The Small House Book (6 page)

pressure have failed to eradicate antiquated codes, lawsuits have generally

succeeded. But these measures all take more time, money and patience

than many of us can muster. To make things worse, local covenants prohib-

iting small homes are being enacted more quickly than the old prohibitions

can be dismantled. These restrictions are adopted by entire neighborhoods

of people needlessly fearful for their property values and lifestyle.

The process of changing codes and minds is slow, and the situation is dire.

As long as law ignores justice and reason, just and reasonable people will

ignore the law. Thousands of Americans live outside the law by inhabiting

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houses too small to be legal. Some of them cannot afford a larger home,

while others simply refuse to pay for and maintain unused, toxic space. These

people are invariably good neighbors: they live quietly, in fear of someone’s

reporting them to the local building inspector.

Williamsburg, VA (facing page) and Klamath, CA (above)

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The Good, the Bad and the Sprawling

Over-consumption is reflected not only in the scale of our houses, but in the

sizes of our yards and streets as well. Oversized lots on vast roads, miles

from any worthwhile destination, have made the American suburb as inhos-

pitable as it is vapid.

Like the design of our houses, the form of our neighborhoods is mandated

by a long list of governmentally-imposed regulations that reflect our national

taste for the enormous. In most U.S. cities it is currently illegal to build places

like the older ones pictured in this book. Taos Pueblo, Elfreth’s Alley, and

Rue de Petit-Champlain all violate current U.S. zoning ordinances. Narrow,

tree-lined streets with little shops and houses sitting at the sidewalk’s edge

are against the law. Countless state, federal and private bureaucracies work

hard to uphold these restrictions. The Federal Housing Administration, the

Department of Transportation, the auto, housing and oil industries and a host

of others have a lot at stake in suburban sprawl and the policies that perpetu-

ate it. Our government has been championing sprawl ever since the 1920s,

when Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, persuaded realtors, builders,

bankers, road-building interests and the auto industry to form a lobby that

would push for increased development to boost the U.S. economy.

Essentially, zoning laws have been determining the form of our neighbor-

hoods since the 1940s. Communities like the older ones pictured on these

pages somehow managed without them. Since its inception, zoning has

brought us immense, treeless streets, mandatory car ownership, and densi-

ties so low that the cost of infrastructures has become nothing short of exor-

bitant.

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Streets Too Wide

One of the most readily-apparent products of zoning is the wide, suburban

street. Roadways built before zoning emerged typically have 9-foot wide

travel lanes. Now, most are required to have lanes no less than 12 feet wide.

This allows for what traffic engineers call “unimpeded flow,” a term some crit-

ics have aptly interpreted as “speeding”.

Safety concerns have played a no less significant role in the widening of

America’s streets. During the Cold War, AASHTO (the American Associa-

tion of State Highway Transportation Officials), pushed hard for streets that

would be big enough to facilitate evacuation and cleanup during and after a

nuclear crisis. Fire departments, too, continue to demand broader streets to

accommodate their increasingly large trucks. Streets today are often fifty feet

across because standard code after the 1940s has required them to allow for

two fire trucks passing in opposite directions at 50 miles per hour.

Sometimes it is not a street’s width but its foliage that presents the problem.

Departments of transportation routinely protest that trees [also referred to as

FHOs (Fixed and Hazardous Objects)] should not line state roads. Now, cer-

tainly safety is important, but the high costs of wide, treeless roads (financial

and otherwise) might warrant some kind of cost/benefit analysis. Fortunately,

we have several. The most widely published is that of Peter Swift, whose

eight-year study in Longmont, Colorado, compared traffic and fire injuries in

areas served by narrow and wide streets. He found that, during this period,

there were no deaths or injuries caused by fire, while there were 227 injuries

and ten deaths resulting from car accidents. A significant number of these

were related to street width. The study goes on to show that thirty-six foot-

wide streets are about four times as dangerous as those that are twenty-four

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feet across. According to Swift’s abstract, “current street design standards

are directly contributing to automobile accidents.”

This study and others like it suggest that we should begin to consider the

issue of public safety in a broader context. Fire hazards are only part of a

much larger picture. The biggest threat to human life is not fire but the count-

less accidents caused by America’s enormous roadways.

Suburbs did not grow out of any particular human need or evolve by trial and

error as an improvement to preexisting types of urbanism. The ‘burbs, as we

know them, were invented shortly after World War Two as a means of dis-

persing urban population densities. This invention precluded virtually all les-

sons learned from the urban design of years past. Even the most universal

principles of good planning, used successfully from 5000 B.C. Mesopotamia

to 2005 A.D. Seaside, Florida, were ignored. Perhaps the most startling de-

parture from tradition was the omission of contained outdoor space. Human

beings have a predilection towards enclosure. We like places with discernible

boundaries. To achieve this desired sense of enclosure, a street cannot be

too wide. More specifically, its breadth should not far exceed the height of the

buildings that flank it. A street that is more than twice as wide as its buildings

are tall is unlikely to satisfy our inherent desire for orientation and shelter.

Rows of trees can sometimes help to delineate a space and therebyincrease

the recommended street-to-building ratio, but generally, anything wider than

a proportion of 2:1 will compromise the quality of an urban environment.

America’s suburbs incessantly ignore the 2:1 rule. The distance from a house

to the one directly across the street is rarely less than five times the height

of either structure, and there are seldom enough well-placed trees around

Sprawl, U.S.A. (pages 48 & 49). Quebec City (opposite)

51

to compensate. The empty landscape that results is one most of us have

become far too familiar with.

To evoke a sense of place, a street, much like a dwelling, must be free of use-

less space. When given a choice, pedestrians will almost always choose to

follow a narrow street instead of a wide one. That we frequently drive hours

from our suburban homes to enjoy a tiny, lakeside cabin or the narrow streets

of some old town is nearly as senseless as it is telling. That we then return

to toil in our cavernous dwellings on deficient landscapes is more sense-

less, yet. The environments we see pictured in travel guides are typically the

walkable, little streets of our older cities. The marketing agents who produce

these guides are undoubtedly no less aware of our desire for contained, out-

door space than were the architects of the streets depicted.

People like places that were designed with people in mind, so it should come

as no surprise that property values and street widths appear to share an in-

verse relationship. Apparently, we are willing to pay more for less pavement.

The funny thing is that the skinny streets we like are actually much cheaper

to build and maintain than the wide ones we so often choose to live with.

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Quebec City

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Services Too Dispersed

Zoning as we know it basically began in nineteenth-century Europe. Indus-

trialized cities were shrouded in coal smoke, so urban planners rightly sug-

gested that factories be separated from residential areas. Life expectancies

soared, the planners gloated, and segregation quickly became the new solu-

tion to every problem. So, while in the beginning only the incompatible func-

tions of a town were kept apart, now everything is. Housing is separated from

industry, low-density housing is kept separate from existing, higher-density