Affordable Housing Institute : US

So thoroughly tongue-in-cheek is the lede of this New York Times article regarding the competition for width bragging rights:

 

A DREAM COME TRUE At 18 feet wide, the average town house provides luxurious space in a crowded city, but there is always the fantasy of a wider house, with three, or even four windows across the front.

 

WHEN Gary Rabin closed on a 38-foot-wide New York City town house this month, he happily acknowledged that his new home’s girth would make him the envy of the tony town-house set.

 

“Perhaps sir would like to see something a little … grander?”

 

He had started off in 2003 with a 19.6-foot-wide brownstone on a quiet Greenwich Village block - wide enough by any conventional brownstone standards. There was no need to hang his head in shame the way he might have had he bought, say, a 13-foot-wide property. But being slightly below the coveted 20-foot mark, it wasn’t the sort of statistic he was likely to brag about among his real estate-savvy friends at dinner parties.

 

Somewhere in here, the writing indulges itself going over the top:

 

Before long he found himself feeling a bit hemmed in by the relative narrowness of his life. He yearned for a home where he could spread his arms a little wider, and enjoy the fruits of his labors as a hedge fund manager with some millions to burn.

 

In the fall of 2004, he found what he was looking for: a 38-foot-wide town house a few blocks away, a massive piece of real estate for New York. Sure, it was a lot more expensive, but he’s a lot happier, too. He now owns one of New York’s widest houses, in a category defined more than anything else by that single statistic.

 

“I have to admit, it makes a huge difference,” Mr. Rabin says, rhapsodizing about his extra-wide new home. “There’s an element of pride when you walk out the door in the morning.”

 

For housing, you see, is not merely the physical space we occupy, but also a tangible and external expression of who we are.

 

“Size matters - and let’s face it, it’s the first thing everyone wants to know when they start looking,” says Kirk Henckels, senior vice president and director for Stribling Private Brokerage, who specializes in high-end East Side town houses. “Most people will say right off the bat that they won’t look at anything under 20 feet. I can tell them it’s the most beautiful place in the world, with fabulous layouts and lots of light and a great facade, but it won’t matter if it’s 16 feet wide. There’s ego involved.”

 

In fact, much more than ego is involved, and what’s involved is something of critical importance in shaping cities and their housing.

 

Cities are the laboratory of home configuration innovation — money brings more people into a defined land space, and since the city cannot go out (bounded either by walls or traffic congestion), it must go up.  Since the time of the Romans, urbanization has led to greater density, which has led to taking buildings up by adding floors. 

 

Townhouses in DC

 

Row houses in New York City

 

Brownstone in Boston

 

The townhouse, with its poor cousin the row house and rich uncle the brownstone, is thus a mainstay of nineteenth century urban densification.  Indeed, it swept through cities in the Industrial Revolution’s wake, defining neighborhood both low (row houses) and high (brownstones). 

 

Beyond its value in greater density, townhouses also offered lower per-home construction costs (shared walls), lower operating costs (some inter-building insulation), and lower maintenance costs (smaller ground footprint).  But when you build a townhouse, you face a critical decision — how wide is each unit to be?

 

People are endoskeletal (except for one organ which you’ll deduce if you think hard enough); our bones are a frame on which hang cables, wires, and soft structures.  Insects and crustaceans (arthropods all) are exoskeletal; their structure is imposed from without.  The two groups grow in very different ways, the lobster and insect having to discard a too-constricting old skeleton and then growing a new one.

 

A townhouse is essentially exoskeletal – its bones are the bricks or stones that define front wall, back wall, and side walls.  Of its five built sides, only two can expand, three cannot:

 

1. The roof can be raised with new floors.
2. Behind the back wall of every townhouse is an alleyway or mews.
3. The front wall touches the street and faces setback requirements.
4. The side walls are nestled as tightly as airline middle-seat passengers (where, as it happens, I am writing this post).

 

“There are 25-foot houses, which are the best,” said one Brooklyn town house owner who has one, and likes to show it off. (He requested anonymity so he could condescend freely toward those less fortunate.) “Then there’s 20-foot houses, which are O.K. You can be comfortable with that. But with a 17-foot house, you walk in and the best thing you can say is, ‘Hmm, nice kitchen.’”

 

That strikes Christopher Thomas, an executive vice president at Brown Harris Stevens, who sells Brooklyn brownstones, as a bit harsh. “I see where you’re going with this,” Mr. Thomas said, “but the fact is that plenty of people are happy in narrow brownstones.” He paused for a moment to choose his words carefully. “It’s not the width, it’s how you use it,” he concluded.

 

A townhouse may go up – and it’s common to see them add floors.  It may go back – and many a townhouse has a series of tumorous wooden growths.  But it cannot breathe laterally.  Once you lock the townhouse’s width, it can basically never be changed.  It is exoskeletal without possibility of expansion:

 

Ms. Smith was fortunate enough to find a way around the fundamental weakness of a truly narrow brownstone. Her house had the benefit of a staircase in the middle of the floor plan instead of by the front door, where it would have monopolized the entranceway almost completely. Thus she avoided the cramped feeling that leads most prospective home buyers to shy away from the narrowest of brownstones - which can include homes as absurdly skinny as the nine-and-a-half-foot-wide Bedford Street brownstone once owned by the writer Edna St. Vincent Millay, which sold in 2000 for $1.6 million after a gut renovation made it at least livable, if a tad crowded. 

 

My townhouse squeezes round its bends,

The bathroom’s very tight.

But ah my foes and oh! my friends

The price was really right!

 

Some townhouses thus become functionally obsolescent simply because minimum room-size configurations change as technology and wealth drive urban home standards.  That functional obsolescence translates powerfully, disproportionately, into value:

 

Miller Samuel Inc., a residential real estate appraisal firm, estimates the average width of a Manhattan town house at about 18 feet. 

 

Brokers estimate that no matter what part of New York you’re looking in, a 25-foot house is likely to sell for double the price of an 18-footer down the block.

 

Forty percent more space = one hundred percent more value.

 

“I have a brownstone on East 71st Street, 21 feet wide, triple mint condition, for $17 million,” said Roger Erickson, senior managing director at Sotheby’s International Realty, who specializes in East Side brownstones. “And basically the same house, seven blocks away and 15 feet wide, for $8.5 million. That’s more than $1 million a foot. Isn’t that so silly?”

 

Some other townhouses struggle awkwardly to cope, for often within a townhouse are further constrains (on, for example, the width of walls).  If technology improves so the building needs new nerves, it must grow them outside its exoskeleton.  Thus we see downspouts, water/ sewer pipes, electrical and telephone cables snaking up and down townhouse stuccoed walls like so many man-made vines.  One sees this all over Europe, especially in the inner-ring suburbs a streetcar’s ride from downtown:

 

Maybe not this visible …

 

Faced with these strictures, what can one do?  Everything now and then a brave developer pursues rehab fusion, banging together two one-up-one-down (as they are called in the UK) together.  Like nuclear fusion, much matter is destroyed — one bathroom, probably an interior staircase, and several interior walls.  But that by itself may not be enough, for the remaining rooms are also small, and voluptuous sitting room may only highlight modesty of its twin bedrooms.

 

“Miss Millay will see you now.”

 

Exoskeletons can preclude design flexibility; they can even preclude use.  When Robert Moses was building his highway empire, he decreed that his parkways would be spanned by bridges of stone, at a height Moses carefully chose to preclude buses and trucks from navigating them (and thus preserving the sylvan verges for the flivver-bouncing family making its serene way from Manhattan to Islip). 

 

 

And today, Moses’s parkways are a pleasure to drive … and horribly underutilized, even as adjacent better highways are clogged with essential traffic. 

 

Beware, then, of Bob Moses’ Curse: the under-engineered exoskeleton.

 

I have previously written that zoning is destiny.  To which add another: building skeleton is destiny.  From some destinies, one cannot escape.

 

From some construction mistakes, you may never recover.

 

When in doubt, build a bigger skeleton.  One day your successors’ successors will need it.

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