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Public Needs to Be Sold on Density as Building Boom Nears
The authors of a new book depicting where high density development is successful and where it is not concede that architects and land planners have their work cut out for them in convincing the nation’s households to embrace alternatives to the traditional single-family home on an expansive yard.
But with 100 million additional people expected in the United States by 2050, rising energy and transportation costs, growing greenhouse gas emissions from driving, and disappearing farmland and open space in metropolitan areas, the need for well-designed density has never been greater, according to “Visualizing Density,” a new book published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
In the next 25 years, the authors — landscape architect and land planner Julie Campoli and pilot, aerial photographer and architect Alex S. MacLean — project that the nation will need 60 million new units to house the population, which equals more than half of the housing stock on the ground now.
“And that doesn’t include the 104 billion square feet of new space that will be needed for commercial, industrial and institutional uses,” they say. “The next generation of Americans will face an unprecedented building boom."
The book examines scores of different neighborhoods across the country to provide objective and comparative views of various approaches to building higher density. More than 1,200 aerial views are included.
“Despite all the advantages of building closer, resistance to density is widespread, to say the least,” the authors write. U.S. cities and villages were dense for only about 150 years, compared to 1,000 years or longer in many developed nations, before they started losing population to the suburbs in the mid-20th century.
“Psychologically, we’re a nation of single-family home owners,” they say. “We’re accustomed to a lot of space between our neighbors and ourselves. This cultural bias often underlies discussions of growth and development and merges with negative stereotypes of recent public housing failures. Many people view density as a threat, believing that it leads to sinking property values, rising crime and traffic congestion.”
Among the reasons cited for why Americans hate density:
- Crowding. It’s true that there is such a thing as “bad” density, the authors say. This is represented by poorly planned and designed development that lacks amenities, is crowded and monotonous and offers few environmental or economic benefits.
The concept of crowding, they say, can be the result of too many people trying to fit into too few housing units. For instance, “measured in persons per square mile, some areas of South Central Los Angeles are the densest neighborhoods in the country, but measured in units per acre they have a relatively low density. They are dense in population, but not in housing units.”
Undesirable density can also be found in recent sprawling growth in desert cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix, they say. This development is oriented to highway corridors and its form is largely determined by the storage of cars. “A remote 500-acre subdivision of single-family homes on cul-de-sac streets, located near a highway interchange, but with a relatively high density of eight units per acre, could be accurately described as sprawl,” they say. “It’s just a denser version of sprawl.”
- Monotony. “Many examples of ‘bad’ density arise from the stack ‘em and pack ‘em approach to housing design, which is tempting to developers in our age of mass production,” they write. While pointing out that the approach epitomized by builder William Levitt of applying factory techniques to on-site construction and working at a large scale “brings down the cost of construction and makes housing more affordable, it also breeds monotony. When the same building form is repeated relentlessly across a broad area, it provokes a response that there are ‘too many’ structures, regardless of the actual number. Density is perceived to be greater than it is.
“All too often, the term ‘density’ evokes an image of repetitive, featureless housing developments with little greenery and no privacy. Some dense neighborhoods are bleak, but it’s not a function of how many housing units are built on each acre. Crowding and monotony are the consequences of poor design, not the inevitable results of density.”
The book notes that interest in more walkable, mixed-use and concentrated neighborhoods is on the rise among some demographic groups, such as retiring baby boomers and young professionals seeking transit-oriented development for shorter commutes.
“But for others, density continues to have negative consequences,” according to the authors. “In many established neighborhoods, concerns about traffic congestion and parking, and strains on infrastructure, schools and parks have led to resistance to more concentrated settlement patterns.”
The book grew out of a series of Lincoln Institute courses taught by Campoli and MacLean since 2003. Participants in those classes shared many stories of concentrated developments that were rejected outright or forced to reduce the number of housing units. The authors concluded that there was a clear need for a better way to present density to the public.
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