The headline, here, is that "the US is running short of land for housing." But if you read the article, you'll see that the headline should probably read, "the US has land-use restrictions in place that make it unnecessarily difficult to build enough new housing." Here's an excerpt:

Asking prices for homes in these new communities [the exurbs of Tampa] go as high as $900,000, in part because the land underneath is so valuable. That has a lot to do with land-use regulations.

Tampa’s zoning rules prevent developers from building anything larger than a single-family home in much of the city. When officials for Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa, adopted zoning regulations in 1950, they said the measures were necessary to prevent overcrowding and traffic jams and would preserve the neighborhood character, all “with a view to conserving the value of buildings,” according to the regulations.

If all you can build are single-family homes, then you're going to need a lot more land compared to if you were allowed to build a bit higher and/or a bit denser. But it is a good way to ensure that supply remains somewhat scarce and that one is faithfully "conserving the value of buildings."

It is, however, worth mentioning that we have invented ways to use land more efficiently. The population density of Hillsborough County is somewhere around 1,200 people per square mile. The population density of Paris, on the other hand, is over 50,000 people per square mile.

Somehow people still enjoy Paris.

I went out this morning to grab coffee from around the corner and, on my way back home, I ran into two people in the elevator that, from what I could glean, had hit the same button in the elevator and then struck up a conversation. He asked if she had just recently moved into the building. She responded with no, and that she usually doesn't see anyone else on their floor. He was surprised by this response and said that he knows everybody on the floor.

Nearly a hundred years ago, architect Le Corbusier, as well as others, had the idea of creating "streets in the sky." Perhaps the most famous example of this concept is his Unité d'Habitation in Marseille (pictured above). Now a UNESCO World Heritage building because of its role in the development of modernist architecture, the building houses five "streets", two of which were intended to be fully-fledged shopping streets. These streets house(d) things like shops, restaurants, galleries, and even a hotel.

Le Corbusier was famous for his desire to create machines for living in. And these streets in the sky were part of this philosophy. The idea was that by having all of the things you needed under one roof, you would then be able to live an efficient, productive, and enjoyable life. Architecture and design could do that for you.

Of course, the other reason for this thinking was that we needed to get people away from cars. As the car became more commonplace in cities, conflicts arose. And architects began to grapple with how best to separate people and cars. One obvious solution was to simply lift people up and off the ground so that the street could be freed up for cars to do their thing. This was going to be the future.

The pitfalls of this line of thinking have since then been widely documented. And today, I think it's pretty clear that most cities are in fact taking the opposite approach. Instead of removing people, they are removing cars through pedestrianization projects. Some of these projects are temporary, but many are also permanent. This happening almost everywhere from Toronto to Sao Paulo.

The other problem is that it's extremely challenging to make retail uses work way up in the sky. And that's why even second floor retail spaces often struggle compared to those on the ground floor. As I understand it, the non-residential tenancies in Marseille's Unité d'Habitation have naturally evolved from being retail-centric to being more office-like. Supposedly you'll now find architects and medical offices, which is not at all surprising.

But that doesn't mean that Le Corbusier's instincts weren't directionally right. We now have lots of examples of tall buildings housing an intense mix of uses and public functions. And in the case of multi-family buildings, the corridors do often serve as a kind of street. I happen to live off of one that houses our building's amenities. And so in addition to just running into neighbors, I'll often run into the odd birthday party or Sunday afternoon sumo-suit party. True story!

It may not be the Champs-Élysées, but it is a kind of street for living.

Photo by Bernd Dittrich on Unsplash

One way to shop for things is to make a list of all the things you want and/or need, and then go to a location that sells as many of those things as possible. As I understand, this is more or less what people do when they go to a place like Costco.

Another way to shop is to just order things piecemeal, and have them delivered to you when you want them and in the least amount of time possible. And it turns out that this latter option is pretty popular.

It is popular because it involves (1) not going anywhere and (2) not having to make a list and think proactively about the things you may want and/or need in the future. But it does mean that we need specific infrastructure to support this method of consumption. Generally speaking you need urban spaces close to where people live and work, and you need people to transport the goods.

I mention all of this because it has translated into two areas of concern within our cities: (1) we now have "dark spaces" that are embedded into urban areas but don't have any public-facing components and (2) we now have throngs of delivery vehicles starting to annoy local communities.

In fact, France has already responded with a new federal policy that is expected to reclassify "dark stores and "ghost kitchens" as warehouses. This is intended to give local municipalities the power to shutter these sorts of spaces. Part of the thinking is that we all did just fine before delivery apps, so why not just go back to doing what we were doing?

My own view is that this shift in consumption is here to stay. And so we would be better served by figuring out how to respond in a way that is both sensitive to communities and that maintains the vibrancy of our urban environments. We also managed without things like refrigerated food and mobile phones, but I'm pretty happy to have these tools available to me.