contrasts

Walking around Glendale is still pleasant but a lot less magical when I'm not coming from a Boston winter. Instead this year I've had subtropical or outright tropical vegetation since May 2[1], apart from a week in Hobart.

[1] I'm torn between "May 2" because I'm American, "2 May" because of Euro style, or "May 2" because ISO (Year month day) sortable order with implicit year.

another density calculation

Been doing a lot of Strong Towns reading today on missing middle housing, incremental development, small developers, and such. It inspired a new calculation:

Consider a typical suburban quarter acre lot, about 1000 m2, maybe currently hosting a modern 3000 foot2 (300 m2) house. I'm not sure what the dimension of the lot are, let's say 20x50 meters. Imagine a 2 meter wide access lane down the length, leaving 18 meters width; and 5 meter wide townhouses fitting in sideways, so 10 of them (50/5). Make them 3-story. 5x18=90 m2 ground plan, 270 m2 square feet in each townhouse, putting 10 rather large houses in the space of one suburban lot. Or 30 decent sized apartments, big enough for 2 or even 3 BR without much cramping. 10-30 times the density, with no particular height, just efficient use of the land.

Maybe the lot dimensions are 25x40 meters. With a similar configuration, but 4 meter wide homes, you get 10 4x23=92 m2 buildings, and similar density increase.

Or, stick a 3 meter access lane down the middle, have 5m wide homes again, and have 8 5x11=55 m2 buildings on each side, 16 total. At 3 stories, get 16 165m2 houses, or 48 55m2 apartments, or some combination thereof.

The depth makes conventional orientation a bit problematic: at 40 meter depth, even 4 meter width gives 160 m2 ground use. Which is fine if you go all in for apartments, less fine if you want the option of reasonably sized but multi-story houses. An article on the blocks of NYC said even their lots of 25x100 feet (30 m deep) was too deep for a modest rowhouse, thus encouraging tenements.

(The assumption is that land is valuable enough to not have yards on most housing.)

Really narrow houses are 3 meters wide! At 30 meters depth that's still 90 m2 ground plan, and 270 m2 for a whole row home.

The final message: 1/4 or even 1/8 acre lots can support far more people without building over 3 stories, but deep lots may either lend themselves to apartments or to odd orientations of row homes, and some legal flexibility if the homeowners are to own their land.