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(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 518: Not Eating Exhaust with Your Beer

This week on Talking Headways we’re joined by Mike Eliason of larch lab to discuss his new book Building for People: Designing Livable, Affordable, Low-Carbon Communities. We chat about single stair buildings, development on arterials, building back after climate disasters, and the problem with RFPs.

To listen to this episode, visit Streetsblog USA.  Or find it in our hosting archive.

Below is a full AI generated unedited transcript of this episode:

 

[00:01:15] Jeff Wood: Well, Michael Eliason, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast. Thank

[00:01:21] Mike Eliason: you for having me.

[00:01:22] Jeff Wood: Thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

[00:01:25] Mike Eliason: Yeah, so Michael Iason, I am the director and founder of Large Lab. We’re a small architecture and urbanism studio based in Seattle.

[00:01:32] I spent a couple of years working in Germany, where I kind of realized that the way that we develop housing in cities was radically different than the way we do things here. Spent a couple of years working on advocacy around housing and urbanism. I also serve on the Seattle’s new social housing. PDA public development authority where I chair the real estate committee and we’re trying to make a better, fairer and a more equitable, more affordable Seattle.

[00:01:58] Jeff Wood: Nice. What was the introduction for you to cities? Like generally, was it when you were a little kid or was it when you were a bit older and thinking about studying something specific?

[00:02:07] Mike Eliason: So my dad was in the air force and actually most of my youth was spent living abroad in Germany and Belgium. And we did a lot of traveling.

[00:02:17] Ended up moving back to the States in Alabama of all places. So it’s kind of like a radical departure from, from everything that I’d experienced in Europe, but it really was in college. So I went to Virginia tech in the fourth year of the five year program. They kick you out of the school. You can go travel abroad for a semester.

[00:02:34] You can go study abroad in Riva San Vitale, Switzerland for a semester. You can go work for a firm for basically college credit. And a classmate got me a job working for this firm in Freiburg. And so Freiburg is this really small university town, 225, 000 people. At the time, I really didn’t think too much about like cities and suburbs.

[00:02:54] Like it wasn’t really on my radar, but I lived in the middle of the Altstadt in the pedestrian zone, a really small unit living in the roof of this building. And it was the quietest place that I had ever lived, despite being like in this dense, compact city. And it was my introduction to pedestrian zones, to trams, to bike friendly cities.

[00:03:14] The mode share for bikes in Freiburg is something like almost 30 percent. You know, easy access to other places by trains. Ecodistricts of Vauban and Rieselfeld were under development at that time, too. Mass timber was starting to be heavily used at the firm that I was working for. And so it really kind of altered my thinking about like cities and what was possible, but it wasn’t really until I came back to the States.

[00:03:39] I finished my fifth year, my thesis year at school. And my wife was like, look, I want to go to grad school. So I met in Freiburg, but she was from Southern California. So we had this kind of funny, like, we’re not quite German, but we met there and we have this strong affinity for it. And she was like, look, I’d like to go to grad school.

[00:03:55] The options are Denver, Seattle, or San Diego. And of those three, like Seattle felt like the most European of the three. And there’s a strong relationship with ecology and nature here that I felt was kind of similar to what I’d experienced in working in Germany. And so. We moved here and, and I worked professionally for a bunch of different firms, but it wasn’t until the housing crisis was kind of in like full bore crisis mode here in Seattle that I realized like the way that we were developing anything, townhomes, all the way up to large apartment buildings was just such a radical departure.

[00:04:31] And over time, just started kind of tweeting about it and writing about it and just doing more research. And then that’s kind of how I ended up here.

[00:04:39] Jeff Wood: What about the journey made you want to write the book then?

[00:04:42] Mike Eliason: So there were a couple of people on the way who were adamant that the things that I was writing about and advocating for were really difficult conceptually for a lot of people to realize or to understand.

[00:04:54] And also just from a, like, when organizations are talking about a concept or some kind of new model of something, like, they like to have something in their hands that they can hold up to show to organizations or developers or fire marshals or, or politicians or whatever. And so they were like, adamant that, like, until there was a book that was kind of talking about a lot of these concepts, especially like around single stare.

[00:05:16] There really wasn’t going to be a good kind of foundation for organizations to really get around this and advocate for it. So that was kind of part of it. The other part of it too, is just like from this one thing, so many other aspects of development are kind of fundamentally altered. And so. The book, it’s kind of started out as single stare, but it’s really about like cities and our relationship with each other and neighborhoods and how we can develop places that are just fundamentally better.

[00:05:44] Jeff Wood: I really liked it because I’ve been watching your posts on social media and I’ve been paying attention to a lot of this stuff. Until like I saw the images in the book and kind of put it together, then it was, it felt more real. And your point about, you know, people want something to hold up and to see makes sense to me because I feel like that was for me too.

[00:06:01] There’s a lot of stuff in the book that I really appreciated kind of was explained and laid out in ways that I could understand a little bit easier. And like kind of makes me feel more appreciative of the stuff that you all are doing and I just really liked that, that once you kind of sit down with it and put it together and it’s not like a small tweet or it’s not like a one image on a blue sky post or whatever that is, it just makes it kind of more.

[00:06:21] Clean and understandable,

[00:06:23] Mike Eliason: I think part of the problem with the way that we’ve kind of developed cities and suburbs over time is that we don’t have, I had to talk about this a little bit in the book. We don’t have the lexicon, right? Like even the words to describe some of these concepts or ways of living or developing places.

[00:06:38] And so, so much of the book is really just kind of like trying to introduce. Not just new concepts, but like vocabulary and like ways of describing things and talking about things. And so I think, you know, having those out there hopefully will be good in the longterm. Right. So like people can see what’s possible in the book.

[00:06:55] A parallel for me is like in the passive house community until they were tangible passive house buildings that people could go to, not a lot of people really understood what the benefits were. Right. But then like the minute there was one that was. And you can go inside and like the air quality was just far superior to anything you had ever experienced.

[00:07:12] And it was quieter because of the way it’s built, despite being like a dense urban environment or something like, and so that there was that tangible thing that you could really experience. It made it difficult to move forward. And now like passive houses, you know, in places like Massachusetts and New York city, it’s going at a much higher clip than it is here in the Pacific Northwest.

[00:07:31] But now that it’s out there, like people can experience it. They can talk about it. I’m not going to find someone who’s going to be like, look, Mike, let’s develop an eco district in the U S at least not right now. It would be great, but having like at least a book as something that people could say, look, okay, oh, this is different and this is why it is different.

[00:07:49] I think opening up those potentials, those possibilities was really important.

[00:07:53] Jeff Wood: I appreciate that. I just renovated my basement and Mark Hogan and Mary and OpenScope Studio are the folks that helped me with that. But. Reading your book, I was like, Oh yeah, that’s why we did that thing. Or, Oh yeah, that’s why I put my ERV in the bathroom.

[00:08:04] Like there’s reasons for that. And I wanted those things and I asked for those things, but understanding how it works and like why, you know, you’ve put together those features makes a lot of sense. And then understanding passive house in the book as well was really, really helpful for me. And actually made me have a little more questions.

[00:08:17] Like, Oh, like, why didn’t I do this? Or even like recently I got a sensor that showed me the particulates in the house and, and the radon measures and stuff like that. And I was like, Oh, well, why didn’t I do this for the radon? And so all the education we can get is out there, but it’s, it’s hard to kind of, I mean, these are big projects, like there’s a lot to consider too.

[00:08:34] There’s lights, there’s doors, there’s, there’s flooring, whether that’s sustainable or not, there’s all these things. And so it can get really complicated. And so you made it less complicated.

[00:08:43] Mike Eliason: I think that’s a great point. And then, you know, for me, another part of it too, is just like, we don’t really talk about buildings.

[00:08:49] And like development, like, at a larger scale, very well in the U. S. right? Like, so, you know, we’re talking about neighborhoods. It’s usually like, kind of parcel by parcel, maybe like, block by block at the best, but like, having some way of, like, synthesizing these things. And it wasn’t until I was writing the book and talking about this that it really became apparent to me as well.

[00:09:06] Like planners and architects don’t necessarily speak the same language. Thanks Planners can go out and plan something, but they don’t really know the building code that well. And so like their assumptions may not necessarily be realistic. And, and so like having some mechanism that starts to synthesize these things, these concepts, I think it was really kind of beneficial as well.

[00:09:26] Jeff Wood: So when did the point access block or single stare, when did that hit you over the head?

[00:09:31] Mike Eliason: So I talk about this a little bit in the book. I had kind of been writing about it and tweeting about it for a couple of years on and off. Mostly with Stephen Smith and just like kind of noticing that small and medium sized buildings in Europe were just radically different.

[00:09:46] And like, I had kind of known that they usually only had like one stair and a couple of units off of it, but I really didn’t grasp like how fundamentally different this was versus like what we did things here. And then I worked on a couple of multifamily buildings. And the early schematic design phase here in Seattle.

[00:10:04] And it was just massive building, double loaded corridor studios everywhere. Maybe at the corners, you’d get like a one bedroom or a two bedroom. And it was just like, Oh my God, this is this the way like housing in the U S is going to be going forward. It’s really not that great. And we moved to, we moved to Byron in 2019.

[00:10:22] The firm I was working for ALN had just won a competition for, I can’t remember if it’s either an 11 or 12 story building. And they had the boards up and it was right next to my desk and I’m like looking at this building. It’s got like a 30 by 40 footprint. It’s really small, basically like a pencil standing on ends.

[00:10:41] And I’m like, Marcus, where’s the other stare? Like, there’s only 1 stair. Why isn’t there a 2nd stair? Marcus was the 1 of the principals. It’s like, what are you, what are you talking about? Like, if there was a second stair here, there’d be no room for anything else. This project would be economically infeasible and it would never happen.

[00:10:56] And that was like, really like the moment where I was just like, Oh my God, this is radically different. And, and then from there, it’s just kind of like every other project I looked at, like France. Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Spain, right? Like all of it kind of fundamentally is for the most part, unless it’s like a hotel or senior housing or student housing, are these more compact buildings, these point access blocks, these single stair buildings with a handful of units around each stair core that just kind of, it’s either a standalone building.

[00:11:24] Or it’s connected with several others to make a much larger development,

[00:11:28] Jeff Wood: better ventilation and light, better floor plans, especially for families in three bedrooms and four bedrooms bedrooms off the street. So what’s the main reason why these are not legal in most cities in the United States?

[00:11:39] Mike Eliason: So the main one is the international building code, which is the model code used in the U S for multifamily buildings and commercial buildings.

[00:11:47] It doesn’t allow buildings that are more than three stories or that have more than four units per stair per floor to have two means of egress. So basically a corridor connecting all of the units that leads to two vertical stairs going up and down that you would use to exit the building. And so even like on a small scale, like you would see like a four story single stair building is really common in most of the world.

[00:12:10] It’s completely illegal in the U. S. And there are some exceptions to this. So Vermont actually uses. The NFPA, the National Fire Protection Association, NFPA 101, for their egress for chapter 10, rather than the IBC. Well, NFPA 101 actually allows four stories. Rather than three. So off the bat, there’s, there’s already some nuance and variation between that.

[00:12:32] And then the cities of New York city Seattle and Honolulu allow up to six stories so you can have, you know, a building with like one to four units per floor around that central stair anywhere from like one floor all the way up to six. And so we’re starting to see a lot more work around some of this.

[00:12:50] There’s been a lot of policy work and advocacy work about trying to. Expand this, but it’s really that that dual stay requirements, which stems from a number of fires over 100 years ago before modern firefighters before sprinklers before contemporary building products, which have to go through, you know, fire tests and all of these other rating systems.

[00:13:11] And so it’s just like this carry over from, you know, 120 years ago that is carried through today, despite all this other stuff being added. And so when it comes to like housing, the U. S. and Canada are really this kind of global anomaly in terms of like how housing is built and what the quality is like, you know, within that housing.

[00:13:31] Jeff Wood: What’s the benefit of a 4, 5, 6 story building versus like a 10 story building?

[00:13:35] Mike Eliason: I think there’s a couple. One is the economics of mid rise buildings, for the most part, tends to be a little bit better than taller buildings. I think, for me, from like a quality of life standpoint, like it’s easier, let’s say your power goes out, there’s a wildfire, there’s a hurricane, but getting out of a four five or six story building is going to be a lot easier using the stairs.

[00:13:53] Then it is in a much taller building. We have friends who were in New York city during, I think it was hurricane Ida and they lost power for several days, but they were on the 14th or the 15th floor, a couple of blocks off of central park. And they lasted one day without power, right? Just having to go up and down the stairs so many times.

[00:14:10] They were like, we’re out. We can’t deal with this. And so from like a resiliency standpoint, I’m not opposed to skyscrapers. I think tall buildings are fine. But I think that there’s something about that mediated scale in terms of like costs, embodied carbon, quality of life. And, you know, there’s, there’s this huge aspect where people are just in the U.

[00:14:28] S. just afraid to fight in general. Like even getting places that allow three, four, five story buildings can be a really Long slog and fight, but I think, like, there is something about, like, these kind of mediated scales that, you know, it’s more intimate. You have that connection to the ground a little bit better.

[00:14:43] And so, and then for single stair buildings. That limit in places like Seattle is six stories. So I think that there’s a number of different things that kind of come together. The other aspect of this too, is like, once you go above six stories, you’re hitting the high rise code and that starts to add a whole bunch of costs and other things that you have to do as a developer to a building that add costs.

[00:15:02] And so if you’re only doing like. You know, 7 or 8 stories, but it’s really, really small building. You’re never really going to do those up for floor. It’s just because the cost to do those is going to be so high

[00:15:12] Jeff Wood: moving from the building form to kind of the regional or or at least the district aspect of things you’ve written a bunch lately about the focus on arterial streets.

[00:15:21] And I’m curious about that thinking and kind of the idea of putting residential units. Off and away from the arterial streets versus on them, which is what a lot of zoning codes are doing these days. And a lot of focus is because of the land that’s available. Basically, that, you know, isn’t NIMBY.

[00:15:38] Mike Eliason: I think a big part of it is it’s easier politically for a lot of places to say, look, we’re going to up zone these places.

[00:15:44] On arterials, maybe there’s like one story commercial strips alongside of them. If we don’t go too deep into the existing residential neighborhoods, there won’t be any kind of, you know, extended fight with the people who live there. And so from like a political standpoint, I totally understand why this is happening, but from like a quality of life standpoint.

[00:16:03] From a livability standpoint, public health standpoint, like, it just blows my mind that, like, we would limit so much development to, like, this narrow swath of the city where, like, air pollution and noise pollution and, you know, unsafe streets, because oftentimes these tend to be, you know, 4, 6, even 8 lane roads.

[00:16:20] Right? And so there’s this aspect in the US where we’re kind of focusing all of our development on these kinds of places. In Seattle, we already kind of limited our housing to arterials and corridors and freight routes and the city through the comp plan update is going to increase the amount of density and housing that you can build on these places, but we’re keeping like that narrow swath, right?

[00:16:40] Like, at most, it’s a half block for most of the city. There are a couple of places where it might extend just 1 block. But when the city first like published their maps of what this could look like they were showing residential buildings going almost a quarter mile off of that arterial. And so, for me, like, like, having to spend time working and living abroad where you have, you know, Berlin with dense residential neighborhoods that aren’t strictly limited to that corridor that arterial, like, the quality of life in those neighborhoods is radically different than, like, in the US when you’re living on that corridor, that arterial.

[00:17:12] And with like, the way our building code interfaces with the zoning code, right? Like, if you’re in a housing unit on a building on an arterial, let’s say you’re facing that arterial. You’re likely in a studio or maybe a 1 bedroom. You’re in this big, massive double loaded corridor. You can’t open your window because it’s going to be loud.

[00:17:28] You’ve got pollution coming in from the tires and everything else. If there’s a lot of diesel, you’ll have to deal with that as well. And so just like fundamentally from like the combination of all of these things, it just blows my mind that this has kind of become the default mode for dense urban housing.

[00:17:41] And, and then like thinking about like how we layer in like, okay, if affordable housing is only limited on the street, well, it’s not great from like a spatial justice issue. It’s, you know, it’s kind of a different form of segregation than what we’ve had in the past with the red lining and other things.

[00:17:57] And just zoning in general, but it is kind of this form of just this bifurcation, right? Where it’s like these dense corridors, you know, if you want to cross the street, you’ve got to wait several minutes for the light to change. And you’ve got 30, 40 seconds to cross maybe. And then if you have to go to the other corner, it’s the exact same thing.

[00:18:11] And so, like, thinking about extending the zoning and the density, you know, and it doesn’t have to be super dense, right? But just moderate levels of density, you know, a couple of blocks off of those arterials improves the amount of. Housing that’s supporting transit, it makes for better walkable, more walkable neighborhoods and a higher quality of life for the people who will be moving into those places.

[00:18:33] Jeff Wood: When I was reading that section of the, of the book, I was thinking about how all of the things that we do in the driving culture kind of lead to this because the arterials are the place where the businesses want to set up because that’s where the cars are, which is where the customers are, et cetera. I know, you know, in San Francisco and Seattle, a place like that, where you can walk to places and the shop owners or whatever are frustrated if they can’t park there.

[00:18:54] But at the same time, I was just thinking like. All of this is set up for, you know, the banks control where a retail chain can put their building. And so they put their building on an arterial. And if, you know, a city wants to build like a dense development, they also want to put it on that arterial. So people, if they want people to walk, they’ll walk to those retail spaces.

[00:19:11] And so I’m wondering what the difference is between the retail spaces and locations in places like Europe versus In the United States where everything’s set up around that, everything’s set up around these, you know, the bankers being able to finance these buildings and things like that. And so, you know, it’s connecting more of the car culture than just, you know, where we’re putting our housing.

[00:19:30] But I felt like that was kind of an interesting connection that I made in my head when I was reading that section.

[00:19:34] Mike Eliason: I think one of the key differences that I’ve noticed, especially working and living in Germany is. Those residential multifamily buildings off of the arterial, some of them have like a retail component or an office component, but a lot of them don’t, they’re just like purely multifamily residential buildings and, you know, they’ll have different ways of engaging, you know, with the ground level, you know, sometimes there’ll be a couple of steps up.

[00:19:56] So you’re not looking directly into it. Oftentimes they’ll just be at grade and it’s not a big issue, but there’s this aspect where, you know, we focus like all of our retail density on this arterial, on this one heavy, loud street. And for a number of reasons, the financing of these buildings really wants large retail spaces.

[00:20:14] So we lose like the opportunity for like micro retail spaces and, you know, these smaller kind of more intimate places. And so, you know, when we see development in a lot of the U S you have this huge five over one. That’ll go in on the block, it’ll be a bank or, you know, some other, you know, kind of chain restaurant.

[00:20:32] There’s not a lot of diversity in what goes in, you know, maybe we’re lucky in Seattle. I feel like some of the developers work with existing tenants and buildings that are going to be redeveloped to bring them back in as like an anchor tenant for their building, which is a really, it’s, it’s not the greatest way of redeveloping a city, but it is a much better way of redeveloping the city.

[00:20:50] And we’re at least keeping those businesses within the city. And so there are ways to kind of do that. But I think that there are also ways to kind of introduce, you know, some of these aspects into like the residential neighborhood, right? Like corner stores, we used to be common, you know, a hundred years ago and a lot of our streetcar suburbs and the grocery store that we go to is on a very minor two lane arterial for most of our day to day needs, right?

[00:21:12] And like, we can walk there and there’s only one street that we really have to worry about cars. So it’s. You know, mostly pleasant and so it’s just, it’s, our neighborhood is almost like Germany in that regard to still like way more cars and way more car priority and none of the buildings here for the most part are over three stories too.

[00:21:28] Right? So it’s like, even at that intimate scale, there’s enough density in the neighborhood to support a small grocery store. We’ve got a couple of breweries, a ton of coffee shops. Right? And so it’s, you know, I think everyone’s view of density is like, oh, we just have to have these huge towers everywhere on this really small footprint.

[00:21:44] And like, reality is like, if you start to. Spread it out more. walkable neighborhoods, more opportunities for small retail spaces and other places. I posted online the other day, a really small street in the city of Freiburg. I think the right of way was maybe 45 feet. And the businesses off of that street were a restaurant, a bike repair shop.

[00:22:05] There were some home offices and art gallery, right? And it’s, you know, like if you’re going to a restaurant and it’s on this quiet street and you’re on the corner, it’s like a pleasant place to eat outdoors, right? You’re not having cars in multiple lanes kind of blast through you at, you know, 20 to 40 miles per hour.

[00:22:19] And, you know, so you can have a conversation. It’s quiet. You’re not eating exhaust with your beer or whatever your coffee that you’re having, right? And it’s like,

[00:22:26] Jeff Wood: yeah,

[00:22:27] Mike Eliason: for me, it goes back to that quality of life is just. So fundamentally different when we’re not prioritizing the car and car access on every single street.

[00:22:37] Jeff Wood: What’s wrong with a good old RFP?

[00:22:39] Mike Eliason: Oh man, so the RFP the request for proposal is kind of the default mode for all planning in in the US, especially public planning most public planning to me. The RFP is a process We’re older, more established firms who have done kind of the same thing over and over and over again.

[00:22:57] And they can say how much it’s going to cost. And, you know, they, they just know what they can do and maybe they don’t do it well, but like the costs are known. The RFP process doesn’t really offer a lot of opportunity for innovation. So it’s kind of like a dumbed down way of thinking about like planning things long term.

[00:23:14] And so you get this, you get this ecosystem where older firms, which historically in the architecture and planning community has meant, you know, firms that are run by old white guys have like priority on projects. And so in terms of like innovation or sustainability or opening doors for younger firms, it can be really, really difficult to win an RFP unless you’re teaming up with a more established firm.

[00:23:37] And the process in Europe and China and a couple of other countries is incredibly different. So in Germany, when they do a, an urban planning process, instead of an RFP, what they’ll do is a competition. There’ll be an urban planning competition. Sometimes it’s one phase. So like there’s a program, this is what it needs.

[00:23:54] Firms will submit a proposal and then it’ll be judged. And the winner basically usually gets the commission to do the planning for the district. Sometimes it’ll be two phase. And I think this is becoming a lot more common because it offers the opportunity for feedback on a proposal. And so what you’ll get is you’ll get the community kind of saying, look, they’ll be like, workshops and outreach sessions before the competition even starts.

[00:24:17] The community will say, look, you’re putting in all this housing. We need like a grocery store. We need a kindergarten. We would like a school. So the community has an opportunity to kind of introduce. Like their needs and not just the community that would live there, but the greater community, the city or entity will come up with a program planning and architecture firms will kind of submit their design proposals for what this program would look like.

[00:24:40] And then it takes a stop there and they’ll review everything. They’ll get feedback from the people who live there. They’ll get feedback from professionals. They’ll get feedback from climate modeling is a new one that they’re trying to incorporate. You know, other architects and planners and politicians will all kind of say, look, we like these four proposals.

[00:24:59] We think these offer like the best opportunities. Here’s all of our feedback. And then those four firms will go back and kind of redesign, reconfigure what they’re planning. And then that second phase gets judged. And again, the winner of that typically gets the planning contract for that district or that development.

[00:25:15] What I find really fascinating about this process is it opens up a lot of opportunity for new ideas. And so, like, new ways of thinking about, like, how do we live together as a society? A lot of times, these are won by younger and younger firms, although that’s not necessarily the case. But a lot of young firms in Europe, especially, that’s how they get their first built work, right?

[00:25:33] Is they’re winning these competitions, whether they’re planning competitions or architecture competitions, and kind of establishing themselves. So it opens the door, I think, for a lot more. Diversity for younger firms and for new ideas and also like a city could come out with an RFP and be like, Oh, look, we want a sustainable development, but you’re not really going to know what any of that looks like, right?

[00:25:52] Like the RFP will be awarded to the firm and then they go through the planning process. But even then, like, you don’t know what that district or development that is going to look like, you know, for a long time, right? Like, they have to go through the planning process and all of their outreach process.

[00:26:05] And you’re up to kind of flip it. And they say, look, we’re going to get all the outreach that we need. We’re going to come up with a program. We’ll have, you know we need mobility concepts, we need sustainability. But that, that planning process kind of gives you a, what you see is what you get moment, you know, before you even start down the road, like what that project is gonna look like.

[00:26:24] You’ve got a, an urban framework that you can develop off of the planning, competition. Like people know what the urban feel and flavor is gonna be like with that district. And so I think it. In some ways, it allows more people to kind of buy in to these changes as well, whereas in the U. S. it’s like, you know, the planning department will go in, they’ll send in an RFP or they’ll do planning and the firm will be working with them or something.

[00:26:48] A lot of people don’t really know what’s going to happen. And then boom, it’s like, oh, these really drastic changes and we don’t know why. And then the city like works this process of like trying to maybe make it a little bit better or maybe the neighbors don’t want it at all. And so they just want to.

[00:27:00] Cap all of the heights. And so it’s, I think, fundamentally like a different way of thinking about like how we bring people into this. And so for me, like the RFP is just, I understand why people do it, right. It’s really common, but I think that the competition process allows for, it’s just. New blood, new thinking, so much more creativity than we would typically see.

[00:27:20] Jeff Wood: How much does it depend on the public sector capacity as well?

[00:27:23] Mike Eliason: I would say it’s probably, it’s probably about the same as what we do now. So some development, some district planning in European cities will be led by the city itself. You know, the city will put out the program for the competition and the city will actually then start doing a lot of the infrastructure work.

[00:27:41] And this is kind of common on larger projects, but it doesn’t always go that way. You could have a private entity, say, like, there’s a mall and the mall is defunct. Right? And so that entity, you know, in the US, it would be like Simon or some other mall company. Would then kind of come forth and say, look, we’re going to redevelop this to work with the city to kind of work out, you know, the program and then they’ll, you know, have the planning competition and, and that entity, the private entity would, you know, develop it.

[00:28:07] But along with that, though, like the city is like, the city is controlling some of it, right? So, like, the city is like, look, this is what they do in Munich. We’re going to rezone your industrial property or your 1 story commercial property for this dense eco districts. That’s great. You’re gonna make a ton of money.

[00:28:23] We’re gonna reserve X amount of lands. I think it’s about a third for affordable housing. Now, you don’t have to build that affordable housing. We have entities that we can give that land to, and they’ll build the housing. And so I think the processes that are just, it’s all a little bit more geared towards, like, more affordability, more economic and social mixing, right?

[00:28:42] Like all of that. And it’s not often the competition process, but I think. There’s something about that process that helps enable these places, whereas, like, in Seattle, we have districts that have maybe a token affordable housing projects at a light rail station, right? Where there should be abundant, affordable housing and a broad mix of not just like units, but unit types and building types.

[00:29:05] And so it’s just like, our process doesn’t induce a lot of housing variability. And then, like, we can’t even, like, this goes back to the discussion around Lexicon, right? Like, we can’t even. Talk about different unit types, just because like in our brain, it’s either apartments or like townhouses, but there’s this whole like ecosystem in between.

[00:29:21] And, you know, Daniel Parolek and it was an optical, right? Talking about missing middle housing is like return some of this, right? So we can talk about plexus and, and stack flats. And so that’s been really beneficial. But like, a lot of these concepts are like transferable to larger buildings too. And so.

[00:29:39] Yeah. Like having the ability to kind of talk about some of these things at a larger scale, I think is really beneficial.

[00:29:44] Jeff Wood: Then you don’t have to worry about what they do to the orcas, right?

[00:29:47] Mike Eliason: Oh my gosh, that was mind blowing. So Seattle has this long history of entertaining public comment. A couple of years ago, there was this wonderful song about saving the trees and And in my mind, it’s like, look, we can have, you know, thin buildings and density and trees and space for nature and community.

[00:30:05] Like they can all coexist, but like the way our development code is written, they don’t really coexist that well. And so there are a lot of people in the city who view like development is like being anti nature and anti tree. And so they came out with a I think they were like dressed as a tree. Maybe I’m wrong and they sang the song about it.

[00:30:22] Right? And then most recently in our last it was Monday. It was our public hearing on the comprehensive plan update. The orcas are the new thing because 1 of the local orcas who had a baby died a couple of years ago and then carried it like 1000 miles. Up into Canadian waters, she had another infant die.

[00:30:41] And so I think everyone is kind of like fresh on this idea of like, okay, nature is not thriving. There’s something going on. But like, the reality is like, we’re sprawling into the wild and urban face, you know, in the Seattle metro area, we have 60 percent more cars in Seattle alone than we did 30 years ago.

[00:30:58] Like the issue isn’t housing. The issue is like cars and tires. Killing salmon and salmon not being there for the orcas to eat. Right. And so it’s, you know, everyone’s just like, Oh, we’re not going to make the connection between what’s actually happening. We’re just kind of like, gonna, gonna talk about like what we don’t like and try to connect that to the issue around the orcas.

[00:31:17] But for me, it’s like, dude, I want the orcas to survive. But like the way that we do that is fundamentally different than just like saying, look, we’re not going to allow housing here because like people are moving here that housing is going to be built somewhere. So do we build it in the mountains and the wild and urban face, which I mean, as we’re seeing in LA is like not someplace that we should be thinking about building new housing.

[00:31:36] So it’s, you know, for me, it’s like, how do we, how do we synthesize those debates? Because fundamentally that’s so much of what the fighting about housing has been in Seattle.

[00:31:46] Jeff Wood: It’s scary what’s happening in Los Angeles at the moment. And it’s scary to think about what’s going to happen afterwards and all the mudslides, the things that happen after a big fire scar occurs on the natural habitat, but also like, are we just going to, after disasters specifically, we just tend to rebuild what was there because people have a deep, deep attachment to their homes.

[00:32:04] And so they just want to, you know, get over the pain of the past and start building again, instead of thinking about new ways of doing it. And so thinking about that from an environmental restoration perspective, how does some of the ideas that you have in the book fit into that?

[00:32:17] Mike Eliason: So I talked about this a little bit in the book, and I wish it was something that I had spent a little bit more time on that.

[00:32:23] I think a lot of this really comes down to the issues around insurance. So in the Marshall fire in Colorado, according to a conversation with a colleague I had, who was doing some of the redevelopment work there, homeowners had like 2 years to rebuild their house. The city was not allowed to change the zoning.

[00:32:39] So you couldn’t say, look, there were. 100 buildings here that burned down. Well, what if we did like really compact footprint of homes, you know, instead of this, you know, small distributed, you know, 100 units sprawl back into the place that already burns and in 10, 15, 20 years ago, it might burn again. But the insurance company was like, we won’t allow the city to do the reason process, or maybe it was just that the reason process would take too long.

[00:33:03] And also, what was fascinating is like, they wouldn’t cover. Like, if your house burned down and it was built in 1990, they wouldn’t pay for you to build under modern energy codes. And so like, there were people who were like, look, we’re going to do passive house. Insurance wasn’t going to pay for that. They were only going to pay to the level of what the house was when it was built.

[00:33:22] And so there’s this weird, it’s not just the Landy’s issue. There’s this gap around like codes and how we kind of synthesize some of those things, because if you’re building a house back in that place and it’s not necessarily fire resistant. You know, if it’s not set up like passive house where you can be relatively smoke tight.

[00:33:38] So if there are smoke events, you can at least if you don’t have to leave your house, you can at least, you know, breathe in your house, right? There’s this fundamental disparity and like how those places, I think, redevelop. And a big part of it is driven by insurance. But fundamentally, like, are we going to go back in and just rebuild the palisades?

[00:33:54] Like,

[00:33:54] Jeff Wood: we shouldn’t

[00:33:55] Mike Eliason: write the hills, the Hollywood hills. You know, Eaton Canyon, those places are going to continue to dry out, they’re going to burn, and so I think fundamentally we need to think about, or be having conversations about like, how we redevelop places, because those people are going to need homes, right?

[00:34:11] We can’t just not build housing for people. And so how can we do it in a way that’s like more protected? More community oriented, you know, are we taking climate adaptation into account? Are we taking smoke and fire mitigation into account? And if we’re just rebuilding kind of the exact same thing Maybe solid materials instead of wood framed on the same site I think we’re going to keep seeing the same kind of events play out and you see this conversation I think it’s a little bit easier on the East Coast around like hurricanes and sea level rise because People kind of, you know, the hurricanes keep coming, the beaches are going away, you don’t have a beach to build on anymore.

[00:34:48] Right. And so I think those conversations are a little bit easier to have, whereas on the West Coast with like wildfires, it’s kind of, we don’t really have that, that recurring history in a recent enough period of time. Right. And so, you know, in Washington, as our forests dry out, we’re going to see a lot more fires in the wildland urban interface.

[00:35:05] And that’s also where a lot of dense housing, well, moderately dense, you know, sprawling suburbs are, and so we need some kind of mechanism to, you know, as those places burn, redevelop them in a way that’s a lot more resilient.

[00:35:17] Jeff Wood: One of the things that was released in December from California, at least, was The new kind of insurance rules for insuring houses.

[00:35:24] And one of the things was allowing insurance companies to do more catastrophic modeling that might be beneficial in terms of the insurance and how much, you know, their premiums are and things like that, but also it’s hard. And I released this morning, something about transportation modeling, highway modeling, where the modelers are just kind of.

[00:35:42] Trying to justify building more highways. And not that I’m saying that catastrophic modeling is the same thing. They’re not trying to, you know, make sure that they, that catastrophe happens everywhere. But with these fires that just happened in Los Angeles, you never know where the winds are going to blow or where the sparks are going to go or what’s going to start it, I mean, they’re so random, but they’re predictable, but random at the same time.

[00:36:04] And so that’s another frustrating thing as well is like traffic is, is modelable. You can see, you know, we can talk about the rules and all that stuff, but wildfires, Natural disasters, climate change created disasters. Those things are, the risk is there. You can model for the risk, but you never really know where it’s going to be.

[00:36:23] Mike Eliason: Yeah. And part of this for me goes back to like how we model things and our, even our maps, right, are all based on historic data and historic events. They’re not. Forward looking for the most part. And so like the flooding that we saw last year in Appalachia and Asheville, that was a polluvial flooding, right?

[00:36:40] So that’s just a huge volume of water coming down in one place. And our flood maps, like FEMA’s flood maps, historically haven’t looked at polluvial flooding, right? They’ve only looked at like, you know, rivers and oceans and rising with, you know, rain and stuff related to that. And so. Having like this huge volume of water drop in a place that hasn’t necessarily seen that kind of rain in a long time.

[00:37:01] Like people didn’t know that they were in located in a place that, you know, the habitability is not necessarily a guarantee longterm. And I think the fire issue is exactly that too. Like we can say, okay, look, no more new construction in the wild and urban interface, but like the fire came down into like Santa Monica and like urban areas.

[00:37:20] It wasn’t in the wild lands anymore. And like the way that we build, like, it’s just, it allows it to spread, especially, you know, I read that there were embers traveling over a mile away because the winds were so strong. Like, you can’t,

[00:37:33] Jeff Wood: yeah,

[00:37:33] Mike Eliason: the buffer doesn’t exist. My wife’s family lives in North County.

[00:37:37] In San Diego, and they kind of live in a really rural area. There’s one road in one road out and over the last 27 years, there have been like 3 major fires and everyone just gets like a little bit closer and we’ll get the call. Like, okay, well, it’s it’s on our doorsteps. We’re leaving now. And part of it is like, they just.

[00:37:57] Have learned to live with fire, but like it’s also a much smaller community, like, you know, getting in and out of their neighborhood is not anywhere as bad as we saw in like Maui or the Palisades, right? Like just watching the bulldozers clear all of those cars because people had to just abandon them was, it’s, you know, it’s heartbreaking and gut wrenching on my end, but it’s also like, it’s kind of self induced, right?

[00:38:20] Like the canyons have a history of wildfire, right? Like chaparral, you know, fire isn’t, a foreign topic in that topography in that landscape, but we’ve kind of Ignored some of the history when we when we do development and so not having the proper maps or you know anything that we could model to really show like how dangerous or unsafe something could be I think is pretty For me, it’s pretty problematic

[00:38:45] Jeff Wood: There was a big earthquake in the California in the 1800s, but you know, nobody was here.

[00:38:48] But when in 1906 obviously people were here in San Francisco and they noticed. And so, you know, people pay more attention. I know for me specifically, like I tell friends when they say, I’m going to think about moving to San Francisco, at least, you know, early on. And they’re like, where should I live?

[00:39:01] And I was like, we’ll go to the map and look at all these liquefaction zones and don’t live there.

[00:39:07] Mike Eliason: Same in Seattle. And our fault lines run through the middle of the city, right? Right there. Through downtown, I feel like most of our liquefaction areas are probably closer to water and there’s not on green belts.

[00:39:18] So, like, for the most part, like, where existing housing is is kind of safer to build. For the most part. It’s, you know, it’s an issue here. We’re constantly waiting for the big 1. You know, the big 9. 0 to come ripping through here. And so we moved here knowing that earthquakes were a possibility. Didn’t really think like climate change, we were like, Oh, sea level rise.

[00:39:37] Well, there’s, you know, we have hills in Seattle. We’ll be fine for us. It was like six, seven years ago, the wildfire smoke season becoming an annual thing when it had never really been a thing that we had to deal with. And so now we have a. Of course, the Rosenthal box that we have a bunch of filters and when the wildfire smoke gets bad, we bust it out so that we can have, you know, clean air in our home, but it’s like part of the process of like, okay, that’s 1 more thing that we have to deal with.

[00:40:02] And then we haven’t really dealt with any fluvial flooding here in the Northwest. So, you know, knock on wood that hopefully isn’t something that we have to do here. But I think it’s, you know, it’s something that we probably should start preparing for. It’s happening everywhere else that there are mountains.

[00:40:16] So it’s. It’s, it’s kind of crazy to think about, like all of these places that we thought were like, oh, this is a climate safe place, like, let’s live here. Like, it turns out, you know, no place is actually safe. Every place has some level of risk. And so it’s, you know, what level of risk are you willing to live with is really what it comes down to.

[00:40:34] Jeff Wood: You talk a lot about, you know, in the passive house, the ventilation, the ability for cross breezes, also for closing it all up and making sure that you’re fire safe and smoke safe. One of the things you did mention that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, and we’ve tried to put on the house, this window screens.

[00:40:47] And the reason why is that my daughter, when mosquitoes come and give her a bite on the, on the cheek, it stays for like a couple of months. And so getting screens up and those types of protections too, in addition to all the other, you know, protections you’re talking about, I think are important, but I just wanted to put that on your radar because that’s something that like.

[00:41:03] We thought about the smoke, you know, inhalation and the problems with that because of the number of, you know, summers that we’ve had here in California and falls, but also just the, the simple things like screens and other ways to like let the air rush through, but without some of the potential risks of, I’d never expected to have, you know, I grew up in Texas.

[00:41:20] I never expected to come up here and have mosquitoes, but here we are.

[00:41:24] Mike Eliason: We’re lucky. We don’t really have a lot of bugs where we are in the city. I think it’s. Combination of we’re on a hill. So there’s like a constant breeze for the most part. And we actually have screens on all of our windows in Germany.

[00:41:37] We didn’t have any screens, right? Like insect screens are not really a thing. You’ve got an exterior, you know, roll down shutter or some kind of operable shutter that you can use to keep out the sun and just keep out most of the bugs. But we didn’t have screens and we would have our windows open just all the time because it was relatively comfortable, but they have wasps.

[00:41:56] And so we would have, you know. There would be some nights where it’s like dark, we’re watching a movie and all of a sudden we hear like, ZZ and we’re like, oh, it’s a mosquito. And it’s like, no, it is like a wasp. You turn the light on and there’s like four or five wasps just Oh no, flying around the house.

[00:42:09] So that was, you know, and my son got stung by a couple when we were there, so that was a little bit traumatic for him. But like the, the insect thing here is like, it’s funny, it’s not something that I, you know, if we go out of the city. Like when we go bike camping and stuff, the mosquitoes are really, really bad, but like in the city itself, it’s, you can hear the bugs, but like, they’re not like flying around and into you for the most part.

[00:42:31] Jeff Wood: Yeah. That’s what I was surprised about. I was like in San Francisco, it’s foggy, it’s cold, it’s, but there’s mosquitoes or maybe they’re just attracted to us. I don’t know. Maybe it’s my family. I had no idea. Like

[00:42:39] Mike Eliason: mosquitoes, like are definitely attracted to certain people. They don’t, they don’t really come after me, but no, my mom, my kids, they love them.

[00:42:46] They love my wife too.

[00:42:48] Jeff Wood: What’s a question that you haven’t been asked or what’s a topic that you haven’t talked about a lot when you’re talking about your book? Oh man, that’s an interesting question.

[00:42:57] Mike Eliason: Financing is probably the biggest one and I didn’t spend too much time talking about financing for me.

[00:43:03] Financing is such a fascinating aspect of like development because it’s. You know, you need money to build something. And so there’s this really important question about like, how things get funded and where that funding goes and who it goes to for me, like the cost of construction in the U S for the quality, especially seems really, really high compared to other places.

[00:43:24] So Germany and Switzerland and France are building. You know, affordable housing, cooperative, social housing with 3 bedroom units and single stair buildings, wood windows, like, really nice development. Like, what we would consider luxury development, but it’s affordable housing and they’re renting them out for like.

[00:43:44] A third of what like a new building would rent for, for like a studio, right. Or a one bedroom in places like Seattle and San Francisco. And like, that’s like the least common denominator building, right? Like it’s wood frames, vinyl everywhere, vinyl windows. It’s like the cheapest building that you can physically build, you know, noise insulation isn’t taken into account.

[00:44:04] And so like, there’s this fundamental disconnect between like how we finance buildings and what that process is that I really wish I had spent more time on because I would love to know like how they’re able to develop. Buildings where a three bedroom, like our, our four plex in Bavaria, a brand new building was 1200 bucks a month for, you know, this huge three bedroom place and like 1200 bucks a month in Seattle.

[00:44:27] It doesn’t even get you like a micro unit, right? Like there’s like this fundamental disconnects between the two. And I mean, okay. We weren’t in Munich proper. We were like half an hour, 40 minutes outside of Munich. But like, Bavaria is relatively expensive. We were in a city, we weren’t like outside of the city.

[00:44:42] And so like, then a family, you know, it was just me working when we were there to live on an architect’s salary and have like the same quality of life because our rent was so much cheaper and everything else just was so much less expensive too, was a little bit mind blowing. I think part of it is we don’t have any process for cost control in the U.

[00:45:00] S. We don’t have a development bank that funds housing for the most part, like in Germany. They have banks that are set up specifically to fund development, whether that’s like affordable housing or market rate housing, that’s doing different like environmental levels, like passive house. So there’s the KFW, which is a development bank that was founded by money from the Marshall fund, right?

[00:45:21] So we basically helped craft this development bank that funds all of these incredible projects in Germany now. And I think it’s like the. Third or fourth largest bank in Germany. You know, we set up a development bank for Japan after World War II as well. We’ve never really developed a development bank for the U.

[00:45:36] S. There’s, I think, one bank that really funds cooperatives. And until recently, like, their terms for development were just not workable. Especially for, like, young families that don’t have a lot of access to wealth. You know, you go to Germany and there’s the GSW, which is a bank that funds co ops and affordable housing or, you know, co housing like Baugruppen and things of that nature.

[00:45:57] And so this is this history, I think, around development and other places that is not as market oriented as it is here. And so I think that maybe that plays a role, their labor costs are lower, their construction costs are lower, you have socialized healthcare systems, does that play into it as well? And Alain Levy has written a lot about like the, the cost of transit, right?

[00:46:17] Like the, you know, Paris is building tram lines for like, you know, nothing. And we can’t even build a light rail line in the U S without, you know, just blowing through billions and billions of dollars. And so it’s, it’s kind of the same question for me. Like we need that study for, for housing as well, because I think it’s, it’s a lot of the same stuff.

[00:46:34] And even when you, you know, take the PPP, right? Like the, the price parity into account. Like, I think that. It’s so fundamentally different and it’s not just how we build, right? Like, it’s not just because it’s single standard, like there are other aspects too, but just like how they build is just so different and the outcomes.

[00:46:50] And to me, like where I see the development in the U S going bigger and bigger five over one buildings or five over two or six over two more studios, but much deeper windowless bedrooms. Like this is like the future of development, multifamily development under the international building code. And it just seems like it’s like a really.

[00:47:10] Like self limiting way of like, you know, building cities and places that are of it should be of a high quality.

[00:47:16] Jeff Wood: It’s human depressing, right? I mean, it’s, it’s the idea that you could, you even want, I mean, I’m sitting here in my basement in my office and I have one small window up there, but in the interior wall, I put a window so that I could get the light from the other side too.

[00:47:28] And, you know, just thinking about life without. Light is in, even if it’s like, and I have good lights, but it’s not the same, right? It’s not the same as getting that sunlight on your face and it really does matter. So that that’s, that’s scary. And what, what was happening? What was it in Santa Barbara with the Charlie Munger and the Dormzilla, right?

[00:47:45] His ideas of, of trying to shove everybody into windowless bedrooms that just had lights that were mimicking real light, but it’s still not the same. It doesn’t matter if it comes from a light bulb.

[00:47:54] Mike Eliason: You forget what the number, it was like 2000 unit, 2000 bedrooms or something. Just an absurd amount of people.

[00:48:00] On this 1 massive building, but again, like, this comes down to the fact that, like, the university needs housing for its students. The existing residents don’t want new housing. They don’t want the zoning to change. And so, like, in some ways, it’s like a extreme reaction to like, look, if we don’t allow development here, we still need places for students to live.

[00:48:20] Otherwise, they’re going to be living in their cars like they already are. Right? And so. So to me, this goes back to like this bigger discussion around just, we need to find places where development can happen. And it’s that, I don’t know if it’s a balance or something, but like the whole outreach process in the U S around land use and housing feels like it’s a bully’s veto, right?

[00:48:40] Like we don’t want this. We don’t want that. No, no, no. And there’s no opportunity to get people to yes. And so how we get there, I think is, is really important. And like the people who live there should have a say in how. Their neighborhood changes and grows, but like they shouldn’t be able to say no to anything, right?

[00:48:56] But we’ve allowed that to happen for essentially a hundred years. And so, you know, we’re, we’re not building housing at the rate that we should have been. Housing starts in the next couple of years are looking way more anemic than they have been the last couple of years. And so I, you know, things are going to have to start happening pretty quickly.

[00:49:14] Otherwise it could get pretty dire. Yeah. It’s already dire, right? Like, homelessness jumped up 18 percent in one year. Yeah. Well, the book is Building for

[00:49:22] Jeff Wood: People, Designing Livable, Affordable, Low Carbon Communities. Where can folks find the book if they want to get a copy, which they should? Yeah, so it

[00:49:29] Mike Eliason: is available.

[00:49:30] You can order it from islandpress. org. Amazon, Barnes Noble, I think most online booksellers have it. A lot of people have been going to their library. And asking for it, and I saw that some of the libraries in Oregon have already received some of their copies, but I think in the next couple of months, you should be able to find it at like most major online and brick and mortar stores.

[00:49:52] Jeff Wood: Awesome. And where can folks find you if you wish to be found?

[00:49:55] Mike Eliason: I am on LinkedIn under Michael Eliason. My website is largelab. com. I was on Twitter. I am no longer on Twitter. I am for now on blue sky under holds dash bow.

[00:50:07] Jeff Wood: Awesome. Well, Mike, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time.

[00:50:10] Mike Eliason: Thank you so much for having me, Jeff.

 


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