Think the city is a museum? Wait until you hear about the suburbs

Framing America’s housing crisis around historic preservation is unnecessarily provocative. The real problem is that the most banal cityscapes are effectively treated like architectural gems.

This is the most common type of building we “preserve” in America.

Who doesn’t love old buildings?

New York Times opinion columnist Binyamin Appelbaum, for one. At least that was the impression many readers got from his recent piece entitled, “I Want a City, Not a Museum.” In it, Appelbaum attributes New York City’s housing crisis to the many policies that “protect existing buildings” and “impede the construction of new ones.” 

In a city where housing construction had actually kept up with demand, Appelbaum writes, the small Manhattan apartment buildings where his great-grandparents lived a century ago would have been redeveloped into higher-density housing. Yet they remain standing, monuments to the city’s housing shortage. “New York is preserving the corporeal city of bricks and steel at the expense of its residents and of those who might live here,” he writes.

Readers, it turns out, are very, very attached to New York City’s historic architecture. The article’s most recommended comments are uniformly negative, which is unusual even for the most controversial Times opinion pieces. “It would be beyond tragic to lose these beautiful historical buildings in a misguided attempt to create new housing,” reads one representative comment.

Appelbaum’s provocative framing — endorsing the demolition of charming 19^th century buildings — apparently blinded many readers to the substance of his argument.

That’s unfortunate because Appelbaum’s overarching point is correct. American cities have become museums. But they are not, by and large, museums of historically significant architecture. They’re museums of ranch houses and strip malls; crumbling freeway viaducts and tumbleweed parking lots.

Framing America’s housing crisis, or its broader inability to build big things, around historic preservation policies in the oldest, most famous neighborhoods in the country is unnecessarily polarizing. The preservation of a handful of exceptional, highly-contested places is not the main obstacle to progress. The problem is that virtually all of America’s unexceptional neighborhoods are effectively treated the same way.

A few New York City historic districts, like Brooklyn Heights and the Upper East Side, might be better described as fine art museums. These are ultra-elite spaces — urbanistically and sociologically — that have been closely guarded since the emergence of historic preservation laws in the 1960s. With a static, even declining, housing supply and official recognition of their aesthetic value, these neighborhoods have steadily grown wealthier and whiter. Meanwhile, adjacent neighborhoods where the population may not be as financially secure are called upon to absorb new development and population growth. It’s not a particularly fair or just arrangement.

Historic preservation policies in New York and other expensive cities could certainly use reform. But these vivid symbols of urban inequality tend to obscure the fact far larger areas, with no reasonable claim to historic status, are likewise encased in amber.

These neighborhoods are on the fringes of big cities and, especially, in their suburbs. Think: San Francisco’s Sunset District, or Levittown on Long Island. Residential areas are preserved in their original state by single-family zoning and HOA covenants. Commercial areas — including failing shopping centers and empty office parks — are preserved by strict “Euclidean,” or use zoning, designed to keep places of work far away from the places where people live. Freeways — including those that are under-utilized, those that are dangerously out of date, and those with very clear links to horrific public health outcomes — are preserved due to a lack of imagination on the part of state departments of transportation. Parking lots are preserved thanks to property tax laws that incentivize asphalt over housing.

Critics like Appelbaum tend to gloss over these suburban atrocity exhibitions and biennales of banality. While the evolution, or lack thereof, of a handful of prominent urban neighborhoods is endlessly debated and analyzed, the static nature of the suburbs goes unremarked upon. These unremarkable spaces are imagined to be eternal, since they, unlike older urban neighborhoods, remain in the state in which they were initially developed.

Still, Appelbaum’s provocation is a valuable one for residents and policymakers in America’s oldest, most crowded cities, like New York, Boston, and San Francisco. If these cities are ever to build significant amounts of housing, existing buildings, including plenty of old buildings, will have to come down. It’s a disconcerting thought for many city dwellers, accustomed to a built environment that has changed little in living memory. There’s a palpable clamor for a third way.

Several commenters who were incensed by Appelbaum’s article said they prefer the vision sketched out in a companion piece by the architect Vishaan Chakrabarti. The latter explored how New York City could add half a million homes exclusively on parking lots, vacant lots, and single-story commercial properties — all without building taller than existing buildings nearby. It’s a smart, appealing vision.

Unfortunately, it won’t produce housing on the scale that New York or any other major city needs. Even if New York City were to follow Chakrabarti’s plan, only a fraction of the homes it makes possible would actually be built within a reasonable time frame.

Cities that build a lot of housing have a “zoned capacity” — the number of people who could possibly be accommodated by zoning — many times larger than the existing population. Before its 1961 zoning code overhaul, which reduced New York City’s zoned capacity to roughly 12 million inhabitants, the city was zoned to accommodate a hypothetical 55 million people. In the 1920s, urban planner Homer Hoyt quipped that Chicago had a zoned capacity roughly equivalent to the entire U.S. population at the time, or over 100 million people.

Neither city would have ever come close to reaching its zoned capacity threshold, even if they hadn’t eventually been downzoned. Those figures simply demonstrate that high-density housing was legal to construct virtually everywhere, including, crucially, on already built-up lots.

New York City’s current zoned capacity is estimated at about 16 million people, according to Rutgers economist Jason Barr. Adding an extra half million potential homes, or about a million potential residents, would be helpful, but hardly a game changer. Significantly upping the city’s zoned capacity and creating the conditions for a real housing construction boom will require the redevelopment of existing structures. There’s just no way around it. In an old city filled with beauty and memory, where and when and why to demolish historic buildings will always be fraught.

All the more reason to ask the suburbs, those dime-a-dozen museums of 1950s television sitcoms, to do their fair share, too.