Interview with Michael Eliason, Author of “Building for People: Designing Livable, Affordable, Low-Carbon Communities”
By Harry Krizmanich
Planners, developers, and municipalities across the country are trying to build their way out of the housing crisis, but we must first reflect on what is being built and where it’s being located. I spoke with Michael Eliason who made the case that our planning regime’s status quo and our cities and states archaic building regulations hold us back from realizing a better way to live. Why do most buildings in the United States require two or more stairs that result in multifamily housing that is significantly larger than our European counterparts? Why are Transit-Oriented Developments so often bisected by arterials, exposing residents to avoidable air and noise pollution?
Michael is a Seattle based architect, activist, and author of the new book, “Building for People: Designing Livable, Affordable, Low-Carbon Communities.” He is also the founder of Larch Lab, a design studio that focuses on bridging the gap between the housing crisis, public health, and climate-adaptable urban living. His experience living and working in Germany informed his systems-thinking approach that considers the necessary interconnectedness of building code, zoning, and progressive city planning to create decarbonized, car-light, family friendly communities. In part due to Mike’s work and his influence on X (formerly Twitter), state lawmakers introduced a bill in Washington state to reform the building code allowing single stair buildings across the state. But progress is slow and so much more needs to be done to improve how we build across the country to create livable, affordable, community oriented developments.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Planning in Europe seems to happen at such a faster pace than in the United States. Could you speak to the environmental review processes there and how they differ?
I think it varies a lot by jurisdiction. In the city of Freiburg, Germany, they were going to be expanding a new development that’s at the edge of the city. It’s dense, it’s urban, but it’s also in the suburban greenfield. The review processes in much of the U.S. is not really a process of finding a path forward, whereas the European approach is like “This is our vision. This is our goal. And these are the things that we need to accomplish to get there.” It’s about utilizing co-participation and co-determination into the city planning process. Instead of having community meetings act as a “bully veto” to stop something, their community outreach process is more productive because they’ll find out what the citizens want through multi-stage urban planning design competitions and then firms fold all of that feedback into the program brief. In a lot of ways our comprehensive plans are not comprehensive because we’re not looking at things holistically. We’re looking at things lot by lot, parcel by parcel, and so it makes it difficult to do things on a much broader and faster scale.
A lot of the planning I see in Europe with eco-districts, for example, is a ground up rethinking of urban life, a new neighborhood with this detailed plan; in the US, it’s really kind of like you said, it’s maybe a re-zoning of an area, but it’s all market rate and development just happens piece by piece.
We don’t really have the processes in place for thinking about urban form beyond like a very rudimentary level, but it’s changed a little bit with form based codes. In Seattle, we’re going through a comprehensive rezoning process where they’ll take typical size lots – small, medium, large blocks down to a small infill and say, “this is what we think it’s going to be like.” But, in the European context, it’s really more of “this is actually what our building envelope is.” And then there’ll be additional competitions or people will go to architects and have that specific parcel designed within that urban planning framework. It allows for much more granularity and diversity versus what we do here, which is every lot is by itself. We’re not really thinking about how two up-zoned parcels right next to each other would actually interface. We’ve allowed a ton of density (high FAR) on these infill mid-block sites, so we get these huge double-loaded corridor buildings with units on the sides facing the side lots. And then there’s going to be the exact same building mirrored on the on the lot next to it. Those people don’t have any access to light or air because they’re looking at a building that’s somewhere between ten and fifteen feet away.
What we’re able to build is not just limited by zoning, but by building codes as well. There was some progress in Washington state with a bill aimed at reforming building codes with regards to single stair construction. What’s the impact of that legislation? What is it about single stair buildings (also known as Point Access Blocks) that create this ideal housing typology that is conducive to family living and social housing?
The Washington code committee came up with a list of recommendations, taking Seattle’s requirements but changing them a little bit. There’s going to be an appendix at the back of the code so cities can choose to adopt it. In some ways, I think it’s the best that we’ll get. In other ways, it’s a little bit frustrating and I’ve kind of like checked out from the process. The city agencies opposed to change don’t want to think anything beyond what they already know, but the outcomes of how we build have implications well beyond just fire safety, for example. There’s public health, there’s quality of life, and climate adaption and all these other things.
And to your questions about family friendliness, the five over ones that we’re building in Seattle are almost exclusively studios or one bedroom. Maybe you get lucky, and you get a two-bedroom or three-bedroom on the corner. But those end up being massive units and they’re not inexpensive. And so, by default they become places for roommates rather than families. And if it is for families, you’re living on a double-loaded corridor with forty to eighty units. A lot of the social housing projects I’m enamored with are closely tied to being single stair buildings because of the types of units it induces. The units are larger because you are limited on your floor plate. So, off the bat it ends up being a little bit more family friendly, there’s fewer people per floor and per building, and there’s better social cohesion. The other thing with single stairs is that you could have like somewhere between six and ten different buildings on a block – a townhouse next to a market rate walk-up next to a co-op that could be right next to public housing – there’s so much economic and social diversity within it. The single stair buildings induce these opportunities and there is flexibility for adaptability that you don’t really get with the rigidity of the massive buildings that we’re seeing in a lot of the US now.
Throughout your career, whether it be your efforts to reduce the cap on height limits for single stair buildings or your push for mass timber buildings, you’ve been confronted with the reality that a lot of your projects may be decades out until you see its fruit. Where do you get your drive to keep working in this space?
Part of it is like I have really bad ADHD and so I’m just focused on so many different things. I’ve taken a backseat to the single stair building work and others are running with that now. I’m happy to take a break from that and now that my book just came out, I can focus more on meeting with politicians. We’re trying to get a bunch of folks over to Munich and Vienna next year so they can start to understand not only the why’s, but the how’s of construction. Hopefully they get a better understanding of these systems in these networks.
I think it’s going to be really hard to enact these changes, but five years ago, I was yelling about single stair buildings and then Stephen Smith (of Center for Building in North America) caught on to it and now out of that, it seems like the whole ecosystem has changed pretty dramatically. There are a lot of people who are very smart and can kind of focus on one certain thing. And like I said, there are one hundred things that have to change for our development to get better. So, if you just get all these little silos that are loosely connected, and people start working on them, then hopefully one day things will start to connect and pop. But for me the big part is I just want to leave the world a better place for my kids.
“Building for People: Designing Livable, Affordable, Low-Carbon Communities” is available now so I’m wondering what you want people to get from reading your book?
The big take away for me is that the status quo, kind of where we’ve boxed ourselves into, is not resulting in the kinds of places that we claim or ascribe to, in terms of transit oriented development and all of these other things. There’s this connection between the building code and the zoning code and public health and climate adaptation that no one has really connected the dots to. A big part of the book is thinking about how all these systems intersect. The place where we need to be and where we are is too far apart. A lot of things have to change for us to get there, but if we want to create these places that are climate friendly, sustainable, low carbon, walkable – then there are huge transformations of our status quo that have to take place. Hopefully the book will open people’s eyes to what that could look like.
Harry Krizmanich is a graduate student in the Master of Urban Planning Program at Hunter College. His interests include improving the built environment so that it prioritizes people’s wellbeing and safety. He currently works in environmental planning in NYC.
