4 Comments

Thank you Kevin for this article! It is a great encouragement for small developers like me to build places that are “lovable”. I’ve been following the New Urbanist movement for years and recently I have found Andrew Gould’s New World Byzantine (which combines my loves of traditional liturgical art and New Urbanism seamlessly). I would love to read / hear a conversation between you two. (He is also a Charleston man)

Expand full comment
author

I don’t know of that, but will definitely look it up. Thanks!

Expand full comment

I'm curious how you think this interacts with Chuck Marohn's take on the fact that these developments are just a financial product.

I think that explains why they're made so shoddily and ugly. Although zoning/etc restrictions force these projects to be of a certain size in order to be practical, the financial market also needs a steady supply of them. For them, it'd be no good for us to build out our next decade's worth of housing supply, all at high-enough quality that it'll be still standing with minimal maintenance in 50 years -- at a 20% markup (to borrow your example), that's a STEAL over something built only to last 20-30 years.

But the financial markets need a reliable source of these things. So they're not going to finance solving the housing crisis all at once; they're only going to finance solving it piece by piece, in buildings that will reliably fail in 20 years so that ANOTHER can be built.

Expand full comment
author

There’s a direct line from the financilaized, administrative world we’ve created to an ugly built environment.

Expand full comment