It's getting to be a real thing now to attack housing. Full frontal front-page news real.
It's too simple to call private enterprise residential builders and developers--and their partners--villainous, environment-wrecking, neighborhood-killing, greed-mongers. It's too tempting for elected officials or candidates to run and win votes on an "I'll fight big real estate" platform that aims to throttle present and future community development.
And it's too easy to say "no" to projects and communities that would bring more attainable housing to more people by adding to the current stock, expanding supply at a pace that could keep up with demand. Are you accepting of the fact that--at current paces of development--it'll be 2120 before some California towns hit their housing goals?
Are there bad players, unscrupulous types, scammers, and unprincipled profiteers in residential real estate and construction? We're talking human nature here, so the answer is yes, and they need to be called out.
Is everybody who wants to develop a new piece of greenfield, urban infill, brownfield, grey-field, adaptive reuse, or any other type of property up to no good? Some would have us believe that.
Have a look at this piece and indulge me for a couple of moments in a multiple choice quiz. It's a way of simply asking you how you'd characterize the article's viewpoint for accuracy, fairness, balance, clarity, etc.
Two observations up front. One, is that I happen to be a fan of the piece's writer, Allison Arieff, and find a lot of value in what she does, how she works, and where she focuses her gifts as a critical thinker, an architect, and storyteller. The other is that the New York Times, another longtime love of mine, includes Arieff's article, "The New Dream Home Should Be a Condo," as an opinion piece rather than as an analysis its editorial leaders would necessarily get behind. Still, what do you think when you see this? At its core, Arieff's assertion is that builders and their trade industry association should cease and desist in designing, developing, and showcasing New American Home projects that don't fit her definition of housing types more people need.
As I said, let's do a multiple choice thought experiment, and you select which of the following "sayings" applies to the article:
- a. Misses the point
- b. Speaks truth to power
- c. Barks up the wrong tree
- d. Compares apples with oranges
- e. Is the pot calling the kettle back
- f. All of the above
- g. Other
Now, take a moment, go to the comments box below, and let me know what you think and one or two sentences why.
Fair warning, if your answer is "b. Speaks truth to power," which is, I think the intent of Arieff's op-ed piece, you may not be interested in my thoughts below.
Now, I'm all for challenging builders and builders' partners in investment, development, design, the trades, manufacturers, and others to be better, to learn to evolve business and operations models to serve more customers, and to work, with the rest of businesses, on more sustainable approaches to housing people.
And who would disagree with the fact that the nation needs more of the projects Arieff identifies in contrast, the beautiful, award-winning Cloverdale749 building designed by Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects in Los Angeles?
What I would disagree with is using a few dozen facts--square footage trends, land position, and a few zingers about "smart" home technologies many might call frivolous--to conclude an untruth. Misrepresenting the essence and purpose of the New American Home initiative, and then assaulting that misrepresentation is helpful to no one. This essay devolves into an attack rather than the kind of rigorous analysis that would help builders, architects, and engineers all get a sense of how much we all have to learn.
Normally, it would not be my place to comment on the particulars of the project Arieff holds up as "a failed experiment badly in need of a new hypothesis." My reasons for saying that may be self-evident. BUILDER, this year produced its own annual Concept Home, the KB Home ProjeKt, which, while smaller in square footage, might be held up with similar contempt prior to investigation. Fact is, Arieff's word and phrase choices come across to me more as ad hominem attacks on builders and their partners than a valid, evidence-based architect's opinion on housing types. This is why I feel there's a need to speak up in defense of the NAHB--and a competitor's--research and development intitiative. For example, she writes:
"The N.A.H.B. house may be meant to highlight trends, but they’re not necessarily the trends homeowners want (and certainly not what most people need). Instead, they’re what builders, kitchen and bath manufacturers and real estate agents would like to sell them: Think cathedral ceilings, granite countertops, gift-wrapping rooms and, more recently, “smart” appliances like a refrigerator that can text you when you’re low on milk and eggs.
Many builders will tell you that though these houses are large, they are more efficient – even that they have a small carbon footprint. But this is like bragging about the good gas mileage of an S.U.V. While a 10,000-square-foot house built today uses less energy than a 10,000-square-foot house built a decade ago, a home of this size requires a phenomenal amount of energy to run. (And most likely has an S.U.V. or two in the garage.)
Does anyone need 10,000 square feet to live in?
If one hand went up in answer to Arieff's question, and a buyer felt that whatever the price tag is for the New American Home is a fair price and a one-time value, does that buyer then earn more attacks from Arieff upon that very subjective "need" and that particular "value" opportunity for that one-of-a-kind home coming together?
Now, let's turn the tables for one moment. When an architect creates a singular, dazzling, imaginative design that intends to push forward the boundaries of common practice, demonstrate what could be achieved with new materials and processes, and explore--with a number of suppliers who may offer their goods and services as part of the venture--uncharted territory in function and performance, does such a project, whatever its aesthetic appeal, stand for all architects, all of architecture?
Or is such a project looked at in the context of its particular intention, its purpose for being, and the economic backdrop of how it came to be? Is that one building looked at through the lens of architects' identity and motives, or is it viewed as an individual or team's vision regarding a certain set of problems it tries to solve?
Arieff, instead, holds up the New American Home project as a "failed experiment" but she doesn't look at the experiment's purpose, which is research and development on design, engineering, and construction techniques--many of which are inside the walls, many of which precede the actual on-site build, many of which entail manufacturers, designers, and engineering experts remapping their processes to learn new ways to approach building.
Out of one side of people's mouths, individuals lambaste builders for not investing in research and development, and then, when it happens in a project like this one, they choose to see it from the standpoint of all they feel is wrong with a business model they disagree with, one that happens to meet the needs of hundreds of thousands of customers each year.
Who is Allison Arieff to conclude that thousands of people--builders--who visited the New American Home project in Henderson during the International Builders Show did not learn from it exactly as intended: about what home buying customers want and will want, about new integrated home technologies, about construction techniques, about improving energy performance and water preservation, about materials they may never have seen used in such a way before, and about how to improve their own businesses?
Who is Arieff to conclude that all builders should be building--not to mention, could do so--three-story structures in walkable urban neighborhoods, each with six or more units, all under 1,850 s.f.
Arieff asks, "does anyone need 10,000 square feet to live in?"
We'll get to that in a moment, but first take a look at Arieff's article. Does anybody really need parallax scrolling effects, advanced precision graphic renderings, airial photography, data visualization, etc. to get the point of her 700-word piece?
We, as journalists trying to create a powerful, engaged experience for our user audience and make stronger connections with our client sponsors, might think that to be an unfair question.
Isn't that, however, what Arieff is doing? Do we look at Arieff's article, with its biases, its selective inclusion and exclusion of data and perspective and insight, and its arguably supportable conclusions, and conflate it into statements about what journalists, their publishers, and their sponsors "want us to buy" in terms of trustworthy information and insight? We'd say that was unfair.
Arieff takes issue with this home "representing" the be-all-and-end-all of luxury construction, and asserts that it should not be used as a learning too. Well, we can cite many examples--automobiles, appliances, tech devices, etc.--where premium luxury products, aspirational items, presage what mainstream marketers and manufacturers one-day will offer the masses.
Why should that not be the case with a fully-loaded, custom designed, niftily engineered home?
The fact that there are six months or so of new-home for-sale inventory means not that builders "want us to buy" this or that, it means that we, home buyers, want builders to build this or that. if we did not want the square footage, and people stopped buying homes with larger footprints, do you think there would be a shortage of new homes right now?
Lastly, when you look at the gem of a project, Cloverdale749, Arieff proffers as one builders really should emulate, that one too might easily be taken, by 40,000 homeless people in Los Angeles, or by millions of "missing middle" working American households who would not have a prayer of access to a home like Cloverdale749, as wildly chimerical, bordering on ludicrous, and for someone or other, the wrong message to send.
Clearly, we do need more Cloverdale749s, but we also need even more nimble, less expensive, more daring, and less conventional projects than that to begin to meet an intensifying pathetically crying need for more housing, period. Ideas like these might make Cloverdale749 look gargantuan and extravagant in proportion by comparison.
Look at what the state of Oregon just did about housing, ostensibly in the name of policymakers going head-to-head with "evil big real estate." This, despite evidence that new housing lowers rents. Attacks on the people, their intelligence and intentions, their livelihoods and skillsets, the business and operational models, their motives, and their impacts, help noone. We all have much to learn and more to do.
Housing--writ large--serves a cultural, societal, and economic purpose. It has a job in our nation that no other business or industry can do. For housing to work at a macro level, it needs to have market participants who can thrive at a micro, private enterprise entity level.
The New American Home and BUILDER's Concept Home are examples of builders, architects, engineers, manufacturers, and construction trades doing research and development, to learn new ways to improve making homes and communities for people.
When will smart, gifted people like Allison Arieff, and well-intentioned policy makers like those in state and municipal governments who are bent on enacting rent control measures in more and more locales, stop attacking housing?
When will they stop looking through what they believe is a wide-open door of knowledge and insight and realize they're really peeking through a keyhole?
When will they ever learn? Oh, when will they ever learn?
