Richard K. Rein

Thinking Big and Building Small to Respond to Today’s Housing Crisis

By Daniel Parolek

Reviewed by Richard K. Rein

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Other times a thousand words can paint a picture. Both ways work in this timely new book, Missing Middle Housing.

The picture is actually a diagram showing detached single family homes on the one side, and bulky mid-rise apartment buildings on the other. For many towns these are the two principal housing choices. For apartment dwellers the recurring question is when or if they can make the leap to a single family (and often very expensive) house. In between those two choices author and architect Daniel Parolek shows examples of “missing middle housing:” duplexes, triplexes, multiplexes, courtyard apartments, bungalow courts, townhouses, and live/work units.

The word portrait is the preface, where Parolek shows how his path to missing middle housing began in Columbus, Nebraska, an old-fashioned, walkable town of 18,000. As a kid Parolek could visit his great-grandmother in her 600-square foot apartment carved out of a classic Victorian duplex. A senior year design studio at the Notre Dame School of Architecture opened his eyes to the multiple building and housing types already existing into many neighborhoods. After earning a masters in urban design at Berkeley, he formed his own firm, Opticos Design. The first major project for the Berkeley-based firm was a master plan for the nearby community of Isla Vista. Townspeople were feeling overwhelmed by poorly designed, high density apartment buildings. A citizens advisory group told Parolek’s firm that the community couldn’t accept any future developments with a density of more than 18 units per acre.

What would be acceptable? Parolek took townspeople on a walking tour of Santa Barbara, which has a wide range of missing middle housing types. The one site loved by everyone in the group was a two-story, C-shaped Spanish Revival courtyard building. They all agreed it was the kind of housing that zoning should permit. Then Parolek calculated the density — almost 45 units per acre. Parolek then was able to shift the conversation away from abstract numbers to more visible aspects of form and building type.> Read More …

The Collective Power of Small Actions

By Hank Dittmar

Reviewed by Richard K. Rein

If you have been pleasantly surprised by some of the makeshift outdoor dining areas fashioned during the height the Covid-19 pandemic, and if you wonder what other, similar – yet hitherto not yet considered — improvements could be made to your urban infrastructure, then you should read DIY City: The Collective Power of Small Actions. The author is Hank Dittmar, an accomplished urbanologist with eclectic credentials who died as he was completing the manuscript in 2018. The final book, published in June of 2020 by Island Press, was completed by family, friends, and colleagues.

The book’s timing could not be better given the rapid transformation of cities during the pandemic – dining areas created out of parking spaces, streets closed to all but local traffic, parking lots turned into open air markets, and lanes of cars appropriated for bicycles. But it’s clear that the “do-it-yourself” brand of urbanism has other values. “However well intentioned, government tends to homogenize when it comes to urban revival, to favor big players rather than small, and to fall into the trap of creating capital value rather than social capital.”

Dittmar, whose planning credentials include jobs on both coasts of the United States as well as in Great Britain, uses the first-person plural referring to the professionals. “As planners, we all too often try to get everything right, and we all too often respond to short-term shifts in economic fashion as if they are epochal in nature.” He cites retail as a case in point, with planners shifting their designs as the winds favored first outdoor shopping malls, then festival marketplaces, then big-box centers, and then online shopping coupled with hyper-local neighborhood retail. “Each wave has left behind stranded public investment, to the point that a cottage industry has sprung up to redevelop shopping centers that are often less than twenty years old.”> Read More …

How an Old American City Made Itself New Again

By Inga Saffron

Reviewed by Richard K. Rein

Designing a building and writing a column about the building “are more alike than meets the eye,” says Inga Saffron, the architecture critic of the Philadelphia Inquirer. She makes the point in a new collection of 80 essays drawing on more than 1,600 columns she has written in the past two decades. “A good column, like a good work of architecture, is an expression of a singular vision, as well as a very public demonstration of ego.”

Saffron’s new book, Becoming Philadelphia, published by the Rutgers University Press, extends that analogy. Just as some architects (but, sadly, not all) consider both the design of their building as well as the space it creates in relation to neighboring buildings, the author of a collection of columns has similar relationships to consider. Saffron, who won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2014, has arranged the columns chosen for this book in 10 chapters, with titles that will intrigue any urban-minded reader: “Suburbanizing the City,” “Age of the Megaprojects,” “Building the Equitable City,” and – appropriate given this analogy – “The Spaces between the Buildings.”

That chapter alone gives you a sense of Saffron’s core values. A column from September, 2015, now (in this Covid-19 lockdown) seems prescient. Saffron reports on Pope Francis’s visit to Philadelphia, which prompted the authorities to block car traffic in the five-square-mile heart of the city. The result was, well, heavenly: “The virtual absence of vehicles in the sprawling secure zone, from Gerard to Lombard, was a revelation. Instead of locking us in, it turned out that the much maligned traffic box liberated us from the long tyranny of the car.”

In another column in the “spaces” chapter, Saffron calls out a “high-handed” decision to prohibit “the time-honored practice of parking your bottom atop Rittenhouse Square’s elegant limestone balustrades.” The public interest, in Saffron’s forthright opinion, coincides with her urban sense. “Even though Rittenhouse Square is in the toniest part of town, there is a strong sense that these gracious seven acres belong to all of us. . . A microcosm of the city, the park is the place where we learn to tolerate people who are different from us.”> Read More …

Learning from Bryant Park: Revitalizing Cities, Towns, and Public Spaces

By Andrew M. Manshel. Published by Rutgers University Press, $29.95.

Reviewed by Richard K. Rein.

You don’t have to read too far into Andrew Manshel’s new book to realize that its title, Learning from Bryant Park, is an alluring misnomer. It could just as well have been Learning from Bryant Park; Grand Central and 34^th Street; Jamaica, Queens; Campus Martius Park, Detroit; Pershing Square, Los Angeles; Gloversville, New York, and a Lot of Other Places. But that list would not fit easily on the cover of standard size hardcover book.

Bryant Park, however, is an excellent starting point for the book and the title. Manshel picks up the story at the point when urban advocate William H. Whyte presented a bold plan to transform the park behind the New York Public Library from a hangout for drug dealers and homeless people into a bustling year-round public space for residents and visitors. Whyte’s game plan was elegant in its simplicity: expand and widen the access points into the park, trim and improve the plantings so that no one could hide in a dark corner, bring in some food concessions, and spread out hundreds of movable French bistro chairs so people could create their own personal enclaves. One of those now classic chairs graces the cover of Manshel’s book.

And Manshel quickly shows that the lessons are not only found in what went right at Bryant Park but also in what went wrong and in the amount of time and sheer persistence needed to move from Whyte’s vison presented in 1979 to the “overnight” success it became when it reopened (13 years later!) in 1992. The lessons extend far beyond Bryant Park and the city and extended even into suburban settings. After reading this “field guide” to public placemaking, you might take a new view of your town square or neighborhood park, no matter where you live.

Manshel joined the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation in 1991, and also served as counsel and “director of public amenities” (including public toilets) at the Grand Central and 34th Street Partnerships, serving at all three under Dan Biederman. (Biederman Redevelopment Ventures now revives and manages public spaces nationwide. One prominent recent project is Salesforce Park atop the new Transbay transit center in San Francisco.)

After 10 years at Bryant Park, Manshel left and became executive vice president of Greater Jamaica Development in Queens. Creating and financing these various partnerships and projects, and then shepherding them through the bureaucratic labyrinth was the first hurdle. Like his inspiration, “Holly” Whyte, who helped write cluster housing ordinances, open space regulations, and urban zoning codes, Manshel was not afraid to enter the weeds of municipal zoning and finance regulations.

> Read More …