3-2-1: Going Car-Free, Why You Need a Mechanical Engineer, & More
Week #2
3-2-1 is a weekly newsletter where I’ll share:
3 things from others
2 things from me
1 picture
All focused on real estate, development, and creating great places.
If you like it, please subscribe. And if you’re worried about me selling your email, there’s no need. Because, you know… I’m not a jerk.
3 THINGS FROM OTHERS
I.
What do you do when the Walk Score index ranks your city as the second-worst in America for pedestrians? You invest $170M in a new car-free neighborhood.
Say hello to Culdesac Tempe, a 17-acre development just across the Salt River from Phoenix. Brought to you by Opticos Design, the guys behind Missing Middle Housing and the form over function movement—an absolute game changer for how we think about human-scale development.
But that’s not all. Once Phoenix has risen from the ashes, Culdesac plans to 10x their original concept and build something for 10,000 residents. Then, they plan to “build the first car-free city in the U.S.”
Shut up and take my money.
Source: The Capital of Sprawl Gets a Radically Car-Free Neighborhood
II.
Portland, Oregon had some landmark housing news this week. After a 7-year campaign, the city has lifted a series of century-old zoning bans on seven different types of homes.
Specifically, homeowners can now build the following on most residential lots: a duplex, a triplex, a fourplex, a mixed-income or below-market sixplex, a large group co-living home, a double ADU, and a tiny backyard home on wheels.
For the non-zoning nerds—residential zoning usually prohibits anything but single-family houses. And, in areas with housing shortages (i.e. most of the US), this practice artificially suppresses supply and we’re left wondering why the average house costs $350,000.
Now, Portland homeowners have more options than a Wall Street stock broker.
Except… not so fast. Construction costs, impact fees, and land prices relative to potential rents make four of the seven options unfeasible to build in today’s market.
Michael Andersen and Neil Heller break down the numbers below.
Source: We Ran the Rent Numbers on Portland’s 7 Newly Legal Home Options
III.
Trying to hire a contractor? Get in line, buddy.
September: “We now have material but we’re booked up through the end of the year.”
2 THINGS FROM ME
I.
If you ever go down the road of high-performance building, don’t skimp on the mechanical engineer for heat load calculations and system sizing.
Here’s why. We just got the calculations and sizing back from our mechanical engineer for a 9-unit new development project. It’s a high-performance building (R-33 walls, R-80 roof, 0.6 ACH50) with minimal heat loss and air leakage—all in an effort to use high-efficiency heat pumps as the primary heat source.
Before sending the plans to the mechanical engineer, I had my HVAC contractor size the heat pumps on his own. Just for sh*ts & giggles (keep in mind the majority of small-scale builders and homeowners rely on their contractor for system sizing, not an engineer).
The result? There was a 3x difference in the size of the recommended heat pump capacity per unit. The engineer did a thorough Manual J calculation, accounting for insulation, air leakage, window size and placement, ceiling height, etc. The contractor just used his wholesaler’s standard sizing sheet based off of unit square footage.
If we had gone with the contractor’s recommendation, our heat pumps would have been severely oversized. Meaning: inefficiencies (short-cycling), greater install cost, and more long-term system maintenance. Ultimately, that would have netted out to tens of thousands in added cost.
Engineers are worth their weight in gold—don’t underestimate their value.
II.
The 1920s ushered in the popularity of automotive-scale development following the completion of the Miracle Mile in L.A. Developer A.W. Ross specifically designed its storefronts to be viewed at 30 mph, creating an entirely different experience of the city and its streets.
Perhaps Ross should be known as the Father of Sprawl. As it were, he paved the way for the success of the modern suburb, shopping corridor, and auto-centric urban design—development practices that are now understood to be unsustainable and prohibitive, yet still widely accepted.
To combat this, we should be taking a human-scale approach to real estate development.
Human-scale real estate projects are designed for, well, humans. That is, any human that happens to interact with the space—resident, retail customer, or passer-by.
The end user is not just the tenant, but the whole community. Real estate that is built for humanity, not cars.
In my mind, there are three principles for developing on a human scale:
Create an active streetscape that promotes walkability, enables social interaction, and allows for serendipity.
Build in the context of your surroundings. Real estate development should not be done in isolation, but as an ecosystem.
Take a green approach. Both in terms of incorporating nature into design and striving for high-performance construction and renewable energy.
Tony Hsieh once wrote,
“Happiness is really just about four things: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness (number and depth of your relationships), and vision/meaning (being part of something bigger than yourself)”
I would go one step further and add that all four of Hsieh’s happiness drivers are, in varying degrees, affected by the space people inhabit. There are even scientific studies linking space to mental health and well-being.
Human-scale development is not a new construction method, technology, or business model. It's a new philosophy for building a sustainable future for us all.
Human-scale → better places → happier people.
1 PICTURE
I.
When you move away from decades of prioritizing cars over people in your city, life flourishes.
📍 Amsterdam, Netherlands
That’s it for today. Thanks for reading. If you haven’t yet, go ahead and subscribe here:
About me: I’m Jonah Richard, ex-Accenture Consulting and Columbia Engineering alum. I’m currently building Village Ventures, a real estate development and investment company focused on creating great places.
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