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Multifamily Trends - January/February 2006 - Point of View

Building the First 21st-Century Cities

by John McIlwain

Multifamily housing is the key to creating lively, walkable, sustainable mixed-income neighborhoods.

Evan Rose, a young architect from San Francisco, put out a challenge at ULI’s 2005 Fall Meeting in Los Angeles, declaring that “New Orleans can become the first 21st-century city—a city built in tune with nature.” His challenge immediately stoked the imagination of all in the room. They had gathered to consider how best to rebuild the destroyed city, and saw this as the possible silver lining in the clouds of Hurricane Katrina. But what would such a vision entail? Could it encompass all the towns along the Gulf Coast destroyed by Katrina? And what role does multifamily housing have to play in such a vision?

Causing from $70 billion to $130 billion of damage, Hurricane Katrina was the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history. It created a humanitarian crisis on a scale unseen in the United States since the Great Depression, displacing more than a million people and leaving 80 percent of New Orleans flooded. It is regarded as the largest urban disaster in U.S. history—worse than the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the Chicago fire of 1871, and the terrorist attacts of 9/11. Yet, new visions and possible new ways of developing are emerging from this devastation that respond to the natural environment instead of defying it.

It is still too early for rebuilding plans to be fully developed, and for all the many issues to be resolved. Nevertheless, interesting ideas are emerging to which the multifamily industry in particular should pay close attention. Disasters accelerate the spread of trends as obstacles to change are removed, forcing people to rethink how they want to live and build their communities. The level of destruction in New Orleans and other cities along the coast is such that residents have a virtually free hand in creating new communities, drawing on the very best urban and ecological thinking of the day. National trends such as the move back into urban areas and increased sensitivity to surrounding ecologies can have powerful, positive impacts on these plans for redevelopment. And while it may be uncomfortable, even the long-term trend to ever-higher energy prices can serve as a stimulus for better patterns of redevelopment. Interestingly, an important component of each of these trends is multifamily housing.

The first visions for rebuilding were created by the Mississippi Governor’s Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding, and Renewal, which sponsored a weeklong architectural charrette in mid-October, the results of which can be seen at www. mississippirenewal.com/info/plansPresentations. html. Eleven Mississippi towns destroyed by Katrina were studied and visions of how they might be rebuilt were put forth. What emerged is based on the principles of new urbanism, including street grids, mixing uses, and housing types and town centers that draw on local vernacular architectural styles. At the heart of these proposed designs is multifamily housing. All the streetscapes of the towns show multifamily housing, from low rise to mid rise, depending on the context. At this time, the solutions are only visions, not yet vetted by local citizens. They demonstrate, however, the thinking of a large group of architects working in close collaboration with local officials.

The same trend is emerging in early discussions about the rebuilding of New Orleans. There is wide agreement among residents of New Orleans that the city needs to be rebuilt better than it was, but what does this mean in physical terms? Community leaders from many parts of the city and a variety of economic backgrounds talk about mixed-use neighborhoods with housing affordable to people with a wide range of incomes—walkable neighborhoods with structures that reflect the best vernacular building styles of New Orleans. These include the famous shotguns, camelbacks, and Creole cottages, but they also include the multifamily styles of the French Quarter.

These views are reflected in the many conferences that have been held recently on the reconstruction of the city, including a ULI advisory services panel that presented its report on November 18 and made the most specific recommendations to date for rebuilding New Orleans. The ULI panel’s recommendations can be found at www.uli.org/katrina and in the January 2006 issue of Urban Land magazine. Given the extent of the city’s destruction, the panel recommended that redevelopment be focused first on the higher, safer parts of the city while the lower, more heavily flooded regions be studied. These higher grounds, however, already contain housing, retail, and commercial development, and include most of the city’s older historic neighborhoods. How, then, is it possible to provide the opportunity for everyone to return, another of the recommendations of the ULI panel? The only way to do this is to build more densely than in the past. This does not mean more density than New Orleans has seen before, for the city has always had neighborhoods with density that, were it copied along the high ground, would allow for sufficient housing for all who wished to return to do so. There is also the central business district that could accommodate multifamily high rises to match its tall office towers (some of which may well be ripe for conversion to residential use). All this means a renewed city built with neighborhoods that mix uses and incomes, neighborhoods of low- and mid-rise residential buildings, with stores and restaurants along the street, designed much in the spirit of the French Quarter.

These early visions emerging from Mississippi and New Orleans reflect both the practicalities of local circumstances and the growing desire for better-built urban neighborhoods. This trend is evident in the housing booms witnessed in so many central cities and in satellite urban centers in most of the nation’s metropolitan regions. Central to their success is multifamily housing, both rental and for sale.

Higher densities also allow for a more sustainable, green building pattern. Less land is used to house more people, permitting the residential areas most susceptible to flooding to be returned to wetlands to provide protection from future floods. The cost of denser development on higher ground is less than the cost of the massive levees needed to protect lowlands from the Category 5 hurricanes being predicted for coming hurricane seasons as a result of rising water temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, which is in turn a result of global warming. These savings then can be used to provide sufficient housing subsidies to allow families of all income levels to return to better housing and stronger neighborhoods.

Finally, and of significance, multifamily housing is far more energy efficient than single-family housing of equal quality. The long-term global supply-and-demand trends for oil and gas are problematic. India and China have rapidly growing populations and economies, and their consumption of fossil fuels is rising dramatically, putting intense pressure on the already delicate balance of supply and demand around the globe. Absent a major and sustained economic depression, demand will soon outstrip production of both oil and gas, driving U.S. prices up well beyond today’s price ranges as we compete with the rest of the world for limited resources. Low-density building patterns make sense only when energy is cheap. With the coming end of cheap energy, rebuilding on the scale required by Katrina in the low-density suburban patterns of the past would be absurd and unsustainable.

In short, the 21st-century city—as well as 21st-century towns and coastal areas—will be built to higher densities, with lively, walkable, sustainable mixed-income neighborhoods. Multifamily housing will be the predominant housing stock. That is Evan Rose’s vision of how New Orleans and the towns along the Gulf Coast can be rebuilt. It will take great leadership from the governmental, industrial, and grass-roots sectors to bring these visions into reality, but the opportunity is one that, it is hoped, will not come along again for a long time, if ever.

John McIlwain is a ULI Senior Resident Fellow and ULI/J. Ronald Terwilliger Chair for Housing.