BiblioVault - Books about Housing development

Best-Laid Plans

The Promises and Pitfalls of the New Deal Greenbelt Towns

Julie D. Turner

University of Cincinnati Press, 2022

A history of the New Deal program intended to improve the living conditions of America’s underclass.

In 1935, under the direction of the Resettlement Administration, the United States government embarked on a New Deal program to construct new suburban towns for the working class. Teams of architects, engineers, and city planners, along with thousands of workers, brought three such communities to life: Greenbelt, Maryland; Greendale, Wisconsin; and Greenhills, Ohio. President Franklin Roosevelt saw this as a way to create jobs. Resettlement Administration head Rexford Tugwell longed to improve the living conditions of the nation’s underclass.

In Best-Laid Plans, Julie Turner identifies where the Greenbelt Towns succeeded and where they failed. The program suffered under the burden of too many competing goals: maximum job creation at minimal cost, exquisite town planning that would provide modest residences for low-income families, progressive innovation that would serve to honor and reinforce traditional American values. Yet the Greenbelt program succeeded in one respect—providing new homes in well-planned communities that continue to welcome residents.

Town planning and suburbanization did not follow the blueprint of the Greenbelt model and instead took a turn toward the suburban sprawl we know today. The Greenbelt towns may represent an unrealistic dream, but they show an imagined way of American life that continues to appeal and hints at what might have been possible.

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Custodians of Place

Governing the Growth and Development of Cities

Paul G. Lewis and Max Neiman

Georgetown University Press, 2009

Custodians of Place provides a new theoretical framework that accounts for how different types of cities arrive at decisions about residential growth and economic development. Lewis and Neiman surveyed officials in hundreds of California cities of all sizes and socioeconomic characteristics to account for differences in local development policies. This book shows city governments at the center of the action in shaping their destinies, frequently acting as far-sighted trustees of their communities.

They explain how city governments often can insulate themselves for the better from short-term political pressures and craft policy that builds on past growth experiences and future vision. Findings also include how conditions on the ground—local commute times, housing affordability, composition of the local labor force—play an important role in determining the approach a city takes toward growth and land use. What types of cities tend to aggressively pursue industrial or retail firms? What types of cities tend to favor housing over business development? What motivates cities to try to slow residential growth? Custodians of Place answers these and many other questions.

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Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited

Capital and State Building in the West Bank

Kareem Rabie

Duke University Press, 2021

In 2008, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad invited international investors to the first-ever Palestine Investment Conference, which was designed to jump-start the process of integrating Palestine into the global economy. As Fayyad described the conference, Palestine is “throwing a party, and the whole world is invited.” In this book Kareem Rabie examines how the conference and Fayyad's rhetoric represented a wider shift in economic and political practice in ways that oriented state-scale Palestinian politics toward neoliberal globalization rather than a diplomatic two-state solution. Rabie demonstrates that private firms, international aid organizations, and the Palestinian government in the West Bank focused on large-scale private housing development in an effort toward state-scale economic stability and market building. This approach reflected the belief that a thriving private economy would lead to a free and functioning Palestinian state. Yet, as Rabie contends, these investment-based policies have maintained the status quo of occupation and Palestine's subordinate and suspended political and economic relationship with Israel.

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Regional Governance and the Politics of Housing in the San Francisco Bay Area

Paul G. Lewis and Nicholas J. Marantz

Temple University Press, 2023

The San Francisco Bay Area is generally considered the most expensive regional housing market in the country. Because the region added jobs and residents at a faster rate than housing, rents and home prices escalated. Moreover, small municipalities, common in the most job-rich parts of the Bay Area, have strong political incentives to resist development of new multifamily housing. Regional Governance and the Politics of Housing in the San Francisco Bay Area explains how a decentralized, localistic structure of government shapes land-use politics in ways that exacerbate housing shortages and inequalities.

The authors evaluate six potential reforms, arguing that targeted changes to local and regional institutions could generate durable improvements to the region’s housing opportunities. The main lesson from the case of the San Francisco Bay Area is the need to focus on governance when addressing the housing challenge. As the authors effectively illustrate, leaving a solution up to individual cities is unlikely to lead to increased housing supply.

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Site Design for Multifamily Housing

Creating Livable, Connected Neighborhoods

Nico Larco, Kristin Kelsey, and Amanda Stocker West

Island Press, 2014

The United States is over eighty percent urbanized, yet over half of the population still lives in suburban settings, characterized by low-density, automobile-dependent development with separated land uses. These disconnected and isolated models of development have been linked to increased greenhouse-gas emissions and reduced quality of life, health, and social connections. In Site Design for Multifamily Housing: Creating Livable, Connected Neighborhoods, the authors explain that creating more livable and vital communities is within reach and the design and development of multifamily housing is a key component to reaching this goal.

Multifamily housing is an important component of increasing density, but large lot multifamily developments often lack connectivity and hence limit livability and walkability. Multifamily housing in suburban areas presents greater challenges than in urban areas due in part to larger lot sizes and street patterns that are often a mix of cul-de-sac, curved, looped, and dead-end streets. Increasing the livability of these developments is an important first step in affecting the livability of the country as a whole.

This handbook introduces planners, developers, and designers to ten key elements of multifamily site design, comparing typical and recommended conditions. Case studies of successful large lot multifamily developments as well as retrofit proposals for existing developments with low internal and external connectivity will demonstrate how the tools in the book can be applied. Examples are drawn from Oregon, California, North Carolina, and Arizona. The ideas and tools in this book, including the planning checklist, code guide, and code summaries, will help users to create more livable, vibrant, and healthy communities.

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