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Responding to the posts above, I just don't think that row houses/terrace housing is very special. They're more a way to maximize developer profits that would be diminished with property separation. Row house neighborhoods with mixed commercial activity are more urban than similar neighborhoods with detached housing or neighborhoods with a mix of apartments and detached homes that lack commercial activities.
But compare a row house neighborhood to a neighborhood that is a mix of multi and single family homes that achieves a greater density of residents and amenities (areas of Seattle come to mind) and I prefer the latter and consider it more urban.
I don't think this is necessarily an accurate assessment of how rowhomes work. Yes, they maximized developer profits by building out the lot where land is valuable, but that's how urban land works since it's higher development intensity. There are a few distinguishing attributes about rowhomes that were important. One, arguably less important now and not always relevant depending on the climate, was the heating needs went way down with the shared walls. The other is that these were still on small lots so there was the ability to have density while still having both land and structure ownership that is tenable for some people.
On a neighborhood scale, you can certainly get a more residential, job, and retail dense with a mix of detached SFH and multifamily homes and I have made this argument with Seattle over Baltimore overall and on some neighborhood levels, but it should be recognized that it takes a proportionally quite large proportion of multifamily and mixed-use build in order to go up against an *intact* rowhome neighborhood. Like, a *lot*. The thing with Baltimore is that a lot of their formerly densest rowhome neighborhoods lost a decent chunk of their rowhomes and those neighborhoods lost almost all of their local commercial / retail and meanwhile Seattle's area of almost exclusively wall-to-wall mid and high-rise area expanded and some neighborhoods with a mix of detached SFH and multi-family built out a lot more of the latter.
I'll also note that rowhomes aren't necessarily exclusive of multifamily apartment buildings or detached SFHs. In Brooklyn, and elsewhere, you can have mixes of these.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 06-17-2023 at 08:31 AM..
There's few statistics more meaningless than single census tracts population density. They aren't uniformed sizes and they don't mean anything in relation to 50 squares of a city. Not sure why they are brought up in the discussion. I visited LA again a couple months ago, and I have a hard time agreeing there is any 50 sq mile part that belongs anywhere near this conversation.
Somebody guessed that Baltimore could match Seattle on neighborhood population density. While it does have wide areas of pretty good density, Seattle easily beats it on peak densities, and citywide average of course. Tracts are typically a few thousand people, via the Census Dept.'s loose but consistent standards.
One tract means little, but Seattle had 19 tracts denser than anything I found in Baltimore....
Density obviously isn't a stand-in for urbanism, but half this thread is about density.
Somebody guessed that Baltimore could match Seattle on neighborhood population density. While it does have wide areas of pretty good density, Seattle easily beats it on peak densities, and citywide average of course. Tracts are typically a few thousand people, via the Census Dept.'s loose but consistent standards.
One tract means little, but Seattle had 19 tracts denser than anything I found in Baltimore....
Density obviously isn't a stand-in for urbanism, but half this thread is about density.
Yea, and that resident density loss tells only part of the story. You go around some of those streets and there are blocks that may still have buildings, but they are really dead. No stores, no employees, no customers, nobody. I don't want to make this out to be all of the city at all, because it's not even close to being all of the city and there are some bustling and intact Baltimore rowhome neighborhoods. It's just that some of the historically densest of them had been hit very hard. There's also the specter of a kind of environmental debt burden that Baltimore has not been given nearly enough funding to solve quickly with lead poisoning among kids still being on the high side (though much better in recent years) as more homes and infrastructure continue to deteriorate in the worst off of the neighborhoods which is essentially continuing to accrue a familial and societal debt burden for at least the next couple of decades. It's madness.
Apartments can grow hugely using relatively little land.
Seattle allows real density on about 20% of its land, and historically only SFRs on about 60%, with the rest being non-residential. The 20% now has the majority of housing units in the city, and more than double the units that those areas had in 1996 (about 97k to 204k completed units at last report -- see last page).
Apartments can grow hugely using relatively little land.
Seattle allows real density on about 20% of its land, and historically only SFRs on about 60%, with the rest being non-residential. The 20% now has the majority of housing units in the city, and more than double the units that those areas had in 1996 (about 97k to 204k completed units at last report -- see last page).
Yes, they can, and that's why I think it's appropriate to put Seattle in a different tier than Baltimore at this point especially if we're talking about a contiguous 50 square miles or less since *where* the apartments are being placed are generally in the greater downtown area or fairly close to it. Meanwhile for Baltimore, it's often some of the closer in rowhome neighborhoods that got wrecked hardest.
Much of the apartment construction is in greater Downtown, but per the same link it's also in "urban village" districts dotted through the city. The 50 square miles, which would include more areas to the north than south, would include most of that construction.
I don't think this is necessarily an accurate assessment of how rowhomes work. Yes, they maximized developer profits by building out the lot where land is valuable, but that's how urban land works since it's higher development intensity. There are a few distinguishing attributes about rowhomes that were important. One, arguably less important now and not always relevant depending on the climate, was the heating needs went way down with the shared walls. The other is that these were still on small lots so there was the ability to have density while still having both land and structure ownership that is tenable for some people.
I'll also note that rowhomes aren't necessarily exclusive of multifamily apartment buildings or detached SFHs. In Brooklyn, and elsewhere, you can have mixes of these.
Row houses were built in a specific time and they worked for the needs of that time. In the end, they're still single family homes. My position was that a row home neighborhood isn't necessarily more urban than a neighborhood of apartments and single family homes. Row homes can be part of a very urban environment and they often are, which is why so many consider them urban full stop.
There's few statistics more meaningless than single census tracts population density. They aren't uniformed sizes and they don't mean anything in relation to 50 squares of a city. Not sure why they are brought up in the discussion. I visited LA again a couple months ago, and I have a hard time agreeing there is any 50 sq mile part that belongs anywhere near this conversation.
Row houses were built in a specific time and they worked for the needs of that time. In the end, they're still single family homes. My position was that a row home neighborhood isn't necessarily more urban than a neighborhood of apartments and single family homes. Row homes can be part of a very urban environment and they often are, which is why so many consider them urban full stop.
Rowhomes are single-family, but they're in attached form.
Spacially, they have no setbacks from abutting properties. By default they are indeed more urban in form than any single-family home with setbacks.
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