On the Park Bench – Author's Series: Increments of Neighborhood

hmm we're gonna give a minute for everybody to um come on board and then we're gonna start so i wanted to welcome everybody to on the park bench in public square conversation on the park bench is a webinar series that cnu has been doing for the better part of a year and we do it always on tuesdays at 12 noon um not every week but um but usually a couple of times a month and within that webinar series we have a series called the author's form which is all about discussing books that have to do with urbanism written by urbanists and of interest to this field the authors forum producer is is dura to dani architect and urbanist and without his hard work we wouldn't have this series so i want to thank dhiru today's authors forum is on increments of neighborhood a compendium of built types for walkable and vibrant communities by author brian o'looney so you can share your thoughts on hashtag on the park bench and go to uh that url on the screen for uh feedback and you can register for our next two webinars uh which are also authors forms uh tuesday march 2nd transect urbanism with author andreas duwani and interviewer charles ball and on tuesday march 16th main street how a city's heart connects us with author mindy thompson full of love and interviewer kennedy smith those both look excellent go to cnu.org slash resources slash on the park bench remind everybody about cnu29 design for change you need to register for that the early bird registration is available through march 7th and it's um really is an incredible bargain especially if you've got a firm with with several people attending you really want to register by march 7th cnu 29 design for change may 19th through 21st will focus on the intersection of design and power the power design holds to influence the way we live to physically change and adopt adapt the spaces we inhabit as well as how we can use it to achieve the change we want to see in neighborhoods towns cities and across regions uh cnu 29 program will break the mold of previous congresses multiple formats that maximize the benefits of being held virtually and encourage creativity and innovation from participants learn more at cnu cnu.org cnu29 i'm really excited about this uh discussion today we have a panel uh that between them probably has been involved in more charter winning charter award-winning projects than they can probably count um and we have the author brian o'looney of increments of neighborhood and he is a principal with torny callison partners a major new urbanist design firm located in silver spring maryland and before that he also worked at a uh a notable urban design firm uh uh david schwartz architects and we have uh the interviewers todd zimmerman uh who is a co-founder with his um wife laurie vogue of zimmerman vogue associates a pioneering firm in the market research of of residential building types in in walkable neighborhoods and we also have matthew bell and the other interviewer a professor of architecture at the university of maryland one of the significant pedagogues in the uh new urbanism field and the principal at the private architecture firm perkins eastman and i'm rob studeville editor of cnu's online journal public square and senior communications advisor with the congress for the new urbanism and today we're going to be talking about increments of neighborhood a compendium of built types for walkable and vibrant communities when i reviewed this book for public square back in march of 2020 we had the whole nation had shut down for covid and i was worried at the time that this book might be overlooked because nobody was really thinking much about urbanism at the time but what i said was that every urban designer planner architect and developer who is building urban places should have a copy of this book and that in every charette where you're designing walkable neighborhoods or portions of walkable neighborhoods there should be this book available because it literally talks about the building blocks of uh what you need to build neighborhoods and it talks about them in such a way that it's incredibly useful beautifully put together um this is not just a book but it seems like is it's a result of a career in in urban planning and designing neighborhoods and uh briana looney has been involved in scores if not hundreds of designs of walkable neighborhoods in similar places so before i turn this over i will inform everybody that uh that we are going to be doing a presentation then a discussion among the three uh panelists today and then we're going to go to q a from the audience and so as uh questions occur to you please ask them using the q a function of zoom not the chat function you can make you can make a comment in chat but use the q a function for the questions because that's how uh these questions are going to be organized during the general q a so we'll get to that q a as soon as possible but uh first i wanted to pass this over to brian so that he can uh give his uh presentation okay well thank thank you can everyone hear me okay great uh so i was asked by uh uh dear and robin thank you for inviting me to present this book it's it's an honor to be amongst such other great publications that this series has uh talked through uh and uh excited to to talk about this book today um and so anyway i was asked by dhiru and and rob to talk a little bit about the goals of of putting the book together and why we put the book together uh and i think uh i we we recognized there needed to be a resource at the beginning of assembling this book and it was partly a reaction to a great article uh written by chris leinberger about the kinds of building types that were getting financed uh in in the late 90s and what if one wanted to become a developer what one can go out to do and he identified uh for the purposes of trying to uh have the community identify types that were contributing to walkable places he identified the what he called the 19 types of of some of uh uh uh 19 standard product types uh that were being financed and getting built and uh and those 19 types are on the slide today in this grid uh they include for sale housing types uh which were starter homes and he he had a different definition than we might have defined but i had what was called a move up home and a luxury home and a retirement facility and vacation homes really defined by market segments uh that a bank or investor might be looking to uh address and then he had the income products he identified as uh in retail neighborhood uh shopping centers regional shopping malls big box power centers uh and then in the office market uh build a suit office medical office uh multi-tenant bulk warehouses and finally multi-family uh buildings or a uh buildings and what was interesting about the 19 types uh as we were went through working through this book uh we you know they're all supported by one other type which was the type of surface parking that contributed to the public realm and that makes up the suburbs that we uh uh reacted to in putting this book together uh we wanted to answer the challenge with this book uh and uh so we looked at um a uh the the neighborhoods that we love and and and and uh are charmed by and so this is an image of georgetown that john tordy uses a lot of his presentations for our office uh and it shows the the variety of types that contribute to this one neighborhood there's a big mansion in the center uh but they're surrounded by some multi-family some mixed-use retail buildings uh and other kinds of walk-up town houses stacked town converted stack uh to stack product there's a wide range that makes this rich fabric uh unique and and charming uh similarly in short north uh uh north of uh the core of columbus you have a neighborhood that again has that uh uh mix of types a lot of which have changed their uh relationship to the street over time so that my started out as a townhouse but then uh were converted to stacked flats or put or had retail brought into the ground floor uh over time uh here's a view in san francisco of broadway uh near where i grew up in new london connecticut and then chicago which has a very different range of types and so what we wanted to do was compile types that were today contributing to uh to neighborhoods to the kinds of communities that we love to be in and wanted to be a part of and so we uh had particular attributes that uh those who uh are interested in walkable urbanism are extremely familiar with the we wanted active street frontages that were pedestrian oriented that had engagement with the the street frontages that had doors on the street connectivity and allowed for uh personal ownership and and and occupancy even if they rented the product that there was an opportunity to buy into the place and that was something we learned as we were putting the book together that was important to defining the types uh the difference between the types that contribute to walkable place and those that don't um and so we started to compile the types over many years and uh then started to group them uh and uh it was interesting of the types that we collected or there's 140 in the book i only 33 percent are from greenfield new urbanist projects the rest are infill product product that have been built over the last 20 years uh and uh another thing we learned was that the types often in reinforce one another we can talk about that a little later um but they um they they can there starts to be a little influence like uh pieces on chessboard influence one another uh in the neighborhood um we wanted to present successful implementations of each type so we looked hard uh for uh the best exemplar of of the type uh and uh and in in some cases uh we had a hard time and the the best example is it you know has some issues in the in the in with the way they react to the street or or otherwise uh we also showed uh bad examples and we call those missed opportunities to to describe uh what could be problematic or what could be improved we tried to show plans we tried to show them in construction um when i was in school i wish i saw more buildings naked to better understand what was behind what we see in our public realm and so part of the spreads for each of the types show uh the buildings being constructed and this is a range of building types here that contribute to cores all over the city cores all over the united states and and canada uh and uh each of them have a huge impact on cost and so the the construction type on the right is more than double the cost of the construction type of the single-family home uh that we're all familiar with and that has huge implications for what we do when we build neighborhoods and it has nothing to do with style nothing to do with public realm it has to do with the core elements that make the the community and so that was an important thing we wanted to highlight and i wish i knew more about and was taught more when i was in school um and we we ended up focusing on market vetted types which means they were not patron sponsored types so the types are distilled to their essence um and that's interesting because it shows the range and and that there is still a need for architecture and art um we worked with uh rcl co and so in helping to put numbers on these types uh to understand their place in the market and uh one of the partners there had a very interesting comment was that when you do that you start to see the value the architecture adds and you can start to understand that uh when the types are distilled down so uh well each of the types can be elaborated to become a custom home or a branded or a pad site can become a brand branded retail building or a urban office building can certainly become a corporate headquarters but we didn't add those as types those are uh elaborations that we uh can find out there so we tried to distill down and and were guided in many ways uh and thought of it in terms of sort of the crutches of art of architecture that phil johnson had talked about uh and really distilling down to all these items the structure the utility the cheapness the comfort and serving the client uh and and delving into history a little bit and drawing but really was more about the core uh pro the core essence that contributes to the neighborhood and community um and then finally we wanted types that uh we want to uh share successful compilations of type to allow folks to go out and say wow we can mix these together and make great neighborhoods um and uh the example on top is from my office example in the lower right uh is from amol polyzoides uh and in that mul polyzoys example there's everything but the kitchen sink typewise mixed into that one project at del mar uh there's a double loaded quarter multi-family building an office building retail stack flats and towns all making an incredible destination at the del mar train station in south pasadena and that and and the plan on the left the lower left is one of my partner uh uh cheryl neal and murphy antoine put these plans together and again the colors represent the different types that start to establish the richness of the neighborhood of uh and this is a campus uh community at george mason university um and then finally i wanted to expand the the notion of missing middle there's a lot of talk about missing middle uh but they really that talk is really focused on housing and the the interesting charm of the neighborhoods that i talked about the beginning or uh neighborhoods particularly like in philadelphia where the end grain always has retail built in is that the the market through the the specialization that chris leinberger identified had moved away from these softer retail types that had been used to warm up and and enliven neighborhoods and and they're still allowable under the building codes and can happen and so we this is another 20 gallons example uh where this is a wood building with residential above retail and it's wood with uh and you can see the construction in the middle image uh but it's it has a starbucks in the bottom and and a a liquor store and a uh convenience store built into it and it serves the neighborhood well and it doesn't have to be expensive and so that was another goal of putting this book together uh and with that i'm i'm i mean i i'm excited that it seems to be have been received well and i look forward to questions um from from everybody here today well great brian i guess first of all excuse me congratulations on the book it's a very very impressive work and um it is a lot of work to put a book together and i can imagine um having all the stresses and strains of practice it's a lot of work to put putting a book together while you're trying to put buildings together as well um so kudos to you for making that all happen i guess i get the first question here um it's kind of an obvious one um how do you think people should use this book or maybe the converse how should they not use the book what are the ways you think the book is useful and to the different kinds of people who might be interested in it yeah um again um i i hope people would learn about more types and uh and i hope it would appeal to broad audiences i can see it being used by students but also to you know uh for developers to show to bankers of examples of where they've got where types have been built that they may have been unfamiliar with or are not clear about um i think planners can can use it to to better understand uh how the building code impacts what gets built uh the tranches that are developed in the book are relative to what the building code allows and actually the image here these are these types come from where the tranches that the building code uh forces upon buildings and uh maybe we can talk about that a little bit later but the um how the book can get abused i i don't know someone could try to analyze it to find the one type that maximizes land value and do a whole plan of that type that clearly would be a misuse of the book um i think the idea of the book is to understand uh the uh to to lessen the the fear about particular types and to better understand them to empower folks to use them uh in uh their work uh either to infill in cities or to master plan new places terrific yeah uh this this book is extraordinary you reminded me this morning that nine years ago we had a conversation about some of the details you were aspirational at that point uh hadn't the whole reality of putting it together had hadn't kicked in the the idea of accident metric drawings at the same scale for every type which would be wonderful but i i will say that the common layout the one to 500 aerials i think are absolutely spectacular the you know i could complain about the size of the book perhaps you can tell us whether the ebook is coming out will it be available because that would be ideal uh it is officially out apparently on apple books now so you can if you have the apple books icon on your phone you can click on it and get the uh the digital version which will allow you to enlarge it and uh yeah you you've already identified one of the challenges as we were um developing the book uh we had always worked on the eight and a half by eleven size because it seemed like the best handbook size uh but when our last um uh copyright copy reviewer uh asked to see it she asked for enlarge on 11 by 17 so we printed it out in 11 by 17 and it came more alive and if we do if ever get to do a future edition hardcover or hard print again we'll do it larger but uh the digital version does resolve that because you can zoom in you can zoom into the plans and see them in at a larger scale uh and it should be somewhere around thirty dollars for the for the digital version so that hopefully that will it's meant everybody should have one everybody this is uh you know the thing about i i wish that that every uh volunteer zoning commission had this certainly matt talked about uh or maybe brian you talked about uh developers talking to financiers i have the problem oftentimes of developers talking to builders they say i we can't build that well you know you open book to page 43 and there it is built yeah that's a that's an excellent point you know my my teacher in college or in graduate school once when we had an architect come give a talk and he was trashing the idea of typology this was called he said that's absurd because every banker knows what type apology is all about which struck me as a pretty insightful thing and i think typology is something that really doesn't get taught very well in schools even in my own school where we profess to have an urban focus i think typology is still something that is often times of the outer fringes of what the curriculum is so um getting to that brian did you start this by analyzing historic fabric you touched on that a little bit in your intro and then see how they developed into contemporary market types or sort of a chicken in the egg question collect current market types and then trace back the historical dna because you know obviously these are all things that one sees in the market place today but they all do have relationships to historical antecedents or at least through all the all the types in the book you think have some dna that is historical yeah that's a great question matt i mean we um we looked at types that um we were collecting types and realized pretty early on that we wanted it to be present we wanted we didn't want criticism of well that's a type that got built in 1945 and you couldn't do that today similarly we didn't want any i types that uh were visionary and i mean there's some great things that we've seen drawn that have just haven't been built and we didn't include those either because we wanted it to be about what has been implemented well or what has been implemented successfully and and and by having a book focused on that we felt there was some power to that message uh and so basically it's it's post seaside uh development that's compiled in the book and mostly north american there are a couple australian uh and new zealand uh examples uh because their market tracks similarly to the north american market and so we felt including them that where their examples built that don't exist anywhere else was was appropriate i'd like your your seaside thing you have before seaside and after seaside as a way to measure the change in the world the uh one of the things that that intrigued me because our practice is holy housing we're very opinionated about everything else but housing is our thing and live work which to us is a function rather than a type that that that the the townhouse with the convertible or or commercial ground floor is a very very different creature if it's owner occupied versus uh income property did you um use uh make distinctions in tenure renter versus owner when you were organizing your types we didn't we felt it was uh it provided broader access if it was ten or uh tenure uh neutral uh there are types that tend to be predominantly rental uh and there are types that tend to be predominantly for sale but it's almost always never the case that one is a purely for sale and one is a purely rental product and so uh by being agnostic to that i think it allowed the accessibility for the reader to decide the appropriateness in their market in their world state uh what would be appropriate and and in their time it may be that you know postcovid some of these types may have changed already in terms of their applicability uh to be a rental or a for sale product and and i think uh it allows the book a little more timelessness not to to talk about that other than to say in certain cases that this is predominantly a rental type for these reasons so and that is spelled out in some of the narratives for each of the types right i you know you're seeing the the shift uh if anyone saw our park bench earlier about the the shift from owner to rental is obviously most prevalent in the single-family detached house where big builders are getting into building purpose-built rent but the the idea of being completely agnostic uh is excellent yeah the um what the residential mixed use section is is very rich and layered with formal types and ideas well i would say the difference between that and the civic section civic section seems to be based on functional differences rather than the relationship between the actual form of the buildings and the program is the result i'd like to hear you talk about this the result of your focus in your practice or does the notion of type lend itself to a more consistent threat of analysis when you have a residential program as all are part of the type as compared to civic buildings that have more varied programs and perhaps less less typologically derived formal possibilities yeah it's a little more uh banal than that it's a great insight matt and i'll have to give you a little background on how the book came together um originally it was only meant to be market types and i was actually working with a different more academic publisher before we partnered with oro and that publisher saw said you really should include public types in this volume and so it was actually probably a year or two added to the process if not three of putting to book together to assemble the public types uh and again this was a team that put this together so um you know peyton chung who was on the team was really helpful had a very a lot of good he's former cnu uh employee for really had a lot of insights on great uh buildings that contributed to the public realm like your school in the upper right here uh and and and it ended up being that the public building types were meant to be exemplars of the type as opposed to really telling the story and it so there was a difference in the way they got assembled versus the private sector where we had multiple options to choose from and were in most cases and we're trying to underst either find the the the nuances that ex that define the type uh but like in the dunbar school uh it's incredibly impressive how that building we can you know there was a school there before as you know um that that really turned its back to the neighborhood and then the new building uh really does its best to reach out on all sides and and re-engage the neighborhood an incredibly strong way and it is truly an example of how you can build a high school with all its land needs in the heart of the city and and that's why it's in the book as in all the other public examples uh in the lower right left image is david schwarz's uh uh bass hall in fort worth texas again how to how to squeeze a concert hall on this on a super tight 200 by 200 foot site in the city um you know just go over the images that are on the screen the milwaukee public market uh you know that one building being reinvigorated an entire neighborhood on the south side of the city uh and similar with the uh uh the um what was the um mci center then became the verizon center uh i think it's got a new name now in in the heart of dc again it brought the whole neighborhood around it because it was engaging in a way it had active doors along all the frontages it did all these things that uh that truly uh if someone is thinking about how to invigorate a neighborhood these are the kinds of examples we would want uh folks to look at and so i thank peyton for that uh other contributors to the book on on the transit types which we can talk about a little bit later uh nat bonheimer who used to be the head planner at walmart here in dc really helped us coalesce our thinking about what transit uh comparables are out there uh particularly when you're thinking about that in relation to privatized mobility uh that impacts neighborhood quality and that was powerful and then alex dixon uh helped with the lower lower end of the scale where she's very passionate about single-family homes and and and stack product uh and um and kelly mangold at rcl co helped us uh put together all the data on particularly the private sector types to try to get a good comparative um and we use 2010 numbers for the comparative i'm really glad we did because we would have known when this book came out the market would do a flip like it did but by by having that we were able to sort of the numbers work reasonably well for suburban dc but the point is that the the relative nature between the types uh in putting that together and so having a team uh to put this book together was really powerful because we were able to bounce ideas off each other and rich and make it richer um through those those thoughts and and and each of those contributors uh uh uh considerations that they know like the uh if it wasn't for peyton though the library section would not have been as strong and i learned so much about how what what what's happened to the library in a post-internet time that that's that we've got in the book and that's great the uh you i i envy your ability to have spent a decade with a close examination of of types the um uh there's there's it's so rich and yet it's a springboard for so much else um i i've noticed for example that there at least maybe i missed it it is a very very dense book but the the relationship to the street and what's opposite the street again from a housing perspective one of the big no-nos that actually john torti mentioned very early on don't have a front-loaded lot facing a a rear-loaded lot and uh john anderson was always very uh eloquent about the phenomenon of looking at an open garage door like you're sitting across from someone in one of those alternate facing seats on a train and the guy's falling asleep with his mouth open which is a kind of a vivid description but if that close examination of these types what did you learn during that that whole process was there something that really stands out um well a couple things one uh we we had to sort of divide the i had to learn about courtyard types and what makes them and in order to to provide a good home for them in the book and we broke them up into multiple places based on the types that uh form the courtyard so there's it turns out there's a single-family courtyard type and a townhouse courtyard type and uh and a stacked housing courtyard type and then more complex courtyard types that was one lesson uh john anderson who you just mentioned introduced me to dan camp and and again here's a i mean so sad loss of covet he passed away because of the disease this year but to to this project and you know what he did in the cotton district is is astounding in inventing all these or reinventing or rebringing to life these super small scale uh student housing types that make a neighborhood it's incredibly rich and and there are three spreads in the book solely due to dan camp's passion uh for what he did in the cotton district and so i met and learned about him and those types through john anderson and and dan camp and that and that was one thing i learned very powerful um i also learned a little bit about um the power of you know a little bit about public policy and public policy gone awry which you can see in all the images here the left is a communist example but the right are all american examples uh one that is top one is purely private the bottom one is public and the one in the middle is a public-private partnership but they all devastated their neighborhoods with a misguided uh intrusion and and and imposition uh where the hope 6 program you know thought uh and whether you know came up with an approach that was more incremental and then invited people to participate and own each of their neighborhoods and these are all 20 examples here there's also some military housing at the bottom of the screen but the the point of the slide is to say that the that there there these became neighborhoods that were owned and and express uh a world view of the communities they're in and and are owned and beloved of the communities that they're in and that that's a powerful thing that when you think incrementally uh and you and you uh empower a policy incrementally can cause strength another great example uh which i'd previously learned about but only had thought about in these terms was the j-51 program in new york city which uh took completely uh uh abandoned and and uh forlorn neighborhoods uh that are now the most expensive addresses in new york city in chelsea and uh the the west village and and and reinvigorated them through a policy that be what was an incremental policy it allowed smaller developers to come in and create investments that brought in artists and folks that believe in the city and then enrich those places and make them come alive again so i i thought that was something i learned i learned about in in uh in um in putting the book together so um probably a lot of people here listening are designers and they probably deal with lots of different kinds of types my experiences with developers sometimes specialize they want to do their product and you know they they know everything about their product but you know they don't know too much about what somebody else does so i guess one question that all this talk about tight brings if one assumes that the good city is comprised of many diverse types any thoughts about the challenges that you see in terms of the aggregation of diverse types in terms of making city fabric because a lot of folks who are you know see and you were really interested in how these things go together to make place and make neighborhoods and makes these challenges of aggregation uh it's a good question i didn't again we were just uh the focus of the book was more empowering with the types and allowing others to to aggregate i mean again i could go back um to the example of del mar um where you know an incredibly rich neighborhood was was formed through that type i think you know the questions of of tenure are are always a challenge in aggregation if you have a larger developer tent they tend to be uh focused on one market segment as you said and that's always an issue um we um you know we uh find that um that there's uh you know we're we're lucky in our firm that there's just broad we we we do affordable as well as uh high-end market rate housing and we learn lessons of both and those lessons are brought to bear as actually example are exempt exemplified on the images on the screen now uh which are for the most part all affordable and the lower ones are all military which is effectively affordable housing and uh but yet you can take some high design details and apply them to a box at a very efficient and cost effective price point and create a charming neighborhoods that bring up all boats that the neighborhoods around these are much stronger now for these these buildings to be there even though the primary uh audience not the only audience uh is uh were form you know former affordable residents these all many of them because their hope six have of course mixed tenures and that empowers those neighborhoods and i would hope in the future that there are more opportunities for mixed tenure uh projects but that is the true charm of the hope one of the great lessons from hope six uh that i hope could be repeated in future policy but certainly stands to argue in terms of type that if the buildings all look great on the outside you can't always tell where the affordable is which is i think the sort of neighborhoods that you want um that that when one pays attention to those details these these the stigmatization and that we used to be so good at practicing on the poor can go away and i think that's one of the great lessons yeah that is that is so true uh brian it's been a year now and since the book was released and so many people have contacted you and i think that you've probably looked at it for different eyes did do you think you missed anything are there types that have come to light are there new types um what's the next one going to look like yeah i mean there so there were some types like we had to type on the board i can pull up in a second um that uh we couldn't include because it wasn't built yet and we base we were rigorous about only including uh implemented types there are some other things that are out there and here's a slide that shows you of some examples so the upper left image is a one and a half over one and a half uh that pull there's a version of this being built by pulte in new jersey in a project we're working on and uh hopefully trying to get this done in texas as well uh that isn't in the book because it didn't we didn't know of an example of it uh there's an image uh you know there's a lot of changes happening in parking in the um autonomous uh another time it's in the um uh in storage and parking storage and so i would expect if you know particularly with there's there's these tray systems now that are coming to four that might need to spread in the future um the the images on the right are a very impressive type uh that was built in philadelphia these are from the neighborhood development uh facebook group where we had a long conversation about whether it met code and we those numbers in the in the court in the stairwell are to measure the the length of of travel distance to the furthest most point in the unit to see if this building actually worked uh and there was some contention as as to that in the in the conversation on that facebook group but that's a type that was impressive and that would came out too late to be in the book and if we did another version i'd probably want to talk to that um here's another one um this is built in only a mile from our office in upper george avenue this is a three unit stacked building uh one of my uh teammates calls this the ant farm unit on the right uh but again this wasn't included in the book but i could see us talking about it a very complex building that again just squeezed into the code a very interesting product um and and so there there are types out there i'm sure they're more i hope that in talking about the book other people make me aware of of type so if there's another edition we can put the best examples out there for folks we should probably be getting into a q a from the audience i wanted to remind everybody to use the q a function of zoom to ask your questions we have um actually three questions that that kind of tie together um question about uh types for suburban infill for um small locations of rural areas and what have been implemented in smaller communities the idea of using what types would be best to help repair the damage of the auto-oriented dendritic form that's a great question i think um hopefully if anything that you know to answer your question now and matt's question earlier i i hope that the book will allow for more site-specific responses um i think there's an uh folks who know townhouse development uh have an opportunity to redevelop a suburban site and often will look at it through their townhouse development eyes or their single family eyes or their multi-family eyes and to see other versions uh that aren't as strongly promoted like stacked housing uh i'm i'm hopeful that they're that might open up opportunities uh both for uh uh to create a wider range of housing opportunity and meet um the needs of more lifestyles and more um folks in different stages of life um but also uh to provide comfort again uh with those types particularly the stack types which i don't think are uh i you know they have challenges but they're they're easily built um by the you know by home builder groups and if there's any you know those are the kinds of groups that would be looking at those infill sites and to have a home builder have a copy of the book and have them see hey this isn't a bad idea uh this is something we can do is an opportunity to be open up for folks uh we have one question that is kind of related the uh the question is types that would be most relevant again increment of neighborhood in more rural areas this questioner is asking about the state of maine in um fireplaces yeah i mean that you you would segue towards the more um um the the the single family realm of the book and i think also um there are some types that are coming out and there's another set of types that are coming out now that we really didn't capture in the book which are a lot there's some developers working in rental single-family uh and that's becoming uh uh again in places where land are is relatively inexpensive a new market because there are there are folks who want uh who want the the notion of the home but i would prefer being in a rental arrangement and and i think those there's some interesting types of being arrived at in that world in that space now uh that could meet some challenges in in more rural places and more rural communities i have a question about the small apartment building the 4 6 even 12 unit building is so hard to get built because of financing why is it hard to convince developers that it's a perfect fit for single-family neighborhoods you know we've always suggested that you could have a uh a block with a mansion apartment building living perfectly comfortably on the corner with uh some townhouses and single family detached houses um i don't know how to answer that question i mean i think i mean i think there's again i think it's just uh exposure and so i this is trying to get to 12 flex but on my screen i hope you see there's a these six plexes that are quite powerful i think again again it's really about uh broadening the notion of what can be built uh in this here's a 12 plex uh in in the world of of um of in today's finance realm i think uh i mean oftentimes the money you know bankers are looking for the the best return and that typically is not a 12-plex it's it's a lot of groupings of 12-plexes or multi-family building this you know a 12-plex is really just one component of a walk-up building and so what we we showed that this is an example of one just built on its own and you could easily do that uh in a number of places and it could contribute i think they're you know what we didn't show here which we could have found and maybe for the next edition we would find is one that's a little more residential scaled but the six plex has some and the four plex has some that are that you know this is a four plex that looks like a house um and and there are other examples you know of this is a corner unit uh that is almost this is a nine unit corner building that looks like a house and so one of the the reason we use the word increments instead of type is partly because you can clothe a a a a you can take a single family home and put mult many units in it and that is an increment for the community of a single family home and not an increment of a five as a four plex or a six plex and so part of you know the distinction of the word increment versus type is that the increment is the impression on the on the community and on the public realm and so that's the uh and that that's the uh we talked we used that term in our in our practice uh and so that's what we wanted to talk about here because we think you know just as you can take a row of townhouses and make them uh stand out individually you can also take a row of townhouses and express them as one building uh so that it uh is a good neighbor to a larger multi-family or more civic building next door and and that's an important lesson to know when one is crafting neighborhood uh and and a lesson we were hoping to impart with with the book here's where tenure uh comes in again uh because we we've been advocating the the mansion apartment building which we define as four and six units of the same scale as a as a large house as a way to get around the the challenges of uh development and construction finance for condominiums because you know you need to get certain pre-sales to get the thing built it's only four units it's easier to do and it's a wonderful increment the developers who are building neighborhoods rental communities that look like neighborhoods you wouldn't know what the tenure is as you walk down the street because they're composed of everything from say a 12 plex all the way down to detached or duplexes um well i was just going to ask along the lines of where you guys are going have you found you're sort of talking about the dressing of the building as compared to the type how it how it's dressed right and have you found that a lot of ways these buildings how they're dressed allows you to introduce greater density in contexts where um if the building looked more like a traditional apartment building it would be opposed by the neighbors but the fact that it's dressing is more uh commensurate with the sort of context around it allows that type to actually enjoy a more fruitful relationship to its neighbors and therefore get approved yes and and there are some great examples of that so down in the lower right hand part of the screen on the spread for the six plexes there are these wonderful six plexes at um mueller miller in austin uh which uh you know has a really one a low residential scale it fits in uh and segways to single family and and and and stacked and towns uh but are all even the towns in the single family are i mean the towns in the stack are in a single family form and it makes a great neighborhood and you have you really have to look out for it to realize oh wait a minute that is a six plex building there it's not a it's not a single family home and this you know this may help communities in the future also address affordability concerns and notions i mean you can you can you can in in single-family areas there are a variety of ways of addressing that uh obviously uh the you know the the the back unit there's there's ways you can incorporate them into the main building but there's also ways you can you can incorporate them either as a granny flat or other kind of of of of smaller unit in in the in in the um or a tiny home that's on the backyard there are a lot of great architects uh working uh to incorporate that and a lot of codes that are becoming more flexible uh for um uh for for units uh uh uh to to extend uh livability in the suburbs for folks that are they're not in the prime uh single-family uh audience of uh a couple with two kids uh and so the uh so there there's some stretching happening and these types can help stretch in a different way than is typically con cons um uh considered with uh with granny flats and and their ilk in single-family neighborhoods a question about broadening the discussion of buildings or or configurations that are easily convertible from residential to commercial or vice versa i was delighted to see in your book that you selected the mezzanine loft as the perfect ground floor type for those awkward situations where there's not enough retail to fill the ground floor but you want to have the 16 foot plate height and the ability to convert gracefully at a zero entry for residential to the required zero entry for retail stephanie bothwell mentions that there's a great deal of pressure in georgetown with a rash of applicants that come for approval as residential over commercial but quickly convert to residential because of the present market condition what are the elements that need to be included to go both ways yeah so that's a refined aspect of the building code where the building is considered initiative so typically in the world of construction today for cost-effective uh mixed-use building you would have four stories or five stories of wood over a concrete podium it used to be that podium can only be one story now that's that podium could be multiple stories on the lower level as long as within a certain height uh in terms of the type five wood construction world it's 65 feet i believe and then uh if it's a type 3 you can go up to 85 feet plus or minus we can talk about that later but what what's interesting is that besides now being allowed to do multiple levels in that podium you can also do a mezzanine in that podium area uh and uh and those and a mezzanine is a little different section of the code uh if the space is is is of a certain size in relation to the space below uh you can you can build that space up into the top and it doesn't count as an extra floor and so sometimes that's something you can do and that was the example you're citing uh from the book uh in uh in the in the type uh in the mixed use buildings i can go dig out if we really want to look at it um but um there are a number of devices one can use so that you can fill in that lower podium day one say if the market isn't quite there you're building out a whole neighborhood you eventually expect to have ten thousand people but you only have a few thousand day one you can put residential units in that space and then when that neighborhood's built out and you know you have the need for more commercial uh just like any tenant fit out those units can be gutted and turned into uh retail or commercial or doctor's offices and so that that's something that we talk about in in the book and we have a number of types that allow for that uh again flexible retail is an important part of what the of the missing middle you're talking about flexibility brian a colleague of mine once said that the best urban building is the loft because it is the most flexibility for living work um what are the challenges of flexibility i mean you know some of these types i think you said in the intro the the the more towards the lower end of the spectrum the less flexible they are and things like that um are are we headed into a time when we need that flexibility and if so what sort of things should we be doing so yeah it's a huge issue because to people need to understand matt it's really insightful the um to to make residential flexible into the future for other uses it has to be built slightly more expensive you you typically most residential is built out of wood stick construction and in order to make it a commercial use you typically want it to be a little more stout either uh protected steel or concrete doesn't always have to be and we have precedence in here as i showed earlier that can be done in wood if you're thoughtful about it uh and and that is a way of succeeding um but to do it loft building you really it needs to be uh primarily uh for the moment primarily a concrete frame or steel frame and then you infill with with the units and that concrete frame or steel frame is more expensive however big however uh there is a lot of talk about changing the building codes uh so that type four which is a post and beam heavy wood construction uh can be used uh to be built taller and you're seeing all these stories about wood high-rises well that meat that's requiring a change in the building codes and that change would allow more of that flexibility so that you can have uh the you know an easier change from what from residue to to to commercial uses uh and so that's sustainable and a more sustainable yeah price point absolutely right and so those are uh that's an innovation that's happening in the building codes to address the concerns that we're seeing in society um so yeah we're we're coming up on the hour uh and we're proposed we're we're prepared to continue uh i wanted to get one question in from professor chuck bowell at the university of miami uh who said there's a large group of real estate development students can you provide additional remarks on how aspiring real estate developer professional can learn from and use the book in their work eg translating matching up calculations of max lot coverage and square foot market segmentation bedrooms and baths and amenities into more varied and context appropriate building types in uh you have two minutes [Laughter] um okay uh well the book's organized in a way that allows um generally the the front of the book or the less expensive types actually let me see if i have a slide i can share on the breadth of product um yeah here um if you can see my screen um you know really understanding the cost per square foot is is critical to evaluating what you can do and what you can deliver uh and these this is the range here with the sort of the the the fully clothed buildings up top and the naked ones below and each tranche has allows you more to build but at the same time limits you know it's more expensive so you you then you you then are your profits are minimized and so knowing what the right tranche is for where you're building is really important not just for developers and young real estate students but particularly planners i can't tell you how many um well-meaning new urbanist plans we've seen uh where the intention of the zoning envelopes do not correlate with the uh descrip prescriptions of the building code and and so these are the tranches here on the screen of the building code where you can do i residential code and you can do three stories you can do type five wood construction you can put it over a podium you can do type 3 uh wood construction which comes from the chicago heritage with masonry walls and wood floors in new jersey it's still masonry walls and wood floors but in a lot of the country the drywall industry has come up with a two hour wall that supplants that and so that you can build a fully drywall building in type three on the next tranche is type 1b which are seeing a lot in denver where you take this sort of hotel light gauge type and put it on top of a concrete podium and get a building out of that and that seems to be the next increment and that uh different using different meaning of the word increment um where you're you can go up to 12 stories and 120 feet with that compilation and then after that there are these um modular construction types like tunnel form and then beyond that there are steel and frame construction types you can see there's a price to be paid for each of those types and understanding uh where those price points are and what the limitations are really critical in general and i hope the book helps people understand that so we are up at the one hour point right now and we still have more questions and we can continue our conversation for those who need to peel off we're going to post the entire video tomorrow and you can watch the remaining discussion then if you have a question that you wanted to have answered for everybody else we can continue for a little while with more questions and you can keep on asking questions in the q a section thanks okay we're in deep in the professorial area of of questioners professor talan from chicago asks are sketchup models of the building types available and could you contributed them to the sketchup for new urbanism resource started by the late great bill dennis wow i'm getting hit with every every hole that we put in the book you know unfortunately not we try at the beginning we started uh and it was just it was too much work to try to to do sketchup for everyone all the types in the book so unfortunately they're not available uh that was as uh that was a hope but it didn't happen for the book unfortunately but uh it would be great if the over the time if sketchup uh versions of each of the types become available we'd love to compile them and share them uh we actually in the spreads we actually had a place for them originally as we were putting together and then ended up having to pull it out um uh the the way the book is assembled on the show spread these are parking spreads um there's a the right page was meant to pinwheel depending on the number how much information we had the different categories of information we wanted to present and so uh we always have that scale image in the upper right uh and construction photos and plans and depending on what's available or what the best imagery is relative to the type we grow or shrink on that page to best communicate the the most pertinent information and in the end we just squeezed the sketchup models out of the spreads um regrettably i would love to see a sketch of mine i mean we have obviously there's sketchup models for for the types that are out there and certainly in the sketchup for the new urbans has plenty uh but we we did not end up doing a a range of sketchup models for the types that are in the book that that could be volume two there brian i guess yeah we have had a suggestion uh about uh aggregation as a focus for volume two it's a great question i mean we honestly that that was part of what drove uh the book i mean i had a wonderful conversation early on actually at the cnu in west palm beach with uh stephanos polizzortis about aggregation and more and about co and about describing and breaking down the courtyard types but you know his the the work they do in their projects it's so well considered in terms of how they aggregate the different types to craft neighborhoods and craft place and craft realms that are comfortable and joyous um you know seven fountains is is is the exquisite example of that extreme consideration and thought and uh and there are other examples of that the seven fountains is a marvelous example of how quality of public space trumps all of the market shibboleths there's a a unit that i think is 92 steps from parking up that is at the top of of seven fountains that's getting i think six bucks a foot in a market that is a four buck a foot uh market uh another suggestion is it and and i i suspect that this is already uh an alliance that is well along its way but someone suggested that it'd be interesting to pair this work this thinking with the work of the incremental development alliance to provide a boot camp workshop uh i i am a big fan of the incremental development alliance i remember the facebook group learn a lot love to share there and would be happy to contribute in any way we can to promote uh and empower more people uh who are out there trying to do this on the ground absolutely the the last question i have here actually we're we're ending in a much more reasonable time is uh actually is one that's ripe for discussion uh the writer suggests that these are creative designs wonderfully creative designs but presumably for new development projects thinking perhaps green fields i'm not sure but can you speak to reincentivizing older neighborhoods without cultural loss that is working with older neighborhoods versus replacing them uh i couldn't have a more perfect example on the screen than this parking garage um here i'm gonna blow it up um this is in leesburg virginia this is part of the amazing uh city hall complex um and um that's there uh and uh what's really fascinating it just happens to be a staggered tier garage but it it is integrated so well into the neighborhood there's a there's uh circulation paths that come off the main street that lead to it uh it ties into the city hall uh exceedingly well so there's two types married together uh and um and and it it it's just it's just a great way of responding uh to uh historic context actually again the interesting thing about the book is the majority of examples are infill and not new greenfield um and that was i didn't really realize that until the end i was asked a question about how much of this is in film most of it is is infill i'll give you an example from our work this is a an infill project um which we which tortigales did in south orange new jersey and it's a big building it's replacing a transit parking lot uh with a type 5 multi-family building uh and again uh it's trying to do it in a way that's uh that scales down again types can can try to be bolder and scale up like when you gang townhouses and put a skin across all of them that's taking that townhouse type and making it an increment that is larger uh this building happens to go the opposite way it's a uh it's a four-story with basement so five stories of residential that steps down to its surroundings and tries to fit in uh the plan the colors all represent different different architectures that you can see in the images in the upper right um and then to try to break that building down have fingers that come out that that are lower and and scale into the neighborhood and so uh so there there are a lot of ways that these uh that the that this level of thinking can be brought to bear in uh and hopefully brought help empower folks trying to work in infill locations as as in this case and the three images on the left are the new building by the way the image the upper right is the existing context in the um and obviously the plan shows the building fitting into that context so uh if that's it uh todd um uh then i'd like to thank everybody for uh for this great uh webinar um um our three speakers and um uh brian and todd and matthew and uh everybody who participated in this and asked questions uh it's really an interesting uh discussion that we had today and uh once again the book is increments of neighborhood a compendium of built types for walkable and vibrant communities uh you really should get this book if you're uh you're involved in any way in building urban places uh um and uh go to uh on the park bench uh seeing you seeing you dot org on the park bench to look to look at uh upcoming uh webinars we've got some really interesting ones coming up and everybody have a great day thank you very much