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Yeah these 5 over 1s really ruin the neighborhood character of my suburban strip mall state highway hell.
Leave them as derelict auto body warehouses tyvm.
I thought the idea of the post was the pictured buildings are far too small and we need much larger apartment buildings.
A desire for single-family homes (protecting suburb character) or no change (leave the warehouses) would be something else entirely.
Did I miss something?
Climate-wise, 5-10 story buildings are the most efficient, and they are plenty dense enough to support a good level of public transport service etc. It’s probably not desirable to go much bigger except in the most constrained areas.
Source for them being more efficient than taller buildings?
The people who post this meme often do not want for-profit housing development of any kind.
5-over-1 is frankly larger than is needed, many downtowns in europe are mostly 2 or 3-over-1.
the real secret is just to not stop building them
As an American going to Vancouver (South of the river) I can’t disagree
I’ve seen these around my area. In theory, it’s great: replace strip malls with medium/high density housing and walkable retail.
In practice, the units are always high-end condos or expensive apartments, with nothing but nation-wide franchise shops in the retail space. And they come with a colossal parking deck in the rear since you’re likely car commuting at these prices. It’s neither for local business, or to create a walkable community, or to help with affordable housing. If anything, it’s purpose built to be attractive for people looking to downsize from a detached home.
Well, they’re building three in one go in my urban area. And they’re fucking up my neighborhood. The whole neighborhood is lower rise buildings and prewar apartment buildings, so they have character. And then they knocked down a grocery store to put up these three ungodly ass warts.
Good neighborhoods should have a mix of older and newer buildings.
From Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Thank you for sharing that excerpt! Definitely a concept I had not thought about, makes perfect sense, and is seen demonstrated in the gentrification process.
Yeah, she definitely has some thought-provoking explanations on how cities work.
I would say gentrifying 1 building is ok, and is something you can do every 5 years or so to help boost the economy and modernize the building stock. But it becomes a problem when an entire block or an entire neighborhood becomes gentrified all at once. It’ll lead to a slum in the long run.
They did a bunch of them near where I used to live. The problem with these (and really all unplanned high density housing) is that while their intent is to create walkable communities (a great idea in itself), they ignore the reality that most people are going to commute to a job, and they create the nastiest traffic bottlenecks ever. They’re not bad when they’re located next to a major highway with preplanned egress/ingress, but many of these halfwit developers will plop them with an entrance exit on an already busy 4 lane road and wonder why everything is all wacko.
If traffic gets bad enough people will make different decisions.
Only if the infrastructure is there tbh. Every time I get on my bike I have to make peace that I might just die that day because I can’t hardly get out of my apartment before a car tries to hit me. And we even have bike lanes all over here they just aren’t set up well. Tons of people don’t want to do that even if the alternative is to sit in traffic for longer than it takes me to bike somewhere
the impetus to improve the infrastructure will be stronger if conditions are worse
don’t chicken-and-egg yourself out of densification
My neighborhood has been pretty long standing in its current state. This is part of a hugely explosive new wave of gentrification. I’m seeing it happen before my eyes. It’s pretty sad.
Indeed. I will say that we certainly need to rethink the way we go about planning and engineering our cities in a way that removes the necessity for cars as a primary means of transportation, but these designs need to come from a higher collective level within local governments that allows for a more intertwined planning and management. As of now, you have individual developers doing whatever they think is best (aka most profitable) and it tells these subpar effects.
People who think you can solve the housing crisis without removing or greatly diminishing landlords, house flipping, investors, and people profiting off of a necessary and inherently limited necessity, do not understand economics.
I got a coworker who started flipping houses. Went all in and just finished posting her third house for sale. They got a second(third?) job to can pay the mortgages/loans until they sell. It’s been 4 months and they’ve dropped the price to be competitive. I think they’re gonna lose money after all this is said and done. Which couldn’t happen to a more deserving person. They’re the reason bosses are cracking down on us for every single thing. They aren’t sleeping and keep fucking up. Fuck these leaches
Yeah if you’re going to flip houses you shouldn’t be buying liveable units to upscale, you should be buying nearly derelict buildings nobody would want and fixing them up to be comfortably inhabitable. Your highest cost shouldn’t be the mortgage
Quite frankly, you shouldn’t be doing that either.
If someone wants a building a certain way, they can pay to make it that way. If you pay to make it that way and then sell it to them at a profit, you are not really providing them with anything, you’re just taking a profit and giving them a not-quite-right renovation they now have to deal with.
In the grand scheme of the system, it would be far better if your profit ended up going to other people who could instead use it to pay for a better renovation that they actually want.
Not true at all.
You’re providing the service of doing all that installation and restoration. You should be compensated for your efforts. You can do that work a lot more efficiently when you’re not beholden to a specific client’s needs or wants, you just want to get another affordable home onto the market.
We have a severe lack of homes that are affordable for people who work most of the time and don’t have the time or the savings to restore a home themselves, but might have the savings to make a down payment on a completed restored home. Not everyone has the same means, and we should be using our side hustle to help the world we live in, not hurt it
You’re providing the service of doing all that installation and restoration. You should be compensated for your efforts. You can do that work a lot more efficiently when you’re not beholden to a specific client’s needs or wants, you just want to get another affordable home onto the market.
Providing a shittier product that fits a clients’ needs worse so that you can profit is not efficiency.
We have a severe lack of homes that are affordable for people who work most of the time and don’t have the time or the savings to restore a home themselves, but might have the savings to make a down payment on a completed restored home. Not everyone has the same means, and we should be using our side hustle to help the world we live in, not hurt it.
Again, no. You are not helping anyone when you invest in the housing market and try and make a profit off a limited commodity. All you are doing is driving up the prices with your profit seeking and making it harder for people to afford a down payment.
You’re not investing in the housing market by buying bottom-of-the-barrel, derelict homes that no investor or resident would ever buy. Those buildings have fallen out of what could be considered housing, and you’re restoring them to use.
This is the same argument as saying nobody should buy old broken watches to restore, for example.
Also, driving up the prices??? You’re ADDING to the supply curve without touching the demand curve at all. Any theory of economics shows that prices will decrease when you do that. You have zero idea what you’re talking about
No house flipper is buying bottom of the barrel derelict homes that no one would ever want because those are hard to flip.
If you’re truly saving a property that’s literally sitting abandoned and unused and falling apart without you being there and restoring it, then yes, you are providing a service. If you’re instead just buying a fixer upper that literally any starting couple might want, then no, you’re not.
i.e. house flippers do not increase supply because by and large they do not buy out-of-market assets and restore them to in-market assets, they buy low in the market assets and try and flip them as cheaply as possible into slightly higher in the market assets.
[stares directly into the camera]
Yes.
Replace all single family homes with mixed use commie blocks. Send your strongest cops, they won’t be enough.
These aren’t commie blocks, and they usually aren’t replacing single family homes. They’re most problematic when replacing older multi unit buildings, because they’re taking low income housing and replacing it with housing only upper income people can afford (plus a couple low income units to say that they’re trying). And they get tax breaks to do this gentrification, after years of neglecting the upkeep on the older buildings it’s replacing.
Okay, I can get on board with saying fuck gentrification. But we need to be building a hell of a lot more of these than yet another shitty tract of single family homes just a few minutes’ drive from the stroad to take you to big box mart.
You’re not wrong. And to add to that the stupid building codes that lead to the type of small 500 sq ft condo unit with only one wall with windows and no air circulation. This article covers that well.
But all these condos, not only are they not human-sized and lack air cicrulation, most of them are fitted with luxury features to up the price beyond what regular folks can pay and don’t leave any room for social housing.
There should be a law for mandatory social housing in these constructions.
They knocked down my neighborhood’s lower income grocery store to put up three on the one lot. Fuck these monstrosities.
The right way to do this was to have the entire lower floor become the grocery store and build sound proof residences over it.
Replace all single family homes with mixed use commie blocks. Send your strongest cops, they won’t be enough.
Do you want Judge Dredd? Because that’s how you get Judge Dredd
tbh, their funtion isn’t all that objectionable. Mixed use buildings are cool and good, actually. But the fact that they’re made of cardboard and duct tape, look like ass, and are signifiers of gentrification are what suck about them.
As an example, large Japanese cities go extremely hard on mixed use buildings and are very livable despite their crazy density.
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What’s wrong with five over ones?
But the short answer is that they’re hugely reliant on fossil fuels, both in construction and in the way they dedicate an enormous amount of space to car parking. They’re also not particularly well-built, which means you end up knocking them down and rebuilding every twenty years or so. A more traditional design of steel and concrete could last 50-100 years, but would cost more upfront to build (and builder hate that). Finally, there’s the financialization of 5-over-1s, which ties their existence/maintenance to the fickle lending markets and can create exploding rents during periods of high lending costs.
They’re definitely better-ish than traditional ticky-tacky ranch style homes or detached houses. But they don’t make good permanent housing, because they’re shoddily constructed. And they don’t bring down the cost of living, because they’re so heavily pegged to the current lending rates. And they really don’t help with climate change, despite giving the superficial appearance of dense urban development we’d assume would reduce reliance on cars and encourage biking/walking/mass transit.
The overpriced luxury apartments of today are the shitty apartments of tomorrow
They’re also the shitty apartments of today. The actual good apartments are the older buildings with character and actual walls, not these fuckin paper thing barriers they pretend are walls in the newer buildings. And they just got no fuckin soul. And they knocked down a grocery store to build some in my neighborhood. Motherfuckers.
“luxury” just means new. Who is building “basic” apartments anymore.
They built some near my workplace and theyre charging 3k for a studio apartment
Absolutely insane
I think the thing to keep in mind here is that those midrise mixed use buildings are housing, and can help the housing supply issue. The issue with them is often that wealthier neighborhoods and suburbs resist them so much that they end up being new expensive housing in the areas that were already doing the heavy lifting housing supply-wise.
Near where I live there is an estimated housing supply deficit of literally several hundred thousand units. My city, a medium city in the Metropolitan area of a big city, has built more than 50 of these buildings in the last decade, but wealthier suburbs a little farther out have gone to absurd lengths to prevent more than one or two token multi-family units from being built in them. The metro area cities, who’s inhabitants feel the rise in housing price most sharply, cannot possibly build hundreds of thousands of units, there needs to also be significant building in suburban areas nearby if we want to hit that number and move the needle on housing.
tldr: Those housing units are fine, we just need to get wealthier less densely developed suburbs to build them too. Oh and build a fucking train station there while you’re at it.
5 over 1 are rookie numbers. I want high towers, 30 floor minimum. Entire towns per block. Comercial, office space and residential on each one. I want the grocery store, the doctor office and a metro station on the same building I live.
I also loved the game SimTower
You want the megablocks from Dredd or Cyberpunk 2077.
I don’t even necessarily disagree with you, but, well, there it is.
Its funny to play one of those games and shake my head, thinking, “Damn they were too optimistic.”
More like The Plataform actually.
People are replying to you like this is a pie in the sky fantasy, but actually this is an accurate description of Tokyo.
Sao Paulo is also close to this, but they don’t have a lot of mixed use buildings. Ironically, you can find them in the richer neighborhoods, but those mfs fight tooth and nails against any expansion of the metro network close them.
those mfs fight tooth and nails against any expansion of the metro network close them
It’s ok. You keep expanding it on the direction of people that want it, and leave the dinosaurs to suddenly discover nobody want to live near them.
The problem is that some nice areas where people want to go, like the Ibirapuera park, or some other that people need to go, like business district (where the financial and tech companies of Brazil have their offices) are on those areas.
I live in the bay area, and wish we had more mixed zone housing. But then I see it in action in other cities and see they end up crazy expensive. So I’m not sure if it helps anything at all. Does anyone know of this actually helps or hurts?
My gut tells me they’re expensive because they offer a set of benefits that otherwise similar units don’t. Until they become more the norm than a stand out, they’ll probably be more expensive. I’ve 0 data, again just what my gut says.
Actually it’s just price fixing and no ownership that’s doing it.
I’m sure that’s a big part of it. Simple supply and demand also is probably part of it. It’s a big situation, lots of influences.
Be careful, you might make a neoliberal cry with this one
I live across street from one of these where a restaurant used to be. I don’t know enough to love or hate the idea of these buildings, but this one’s a damn eyesore. The siding panels are various shades of pale grayish blue, with fucking CAUTION VEST YELLOW panels randomly sprinkled in. It’s just this big plain box with tiny-ass windows and the worst color combination I’ve ever seen.
The bottom one is not a five over one.
Nor is the top one
You sure? Looks like a double-height faux 2nd.
