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Homes built for a new American Dream
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The Mission Meridian Village development in South Pasadena, Calif., designed by Moule & Polyzoides architects.
TEXT OF INTERVIEW
Kai Ryssdal: Just as people like Emily and Andrew are rethinking home ownership, architects and developers are re-thinking the home. Smaller. Closer to the neighbors. Ideally, close to a train station, too.
RYSSDAL: All right, so why don't you tell us where we are.
ELIZABETH MOULE: Well, we are here at the Mission Station in South Pasadena. We're heading north to a project that we built that is a mixed-used project, that is to say it's a retail area, it's got some housing, and it's got some parking for park and ride.
Architect Elizabeth Moule lives and works in Pasadena, Calif. A short hop on the freeway, or a slightly longer train ride, from downtown L.A. For her the subprime crisis and all those foreclosures out there is really an opportunity to rethink the home. And how it ought to be built.
ELIZABETH MOULE: What we're looking at is a brick building in front, and we've got a little florist and a bakery here on the ground floor with some outdoor seatings.
Ryssdal: On the second floor you've got huge windows and lofts inside I suppose, right?
MOULE: That's right. And then as we're going down the street, we've created a series of bungalow courts that are relatively high density but fit into the neighborhood.
Ryssdal: And South Pas is a great city for these kinds of things because it's got lots of parks, it does have the good schools. A lot of big cities, though, that have some other problems might not be as amenable to this kind of living, no?
MOULE: Well, I think, personally, hope springs eternal. I think every city can be accommodated and transformed into a place like this that has a lot of housing and offices around transit. It's important we talk about housing and offices around transit because what we've got to get to is a jobs-housing balance.
Ryssdal: There's a little bit of marketing problem here, right? Because when you start talking about density of living and getting more people in the same spot, and you know, just in a description it doesn't maybe sell.
MOULE: Well, I think the reason I took you over here is that this is not the picture that most people have of density, but it's dense enough. If the single-family house is say about 5 to 7 D.U.'s an acre -- dwelling units per acre -- now we're looking at something that might be 20, 25, 30, but it doesn't really look or feel very different than a single-family house.
Ryssdal: But we are so invested in this country in single-family homes, the yard, the mortgage, and all of that, that it's sort of an uphill fight for you.
MOULE: Yeah, everybody loves single-family houses, but frankly they've been oversupplied dramatically. And what's been undersupplied are other ways of life allowing you to walk places, jump on a train instead and save a lot of time. Because every single person in this country pinning their hopes on one single-family home is just not reasonable, and we just can't supply that really across the country.
Ryssdal: As the demand, though, for this kind of living increases, isn't that going to drive up prices and then make it perhaps not as affordable as it might ideally be?
MOULE: Uh, yes, but it's important to remember that when you're building more units on a smaller piece of land, it's essentially more affordable than putting one home on the same piece of land. I think one could really argue that it's a way to provide more affordable housing than the other way around.
Ryssdal: So much of this discussion is about sustainability and how we can do that. What does that really mean, though?
MOULE: Well, the main thing about sustainability is we need to be thinking about places we're going to make that are permanent. Because the greatest use of resources are resources over time. They have to be used by lots of different functions over time. They can't be single-use buildings. That's one. They have to be more walkable, and they have to be compact and mixed use because when you look at the energy consumption of a single-family house or any single building, buildings are already the greatest user of energy, but when you add the commuting to that building, you actually increase the energy usage by 50 percent, 50 percent! But the main thing is we just need common sense. We don't need new technologies to make this. We need to make them simple. We need to make them compact and pedestrian oriented.
Ryssdal: To make all this work, do we have to get used the idea of giving up the car?
MOULE: I think a lot of people are dying to get rid of their cars and to get out of them. You know, the fact is that we've made lives where we just drive from one place to another. Back and forth. And our lives are largely led now in our cars. And we don't have enough time for our children, we don't have enough time for our marriages. I don't think, speaking as a working mother, that I had children in order to spend all of my afternoons in a car.
Ryssdal: Elizabeth Moule is the principal architect at the firm Moule & Polyzoides in Pasadena, Calif.
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Sometimes typos really affect a story. This says "If the single-family house is say about 5 to 70 units an acre, dwelling units per acre, now we're looking at something that might be 20, 25, 30..." That extra zero in the first part makes it confusing.
It's weird to me to read the responses of libertarians who think that a fifteen minutes wait for a bus is an infringement on their rights. I love being car free. Talk about infringement: I am free of car payments, free of car insurance, free of car repair and storage. Free of road rage. All that mobility comes at a price, and when Americans wake up to what they're paying, they'll howl.
I rent a car if I really need one. I do so a few times a year. It's never a good experience to sit in traffic again, with the road demanding my attention. When I delegate driving to a bus driver, I can use my time productively. When I bike, I get exercise. When I drive, I get to sit and fume at all the people in my way. On top of the unsustainability of it.
Unfortunately, I misplaced this program on my player and was way late hearing it so nobody will read this, but I have to say that this is the price that we pay for overpopulation. I've said, for a long time, that, if there are few enough of us, we can ALL have waterfront property. Costs only go up when demand exceeds supply. Because we have tried to cram so many people onto the surface of the planet, we are at a point at which we are attempting to replicate the days before modern transportation existed when most people spent almost all of their lives within a day's walk of their home, and the fact is that even this is a relatively short-term solution as the population continues to increase.
I don't want to live in a situation in which I can only go to certain places on a certain schedule, which is determined by somebody else.
Years ago, somebody here, whose name I wish that I'd remembered so I could quote him, said something very profound on this subject: "Nobody ever dreamed of winning the lottery so they could live in an urban flat."
I live in a fifty-five plus coop in Santa Cruz that began life in 1912 as a hotel. It is wonderful to live within easy walking distance to downtown Santa Cruz and to have a community of neighbors. For those who love travel, the knowledge that neighbors within the complex are close at hand to keep an eye on your home. Baby boomers moving into downtown coops and condos would open up more single family homes for families with young children who might require more space. I've lived in the suburbs and have no desire to return to the rather barren tract housing lifestyle.
Elizabeth Moule's partner in the firm, Stephanos Polyzoides drives a Porsche and they both live in a large estate in Pasadena. In the worlds of Leona Helmsley, I guess high density living is for "the little people" not the Moule Polyzoides clan.
If Elizabeth Moule was sincere about energy consumption she would promote the idea of telecommuting and relaxing the zoning laws of the land to allow one to more easily work from home. Instead what I hear is a sales pitch to promote a socialistic way of life. Elizabeth’s vision of the future home and workplace sounds more like a prison camp than the American Dream of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
While development that follow the New Urbanist principles (dense, walkable, close to transit) are certainly a step in the right direction, let's not lose track that such neighborhoods already exist in so many American towns/cities. Just about every neighborhood built before 1940 was, by necessity, followed these principles. Most of these neighborhoods are still out there, waiting to be rehabilitated and re-occupied by middle class families. American cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia, Buffalo, Detroit, Cleveland, etc... have lost hundreds of thousand of their residents, but the housing stock, the compact city grid and even the public transportation infrastructure is mostly still intact. Wouldn't it be more efficient to steer public policy into making these already existing walkable neighborhoods more attractive to middle class professionals, than building new neighborhoods from scratch?
Anyone who lives in a large city, knows how desirable a newly gentrified neighborhood becomes, as soon as it hits a certain critical mass that makes it palatable for middle class tastes. The demand is certainly there, it's just that there are not enough of these neighborhood that fit a certain criteria of safety/schools/amenities. That's what makes the urban neighborhoods that do fit those criteria so expensive. It's not about making everyone live a certain way, it's about giving people options beyond single-family, car dependent suburbia. The demand is certainly there, we just need policy solutions to allow the market to create the supply that is so sorely lacking right now.
We moved to South Pas for the easy living: Farmer's Market, walkable streets, restaurants, etc.. But we know people in the Mission Meridian complex Ms. Moule designed and they hate it - only because you have to deal with the HOA and the obsessive compulsive types that live there. That is why I will never live in a condo again: too many people with nothing better to do than complain about their neighbors.
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