Architecture Ransom Notes

A planning commissioner in the Tri Valley, one of the better ones I've seen, remarked in a planning commission hearing a few months ago, that this project was the first project he looked at when he was appointed and now it's the last project he's looking at before he terms out, eight years later. There has been so much tension and fighting between the developer and NIMBYs that it has taken eight years to get this otherwise straightforward project approved. He also remarked that the developers have given huge compromises to the opposition while the opposition hasn't given an inch. The project started off in architecture in 2011, with the intent to build 78 homes between 2300 and 3200 square feet on a slight knoll, overlooking the valley. Immediately, the community in the area came out of the woodwork with complaints. It's too dense! - it's less dense than the surrounding community. We loved walking up the hill to watch the fireworks! - this has always been...

Specifically, I will be writing about the funding of affordable housing via the taxation of market rate housing and how that affects housing prices. It's true that in some instances, affordable housing funds come from the general fund which is funded via other taxes, but that kind of goes beyond the scope of this blog. For the purposes of this post, when I say "affordable housing", I specifically mean a price controlled unit sold lower than market value, and not innovative market rate housing like tiny homes or creative uses of space in a condo. There are generally two ways developers may provide affordable housing: Provide below market rate units within the development. Occasionally, this will come with perks like density bonuses, but many times, it's just mandated by the city that the developer must provide a certain percentage.  Pay an in-lieu fee to the city, which varies by city. For an example of the first method, we go to a sprawling city in the East Bay...

Porches can be wonderful spaces to hang out in. It's an outdoor space where you can sit and read the newspaper with a cup of coffee while watching your neighbors walk around. It also helps activate the street with human activity instead of a street being devoid of life. They do need to be a certain depth to be really functional and comfortable to sit and relax in, which we've found to start at around seven feet in depth. However, even if you only have space for something less than that, it's preferable to just a stoop. You can place some decor and potted plants there, have space for visitors to stand in the cover from the rain, or build a small fort to pelt passers by with water balloons. I'll be the judge of that, says the Livermore development code  (566 page PDF; happy reading). You want an integrated porch in your new house in Livermore (4.03.050). Great! Due to the depth of your lot and your housing needs, you can only get a six foot deep porch, which you decid...

Many jurisdictions will impose height limits on houses in order to keep densities the way the elected city councils want them. Many times, it's for the livability of neighborhoods so people don't build five story condos next to single story houses. Sometimes, it's for aesthetics so people don't build townhomes in a rural setting. Occasionally, it's for pragmatic reasons so someone doesn't, say, build a tall building in front of an airport runway. Sometimes the code will measure from the finished grade to the top of a ridge or parapet wall. Other times, the code will set a limit to the midpoint between the eave and ridge. When the grades are sloped, the code often will prescribe an average or midpoint of the grades. Unfortunately, many times the code isn't perfectly clear or well defined. One of my colleagues ran into this issue with a planner. The code specified a height limit, but although it wasn't specified, these height limits are pretty mu...

Continued from Part 2 HOW long?? Although we worked on the design for two years to gain approval from the DRB, we were always viewed as the "rookies" on the design team. The landscape architect had been with the project for years before us. And we learned that there was a local community group that had been pushing for this project for twenty years. Twenty?! I thought I had misheard the number, but she went on about how when she started the project, her kids were still in grade school and now they've gone off on their careers. Twenty years. I was still in high school then, hoping to get accepted into a good school to study architecture. Bill Clinton was the president. Tech stocks were booming as people began to discover the internet as AOL, the largest ISP, served via 56k baud modems, downloading one mp3 song in 20 minutes. No cell phones had cameras yet. I've since graduated college, earning a Bachelor of Architecture and practiced in the field for over a decad...

Continued from part 1 . More design inanities now from DRB Stuck with the Santa Barbara direction, we were going to make lemonade out of lemons. We decided to make some great Santa Barbara architecture, absurd as it was, and sprinkle in modern style architecture as well. No dice. We went into the design review board and were promptly shut down. The board liked the architecture independent of each other but thought the juxtaposition between them was too jarring, fixating on the gable roofs versus the flat roofs. It was a fair point. We wanted to say that we were forced into this position from the irrationality of the city and we were just trying to get  something  in there that we thought would be in the best interest of the public, but of course, that would just lead to more tension. We instead argued that the roof forms are not so much a focal point in four story architecture as they are in one to two story architecture and that as long as the vocabulary of the design i...

The fateful project In the East Bay, there lies a city that is perhaps the most crime riddled and has one of the most corrupt governments in the Bay Area. There are a few nice areas to be clear, but our project wasn't in one of those areas. In fact, while a senior housing building was going up next door to our project, one of the construction crews was held up at gun point. We did a site visit once, but opted not to stay long and our future site investigations were done on Google Maps. The civil engineer was reluctant to send a survey crew out to the area past a certain time due to crime concerns. But boy, did the site have potential. It was next to a freeway with a small creek running through it. There was a BART station nearby though it would be a bit of a hike. On top of all that, there was extensive history to the site. Around 1906, two Japanese families owned much of the parcel and grew flowers in some fields and greenhouses for a living. During this time, there was much...