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Rowhouses are de facto banned almost everywhere in US? It’s relatively popular way of living in Finland. It’s something between a highrise apartment and your ow
by sharpneli 7y ago
Rowhouses are de facto banned almost everywhere in US? It’s relatively popular way of living in Finland. It’s something between a highrise apartment and your own house.
I’ve always wondered why US seems to lack those and that neatly explains it.
- Frondo 7y agoI spent some time in Philadelphia, where nearly all of the housing in the city core is rowhouses or apartment buildings. It's fantastic. It makes a dense, walkable city, and people still get the amenities of their own house with a little tiny backyard (big enough for a fire pit or grill). Also better for the environment when heat doesn't radiate off all four sides of a house. They've been building some of what they call row homes in the PNW, but these are still detached houses (no adjoining walls). It's better than it used to be, you can fit three houses on the space formerly reserved for one or two, but go the extra mile and connect 'em together.
- burfog 7y agoI think you really should have enough room for scaffolding. How are you going to take care of a wall that is physically touching your neighbor's wall? That wall ought to get inspected at least. It might need paint. If one house starts to collapse onto the other, then both have problems. You're also at a higher fire risk, even if the walls in the middle can't burn, because embers can more easily go from one roof to the other.
- drewbug 7y agoYeah, the Philly MOVE incident led to 64 other buildings burning.
- Frondo 7y agoI think the scope of that fire is better attributed to: the police dropped a bomb from a police helicopter on the home where people were living, and it was a poor neighborhood that may not have had firewalls between dwellings. I've seen fires there where the shared walls are brick, and those firewalls do work.
- ceejayoz 7y agoThey also deliberately didn't put the MOVE bombing fire out.
- refurb 7y agoMuch of SF is build this way. Homes have maybe a 1” gap between them. Good question on how you’d repair the exterior wall. Usually if it’s that bad, it’s almost a complete rebuild and the wall comes down.
- drewbug 7y agoyou're not allowed to have a fire pit in philly within 15 feet of a building
- larrywright 7y agoI wonder if rowhouses weren't banned, just renamed. I'm not entirely sure what the proper definition of a rowhouse is, but at least where I live (US Midwest) there are a lot of newer townhouses (multi-floor houses that share a wall on at least one side). There are also quite a few zero lot line houses (also called a duplex?), which are houses that share a single wall only.
- logfromblammo 7y agoZero-lot-line homes do not share a wall. Each building is constructed such that a wall can abut the property line. Duplexes do share a wall. The two types of building are distinct. Rowhouses/townhomes would be homes with two opposed zero-lot-line walls, exactly the width of the property, all in a row. If a whole-block-width building had partitioning walls at roughly the same interval, that could instead be a rowhouse-like condominium. Sharing a wall does bring in some legal issues and definitions, which do not come into play when each structure is completely independent (but abutting other structures). The ability to build without setbacks is a major factor in urban density. The costs of maintaining a city roughly scale with the linear amount of street frontage, so not wasting that length on empty setbacks is a great way to keep city services cheaper.
- jandrese 7y agoThe whole "sharing a wall" vs. "two walls abutting" seems somewhat academic to me from a homeowner perspective. I'm not sure why it makes such a difference. The drawback of having no setbacks is that your pedestrians have to mingle with the car traffic? The example in the article didn't make it look very desirable to me.
- larrywright 7y agoI think the difference is that in the case of sharing a wall with a neighbor you have a) extra noise leakage that you wouldn’t if you had that extra layer, b) shared infrastructure, which makes things a little harder if you need to make changes/have a plumbing issue/etc. Also the roof is continuous between townhomes, so when it comes time to replace that you have to negotiate with the neighbor.
- asdff 7y agoThere are a lot of them in many cities. In LA a lot of apartments are basically row houses, only turned 90* and facing the next lot, not the street. I'm assuming it's harder to build them here without wasting tons of space as the parcels are narrow and deep.
- hangonhn 7y agoThey're not banned in Mountain View, CA. In fact, they seem to be the only thing allowed to be build in MV these days. My own house was built in less than a decade ago and it's a row house. I don't know what he means by "banned". It seems that given the locality of such regulations and the vastness of the US, there are many exceptions to his claims.
- zip1234 7y agoCities are zoned for different densities. There will be R-1, 2, 3 etc. Meaning 1st density residential, 2nd, etc. My city, for example, requires a 60 ft wide lot and at least 7 ft of setbacks on each side for R-2 zoning. Row-house is out of the question.
- YokoZar 7y agoMountain View underwent a dramatic political change within the last decade - housing/rental prices got so bad that the entire city council was replaced. Prior to that the situation was much like it was in most places in the US: current homeowners interested in raising home prices ran the politics, and everything listed was effectively banned.
- bufordsharkley 7y agoAnd in 2018, two prominent pro-housing councilpeople got voted out of office (Lenny Siegel and Pat Showalter), returning things to a majority of NIMBY homeowners
- adventured 7y ago> Rowhouses are de facto banned almost everywhere in US? No. It's an invention by the author, who provided zero support to their repeated claims of everything being commonly banned. Check out how they phrased each tweet, it's because they can't support what they said at all. When called out about the lying, for example re Texas (the second most populated state), the author promptly evades.
- tmh79 7y ago> Rowhouses are de facto banned almost everywhere in US? They are de facto banned though. ~99% of all land in urban and suburban areas has FAR requirements and setback requirements that make it impossible to build a new rowhouse.
- zip1234 7y agoLook up residential zoning codes nearly anywhere. They are not specifically banned. Most things are banned because of setbacks, FAR, parking requirements, or certain areas zoned only for a certain type of housing (detached single family for example). Atlanta, for example: https://www.dorseyalston.com/knowledge/atlanta-residential-zoning https://www.dorseyalston.com/knowledge/atlanta-residential-z...
- jariel 7y agoThey are common in new suburbs and common enough in cities even if new one's are not allowed there.
- idiot900 7y agoRowhouses are common in Philadelphia, and are constantly being newly built.
- CalRobert 7y agoIn the US you would normally need 2 or more parking spaces for each dwelling, depending on size, number of bedrooms, etc. and if you build semi-detached you quickly run out of palatable options for where to put the cars. An insane amount of US urban design is caused by the desire to give people free storage of private cars on public land everywhere all the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvUByM-fZk&t=346s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvUByM-fZk&t=346s
- bonoboTP 7y agoWhy do these laws exist? If I want a house with no parking why can't I have it? The market should be able to work it out: if buyers and renters want parking lots and otherwise won't buy the house or apartment, then developers will make sure to have parking. As much as demanded. If that's not enough, someone can make profit by constructing a multi storey or underground garage nearby.
- postingFourFast 7y agoFor the same reason garbage collection service is mandatory in most cities: because people will generate trash and dispose of it one way or another. In the city I lived in if you don't pay the trash bill they add it to your sewer bill, and if you don't pay your sewer bill they put a lien on your house. When you go to sell your house, do you want the government interviewing potential buyers and vetoing the ones it thinks are likely to buy a car and park it on the street? A block or two away if necessary? Sorry sir, the high bidder for your house works in an industry that makes him a car-commuting risk. You'll have to settle for the second-highest bidder.
- zanny 7y agoYou could also just have actual public transit in cities so that car ownership isn't mandatory for all residents. NYC is pretty much the only metro area in the US that fits this criteria, and thats entirely because it was the only city built up to reasonable density and scale before the postwar racist zoning laws came into effect everywhere else.
- peterwwillis 7y ago#7 right-side pic is a refurbished row of Baltimore rowhomes. When the author says (of #1-7) "Said bans were put in place largely for racial reasons", sure, there was tons of redlining (racially biased zoning and bank loans) throughout Baltimore, but that doesn't have to do with why rowhomes aren't built more today. Rowhomes aren't built today because they don't scale up very well, and a fire can easily gut an entire block in one night. They also don't make developers as much money to build, and they're less attractive for a city that wants to keep units from becoming abandoned and unmaintained. In both Philadelphia and Baltimore, new multi-unit condos and apartments have been going up for at least the past 5 years, in increasingly gentrifying neighborhoods. Whenever possible they are >3 floors and mixed-use, and when not possible, they are revamped and carved into condos. They all look ugly as hell, and they're all wildly more expensive. In the Fishtown and Northern Liberties neighborhoods of Philadelphia I have counted at least four gigantic excavated lots for new multi-story condo and apartment complexes, where before there had been rowhomes. So in truth, density is going up, but home ownership is going down, while the cost of living is going up.
- jpindar 7y agoThe headline is exaggerated. The things mentioned in that article are banned in some places, but not 'almost everywhere'. There are many, many rowhouses in US cities, as well as suburban condos that are built with the same design.
- Gibbon1 7y agoFor a long time, during most of the post war building boom row houses were banned. Most places have relaxed that for new construction.