind of planning process to facilitate an eco-district. Another thing too that we could be doing is having really, really light touch form-based codes, and I used to hate form-based codes. I think oftentimes they're too aesthetically driven, you know, windows must be vertical instead of horizontal, or all buildings must have a pediment. Like the way that they do planning in Germany is a really, really light touch form-based code. Basically these are the extents of the envelope that you can build in, and then almost like what you build in that, it's really up to you. It could be commercial, it could be residential, it could be mixed use. Maybe if it's in the suburbs, it'll be just supposed to be residential, but there's a lot of kind of variability in that envelope that you want to do. And so I think that the city of Kingston in New York recently passed a pretty light touch form-based code that will allow redevelopment of certain denser parts of the city to be redeveloped as like a perimeter block style building. A big constraint here is our dual egress or dual stair requirement really limits I think a lot of the ways to think about redeveloping these lots. So in the US, and big cities are probably the worst at this. We don't regulate floor plate depth, right? And so when we're rezoning places, we don't say, okay, your building can only be 50 feet or 60 feet deep here. What we're seeing in Denver, Seattle, Los Angeles is we have buildings that are 90 feet deep, double loaded corridors. So it's like living in a hotel corridor on the middle and units on either side that are deep and narrow and oriented perpendicular to the building facade. And what this induces is like these massive dark units that don't really offer a super high quality of life. If we had allowed or if we limited the depth of our buildings and allowed single stair, there'd be more open space. And so maybe you wouldn't have people complaining about lack of space for trees, which honestly I think is an increasingly valid complaint, or just space for community, kids to play, right? The way that we're rezoning our cities just basically allow the entire lot to be consumed by these buildings. And so I think that having this light touch approach, this light touch form-based code, we could start to kind of develop ways to rezone, replan, redevelop these blocks in places that have multiple existing owners on them into a way that it has like a more cohesive feel. Right? And again, this goes back to the lack of comprehensive planning. We kind of do everything on a lot by lot basis, oftentimes without even thinking about the effects of what's going to be happening on the adjacent lot. Another interesting thing, I talked a little bit about this book, is the Netherlands has this approach called the urbanizator. I don't know legally how we would get the framework for this, but basically the government is saying, okay, we're going to come in, we're adding a train line, we're going to redevelop this neighborhood. We kind of suck up all of the land, right? We take all of the land from the homeowners, we come back in, we put in infrastructure, we put in streets, we rezone and replan. And basically all of those individual owners, right, maybe it was like a couple of detached houses on some really big parcels, they would get the equivalent value of their land from the rezoning and replanning process. But instead of being for a detached house, it would be for like multifamily housing, and if they didn't want it, they could sell it. So the idea is that we're changing these larger areas, but we're still finding ways to make the existing owners whole. I would love to see a process like that in the US, but again, we're so reticent, right?

Paavo Monkkonen  38:36
Seems a little politically complicated, we don't love eminent domain.

Michael Eliason  38:39
The legal construct would be so difficult.

Shane Phillips  38:41
I've been thinking about this a lot actually, because especially since reading your book, I was aware of this practice in Japan, it's called land readjustment. And it's similar to what you're talking about, but it's the way I've heard it work, they would actually get at least I think two thirds of landowners to buy into this, but if they agreed, then the rest would be forced to kind of come along. And so they take this area of many parcels, consolidate it, re-divide it up, and add some roads that were not up to code and poor quality, just public infrastructure of various kinds. And then they re-portion them out, and they've taken some of the private land, but what is left over is worth a lot more because it's served by all this infrastructure and amenities that weren't there before. And yeah, I feel like if we could get something like that, where you find the neighborhoods that are actually open to this, because I think there actually would be some. But I've been thinking a lot about exactly how that would work.

Michael Eliason  39:44
It's a super engaging thought problem, but like Paavo said, the legal aspect and the contracts for something like that are kind of frightening on a level. But I really think we're already seeing this in Seattle, where we'll rezone an entire block, and like I said, we aren't really cognizant of how that redevelopment is going to be done with so many disparate parcels. But if there's a way to kind of formalize something, I don't know, maybe we call it like a climate block or whatever, right? So that there is space for trees, there is space for outdoor playgrounds, there is space for affordable housing, and those owners can still maintain some kind of sense of ownership of those places. I think that would be great. But what we see is like, okay, it's a bunch of double duplexes and townhomes, and none of them are oriented in a way that allows for outdoor space or trees or a playground or anything like that. So I think like finding ways to get more of those infrastructure upgrades and community amenities, especially in places that are going to be hit harder and harder by climate changes is necessary.

Paavo Monkkonen  40:43
Yeah. And I think a big question there is the timing, right? So you could redo all the zoning and lot coverage rules such that any parcel that gets redeveloped needs to have a thinner building in order to have a patio, such that eventually once everything is redeveloped, it becomes a perimeter block. But like it might take so long that you wouldn't realize the benefits quickly enough. I don't know. I think when you have a brownfield, it's just so much easier at a district scale than when you have kind of an existing neighborhood with a lot of owners and tenants.

Michael Eliason  41:12
The other issue too is then we're building with firewalls. And so if you have like a neighborhood of like single family houses and all of a sudden we're allowing four and five story mid-rise buildings, again, narrow push to the front inside lot lines, it's going to be a very abrupt condition. And we do see this in Seattle where we do allow mid-rise buildings. Like there's going to be that firewall there anyway, but like in the former single family zones, it's like a big no-no, but like that's also, we have a lot of small lots, like 50 feet. Like if you want to redevelop those lots and have space for family size housing and to have buildings that allow more outdoor space or space for trees, we really need to think about like reorienting our buildings on those sites to allow it.

Paavo Monkkonen  41:51
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you need some land assembly, but it can happen. I mean, that's the thing. It's like, just because we've never done it doesn't mean it's not possible. And I think the Bundy Triangle land assembly redevelopment of single family, of the one rezoned single family neighborhood in West LA is a great case of how it can happen.

Shane Phillips  42:08
Yeah. That was something where they actually got, they purchased every single one of the properties because they paid them like double what they were previously worth. And so I don't think it's like duplicatable in exactly that same way, but I think it shows what's possible.

Paavo Monkkonen  42:21
Last quick question on this topic. How small can an eco-district be? Because just thinking about the US context, like we have, you know, like a target with huge parking lot that could be like a regional shopping center. Could that be an eco-district?

Michael Eliason  42:34
Yeah, definitely. There are some small eco-districts in Germany and the Netherlands, even in France, in smaller cities or more rural places that, you know, maybe it's just a couple of acres. But when they're planning that, they're ensuring that there's space for climate adaptation. There's space for community. Maybe there's at least a coffee shop for people to walk to. And then the quality of life within that district, right? Like maybe it's more townhomes and row homes and a couple of small apartment buildings instead of, you know, massive or even middle scale housing, right? So it's like that smaller scale, that more rural scale, but you know, there's a lot more intentionality and thought into making it a high quality place to live.

Shane Phillips  43:11
A common thread across the eco-districts profiled in your book is how they all seem to be very family friendly. It seems to be like front and center with schools and childcare centers, safe and often car free routes to school and a mix of unit sizes that are all integrated into the neighborhood from the start. North American planners often talk about wanting to build more family friendly housing. But I feel like in practice, the emphasis is really just on family sized housing, which is not nearly enough on its own. This was one of my main takeaways from our conversation with Lewis Thomas way back in episode 14. Like you can build all the three and four bedroom apartments you want, but there's nothing family friendly about them if kids can't walk safely to school or don't even have a school or childcare in the neighborhood. The substantive merits of being family friendly aside, it also just seems like great messaging and politics to be able to say that you're planning a truly family friendly community since parents and cities I think very often feel like the leadership does not really give a damn about them or their kids. What do you think, Mike? What's the what's the role of family friendly design and all of this?

Michael Eliason  44:23
I think this is I'm a dad, my wife and I have two kids, we've been raising them in the city to try to live this car light car free lifestyle similar to what we experienced when we were living abroad. And it's it's really difficult. And so I think part of the reason why I wanted to focus on looking at the eco district scale is that there are these opportunities to design places like that, with the necessary changes to do it. The issue of family sized housing is a really, really good one. With our double loaded corridors, hallway down the middle and units on either side, it's really, really difficult to get the economics of three bedroom unit, especially a four bedroom unit and something like that to work out, especially because you're taking up the area of maybe like three studio bedrooms, right? And so if your studio bedrooms are renting for $1,500 a month, well, all of a sudden your three bedroom unit, which isn't really that high quality to live with, starts at like $4,500. And so it's fundamentally the way that we're designing our buildings induces these small cellular units. And it's not really conducive to a high quality of life for families. Oftentimes they'll only be like one three bedroom unit on a floor. And so it's really difficult. Like, let's say you're in a building and there's a couple of three bedroom units, but they're interspersed while all of a sudden kids are not on the same levels. And so like they're having to traverse this massive building. And in Seattle, we have double loaded corridor buildings that have over 60 units on a floor, right? And so having the kids walk up and down these buildings is just kind of, at times it could be a little bit intimidating. The quality of these units too is relatively compromised. It's rare to have units that are dual aspect or triple aspect. So this is dual aspect is where you have daylight on the front and the back of the unit. Triple aspect would be daylight on three sides. But this is relatively common in European buildings because of their single stair allowances and mid-rise and even high rise buildings. And so the quality of living in that multifamily housing, I think becomes relatively improved once you kind of start to go that way as well, right? It's like living in a detached house or an ADU. You can get more family sized homes in kind of the same area. You can kind of group them. And so there are ways to like keep the noisier families apart. The other way that we deal with multifamily housing in the US is if a developer is going to put in a three bedroom unit, well, we don't regulate that floor plate depth. So we have this really, really deep unit. And then we have to fill it with stuff. All of the sudden, it's not a primary bedroom and two children's bedrooms, which would be kind of the typical mode of developing multifamily housing in the European context. These become three bedrooms, two of them with their own en suite bathrooms and maybe the third bathroom, which is also a full bathroom is shared by everybody. And the units like the common parts of the unit, kitchen, living, dining, ends up being kind of dark and cramped. Maybe if you're lucky, you live in the corner and you do have daylight at least on two sides there. But it's fundamentally a different way of dwelling in a home. And so I think if we're trying to find places where people can raise kids, having them do it in housing that is of a high quality. And I think passive house is a way of also ensuring that higher quality, both from noise as well as the effects of climate is going to be increasingly imperative, having it in neighborhoods where your kids are only a couple of floors up and the stairwell is maybe right outside the door. They see their kids playing in the courtyard. It's not a 50 minute city for them. It's like 45 seconds because they can just run out the front door, go down the stairs and hang out with their friends in the courtyard or something. There's something to the way that European cities and even to some degree, like South American cities and Asian cities before like high rises took over everywhere to that scale. That four to six story, seven story building where you can hear things, you can see things, you have those connections. You have buildings that have loud sides of the building on the street, but there's also a courtyard. So there's quieter sides, right? There are ways to attenuate the din, the noise of living in a city and the way that our buildings are designed. There's no way to mitigate the noise, right? We limit dense multifamily affordable housing to arterials and highways in Seattle and a lot of other US cities because of our building code requirements, there's a corridor. So there's no opportunity to put the bedrooms on the quiet side of the building. There's no way to escape the noise and air pollution. If you're on the street side of the building, if it's really loud, so then you're not opening your windows and it's like you lose so many of these connections and it's really weird to think that, okay, a lot of this is actually related to stairs, but fundamentally and looking at floor plans and visiting and living in these kinds of buildings in the US and Europe, like the way that we're designing our buildings, it's like a beehive. There's none of the community stuff and there's very little of the nature. It's just kind of like these cellular warehouses, mostly for single people and couples. So I think that we definitely need to be thinking more holistically and it's not just important for family friendly design, but if you're designing places that are geared towards mothers and children, invariably they're going to be places that are more comfortable for the elderly and universally we have a growing and aging population, right? So I think designing places that are family-friendly will also induce places that are better for older residents, better for multi-generational living and all of those wonderful things too.

Shane Phillips  49:32
I think that's an important point that if you design a community or even a building with children in mind, you are probably going to just design a better community overall. Everyone is actually going to have a better experience because of that and it could just be one of many motivations.

Paavo Monkkonen  49:51
I'm sure there's something about the size too of scale of neighbors. We were just looking for apartment to rent here in LA when we came back and my wife inadvertently without knowing, she's not single stair-pilled at all and we saw this apartment that was way nicer, but it was on a creepy hallway and she was like, I don't know, creepy hallway, I don't want our daughter, it's like 30 doors on this hallway, who knows? It's too big and we ended up getting one that's not as nice apartment, but the door goes right to a very small entrance area with two doors, right? I think there's something about having neighbors is great, you don't want to have maybe too many, there's some right amount of three, four units per floor or something seems like a good amount of neighbors, but maybe not 50.

Michael Eliason  50:35
Yeah, there is something to that fineness that you find in single stair buildings. In Europe, they still produce or they still develop these massive buildings, but instead of having two staircases and one corridor down the middle, there'll be like six or even ten staircases breaking this building up into smaller ones and so you have maybe a handful of people on your floor, generally it's somewhere between two and three units, it's even more than that, especially on these larger developments and so just the quality of life becomes radically different, right? You don't have people walking by your home all day long of various hours, you don't have to deal with these dark cramped hallways and so I think there's still community in those buildings, right?

Paavo Monkkonen  51:16
Everybody basically, after a year or two.

Shane Phillips  51:20
Right, right, it seems like it would become more similar to a situation in a single-family home where you've got the person to your left, the person to your right, maybe one or two across the street and you're kind of expected that you're probably going to know those people pretty well, but if in that position you're expected to just know everyone for like three blocks down the street, you almost wouldn't even know where to start.

Michael Eliason  51:42
Yeah, I mean we have buildings in Seattle that are over 250-300 units and the turnover on those is really, really high as well, right? And so if you're a single mom with a couple of kids, to me that just seems like one more thing to be dealing with, where it's like why can't we make places, buildings that are family-friendly, that are accessible for single parents, that offer a high quality of life and don't have all of these other issues associated with them and it turns out this is the norm in most other countries. It's really just the US and Canada are these funny outliers.

Shane Phillips  52:15
Our next episode is with Steven Smith talking about his report on elevators, and he had an interesting bit of trivia in there about how, actually, Jane Jacobs wrote about this double loaded corridor thing, but she called it the related corridor problem. So this was back in, you know, the 60s, or 

Paavo Monkkonen  52:35
Sounds like the three-body problem or something.

Shane Phillips  52:36
Yeah, it's something we've known about for quite a while actually.

Paavo Monkkonen  52:38
Of course Jane Jacobs had it figured out years ago.

Shane Phillips  52:41
Well, yeah, she had her issues, but she was a smart lady. All right, so we've really already started talking about corridors and this relates to stairwells. So I had three questions that were going to be what are double-loaded corridors, why should we dislike them, and what do they have to do with egress requirements in the building code? I think we've basically answered the first two. So what does stairwells have to do with this?

Michael Eliason  53:06
So the origins of this, Stephen will be able to speak about this so much more eloquently when you guys are talking about elevators. I dwell in concepts and Stephen is like, I want to get into the nuts and bolts. But basically through a number of incidents that happened in mostly large American cities from like 1880 to 1920, we required two means of egress, so two stairs in basically any building when it is either three stories or more, or if it has more than four units per stairwell per floor. And so what this has induced over time, and these regulations predate modern firefighting, they predate modern building codes, they predate sprinklers. We've added all of these regulations over time to knock down fires and sprinklers have been the main one that have basically eliminated them.

Shane Phillips  53:52
And I think the history seems to be, and I'm basing this off of another episode we're going to be doing soon in part, obviously we had all of these great fires across the country that burned down huge sections of our cities. But whereas in much of Europe, a lot of construction shifted to concrete in particular, which is essentially fireproof, we kept doing wood buildings in part because of the influence of the timber industry and just the fact that we had so much and so it kind of, we stuck with it. So it sounds like this is not in that history that either Stephen or Jesse wrote about, but I'm kind of inferring that we developed these codes as a kind of alternative solution to the problem. Like, okay, we're not going to build out of concrete, so what are we going to do instead? I guess we will require two stairwells if we go over three stories, because we're just going to assume everything is built out of wood.

Michael Eliason  54:43
I think to a degree that's right. I think also part of it is the building code is actually agnostic for the most part on construction materials. So that two stair requirement is there, whether it's stone or concrete or wood framed. And so that's, you know, there is this kind of fundamental differentiation with us and other countries on this wood framed issue. And I think in a lot of ways that sticking with wood frame construction for mid-rise buildings maybe exacerbates some of these issues. You know, I'm thinking specifically of like the massive conflagrations on huge type three or five over one buildings in the Bay Area, in LA, in Atlanta. They caught fire when they were under construction, right? And it's, they're all double loaded corridors, they're all massive buildings, they're all in framing and once they go, there's no sprinkler or mitigation for anything to really stop those fires. They kind of just have to burn out. Whereas on, you know, single stair buildings in Europe, that conflagration issue doesn't really exist in part because they tend to build in more solid based construction techniques rather than wood. Although with mass timber, they're going back to a lot of wood construction, but also just you have these smaller buildings, there are fire breaks between them. And so there's like, there's this aspect of that fine grained nature that in some ways feels more fire resistant or protective than kind of our status quo right now.

Paavo Monkkonen  55:58
Mike, it makes me wonder if there was like one case in 1905 where somebody said, oh yeah, I couldn't get down the stairs because they were crowded. And then they're like, aha, I know the solution is another stairway inside the building. Because you know, something that we've, that people talk about when they talk about single stair is like, you know, if you have 30 units on a floor and two stairways versus a single stairway, you have four units on a floor and one stairway, like, you know, stairways per apartment is much smaller in the single stair building, right? So just because you have two means of egress doesn't mean that they're closer to your door or that there's going to be fewer people like crowding them in the case of a fire.

Michael Eliason  56:37
And in fact, Pew has done some really good research on this, Alex Horowitz with Stephen Smith and Sean Jersnick and a couple of others that look at the maximum extents that would be allowed under building codes. And you know, you could have this massive double loaded corridor building that's I think 500 feet between exits, is that right? Maybe it's a little bit less.

Paavo Monkkonen  56:55
Wow. 

Michael Eliason  56:57
And then if you think about the issue in those buildings is smoke filling up the corridor. So if you're in the middle, and then there's smoke, right, you're having to navigate quite a far distance to get to either one of those staircases. Then you have to deal with having, you know, significantly more people in each stairway. The fire department likes to talk about having a stairwell that's for once for egress, getting people out of the building, and once for ingress, getting the firefighters into the building to attack the fire. But like, you know, when you go into an apartment building, they don't say, this stairwell way down here is the one that you leave, right. And so there's like, kind of like this fundamental disconnect in how we think about approaching this that there's a lot of, not irrationality, but like, we don't tend to think that fundamentally, single stair buildings are significantly smaller than these double loaded corridor buildings. And if there's smoke in the corridor, well, it's limited in length, because of you know, it's a smaller building. The stairwell is right there, the stairwell is protected, the building is sprinkled, all of these things really kind of mitigate any of those issues that you start to have, right, like the smoke issue becomes not as significant in a single stair building as it does in these massive double loaded corridor buildings. And then another way to think about this too, is the fire departments talk about fuel for these fires, right. And if you have four units around one stairway, and you know, okay, that's four kitchens, you know, maybe some bathrooms and some bedrooms, but it's only four units around that stairway, whereas if you have a double loaded corridor building that's several hundred feet long, maybe 250, 300 foot long, taking up a whole block, and 50, 60 units per floor, that's a ton of plastics, vinyl windows, vinyl floors, cabinetry, kitchens, right, like there's just a lot more fuel that's going into that fire than you would tend to find in a single stair building. And so, again, this the safety question I think is important. And there are a lot of folks who can get into the nitty gritty on the details and have a much better conversation around that. But for me, the fundamental disconnect is like, Swiss engineers are fine with high rise single stair building with no sprinklers, and it's not even in a major city, it's in the suburbs, right. And then we have jurisdictions in the US with professionalized fire departments and water access, and they're like, we're not comfortable with a four story single stair building. And I'm just like, the Swiss are super risk averse, like the Germans are too, that's where insurance was like, found it. And so we need to find some way to kind of synthesize these things so that we get more, I think more opportunity and more variability. For me, the benefit of single stair is that it does allow that redevelopment of those smaller parcels, those medium sized parcels with family sized homes and better homes without having to do parcel assembly, add time, add costs and all of those other things, while still adding necessary levels of housing.

Shane Phillips  59:42
Yeah, I do feel like there is this sense among fire officials, building code officials, and I don't think this is unique to them. I think this is a pretty universal thing, but very relevant here where there's a feeling of well, more is better, but without acknowledging or recognizing that more of one thing often necessitates or leads to less of something else. So for example, a larger elevator often means we're going to have fewer elevators total because they're more costly to install and repair. And so the people who have elevators are going to have a better, bigger elevator, but more people will not have any elevator at all. And similarly here, it's like, okay, you're going to have these two stairwells, but it's actually going to take you longer to get out of your building in an emergency than if we allowed single stair buildings, but also just had fewer units per floor. And those trade-offs just seem to be rarely acknowledged or even recognized.

Michael Eliason  1:00:45
So there are fundamentally three different ways of accessing units on a floor. There's the double-loaded corridor, corridor down the middle, units on either side. The corridor is connecting two stairs. Single-loaded corridor is another approach. This is where you have a hallway, a corridor at the edge of a building. It can be internal, it can be external. And then units on just one side of it. This is really, really common in a lot of European buildings, especially cooperatives and social housing. You can have daylight on multiple sides of a building. The economics of this don't end up working out too well, because if you're a developer and we tend to raise far much higher than they do in Europe as well, part of the reason we have these massive buildings that are significantly larger than in other countries, you're not able to really maximize the far with the single-loaded corridor, right? So it's not really taken up by a lot of projects unless they're like specific site constraints that really, really induce it. But this allows for units that can cross ventilate. The single-loaded corridor allows for units that could have daylight on multiple sides. It's slightly better quality of life than the double-loaded corridor, or maybe in some places significantly improved. But from the development side, you're not optimizing or maximizing your far. And so, like I said, it's not really something that you see. The single-stair building, the point access block, it induces larger units. We have limitations generally on floor area or number of units. And so for the developer to kind of maximize the built area that they're going to do it in a kind of backwards way of inducing these larger units, you get units that can have daylight on two, three, even four sides. You have units that can cross ventilate, you can place the bedrooms on quiet side of the buildings. You have daylight on multiple sides. It's fundamentally a very different way of residing in housing.

Shane Phillips  1:02:23
Something I want to highlight here in terms of how we end up with these double-loaded corridors and tell me if I'm mistaken in how I understand this. So part of the issue is, you know, if you have to build two stairwells instead of one, for a given parcel size, that just means more of your building is going to be stairwell space that you cannot rent out and it costs you money to build, but you're not making any revenue from. So that's already a problem and it's going to kind of naturally force you or push you toward building larger buildings to offset the loss of that. On top of that, as I understand it, the stairwells usually are not allowed to be right next to each other. They have to be some distance from one another. I think this is true in Los Angeles, certainly. And if they have to be some distance from each other, you have to connect them to each other with a corridor. So now you're also having to take up all of this space, this common space, which again is not something you can lease out. And so you end up with this, you know, maybe 15 or more percent of the building that cannot be leased out, where in a point access block, it might be 10% or less. And so this is just driving up all the costs, plus all of these design problems that follow from this. Is that a fair description of how we end up with these double loaded corridors or is there more to it?

Michael Eliason  1:03:41
No, that's pretty much it, right? The building code requires it and then in order to get the economics of the project to work on small lots, it's super constrained and so developers will generally default to partial assembly or trying to find bigger lots, which again adds more time, adds more cost, especially in areas that we're redeveloping, right? We've rezoned for multifamily housing, but we haven't really given a thought to like this interaction between the building code and the land use code, the zoning code. Double loaded corridor generally is somewhere between 80 to 84 and 88, 90% efficient. So that's 10 to 18% of the floor plate is vertical and horizontal circulation. So your elevator, your stairs, your corridor. In a point access block, the circulation, I think the best I've seen is about 95%, but it's usually somewhere between like five and 8% of your building floor plate is dedicated to vertical and horizontal circulation. They're incredibly compact. The other thing that's really fascinating though is like with that double loaded corridor, it's really difficult to get a high density. You get a high density of units, but not necessarily a high density of people in the amount of floor area, especially with like how deep our floor plates are. In the European context, you could get a building that is a chain, so several connected single stair buildings that are primarily maybe two and three bedroom units on a significantly smaller floor plate. So not only is your floor plate more efficient, but also the total amount of area you're constructing for X number of residents is also going to be reduced. We've looked at a couple of different projects comparing multifamily development mid-rise in Seattle versus Hamburg, and not only do we save a significant amount of area for effectively only a couple of fewer bedrooms, but also you have all of these knock on effects, right? You have more units that are accessible by elevator. You've got much larger courtyard space. You've got much lower construction costs in net, right? Because you're only having to build maybe three quarters of the floor area versus significantly more for the double loaded corridor. You're getting a better unit mix. You're getting units that have daylight on multiple sides, right? So then we're getting into the qualitative aspects of it are also just so much better. And to me, I think like the economics of single stair become really, really interesting when we start to get into this issue around chained point access blocks, connected single stair buildings on a larger and larger development. Because when huge developers are coming in, that's the economy that they're looking for. They're not wanting to do a five story, 10 unit building, although we should be able to. It's common the world over. If you wanted to do like 120 units, you could do something with maybe five or six connected single stair buildings. Maybe you have to buy a couple more elevators, but you're getting better units, you're getting a better unit mix, you're getting better quality units, and you're offering it in a way that doesn't require as much constructed area as that similar double loaded corridor would be. This is the area where I think that the next step of research on this should be. I'm hoping Steven has the time and capacity to start to take that on. Again, it's another area where our building codes don't really allow it yet. Although we do see the garden suites, where you have two and three story courtyard buildings with a couple of units per floor, but there's no elevator. This is kind of a relatively common typology in maybe some suburban or even rural contexts.

Shane Phillips  1:06:48
I've lived in several of those buildings in my late teens and 20s.

Michael Eliason  1:06:53
Exactly. They're common all over the US. Better single stair legislation in my mind would allow us to go six or even eight stories like you find in Zurich, in France, in Norway, in Finland, in Mexico, Argentina, and so many other countries.

Shane Phillips  1:07:09
Yeah, and I do think that part of what makes single stair reform compelling and why it's caught on so much, which we'll get to as we're closing out, is it's this policy that is at once improving the economics of development, making it more feasible to build and build lower cost housing, and it is improving quality of life. I think a lot of other things, there are some trade-offs there in one way or another, and this is not a trade-off. This really is a win-win, especially once you understand from the work that Pew Charitable Trusts did on safety that there's also no clear downside in terms of safety from shifting to single stair, especially when you're adding sprinklers or other protections. I do want to say that Mike's book has some great diagrams of single loaded corridors, these point access block buildings versus double loaded corridors, so we will put that on our website as well, just so people can refer to that if they're interested, but of course they should buy the book too.

Paavo Monkkonen  1:08:08
Yeah, and also the perimeter block design I think is really useful, and I like how Mike you suggest, I forgot exactly how you called it, but the broken perimeter block. So you have thin buildings going all around the city block, but then there's some spaces in those. I don't know, you're probably aware of the original plan of Cerda for Barcelona's Aishampla neighborhood. It was exactly that broken perimeter block, but then they ended up filling it in those spaces.

Michael Eliason  1:08:37
Yeah. The semi-permeable, I call it a semi-permeable perimeter block, it does still allow that diaphanous nature, it allows wind flow, it allows for a little bit more light and air that you quote unquote give up a couple of units, but I think you get better quality in the units that are there. There's more- More corners too. Yeah, there's more corners, right? And again, thinking about climate change and doing research on the book, I was really interested in this idea of how, or trying to better understand this idea of how our built environment can facilitate or hinder ventilation, like wind blowing through an area, and what are the effects of cooling on a larger scale because of that. And places like Aishampla, where these closed perimeter block buildings and there's no opportunity for the air to get in there, those courtyards can be quiet, but they can also, they can bake, right? And if there's wildfire smoke, that smoke will linger longer in that courtyard or something, right? And so having a little more diaphanous nature to our built environment, I think not only looks better, but it also allows for more adaptive ways of living as well.

Shane Phillips  1:09:41
Mike, you have a lot of illustrations showing how buildings are arranged in typical US projects compared to neighborhoods full of point access blocks. And it really is this difference of having that interior courtyard where these point access blocks exist. And as you said, that's really the result of having much shallower or less deep buildings. That's the distance from the front of the building on the street side to the back of the building where you would have a backyard or alley. They tend to have quite a bit lower lot coverage. So you're only allowed to build on 30 or maybe at most 50% of each parcel, which leaves a bunch of open space in the back. And yet the projects managed to be relatively inexpensive in much of Europe. Here in the US, you would likely hear a lot of opposition if you proposed cutting the maximum lot coverage to below 50% if it's significantly above that right now. And I think for good reason, because it would mean if nothing else was changed that you just couldn't build as many homes. It's just less homes and we've already got a huge housing shortage that we need to climb out of. So tell us how other cities have escaped that trap. I think this is where you really see the value of a more holistic approach to zoning and development standards and building design.

Michael Eliason  1:10:54
I think a big part of it is the way we do zoning is we hyper focus it on the corridors and arterials. And I know that you guys will be discussing that in a future episode. But I think that there's something to this where we don't distribute that far broadly. We limit it to this really hyper narrow swath of land. It makes places that aren't walkable. It puts the most affordable housing in kind of the most toxic places. It's fundamentally like we should be thinking about how we take that far and distribute it further off of the arterials. And I think that that would also induce more walkability, more variability in the types of housing that we see. But so much of the issue around this really comes down to lot coverage, zoning, how we plan for this. You can have a building that takes up, let's say it's 50 by 100 foot lot. It takes up max 60% of your lot. This is fairly common in a lot of US cities. But we have these side yard setbacks, we have these front yard setbacks, and it induces this building that is narrow and deep into the lot. And so all of those units, because of our double loaded corridor requirement, are then looking into the adjacent lot rather than the street or the corridor. In so many other countries where they're looking more at single stair form based codes as well, they tend to allow those buildings to be the full width of the lot, to push it closer to the front. And so you get this building that can still take out 50, 60% of the lot, but the units are oriented not facing the neighbors, but facing the courtyard, facing the street, going back to Jane Jacobs and the eye on the street. Our zoning code induces fewer eyes on the street in this weird roundabout way. And I think that this issue of how we zone, how we plan, is really paramount to the success of the adoption of single stair. A huge issue that we're struggling with in Seattle is that even in places that we rezone, because of our setback requirements and our lot coverage issues, or maybe we have facade modulation or some other planning game to make the buildings not look so big, we really induce the kinds of buildings that, in my mind, make urban living less fun. If we wanted to be something similar to the courtyard buildings in Paris or Berlin or even the buildings in Ijampo, where they have a ton of housing, there's a ton of density, but they focus it at those buildings orienting them a different way. That really allows for that variability and not just the livability of the units, but also you've got a lot more buildings that are touching that's better from a thermal standpoint. There's a lot more space for trees that's better from a climate standpoint. So there are ways that we could be inducing these buildings, inducing these blocks to be redeveloped that really start to better manage within even the same limits, I think. We could still have moderate levels of lot coverage. We can still allow high levels of far. At 50% lot coverage and a far of three with a six-story mid-rise building, you can get a ton of housing and half of your lot is still open space. There are definitely trade-offs. I think the issue is we need to stop putting a far of six for eight-story buildings on the arterial, which we're seeing in a lot of places like Seattle, and maybe it's a far of three and a half on the arterial going to somewhere between one and a half to three off of the arterial for several blocks. Cities aren't really open to having those conversations. They really just want to keep things the way they are for the most part. And so again, this goes back to that comprehensive planning, like how do we induce these neighborhoods, these places where people will want to live long-term and the kinds of environments that we should be inducing?

Shane Phillips  1:14:12
Yeah, so there's the fact of just not enough land that is zoned for meaningful density for four to six stories. And so it's just going to be expensive and something you're going to be driven to maximize the use of when there's very little of it. But yeah, I think the other thing that is really interesting here, which I think I learned from you on Blue Sky just following your posts or something, was this issue of the building depth and what we're really doing here in the US is I think we kind of took the single family home approach where you have pretty significant setbacks on every side. But then we sort of retroactively applied that to multifamily housing that never really worked that way before where we're trying to have the windows on the side. But when you try to have that setback on the side for a multifamily building, it's forcing you to do this deeper project that ends up with a double-loaded corridor. You don't get multi-aspect windows or units. And what you're getting in exchange is just this window on the side of the building that's like five feet away from the building next door. So it's such a bad trade-off, but I think we've imported this suburban practice over into our multifamily. And it's a really hard thing to change once you've done it without kind of re-imagining the whole community all at once because the transition I think will be a challenge.

Michael Eliason  1:15:37
Yeah, that goes back to the firewall issue and how you accommodate that as the block is being redeveloped or as the neighborhood transitions. And the setback requirement definitely came from planners in the 20s and 30s who wanted to prioritize detached houses instead of multifamily housing. And so the fundamental change to development then in the U.S. has really been to prioritize and accommodate the needs or desires or whatever of single-family homes, even in urban environments. And so we've kind of compromised the urbanity out of our cities to do that.

Shane Phillips  1:16:08
So Mike, thanks in large part to your writing and advocacy. Single-stair reform has caught on across the country and actually in Canada, too, and people like Conrad Speckert and others were involved in that up there. A whole bunch of states have passed laws allowing point access buildings up to four or five or six stories, including your home in Washington state expanding beyond only Seattle, which allowed that with one of just a few cities across the country that already allowed single-stair over three stories. And this also happened in California recently. I think we're going through more of a process to get there, but it's kind of in the works. Could you give us a sense for where things stand today and maybe what you think explains the rapid adoption of these policies in so many places? And then we'll close out with just, you know, where do you think we go next? We've been working on zoning reform in U.S. cities for a while. I feel like we're starting to make real progress there. The work you and others have done on building code, clearly people recognize that was going to be the next or one of the next obstacles we ran into. So where do we go from here?

Michael Eliason  1:17:16
Yeah. So Stephen Smith actually keeps a tracker for both single-stair and elevators on his website, centerforbuilding.org, I believe. I want to say something like 18 states or cities in 18 states have adopted legislation either to study or to enable single-stair buildings above the three-story limit. Parallel with this, Conrad Speckert has been working, as you said, in Canada and has actually shepherded a really interesting process where they're just trying to do it from the national building code level rather than a state-by-state, which in a lot of ways I think is a lot easier and hopefully will be even more productive. But it's super fascinating. I really just started talking about this on Twitter back when Twitter was a thing and just talking about the differences in housing and people were like, oh my God, how is this allowed? How is this different? And I was there in conversations with city council members, politicians at the federal and state level, even developers, other architects, obviously. This movement has kind of grown and I think a big part of it is our status quo for multifamily housing in the US is just so tremendously bad. The number of architects I've talked to that have said basically, if I have to design another single-loaded or a double-loaded corridor building, I'm going to quit. It's soul-sucking and terrible. I think people are looking for something that is new, unique, better. We kind of saw that with mass timber, right? I worked on mass timber in Freiburg in 2003, came back to the US and talked about it for a decade and everyone was like, you're insane. And then lo and behold, someone holds a mass timber conference and now everyone in the US knows what mass timber is. It's fascinating to me that I think so many people are trying to do something new and better just to get away from how bad things currently are. Where things reside, I think about half of them, maybe a little bit more, are mostly study bills. There are jurisdictions that have enabled actual physical legislation. I think Tennessee, Austin and Texas recently did as well. In Washington State, so Seattle has actually allowed single-stair buildings since the mid-1970s. We didn't have a height limit at that time. There were no sprinklers at that time. In the 80s, there was a huge reaction to new development, even though there was a housing crisis and so a lot of the city was down zoned. And at that time frame, the max height went from no limit to six stories and it's kind of been consistent ever since. Seattle and New York City both have allowed six story for a very long time and in a lot of ways, those have become like the starting points. At the national level, Stephen Smith is also working on four-story enabling legislation with the International Code Council. So they have their own, the International Code Council writes the building code for the US.

Shane Phillips  1:19:55
Yeah, we're gonna spend a lot of time with them in the next few episodes.

Michael Eliason  1:19:59
Yeah, that'll be great. And so I think slowly, slowly, people are getting more engaged and interested on this. Once buildings start going up, hopefully outside of Seattle, there'll be a lot more positive reactions or press around it. But what comes next? The building code issue is fascinating to me. I'm not a libertarian by any means. I'm on the board of our social housing PDA. The building code in Seattle is some 1800 pages. The zoning code is another 2000 pages. It's not accounting for the energy code, the mechanical code, the elevator code, the plumbing code, right? Like you start adding all of these things together. And like our building codes are a massive, massive mess. The Bavarian code is something like 80 pages long. And it doesn't get into all the technical stuff. It's a little bit more kind of overarching than that. But I think there is something to this issue where our costs are definitely driven by all of these regulations that are just thrown on top and thrown on top, again, without any thought to how things interact or quality of life or any of these other issues. It's really just, we need to like disaggregate ourselves from these massive texts that induce these massively complicated buildings that are not affordable and with tariffs and high interest rates. I don't know that they ever will be.

Shane Phillips  1:21:12
Yeah, I think that's a great place to be focusing. So there's already interest in building code with single stair, with elevators, with a few other things, with shifting from commercial code to residential code for smaller multifamily buildings. But what I think I'm hearing is maybe we need to be rethinking the building code more broadly and even the ways that it is updated. And I think, again, that's something we're going to talk about in a few episodes, the international, quote unquote, international code council. And maybe we just need to overhaul that process entirely. Yeah.

Michael Eliason  1:21:49
I mean, it's super fascinating. The state of California just paused their updates to the building code, right? Except for a handful of issues. I think that's right. Yeah. The code cycle process is, Stephen will talk about this quite eloquently. I think it's too frequent. It's not necessarily geared towards inducing anything related to affordability or climate or even better buildings. A lot of times the process is kind of captured by industry in some ways. And so I think anything to, maybe it's a national building code that's actually published by a national organization or the federal government rather than, you know, the ICC is a private corporation, right? And so I think the Canadian building code is written by the Canadian government. The German building code is written by the German government. The EU codes are written by the EU government. There's something that's fundamentally different in how our codes are adopted and the outcomes of our building. So I think anything that starts to explore that is going to be good.

Shane Phillips  1:22:41
Well, this is perfect. You've really set us up for the next couple conversations. Michael Eliason, your book is Building for People Designing Livable, Affordable, Low-Carbon Communities. Definitely recommend it. And thank you for being on the Housing Voice podcast.

Michael Eliason  1:22:56
Thank you so much for the invite, Shane.

Shane Phillips  1:23:02
You can find a link to Mike's work on our website, lewis.ucla.edu. Show notes and a transcript of the interview are there too. The UCLA Lewis Center is on the socials. I'm on Blue Sky at Shane D. Phillips and Paavo is at Elpaavo. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.