urban | design.banter :: Lessons in Density: Silver Lake, LA, CA

Each Friday we bring you   
urban | design.banter 
:: infill | re-knitting our urban fabric | cohousing | keeping small towns from becoming suburbs :: why shouldn't where you live be somewhere you would want to visit?

My favorite tourist activity in any city is exploring neighborhoods. I have been to LA a hand full of times, but had only explored the more glamorous neighborhoods. Not that Silver Lake isn't glamorous (ask your Realtor), but I'm not sure how well known it is outside of the Dwell Magazine crowd, compared to say, Beverly Hills. It's a very hip neighborhood between downtown and Hollywood, snaking up in to the hills, known for its modern architecture (see Barbara Bestor's Bohemian Modern: Living in Silver Lake).

Silver Lake's residential areas have everything that I find interesting in neighborhoods: density, controlled chaos, nooks and crannies, diversity in housing types, abundant and varied landscaping. Silver Lake was designed for the house and the person, not the fire truck. I'm not trying to dismiss the importance of the fire department, I just think the fire truck should be designed for the neighborhood (i.e., smaller trucks), not the other way around, which is typical and one of the reasons for many of our freeway-width suburban streets.

Density

Outdoor space is programmed. No space is wasted or taken for granted. There is no room for rarely if ever used lawn-and because of the area, drought tolerant native plants must be used. 

Driveway, yard, entry, fence--all in less space than the average great room

Privacy is created not by shear space but by creative landscaping, fencing, focusing on views, and placing living areas on upper floors.

The zero lot lines, Feng Shui appropriate tucked entries, and creative jumble of small houses reminded me of homes in Tokyo, though it is relatively flat there.

Cars can park on the street. The world will not end if a car has to wait 10 seconds for a car coming the opposite way to pass. This is also common in many dense Seattle neighborhoods: short blocks punctuated by roundabouts, two-way streets with cars parked on both sides leaving room for only one car to pass through.

Refreshing: treating cars as second class citizens, almost an afterthought to the design of the house and neighborhood.

The road can be the driveway and the alley. We even saw someone with all of their wood working tools set out in their barely 100 square foot driveway, less than a foot from the road.  

All of this is a cause and a result of cars driving slower. The zero lot lines and street enclosure that is therefore formed, thin streets, and cars parked on the streets create an atmosphere where motorists slow down and are very aware of their surroundings...no texting while driving here. The non-gridded streets add to this: streets twist and turn with the natural topography. 

We should not fear density, though so many do.  On paper, the stats of Silver Lake might be scary to those who see density as a four letter word: no driveways? No lawns? Thin, old streets? Houses practically stacked on top of each other? But the most dense neighborhoods in this country are consistently the most desirable. One look at housing pricing in the area show that we need more neighborhoods like this.

urban|design.banter: Why shouldn't the place you live be somewhere you would want to visit?

A key topic of urban|design.banter will be making where you live a place where you would want to visit. Think of cities where people go to vacation or tour: Rome, London, Amsterdam, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Savannah, Charleston. People even come just for the day to downtown Friday Harbor. The urban core of these places share common traits, including:  older buildings mixed with new buildings; traditional neighborhood/mixed use development with zero lot lines and storefronts lining wide sidewalks; a variety of sizes and types of businesses, shops, bars, restaurants; well planned and maintained green space; and last but not least, the ability to walk or take transit to your destination, or to find the place so appealing that you don't even need a destination. When I lived in Rome the phrase I used for this was "You don't always have to go, you can just be."

A place to just "be:" folks hanging out at a street fair in beautiful downtown Asheville, North Carolina.

So why is it that we build the places that the majority of Americans live with exactly the opposite characteristics? Mostly because it is against the law to do otherwise, and because it's easier to make the numbers pencil on a large greenfield development of almost identical houses. 

What can we do to begin to reverse this trend? First of all, we can support policies that increase or allow for increases in density: allowing for ADU's or backyard apartment, transit (or at least transit funding equal to roads), allowing zoning laws to be updated to allow for mixed uses and less parking, and notifying your city council person when a sidewalk needs repair. These are just a few suggestions, some so big they seem to be insurmountable. "Density" is a four-letter word to many, and many oppose transit because they don't want "those people" to have a way into their neighborhood. But the most expensive and desirable places to live in the country are also the most dense and the most heavily served by transit, and creating density allows for more services close by, thus increasing walkability, thus allowing for places to be more human-scaled, and more like a place you would choose to visit.

When I lived in Chicago, I had to cross over Michigan Avenue on my way from the train to my office building. I would get annoyed as the tourists began descending upon the Magnificent Mile. So, I had to remind myself of a few things, the least of which being that I have been a tourist many, many times and have surely annoyed the citizens of the place I was touring, but also that I was so lucky to live my everyday life in a place where people save up their vacation time and money to come visit. I ran errands in the Hancock Tower and on the Magnificent Mile, and could walk home along the lakefront or through Lincoln Park (and the free zoo) if time allowed (I especially loved to do this when it snowed, as the park was serene and the train would be running behind anyway). 

This subject is covered extensively in James Howard Kunstler's The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape

Introducing urban|design.banter

A new part of our blog will be urban design banter: infill, re-knitting our urban fabric, cohousing, and keeping small towns from becoming suburbs. 

Our firm's motto of smart growth :: green design means we are dedicated to creating spaces that are not only great to live in but also worthy of visiting. Why shouldn't where you live be somewhere you would want to visit? So many people settle for drab, sprawling, monotonous suburbs, and then save up vacation money and time to walk around cities they find appealing. 

According to Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck in "Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream," the majority of time spent at Disney World is not on rides or at shows, but most of the time is spent "enjoying the precise commodity that people so sorely lack in their suburban hometowns: pleasant, pedestrian-friendly, public space and the sociability it engenders." 

In the coming weeks we will be discussing Accessory Dwelling Units (ADU's): where they are acceptable, why they are a good idea, and how they can be implemented.