Booked on Planning

Building for People

• Booked on Planning • Season 4 • Episode 3

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In this episode we sit down with Michael Eliason, the architect behind "Building for People: Designing Livable, Affordable, Low-Carbon Communities." Michael unveils the potential of eco-districts as a transformative alternative to the all-too-often car-centric and monotonous transit-oriented developments found in the U.S. Drawing from his extensive research in Europe and China, he casts a spotlight on how cities prioritize ecological orientation and community vibrancy, offering a path to creating sustainable, affordable, and engaging urban spaces.

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Stephanie Rouse:

RDG Planning and Design is a nationally recognized multidisciplinary firm offering professional services in architecture, landscape architecture, interior design, lighting design, strategic planning, urban and comprehensive planning and design, graphic design, engineering and integrated and public art. Diverse in knowledge and experience, they are united in their pursuit to create meaning together with their clients and in their communities, and by their drive to live life responsibly and do it well. Decades of dedication to success have taken them around the world and in their communities, and by their drive to live life responsibly and do it well. Decades of dedication to success have taken them around the world, and today their commitment to communication and technology allows them to engage clients anywhere from their offices in Colorado, iowa, missouri, nebraska and Wisconsin.

Stephanie Rouse:

You're listening to the Booked on Planning podcast, a project of the Nebraska chapter of the American Planning Association. In each episode, we dive into how cities function by talking with authors on housing, transportation and everything in between. Join us as we get Booked on Planning. Welcome back, bookworms, to another episode of Booked on Planning. In this episode we talk with Michael Eliason about his Building for for People Designing Livable, affordable, low-carbon Communities. Michael moved to Germany because he wanted to be in the heart of where passive house design was being implemented and the ideas from his book realized. These examples are largely from overseas, but there are a few US examples sprinkled throughout the book highlighting the concepts this book had a lot of new and interesting architectural types that cities in Europe are regularly using.

Jennifer Hiatt:

that I found quite interesting and, while I can already hear people saying that the United States isn't Europe, we need to start expanding our housing options. Large mega-block apartment buildings just aren't doing it anymore.

Stephanie Rouse:

I agree, and there's some really interesting housing models like the Bagrubin that I think would be a great idea to pilot in American cities. But, as we discussed in the episode, the current high costs in the building industry and overly restrictive building codes make testing new models like this challenging at best.

Jennifer Hiatt:

The eco-district is definitely a different way of looking at sustainability development. So I hope you enjoyed the conversation. Let's get into our conversation with author Michael Eliason on his Building for for People Designing Livable, affordable, low-carbon Communities.

Stephanie Rouse:

Well, michael, thank you so much for joining us on Booked. On Planning, we're happy to have you on to talk about your book Building for People Designing Livable, affordable, low-carbon Communities. To start off, your book is focused on the idea of an ecodistrict, similar to transit-oriented development but more intentional. Can you talk about what an ecodistrict is and what sets it apart from a standard TOD district?

Michael Eliason:

Yeah well, first off, thank you very much for having me on today. There are a couple of differences in my opinion. So transit-oriented development in the US tends to still be incredibly auto-centric. We don't really put in parking caps. Some places we don't even have parking minimums. We're putting in TOD. There's not really a lot of economic and social mix of residents, it's generally market rate housing with a couple of affordable housing projects at best. There's not a lot of places for children to play. We're not being cognizant of issues around climate adaptation and mitigating the urban heat island effect.

Michael Eliason:

And in European cities, chinese cities they've kind of taken another tack where they're trying to prioritize places that are ecologically oriented, community oriented and have a higher degree of affordable housing than we tend to see in the US, and so in the European context these tend to be called eco-couriers or eco-districts.

Michael Eliason:

We have some history of eco-districts in the US, but it hasn't been very broad.

Michael Eliason:

I think one of the biggest things for me that differentiates ecodistricts and green TOD some folks have kind of talked a little bit about ecodistricts being is just the concept around place and community is much higher in the European context than it is here.

Michael Eliason:

So, as an example, the city of Hamburg is redeveloping massive districts, still within the city, but kind of in the outer reaches of it. It's adjacent to transit. There's this green loop that goes all the way around the district. It's green space, it's part of the urban sponge of the district, right. So when there's this deluge that happens, they'll be flooding there instead of in neighborhoods and in houses. That green loop, not only is it like a way for kids to play right, there's playgrounds and there's brooks and other things alongside it but it also offers an ability to get around the entire district, to go to the different neighborhoods without interacting with cars altogether, right. And so there's this concept of like living in a place that is really more about people and quality of life to just everything is just kind of tuned to a much greater degree than I think we really look into or try to do in the US.

Stephanie Rouse:

I think one of the biggest distinctions reading your book and you mentioned it here is that the eco-districts are adjacent to transit, versus the way we do it here, where we plop the intersection and transit right through the middle of a district and build all the way around it. So it's very still, as you mentioned, car heavy and has some of those environmental issues that the eco-districts don't because of the way they lay them out.

Michael Eliason:

Yeah, it's really interesting.

Michael Eliason:

So we don't take noise planning into account for the most part in a lot of the TOD planning that we do in the US, but that's not the case in a lot of other countries.

Michael Eliason:

Germany has requirements around noise levels for residential districts, and so when they're planning a new district they'll actually model the noise and they'll look at the shape of new buildings that are coming in, how that can deflect the noise, other things that they can do to make it so that when people are living in their homes it's quiet, they're not inundated with the noise of traffic. And in so much of the US we prioritize putting TOD and transit stations, like you said, on a highway or directly adjacent to a highway or at the intersection of two major arterials, and so so much of that district is focused on like having to deal with either crossing those two arterials or one arterial several times a day to do like even basic tasks, and so getting around without interacting with cars is almost impossible, or you're just inundated with, like the noise and the pollution that comes from highways and those kinds of roads, and so it's a really radically different way of thinking about how we can plan places, like I said, that prioritize quality of life, that prioritize public health as well.

Jennifer Hiatt:

And you struck upon one of my pet peeves that I have working in redevelopment, which is that in the US, we try to create depth and dimension with the push-pull exterior walls and too many colors and material variations all on one building. Instead, you offer the I listened to this on Google the Baugruppen.

Michael Eliason:

Yeah, Baugruppen.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Baugruppen no, thank you. Or building a group model. So can you explain why the U away from it? We used to kind of have that model historically. Why have we moved away from it and why should we return to it?

Michael Eliason:

Yeah. So the facade modulation thing. As an architect and as a passive house architect, I find something that just totally drives me crazy because we're playing a game with the facade. Our buildings are getting larger and larger and there's a number of reasons related to this. One is our building codes mandate two means of egress. In most of the world you can do single stair buildings I call them point access blocks to six, seven, eight stories easily. We're limited to three in the US, we can do six in Seattle, but there's a lot of other conditions. So this requirement for two means of egress, two stairs, kind of draws larger and larger development and then a lot of times cities will come in and ramp up the FAR, the floor area ratio, the amount of buildable area on commercially zoned or multifamily lots, and in a way it kind of induces these larger and larger buildings so that when you have redevelopment let's say it's a historic strip in a neighborhood with like five, six, seven different buildings on it Maybe they're like one-story commercial buildings everyone loves right when that gets redeveloped it becomes this huge, massive project and part of it is related to building code, land use code.

Michael Eliason:

It's also related to how we finance projects and so we play these really ridiculous games right. We modulate the facade, change the colors, maybe change the materials or setbacks, like from a passive house standpoint. Every one of those moves is a weakness in our building. That's a point of durability issues and maintenance issues. In the long term it increases the amount of energy that a building will use. It increases the embodied carbon of a building, and so one of the ways that, like European countries and other countries, have gotten around this is they're allowed to do these single stair buildings, these more fine-grained urban buildings that you see in the urban context, and so, as that six or seven parcels on that block face get redeveloped right, they can become, you know, six separate entities, six separate buildings, or they can make six buildings that are effectively all separate single stair buildings, but you know it's connected as one cohesive whole and they can do little things to kind of make it not be so large. But our codes really don't allow this, and so I think any kind of model that would help us move away from that is good.

Michael Eliason:

In the European context, baugruppen could be one means of doing this. Baugruppen are self-developed urban co-housing, and so it's a bunch of people coming together and planning and developing their own urban multifamily house right. So it could be like co-housing, it could be cooperative, the legal structure isn't quite as important, but in a lot of sense it's really just about people coming together, prioritizing their values in the development. So you could come in and say, look, we're all car light families. This isn't a neighborhood.

Michael Eliason:

We're going to develop a place that has a family size housing, because that's another issue we struggle with in development in the US. We're going to have car free development, we'll have a huge bike room, we'll have maybe a workshop or a music room for kids and some open space for them to play in. The point access block kind of enables a lot of these things to happen, because in the European context they use height as the moderator of density, and so a lot of these buildings are going in in places where three, four, five, six stories are fine. The lots tend to be a little bit differently proportioned as well, but in a lot of respects similar to the US narrow on the street frontage and deep, but no setbacks, right. Not having setbacks is a great thing for avoiding this, and it just opens up more opportunities for more livable homes in Balgrip as well.

Stephanie Rouse:

You've been talking about how the code issues are really driving design and good design in our communities, and plenty of developments in other countries have proven that many of our codes are unnecessarily restricting good development, like the single stair. We have a lot of cities or individual states trying to tackle these code issues with getting single stair approved. Nashville's been successful. Minnesota, as an American Planning Association chapter, is really trying to take on this issue With examples of good code revisions working elsewhere. Why is it so challenging to change our codes to match?

Michael Eliason:

So this is a really excellent question. I think part of the problem in the US is our codes are written by a private corporation they're not written by a government entity and there's a board for this entity. Many of the seats of the board are held by organizations that maybe don't care about affordable housing or dense urban housing or even cities in general. It's also a long process, like the process of getting code changes through. You know, there's several rounds of hearings. It's a multi-year process. If it gets accepted which is a whole other discussion then it takes years for it to get adopted into the next code. Not all states are even using the same building code, right? So some are on the 2018, some are on the 2015, some are even on like 2012. Some states don't even have standardized building codes, which kind of blows my mind, and so there's like a lot of variability. If the code council were to allow it now and they wouldn't allow it as something that can directly be adopted, right, it wouldn't go into the code writing process. So the next book until 2027, and then those codes don't get really adopted until 2028, 2029, 2030. And so we're looking at like a decade out from when we start seeing buildings like this. So the process is very long. It's also in some ways captured by industry. So we saw this a little bit with the push for mass timber in the building codes. Like the concrete industry came out and was like, oh, building with wood is dangerous, building with mass timber is going to cause people to be burned. And it's just kind of mind blowing, right, that we have this quote unquote democratic process but we're not really using facts, we're using emotion and other things to dictate it. So I think that's part of it. In Seattle our building code is over 3,000 pages long, right, and that's not even reference standard. So it's already like everything is just it's so complex and technical in ways that I think limit a lot of really good development, or like alternative materials that you would see in other multifamily housing abroad.

Michael Eliason:

The single stair one is kind of the one that comes up to mind the most, but also like elevator costs. So I don't know if you saw Stephen Smith's elevator report that was summarized in the New York Times. For a number of different reasons, elevator costs in the US are substantially higher than other countries. Part of it's related to little competition. We don't have standardized codes. Even within the same state, different jurisdictions can use different elevator codes. So it's kind of the same issue as the building code, right.

Michael Eliason:

Like there's just not a lot of standardization and so it's kind of death by a thousand cuts and all of these other things just really working to prevent not just code changes that can happen in like a rapid or at least more streamlined way of adopting things, but also like we also introduce all of these other things that other countries don't have. So like in Europe, almost no countries require sprinklers until you get to about 10 stories for multifamily housing. In the US, two-story multifamily building we're going to require sprinklers. Some jurisdictions require it for townhomes, right, and so in a lot of ways we're already going much further than a lot of other countries are. We're not really getting massive gains with that right. So we've got two means to begress no-transcript, based in science, I think would be really great.

Jennifer Hiatt:

You state the US has not really engaged in city building in decades, and I kept coming back to how difficult it feels to city build when most of the developable property in the United States is privately owned. So how should cities begin to think about overcoming this obstacle as they start thinking about actually engaging in city building again?

Michael Eliason:

So I used to think that form-based codes would be the way that we kind of work around all of this. But there's this interface between the building code and zoning codes or land use codes that it doesn't really align very well, and form-based codes kind of brought that to the forefront in my thinking even more so. And then a lot of it is really just driven by aesthetics, right, like if you had a really simple form-based code kind of dictating like where a building goes maximum number of stories, roof slopes, things of that nature, like you're starting to get closer to how, like Germany plans in their cities, but what we start seeing is like requirements on window orientation All windows must be vertically oriented and X feet wide, or something and so it just becomes this like aesthetic game. All buildings must have a cornice, right, and so it's. I think you know all of this is really kind of driven in the opposite direction that it should be going. But many cities are going to have larger sites strip malls, malls, airports, whatnot where I think we should be starting to think about mixed-use, ecodistricts and places that prioritize people and ecology.

Michael Eliason:

One option is and I talk about this in the book the Netherlands has this process called the urbanisator, where they're redeveloping a district. Let's say it's a bunch of single-family homeowners. They effectively collate all of those parcels and go through the process of replanning and building the infrastructure and then giving those owners the equivalent value land in what they do, and so it's a process to work with existing privately owned property to develop more urban places. So that's a really interesting one. Whether that's something that would even be legal in the US is a question, but I think that if there's processes for something like that, it can produce something really interesting. Another option is that the city itself takes on the role of the project initiator. This is really common in a lot of European cities, asian cities as well.

Michael Eliason:

A lot of German cities have a development agency or department within the city. This department will handle the planning of the district, the contracts, they'll generally deal with management of installation of the infrastructure, and then what they'll do is they'll spin off the sites, and they typically try to do it in a way that it's like at cost right, so it's a zero cost district for the city. But what they get is they control the land so they can reserve more sites for affordable housing. They can just give those sites away, or they could reduce the price of parcels for more community-oriented or non-speculative forms of housing, like Baugruppen or cooperatives or other forms of affordable housing, and maybe elevate the market rate ones a little bit higher to offset that.

Michael Eliason:

Even in Munich, when they're working with private owners for land that they're going to rezone let's say it's a big industrial area they're going to rezone it for this big mixed-use place the city's approach is like look, we're rezoning your lands, you're going to make a ton of money. You're going to have to reserve some of that land for affordable housing. You're not going to have to build it. We have entities that we work with to do it. And so in a way they're able to induce these large districts that have 30, 40% affordable housing. Another 20 to 30% is like middle-class housing, and so they're able to induce these districts that just have a much more varied economic and social mix than we get.

Michael Eliason:

But even at the small scale this is possible. And Kirchheim Unterteck, which is a small village near Stuttgart, the city redeveloped this nine-acre parcel using this process right, they did the planning, they did the infrastructure and sold it to a bunch of entities. I think about 50% of the parcels were sold to Baugruppen, these self-developed urban co-housing or affordable housing entities, and so, in the end, what they got was this cost-neutral district, they got more affordable housing, they got a strong community, and then they got a tax base that's going to remain in that city rather than flee for the suburbs, and it just ends up being, like this, really kind of great place to live. So, even at the small scale, I think this is something that is totally feasible if we have things oriented in that direction.

Stephanie Rouse:

So if a community has large tracts of land and they're able to do redevelopment on their terms. Often in the US we're accustomed to using the request for proposal process versus competitions, which seems to be more common in European countries. What's the benefit of using a competition approach and why don't we use it here in the US? What's the benefit of using a?

Michael Eliason:

competition approach and why don't we use it here in the US? So it is used a little bit in the US. It tends to be for kind of token projects, so the GSA, the General Services Administration of the government, will use it for some of their buildings. The Seattle Public Library used the design competition as well. So I think part of it is like we just we tend to think of it as something that's reserved for, like these, jewel boxes of a building rather than other things.

Michael Eliason:

The RFP process in the US is something that I find to be really lacking in terms of innovation or driving even sustainability. You can try to write aspects into the RFP, the request for proposal, that prioritize sustainability or prioritize innovation, but a lot of times you don't really get it and in the end what ends up happening a lot with the RFP process is the firms that kind of do the same thing over and over again. May not be the greatest, may not look the great, but they have all of their costs controlled. You know, and they've been doing it for a long time tends to get the projects In Europe. They'll do design competitions, whether that's on the urban planning side as well as the architecture side. It's generally a blind judging, right. So you don't know the firms that are designing the projects. You have a sense of what that district is going to look like almost immediately, right. What you see is what you get, and your judging team is generally a mix of experts, architects, planners, people who are working for the city or maybe politicians that are able to kind of understand what that process will look like and what the urban form will look like and how people will get around in the district and percentages of open space and all of those things. I also think that one of the things that we struggle with in the US is we'll do outreach A lot of times.

Michael Eliason:

The outreach process and planning is really a way for people to come together and say no to something Like we don't want this change, we don't want that. In Germany, when they're going through an urban planning competition, there's a lot of leg work that happens at the beginning. They'll find out, like, what the neighborhood needs. If, like, a new district is going in, maybe there's going to be a lot of family homes in the district, and so the city will need to put in a school. They'll need daycares for the kids, they'll need space for community and so the city kind of takes all of this stuff, writes it into the program for the competition, and then the planning teams, the architects, urban planners, will incorporate that into their designs, and so it's, I think, an opportunity to kind of get more people to come along.

Michael Eliason:

In the end, right Like people are engaged, saying, okay, if something's going to change, at least we're getting this, rather than in the US it's like, well, I don't want anything to change in my neighborhood, right, so we're not going to change the zoning, or multifamily housing is bad, and it kind of becomes the outreach, becomes kind of a bully's veto rather than the process to incorporate actual public participation in the design process and even the competition process in Europe now is changing a little bit.

Michael Eliason:

France has a very low qualification threshold that they'll do for firms, and so it's a way to allow younger firms, more diverse firms, to have an opportunity to win a project, and then they'll also offer a stipend for the firms that are selected.

Michael Eliason:

So it's not free labor, which is, I think, a big issue that a lot of people have with the competition process, but the RFP process is also a form of free labor, right Like. I've worked on massive RFPs and you know, had to go through the interview process for this and on a project that we didn't win, and you don't get anything out of that right, and so there's a lot of free labor that goes into the RFP process as well. I think it would be really beneficial for cities to look at changing their procurement policies to move in this direction. I think especially around urban development and how we're thinking about new neighborhoods around transit, instead of, like, doing all of this stuff that's kind of a little bit piecemeal. Maybe we'll have an urban framework or a policy framework, but even I find those tend to be fairly rare and limited, and so finding a way to do something that's more comprehensive and taking all of these other things into account in the long run, I think would be pretty beneficial.

Jennifer Hiatt:

And once we get those proposals, however, they come to us RFP, for the most part for American cities. We often hear halfway into the process that, well, we can't do what we proposed anymore because everything has become so expensive and we talked a little bit about this with, like, the high cost of elevators. But what makes building in the United States so much more expensive? What's the root issue here than in Europe?

Michael Eliason:

So I think it's like 100 little things and I moved to Germany in 2019. And part of the reason I moved was because I wanted to be close to the central heart of like mass timber and passive house and Baugruppen and social housing. But I also wanted to understand, like why you know, german and Swiss housing is of such a higher quality for lower costs than we get here, and I think it's a combination of things. One is salaries are lower, material prices are lower, labor costs are lower, profit margins are lower as well. There's socialized insurance. I think it's like a hundred different things that really drive down the cost of what they're doing.

Michael Eliason:

I don't know if you've read any of Alain Levy's work around transportation costs in the US. Lévy looked at transportation costs for infrastructure in the US and looks at what's going on in other countries and almost everywhere else. Construction costs are whether it's tram, light, rail, bike lanes, whatever are a fraction of the cost that they are here. So in some ways, it's almost like they're able to do more for significantly less. But also part of it, too, is, I think, that Europe has a long history of leaning into cities. In the US we don't right. In the 20s, we banned apartments in most of the land area of cities and adopted single family zoning widespread throughout most of the US Highway infrastructure went in sprawl. We've kind of reached the limits of sprawl, and so now people are returning to cities but like we forgot how to build in cities. Urban building is difficult and expensive, and so we don't have that. You know 200 year history that you know Berlin or Vienna or London or other cities have of. You know building densely in these compact urban places, and so a large part of it too is just we don't have the construction infrastructure that's really been able to ramp up to do this. So this goes back to the point access block discussion. So most housing in the US ends up being a double-loaded corridor because of our two-stair requirement. This drives buildings that are going to be deeper and deeper, and cities kind of respond to the lack of housing by just opening up far more on existing parcels that are already multifamily or commercial, rather than distributing it more broadly. And so the only way for a lot of development whether it's affordable housing or market rate to use that far is to build deeper and deeper buildings, and so we have these hotel-like buildings. In Seattle we're seeing buildings that are approaching 90, 100 feet deep, and so that means you're living in a studio that's maybe 10 feet wide by 50 feet deep. It's inducing a lot of windowless bedrooms and dark places, but like it's not the way other places develop right In Germany, point access block a single-stair building.

Michael Eliason:

The depth of that building is going to be somewhere between 40 to 50 feet. They can easily fit in the same number of people in a much smaller footprint. So it's not just like that the labor costs are different, but the way that we're building kind of induces these very expensive buildings, and so it's difficult to get a lot of the quality aspects that you find in that right. Like it's difficult to find three-pane windows that are affordable, and that's not the case in Europe, where there are 500 window manufacturers and you know, once you get window certification in Germany, you can sell it to Poland or the Czech Republic or Spain or whatever right, and so there's just a lot more competition and options for some of these things as well, and so I think it's not one thing, it's just so many things that are all lining up together to make everything here just so much more expensive and so much more difficult.

Stephanie Rouse:

Your book is filled with examples of concepts, most of them coming from European countries. Why do you think innovation and creativity with green building approaches is so prevalent there but so hard to replicate here in the US?

Michael Eliason:

I think a big part of this is just they never walked away from cities, right, like low mid-rise urban housing buildings, right, it's been the norm for cities, whether it's affordable housing or luxury housing, for a long time. I think also, just the planning process itself induces more innovation and creativity. Right, we talked about this a little bit. With urban planning, competition kind of allows for people to try out new ideas or new concepts. A really interesting example of this is Henning Larsen's Fallen Bee Project in Copenhagen. It's kind of in this green area that's not quite urban city but not quite village, and so they took it as this opportunity to create this new hybrid where there's blocks that are all kind of focused on the central square. The parts of the block, the buildings that are facing that central square, are much more urban, and then it kind of devolves into more village-type building typologies and then back to nature, right, and so it's offering different ways of even thinking about developing places. So, part of it is the planning process.

Michael Eliason:

Part of it is just the cost issue. And the cost issue is really funny. In the US, single-family houses are built under a separate building code, the IRC, the International Residential Code. That is a much easier code to build to than the International Building Code, and so we have this cost disparity, this bifurcation, where low density sprawl is inexpensive to build and, like low rise to mid rise to high rise, it keeps going up in cost. And that's not really the case in other countries.

Michael Eliason:

Right, in Germany, even Spain, italy, the single family house is like the most expensive to build, like, if you're looking at it on a cost per square foot basis, by the time you go to like low rise, mid rise, the costs kind of drop and they level out a little bit, and so there's not this huge cost increase associated with building density. Right, it's like you're actually seeing the benefits of density and that the costs are coming down rather than up, and so it's. You know, I don't know how we get around to this cost issue, but, like I said, it affects transportation, it affects everything from bike lanes to buildings. I think it's something that we really have to get our head around.

Jennifer Hiatt:

I would agree and changing course just a little bit. One of the concepts you mentioned in your book is called a sponge city, so I was wondering if you could talk about what that concept is and how cities can incorporate these principles for better stormwater management.

Michael Eliason:

So the sponge city is an urban planning principle or concept around flood and stormwater management that's generally associated with blue-green infrastructure. The concept originated in China and is increasingly being adopted in a lot of German and Dutch cities, increasingly, with the effects of climate change as well. We are starting to see it in the US. Pittsburgh, la, new York City are also expending pretty significant sums of money to try to mitigate flooding and future deluge and rain events. What I find so fascinating about this is that it's not just flood mitigation, right Like. It's an opportunity to re-green our cities.

Michael Eliason:

A kind of common example from Denmark, from Copenhagen, is depaving a street, putting in effectively this large park space that you know when there's a flood event, it floods, it absorbs the rainwater so that the houses and other things don't flood, but when it's not flooding, it's urban heat island mitigation. It's a play space, it's a place for pollution to kind of go and filter out instead of ending up in the air. It's really a way of kind of bringing together a lot of concepts right Adapting to climate change, prioritizing public health, prioritizing quality of life and access to nature in a way that I think is much more comprehensive and cohesive, and it can be anything from like tree wells to bioswales at the small scale. Just rethinking our courtyards right to have spaces where water can go and where we can collect it during deluge events. Thinking about blue roofs on structures as well. So our green roofs work as well, but the blue roof is kind of like a rainwater containment system on a roof that slowly percolates back down in the system, the sewage system, so that it doesn't overwhelm and cause flooding down the line.

Michael Eliason:

But you know, with climate change, we're going. We're already seeing the effects of increased rain events, deluges, and so I think we're going to be having to think a lot more about how to mitigate and adapt to these things in the long term. So many US cities are just now starting to think about this and we're probably, you know easily a decade behind where we need to be to even start to move on this. And then there's, you know, significant questions about funding. And you know, if we're depaving streets for blue-green infrastructure, are people going to fight that because they want space for private car parking?

Stephanie Rouse:

And it's just this ongoing conversation in the US. So eco districts are one way that we can start building towards sponge cities in the US. What are some of the first steps that our city should start taking to incorporate eco district concepts in our communities?

Michael Eliason:

I think a big one is just understanding that building depth can play a big role in limiting the amount of space for this, and so we're seeing this in Seattle and areas where we allow density, most of the lot is going to be consumed by the building. We don't regulate floor plate depth and so, like I said, we're seeing buildings that average between 80 to 90 feet deep. It's almost twice as deep as you would see in the European context. On the West Coast, this number is only going up because the housing crisis, I think, is so severe. I've seen a floor plate in Denver that's 120 feet deep it just blows my mind. And then it's got like three windowless bedrooms in it, right, and so it just blows my mind that this is kind of the types of places that we're building. But when our buildings are this deep, if you think about a block, if there's a courtyard, it's going to be really small. If your building is even two-thirds of that, if it's 70 feet deep at least, you have more space for nature, you have more space for trees, you have more space for blue-green infrastructure, space for community, there's more privacy. So I think a big part of it is just cities don't understand this interface between building code and land-use code. That's a big one. But also just the effects of the land-use code at a broader level is not really studied to the degree that it should be. And so if you look at like historical perimeter blocks in Hamburg or Berlin, new districts are kind of replicating that. You know taller buildings, thin floor plates, a lot more green space. New districts are doing that. They're just doing it in different ways. Maybe they're taller or the buildings are a little bit different, but there's still, like this, ample space for community, ample space for climate adaptation, and in the way we're doing our planning in the US, so much of it feels like okay, our land use code is just going to give X amount of FAR, we're not going to limit the floor plate depth, architecture team, developer team, go.

Michael Eliason:

And we see this a lot in Seattle right now. If you have a lot that's narrow and deep, we can do an apartment on it. Let's say it's 60 feet wide, we'll do a 50-unit apartment, double-loaded corridor. Well, you've got 25 units on one side of the corridor, 25 units on the other, and then that exact same building goes down next door. Well, instead of having units that are oriented towards the street and open space.

Michael Eliason:

You now have 25 units in one building looking directly at 25 units in another building, right, and that issue becomes even more problematic in a lot of cities where, like those multifamily zones start to interact with the single family zones, right, because that edge condition becomes so much greater, right, all of a sudden, the single family homeowner went from like having one neighbor who couldn't really look into his yard to like this big building with like 50 units looking into his yard.

Michael Eliason:

And so the way we're planning our cities, we're not taking a lot of these things into account and I think it's not allowing space for climate adaptation, it's not allowing space for even people to feel like they're comfortable. You know, I have a daughter. The building next door had, you know, 25 units looking directly at us and it's only 10 feet away, like. That's like a different condition than what we had before, and so I think it's understanding that the effects of our land use codes have, like these long-term effects that if we're not really taking into account, can be kind of negative towards not just developing places that are better, but also I think it can induce more resistance to urban development.

Jennifer Hiatt:

So, on top of your book, which we recommend everyone go out and pick up a copy of, what books would you recommend our readers check out?

Michael Eliason:

David Simms' Soft City. David's book was actually the book I originally wanted to write, but his book is so much better. It was so well written. If you haven't read David's book, I highly recommend it. I'd like to think that his book and my book are like a good one-two punch on how and why to build better cities and buildings in the US. We were also a car-free family for six years two kids so the subject of mobility is really important to us, as well as climate adaptation and trying to be living some of the values that we talk about, and so anything related to street transformations, deprioritizing cars very high on our list. Veronica Davis's Inclusive Transportation, marco Tebromostrot's movement, wes Marshall's Killed by a Traffic Engineer is next in my queue, and I'm also currently reading Kristen Godsey's Everyday Utopia, which is about just the history of collective urban development as well, which is really interesting.

Stephanie Rouse:

All great books. A couple Island Press in there that we've covered.

Michael Eliason:

Yeah, I think most of them are. Yeah, I have way too many Island Press books.

Jennifer Hiatt:

No, you can't have too many Island Press books Otherwise, like the whole bookshop behind me is too many books.

Michael Eliason:

Yeah, no, I was really excited when they agreed to publish my book because I felt like it was the place that it would land best, and so it's just been great to be working with them.

Stephanie Rouse:

Well, michael, thank you so much for joining us on Booked On Planning to talk about your book Building for People Designing Livable, affordable, low-carbon Communities.

Michael Eliason:

Thanks again.

Jennifer Hiatt:

We hope you enjoyed this conversation with Michael Eliasson about his Building for for People Designing Livable, affordable, low-carbon Communities. You can get your own copy through the publisher at Island Press, or click the link in the show notes to take you directly to our affiliate page. Remember to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and please rate, review and share the show. Thank you for listening and we'll talk to you next time on Booked on Planning. Thank you.

People on this episode

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Jennifer Hiatt

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Stephanie Rouse, AICP

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