How the hell did Vince pull this off?

This is the densest detached single-family development I have ever seen.

I was recently working on a project modeled on Vince Graham’s remarkable Earl’s Court in Mount Pleasant. On just 1.3 acres, they built 27 homes ranging from 1,100 to 2,400 square feet. It sits right at the entrance to the city’s Old Village, transitioning seamlessly from historic fabric into new housing that you’d swear has been there for a century.

For those mathing at home, the project is over 20 homes per acre in a detached single-family form. Which is unprecedented—especially when you consider that the site also includes a renovated historic structure for art galleries and future space for a 23-room boutique inn and restaurant.

This density is natural to Charleston but new to the rest of the South. Building this tight requires taste, architectural skill, and a developer stubborn enough to insist on doing it right.

That’s precisely what Earl’s Court had.

Today I want to talk about what I see as the simple but unobvious reason why all this works.

Last week I called the lead architect, Phil Clarke. We talked through the site’s mechanics: how tight it is, how parking and utilities were handled, how fire access was solved, and how they made it all fit without it feeling forced.

But what struck me most were Phil’s secondary facades. Many of them are barely visible unless you walk the site. And yet they were all thoughtfully designed.

I mentioned that to Phil because in nearly all other American residential developments today, only the front facade receives attention. If symmetry and trim appear at all, it's on the one facade facing the public realm (usually the street). The other three sides are afterthoughts. Windows drift, alignments disappear, and proportions loosen.

Why is it so good at Earl’s Court? Phil’s response was simple:

“All four sides are fronts.”

Meaning: we design all four sides. There are no afterthoughts here.

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The American South has spent the past decade undergoing a quiet but remarkable cultural shift: a home attached to your neighbour is no longer a sign of low income. Until recently, townhomes and multifamily were the exclusive domain of less affluent residents, but they have rapidly become desirable to mid-market (and increasingly high-end) buyers. That’s what is happening with urban townhomes in Durham.

Let’s talk about why.

As someone who designs small infill projects for a living, I sit squarely at the intersection of land scarcity, zoning obstruction, political theatre, and the ruthless economics of new construction. So when a new project appears in my own backyard, it’s an excuse to think out loud about what works. So let’s deep dive into Elm Hill.

ELM HILL

Elm Hill is a proposed 68-unit infill townhome project at 518 Morehead Avenue, a few blocks from downtown Durham. Developed by Alchemy Properties, the homes are large by urban standards—1,900 to 2,400 square feet—with basements that can function as flexible accessory spaces, plus roof terraces and a small package of amenities: a clubhouse, co-working space, gym, yoga studio, and dog run. Prices start at $875,000 and rise accordingly. For a site next to American Tobacco, DPAC, and the Durham Bulls, none of this surprises me.

Predictably, these price points invite the ritualised complaint: but it isn’t affordable! It’s true. And yet, that framing misses the actual trade-off on land this valuable. A buildable pad in this district may cost $300,000 (or more) before a single nail is driven. There is no mathematically coherent path to a $300,000 home here—unless the city subsidies are massive or the product is extremely small.

In that context, Elm Hill is serving the households who, absent new supply, would outbid long-time residents in the surrounding (often affordable) neighbourhoods or occupy historic homes that should otherwise remain relatively stable. Mews-scale density—intimate, neighbourly, but still urban—is a far more responsible outcome than pretending growth economics don’t exist.

WHY LONDON’s MUSES ARE HARD TO DO

One of the harder challenges in townhome design is reconciling density with open space and circulation. Elm Hill solves it better than most. Cars disappear into tuck-under garages, preserving the centre of the site for people rather than parking lots. While the central lanes are technically drive aisles, they have the bones of a true London mews—a form that American developers almost always botch.

The recipe is straightforward but rarely followed: no double-wide garage doors, real greenery (often in container pots due to limited space), good lighting (stringed Edison bulbs work great), and paving materials that make the drivelane feel more like a patio than a public street. Pavers or stamped concrete can transform what is normally a car sewer into something resembling a London lane.

The renderings at Elm Hill suggest that Alchemy at least understands this opportunity.

GARDENS IN THE SKY…

The shift of usable outdoor space from ground level to rooftop decks is another trend that’s rapidly becoming standard in southern urban infill. The trade-offs are real, and there are aspects of the trend I do not love. Private outdoor rooms can offer great views, but provide almost no semi-public space for the casual neighbour contact that many of us believe is integral to urbanism.

Without front porches, southern cities lose some of their social electricity. The “gardens in the sky” may be pleasant, but they are unlikely to replicate the unplanned interactions of stoops and porches that are, in my view, integral and defining characteristics of traditional southern life.

And at four stories, these buildings will require sprinklers—perfectly sensible at this price point, though a cost factor that keeps similar formats out of the entry-level market.

…& BOARDERS IN THE BASEMENT

One design move I genuinely appreciate is the inclusion of basement-level flex units. Unbeknownst to most, Durham is one of the few municipalities in the country that allows ADUs on townhomes. These spaces can (and will) become accessory dwellings or small offices. Durham needs this badly. Every increment of gentle density like this helps (it effectively doubles unit density), and ADU-capable formats are one of the most fiscally and socially productive things we can build near downtown.

In the end, Elm Hill is a strong project. The architecture is competent, the density is neighbour-scaled, and the public realm isn’t treated as an afterthought. Some developers have reported softness in the townhome market this year, and it’s true that a few urban townhome projects are sitting longer than expected. These, I suspect, will still absorb—Durham remains in a structural housing shortage, and its population is on track to nearly double by mid-century. The real gap is not whether Elm Hill should exist, but how many more versions of this we can build with smaller footprints and more attainable pricing.

For now, as infill goes, Elm Hill is a step in the right direction—and a reminder that mews-style townhomes, done properly, offer a middle path between towers and sprawl. That’s exactly what Durham needs far more of.

Additional reading: Durham urban infill continues with new ‘townhome-style’ condos starting at $875K (link)

Last week, I published a piece lamenting the closure of the Durham restaurant Littler. I articulated why restaurants matter and why the undersupply of small retail buildings hurts local business opportunities. This week, I discuss how to increase those building ownership opportunities, especially for those restauranteurs.

How Zoning Stifles Restaurants

Over the past 50 years, cities like Durham effectively ended the development of small neighborhood commercial buildings like Elmo’s (above). With the supply of such buildings artificially fixed, the owners of these properties quickly learned they owned a golden goose and rarely, if ever, sold (below).

Which created a problem.

This government-induced shortage of ownable retail space creates the “restauranteur squeeze” where, because of bad rules, the restaurant owner has no choice but to rent. That puts undue stress on our most ambitious restaurants and clearly causes a situation where fewer Durham restaurants are created—and more fail.

This can be averted simply by creating more ownership opportunities.

Durham has restaurateurs who are ready, willing, and able to own a building, and would be substantially better off, personally and professionally, if they could. But they can’t.

This stifling has many negative effects, which go far beyond increasing the number of quality restaurants and lowering undue stress on the proprietor. There are social costs, too.

Cities must stop obstructing such ownership because ownership is integral to citizen equity and growth. As they age, successful restaurateurs often become a city’s great civic philanthropists. Should these business leaders be relegated to a permanent class of renters, transformational wealth will decline, and philanthropic culture will happen less.

How to Foster More Restaurateur Building Ownership

In 2023, Durham passed an innovative CI (Commercial Infill Code) that addressed this problem by reopening small neighborhood commercial parcels to traditional retail development.

To understand these parcels, imagine the universal urban form of 0’ front and side setbacks, up to 3 stories, use-flexible with no on-site parking requirements. Basically, a Main Street building.

Think of any neighborhood commercial district (they exist all over the globe, in every culture) and imagine just one more building at the edge. At Angier and Drive, such a building might look like this:

A simple building, one lot over.

American planners have all but banned this incremental development practice (mostly without intending to, is my experience). Durham re-established it, with the Planning Department's blessing, I might add (we should give credit where credit is due).

The exact mechanisms of the reform are technical and beyond the scope of this essay. But, essentially, Durham has half a dozen small commercial zones (OI, CG, IL, and CN), all of which consistently did not work. This was primarily because of parking requirements but also because of an overthought and an incongruent use table. The reform allowed all of these zones to use the simple, practical, and urban CI standard as long as they were less than 20,000 SF, essentially half an acre.

Critically, these are small—very small—parcels.

That half-acre maximum lot size matters and was specifically identified to foster localism (i.e., resist corporatism) in these walkable neighborhood districts. Because you know who wants nothing to do with a 20,000sf parcel? Dollar General.

By limiting these financialized opportunities through the implementation of a maximum lot size, probably one of the first in the country, land use policy was tilted back in favor of the locals (FWIW, traditional zoning still heavily favors large national players, but in this narrow case in Durham, it does not).

There hasn’t been much happening with the CI code yet, as the code is still complex, and few willing sellers have materialized. However, I do know of a few projects pursuing ambitious things subject to this reform. Better things are sure to come.

Policy is Downstream of Culture. Development is Downstream of Policy.

“Retailers are the Ambassadors to your city.” - Ryan Hurley

It’s a policymaker’s duty to support retail talent because, as Vert and Vouge retailer Ryan Hurley said, “Retailers are the Ambassadors to your city.”

When you go to a place, be it Durham, Dallas, or Dubai, the experiences you remember are the ones brought to you by the city’s restaurants and retailers. You may see a Duke basketball game or a show at DPAC, but the things that make Durham Durham are the small spaces that serve food, drinks, entertainment, and other highly-curated, creative experiences.

Policymakers can identify and accelerate already this existing cultural change. Restaurants in Durham are worthy of such change and support. Some of these changes are technical, and some are more spiritual, requiring leadership and new calls for respect.

On the technical side, Much reform is needed here. And culture change. Small business owners are still burdened with obtuse stormwater and sprinkler requirements that can trigger hundreds of thousands of dollars of engineering solutions for coffee shops that cost a small fraction of that. Stormwater rules are written for huge entities and never scaled down for smaller ones (and it’s a political third rail to even talk about the issue). District stormwater treatment is also worthy of exploration because each small restaurant on an urban commercial corridor cannot afford its own storm pond but might be able to pay into innovative, larger district solutions.

The same scalability problems exist for sprinklers as well.

Further, more retail districts can be zoned in response to demand. As these spaces are allowed to be infinitely small, more opportunities arise. Pop-up stores are what I call “Phase 0” development: non-permanent structures that generally stay clear of building inspection and Durham’s stifling development reviews.

If every vendor at the Farmer’s Market had to go through an 18-month entitlement process, then we’d have fewer vendors at the Farmer’s Market, and the Farmer’s Market would be worse.

Those onerous reviews raise the threshold at which a permanent structure is viable. Lots of trauma happens in the space under that threshold, with retailers desperate for small spaces that they can own and remodel without going bankrupt.

Because of these thresholds, Durham has too few small spaces available for start-up retailers. I have had friends brought to tears by the lack of small spaces. As far as I can tell, there is near infinite demand for affordable small retail space (less than 1000sf), while demand tapers off as spaces exceed 2000sf.

Task forces working with retailers, developers, and restaurateurs should explore how to create more of these micro-spaces and how to maximize ownership of all of them. Such a goal would mainly require code reform and process predictability.

But it also requires a culture change.

In the spirit of placemaking, the culture requires a paradigm shift towards respecting local risk-takers and celebrating them for their ambition, vision, and service to the city. Too often, we are attacking these small businesspeople rather than appreciating them, and that does have a sclerotic effect on the city’s heartbeat. The city and its media personalities can collectively work to ensure that the culture of great restaurateuring is protected, honored, and enhanced.

The Next Littler

Any such reforms will be too late for Littler, but we should use this opportunity to think of the next Littler. There are kids in high school right now who can (and will) provide the next great restaurant in Durham. Some will do it, even if they don’t own their building. Many more will if they do.

How can a city support such young people? It takes some encouragement and respect, but mostly, it requires getting out of the way.

Restaurateurs and developers will build new restaurant spaces when they are allowed to. Thus, it is critical that we ensure that they are allowed to.

Kudos to Durham for starting that process with its recent CI code reforms and to its citizens for supporting incremental and experimental food developments such as the Durham Farmer’s Market, Durham Food Hall, The Green Flea Market, and The Can Opener.

Thanks to Gray Brooks for years of greatness at Littler and hope for continued success at other restaurants, with the added hope that he will start another in the not-too-distant future.

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Last Friday, I took a loved one to Littler in Durham. It is a thoughtful restaurant on a tiny footprint a bit off the beaten path in Downtown Durham. Littler recently announced they will close permanently on June 21. This lovely dinner gave me a chance to think about why places like these matter, what we need to do to get more of them, and how to ensure that they thrive.

Littler is extremely well-curated. The local chef/owner, Gray Brooks, is well-known (He also owns Pizzeria Toro). He creates short and simple menus; everything is good, and nothing isn’t. The interior ambiance is composed of rich wood, brick walls, and string lights. There is no design noise here, but there is analog sound: a record player flanks the bar. You can bring your own vinyl, which they will play while you dine.

In this setting, with this backdrop, many a memorable night has been had. Everything about Littler is emphatically local. Unlike a Chipotle, it’s sad when a place like this closes. It feels like a funeral. It’s depressing to see something inspiring come to an end.

The Inspiration Test

Whenever I give a talk in the Triangle now, I give my audience The Inspiration Test. It’s a simple question, which I put openly to the crowd:

“Name a new local development, built this century, that inspires you.”

I add: Not a development that you think is OK or you sort of like, but one that inspires you. The kind of place that makes you feel amazing and makes you want to take people there. Any size development is valid: it can be a food stall, for all I care.

Invariably, someone shouts out, “American Tobacco Campus!” Yes, that’s an amazing project—and it is certainly inspiring—but not new. Others shout out things that are pretty good but not necessarily inspiring, such as Fenton or One City Center.

Sadly, not much built today passes The Inspiration Test.

What does pass the test is not “development”, as we traditionally think of it as large and exterior driven, but interior designs and upfits, such as restaurants.

Some of my favorites are Press Coffee and Crepes, a modern Parisian-style cafe designed by Julie Cahoon of Mint Architecture, and Aaktun (video below), a Tulum and Tiki-inspired cafe by James Beard nominee Oscar Diaz. At Aaktun, the developer (CityPlat) worked with multiple restauranteurs to turn a light industrial park into Durham’s next great “place.” On the interior, the creative finishing and lighting blow guests away.

Small storefront businesses like these are worthy of study because they foster diversity across all neighborhoods and price points. Taken collectively, they are precisely what makes a city, a people, and a culture.

Why Restaurateurs Are Today’s Best Developers

Why is it that restaurants are consistently delivering excellence while our buildings are not? It’s pretty simple, actually. Restauranteurs are tasked with curating incredible experiences and are largely exempt from the oppressive design rules and processes that encumber building and site development.

That’s a dual benefit relative to housing because, unlike housing developers, restaurateurs are free to deliver their creative vision—which allows them to focus on putting on a show for their patrons.

As retail consultant Kathleen Norris points out, restaurateuring is essentially theater. Every night you have a fixed number of seats available, and you have to put butts in those seats. Irrespective of a thousand variables—the economy, labor markets, weather—the show must go on. Every night is an effort of Herculean proportions. And when it’s over, the clock turns to a new day, you start at 100 empty seats, and it begins again. It takes a special team to do this work.

This pressure cooker, when combined with talent and freedom, produces abundance, diversity, and quality. Durham’s restaurant scene is the result.

This begs the question: what would happen if housing were similarly freed?

Freedom of Design is a Prerequisite of Great Design

Lightly regulated markets foster creativity. And that's where inspiring stuff grows.

Current zoning codes, which heavily regulate design, encourage housing to be uniform and monotonous. Regulation flattens innovation. They mandate (often purposeless) front and rear yards, private car storage, and car-dependent densities.

As the rulebook grows, localism is squashed, and the diversity of products disappears. Local housing in the Triangle now echoes David Sedaris’ description of his hometown: “There’s a place exactly halfway between heaven and hell, where nothing is terrible but nothing is great, and that’s Raleigh.”*

Or Durham.

A financial, political, and regulatory machine prospers off of facilitating the monotony. And that uniformity is what sucks all the life out of the built environment.

Current zoning regulations do what is called peak shaving in energy management; it removes the highs and lows and makes everything more predictable, i.e., the same.

While the benefit of energy management peak shaving is efficiency, the concept has clear costs in development. Peak shaving suburbanizes housing.

Fighting for the alternative to monotonous sprawl requires supporting things outside this machine environment. Which is, things inside the city. Today that is done chiefly by supporting small local storefront businesses, which are disproportionately restaurants.

Durham is Good at Restaurants

It’s always important for a city to recognize what it is good at. In Durham, we are good at restaurants and, thus, should be making it easier for restaurants to open, grow, and thrive.

That will require a combination of:

1. Better training and apprenticeship opportunities.

2. Support for start-up incubator spaces, like food halls and farmers’ markets.

3. Oversight of regulatory bodies that discourage small business activity

4. An enhanced journalistic culture that celebrates leaders in food. Awards always help, and praise is generally free to give.

5. A Restaurant Guild for professionals to support each other.

Ownership Matters, too.

Continuing that list, owning the building is critical to risk mitigation and the long-term survivability of restaurants through crises like Covid or a recession. Restaurants are extremely expensive to build —a kitchen alone can exceed $500,000, and the nicer restaurants frequently cost more than $1,000,000. If a restaurateur’s restaurant goes belly up, as many do, those loans can be a traumatic loss. If they own the building, however, the enterprise might be salvageable, and their personal finances might not be ruined either.

That’s why retail ownership of buildings is so important.

How To Create Building Ownership Opportunities, next week, in part 2…

*paraphrasing, I could not re-locate Sedaris’ exact quote

In this series, I’ll be reflecting on some of my favorite conversations from Seasons 1 and 2 of The Townbuilder’s Podcast, which I had the pleasure of hosting. Throughout these seasons, I engaged in in-depth conversations with nearly two dozen new town developers and designers. With the podcast set to relaunch in 2025 under the new host Levi Wintz, I wanted to revisit these meaningful episodes, sharing my favorite discussions along with some fresh reflections.

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We don’t think much about alleys. That’s the problem. We assume they’re for trash, for garage doors, for the fire truck to squeeze by once a year.

But what if we’ve misunderstood the alley all along? What if that strip of cracked pavement behind your house is actually the most valuable — and most human — space in the American city?

Architect and researcher Thomas Dougherty has been studying alleys for years, and he’s come to a simple, radical conclusion: “There’s a huge amount of potential” buried in the back lot.

In his book, The American Alley: A Hidden Resource, he argues that alleys aren’t just leftovers from the 19th century — they’re the raw material for a more affordable and inspiring future.

Thomas and I discussed four reasons why alleys matter - their ever-changing raison d’etre, their natural ability to shape public space, foster citizen wealth, and strengthen communities. I’ll recap all in this post:

From Latrines to Forgotten Space

Thomas points out that we used to know what alleys were for. They were busy, bustling spaces — full of kitchens, wells, latrines, wood piles, coal bins, and smoke. Dougherty paints the scene vividly:

“All that infrastructure that fits into your cavity wall… heat, coal, wood, oil, water wells — they were often in alleys.”

But these weren’t just service zones. They were functional extensions of the house, designed for the messy work of living.

But by the early 20th century, alleys had been zoned out, paved over, or forgotten. Why?

Partly, it was new infrastructure: piped water and electricity meant cities no longer needed a separate right-of-way exclusively to isolate the messy business of urban living. But zoning played its part, too. As Dougherty explains, “Zoning was largely responsible for eliminating people living along alleys.”

Alleys became associated with poverty, fire hazards, and blight. Cities like Philadelphia used zoning to push out Black communities who had found a foothold on back lanes.

As regulatory and technological changes made the alleyways less viable for human habitation, we forgot what alleys could be. But this is changing.

ADUs as Street-Makers

Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) are having a moment — especially in the West, where backyard cottages and garage conversions have become one of the few legal ways to add housing. But Thomas sees something deeper. He sees a chance to reform the alley into a real street, and a real place.

“If we don’t develop [ADUs] with a mind to forming minor streets… we’re going to be recreating some of the same conditions that got alleys banned in the first place.”

That’s the key. An ADU isn’t just a building — it’s a chance to form public space. If you align the front door of the unit with a path, or add a garden wall, or line the alley with hedges, suddenly it’s not just the back anymore. It’s a place.

Thomas points to Charleston and Philadelphia as models — places where walls, not just buildings, define public space. He imagines alleys reborn not as infrastructure corridors, but as “pedestrian-scaled streets,” made beautiful by shared design language and human proportions.

Citizen Wealth Through Backyards

Here’s where it gets personal. Thomas believes that 1) the most powerful form of equity is ownership, and 2) ADUs unlock ownership for everyday people.

“There’s real value when an individual has the ability to own two houses on a single lot.”

This is subsidiarity in practice — putting decision-making power close to the ground. Homeowners become small-scale developers.

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tl/dr

1. Cars are a bigger problem in Garden Cities than in London or the countryside.

2. Roundabouts (traffic circles) unintentionally make cars incessant.

3. There is no relief for pedestrians, especially in cities.  Urban roundabouts are irritating, but the suburban ones are downright hostile. 

4. In the modern suburban world, it’s hard to build a village not dominated by cars.  We have to, anyway.

In the penultimate essay in my Garden Cities series, we’re talking cars.  

We Americans are abnormally accepting of cars. We are conditioned by their ubiquity, and pacified by the lack of alternatives.  Given this, you’d think that a few dozen cars running through a quaint exurban British town wouldn’t have bothered me.  But you’d have thought wrong. 

I have never been more irritated by cars than I was in Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities.  Below, I’ll explain why.

If you are just now tuning in, this June, I traveled to the United Kingdom to study Garden Cities with the National Townbuilder’s Association.  We walked about a dozen of these prototype towns, studied their original land plans and quality of execution, and met with leaders around the region in hopes of better understanding how they were built.

There are two reasons the cars drove me batshit in most of them.  First, there were no stoplights, so the cars never stop, a constant assault on walkability. Second, the noise from the constancy of vehicular travel was a high-pitched hum that proved taxing to auditory sanity. It left me hardened to an already existing thesis - we have to do better at not letting the car dominate our public spaces.

UNPLEASANT PERSISTENCE

I was in Letchworth, the original Garden City (and bizarrely the least interesting one), when I noticed the constant hum. It’s a hum that had never bothered me before. All of the streets were two lanes.  A few had informal parking on the side. Generally speaking, that should be a pleasant urban street. The households were modest, for the most part.  You got the feeling that most households here were car owners, but few would have more than one car (I suspect having two cars would be considered weird).  Wages were middling, and the cost of everything in the UK was outrageous. There wasn't a ton of loose change floating around these cities. Ostensibly, the Garden Cities had everything to prevent the need to travel, but with the attractions of the modern world, job opportunities, and the economic pull of London, people still drive quite a bit.

The UK countryside here is built upon a system of roundabouts.  Virtually all of the intersections are roundabouts (or, as the British call them, “traffic circles”). On the arterials, these designs are offensively large and very hostile to pedestrians.  How offensive?  Check out the Magic Roundabout in Hemel Hempstead, which is a roundabout made up of six roundabouts.  

Hemel Hempstead: The Final Boss of Roundabouts. Try walking across that, Grandma.

Even the regular suburban circles have the feel of those new American traffic engineering fads, the diverging diamond interchange (DDI), which speeds cars, increases confusion and makes it really clear to pedestrians that they can F right off.  Just figuring out the rules for these “simplified” systems must be incredibly taxing to our first-time drivers and seniors.  People absolutely fly around these arterial roundabouts.  Even before factoring the-wrong-side-of-the-street driving, which is inherently disoriented to foreign pedestrians, these roundabouts are anxiety-inducing for any American to navigate.

The “Look Left/Look Right” guidance at crosswalks is all over London. Has any country ever spent more on infrastructure just to ensure absent-minded tourists from a single ally stop getting hit by their buses?

But in the Garden Cities, the roundabouts are smaller and neighborhood scaled.  In that sense, they work.  No one is speeding in the Garden Cities (I found out later that most of Europe is flooded with speed cameras - the lead-footed get sent speeding tickets via the mail without ever seeing police).  Still, with relatively wide main streets in Garden Cities, it’s not uncommon for cars to be going 35mph, which is above the threshold for irritation - both for the ears and walking.  Worse, they never stop.  The roundabouts do two things - 1) eliminate the deceleration and acceleration cycles we come to know in America, and 2) evenly space the cars so they never stop.

A Garden City-scaled circle eliminates the need for traffic lights and stop signs, but it also means that cars never stop.

THE HUM

The hum of the cars at 35 mph takes away all of the “town-country” benefits Ebenezer Howard articulated and sought. You can’t hear birds sing.  You can’t hear the trees sway.  It’s just cars. They never stop.  It’s cars all the way down. Interestingly, the same problem did not exist in the urban center of London, whose neighborhoods are probably 3-5x denser than the Garden Cities (which are 2x as dense as most of America) and generally have more things going on.

Why? I found London surprisingly uncongested, which was weird (we were mostly outside the congestion zone).  There were few cars, by American standards, coupled with world-class transit and a recently beefed up cycle-superhighway network that delivered remarkably safe retrofitted bicycle corridors throughout the 2000-year-old town. 

Because the streets were narrower, cars traveled closer to 20mph, which is substantially nicer to walk, bike, or drink next to. The presence of traffic lights, not roundabouts, on most collectors meant a respite from the constant hum, offering brief windows of natural sounds. I didn’t realize how necessary that was until I toured the Garden Cities. 

Density Deadens Sound

Lastly, the density deadens sound. I know, I know--that’s counterintuitive.  But this is how it works: most of London’s buildings feature 0’ setbacks and contiguous 3-5 story masonry buildings, which serve as excellent sound barriers.  Whatever craziness is going on in the next block, you are buffered from.  In the Garden Cities, like a sprawling American suburb, there is no refuge.  If your American neighbor a block over is having a rowdy rager with Ratt on repeat, you’re going to be “attending” the party whether you were invited or not.

If these guys are a block away in an American suburb, you are going to know about it. That is not true in London.

Density, especially urban density, is substantially better for noise contamination than dense suburban development, with its free-standing buildings and no sound walls.

Sounds matters.  That was the main takeaway from the Garden Cities tour.  You don’t really know it until you experience the extremes, at which point it becomes obvious.

Garden Cities were the brainchild of Ebenezer Howard, as articulated through his book Garden Cities of To-Morrow. 

It’s an unusual book with an unusual history. The odd hyphenation in the title might have been used to draw attention to the futuristic vision Howard sought to present, seeking to underscore the forward-looking nature of his urban planning concepts.

Or, perhaps Howard was overcompensating, as when he wrote it he was a stenographer with no development, design, planning, or political experience. 

In either case, the surprisingly well-written book was widely praised and triggered interest in his ideas. It was a commercial and ideological success, coupled with mixed results.

Its followers include British architects Raymond Unwind and Barry Parker, who developed Letchworth Garden City, and planner/writer Frederick Osborn, who developed Welwyn Garden City, all following Howard’s technical principles.  Clarence Stein and Henry Wright brought the idea stateside with Radburn, New Jersey. The idea continued with the New Towns Movement, Green Cities, and, ultimately, with today’s torchbearer, New Urbanism. 

Garden Cities offer the same paradox that originally pissed me off about New Urbanism.  None of these ideas are “new” in any way. 

Humans had been building human-scaled, walkable, mixed-use villages for, well, all of humanity.  In fairness, in light of transformative and traumatic changes caused by rapid industrialization and modernist planning, the core values of human-scaled development are absolutely worth repeating. In this sense, Garden Cities of Tomorrow are little different than the Charter of the New Urbanism published 100 years later. Sure, it’s been said before, but it needs to be said.

Garden Cities are based upon duplicating old towns, old neighborhoods, and humanity through a mix of uses, frugality with land, access to green space and jobs, with civic structures taking prominent spaces in the land plan.  Again - nothing new.  The new part was master planning these cities in advance, including locking up the land, raising the capital, developing utilities, and recruiting residents.  A good chunk of Howard’s book focuses on the finance, taxation, and management of these master-planned visions, which makes for an interesting read, even if much of his structure never came to fruition.

While many new towns and developments took ideas from Garden Cities, only a few were built, and even those only partially.  Letchworth and Welwyn, both about 20 miles north of London, are the most famous. 

Ebenezer Howard's ideas on Garden Cities have long been lauded as visionary, progressive, and beneficial for urban planning. However, a closer read reveals these ideas are impractical and even detrimental in several ways. While Howard's intentions may have been noble, his execution and understanding of urban dynamicism were severely lacking.

Here are six ways Ebenezer Howard missed the mark:

1 Idealism Over Practicality

At the heart of Howard's garden city concept is an idealistic vision of self-contained communities surrounded by green belts, combining the benefits of both urban and rural living (the Three Magnets, above). This utopian dream, however, overlooks the complexities and practicalities of real-world urban development. Howard envisioned these Garden Cities as small, tightly controlled environments with limited populations. Still, such an approach fails to accommodate the inevitable growth and expansion that come with successful urban areas.  The same problem exists in America today, predominantly in blue cities and states, where developments are built to inelastic climax condition, and growth is restricted or prohibited.

2 Economic Shortcomings

Howard's model assumes that economic activities and employment opportunities can be evenly distributed within these small Garden Cities. In reality, economies of scale and the natural clustering of industries make this unfeasible. His vision did not account for the economic forces driving people to larger cities for better job prospects, diverse services, and greater cultural opportunities. As a result, Garden Cities risk becoming economically stagnant and unable to attract and retain a dynamic workforce.  There remains some debate on unipolar versus multipolar metros. Still, Howard’s drawings implied retail storefronts throughout the city, which discounted the network effect of Main Street-ing commercial activity, which is what ultimately happened.

3 Social Isolation

One of the most significant criticisms of Howard's Garden Cities is the potential for social isolation. This thesis plays out in the modern world as suburbia is directly linked to what is now referred to as a “loneliness epidemic”.   By design, Garden Cities were intended to be self-sufficient and separate from larger urban areas. This separation led to insularity, which in a pre-internet world reduced exposure to diverse ideas common to London. Most of the Garden Cities north of London are accessible to London via a 1-hour or less train ride.  And despite each having a commercial core that few American suburbs have, they still feel small and isolating.  

4 Environmental Concerns / Car Dependency

Blaming Ebenezer Howard for failing to plan for the car is like blaming Thomas Jefferson for not making Monticello ADA-compliant. 

Ironically, while Howard's Garden Cities were designed to incorporate green spaces and promote environmental sustainability, in reality, they were primarily early-stage proto-typical examples of urban sprawl. The spread of low-density development increased reliance on automobiles, contributing to higher greenhouse gas emissions and greater land consumption.  Of course, when Garden Cities of To-Morrow was written in 1899, much of this would have been impossible to see. Blaming Ebenezer Howard for failing to plan for the car is like blaming Thomas Jefferson for not making Monticello ADA-compliant.  Still, the long-term effects of car dependency are real and an ever-present lesson in these towns.  For the most part, The Garden Cities development pattern is contrary to the principles of sustainable urbanism, which advocate for higher density and efficient public transportation networks.

5 Planning and Governance

Howard's concept heavily emphasized centralized planning and control, often at the expense of organic growth and local autonomy, which was also an early-stage example of the progressive planning dogma that dominated the 20th century to ruinous effect. This top-down approach led to inefficiencies and a lack of responsiveness to residents' needs.  Howard suffered from what today might be called “Sim City Disease,” the belief that cities can be easily orchestrated by a central maker, with a passive populace and no consequence, and, like current planning, sometimes comes off as sanctimonious: "The whole scheme here advocated... offers a solution to one of the most pressing problems of our time: the accommodation of the people." 

The assumption is that Howard knows how to develop a city and that he had done this before, which, of course, he had not.  Bold assertions require bold experience and bold experimentations.  In retrospect, a better read would be a post-mortem on the semi-failed experience of attempting to build a garden city.

Lastly, the original Garden Cities' aesthetic uniformity mirrors today’s HOAs, with their emphasis on tidy, green surroundings and orderly layouts. This can and does result in a bland and uninspiring environment (though Garden Cities are substantially more diverse than typical monolithic American suburbs).

Great cities thrive on diversity in their populations and physical forms. The cultural and architectural homogeneity promoted by the garden city model fails to capture successful urban centers' vibrant, chaotic, and ever-evolving nature. Comparatively speaking, London feels infinitely more alive.  One hundred twenty years on, the original Garden Cities still feel slightly inorganic, mostly due to their heavy-handed master planning.

Summary

While Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities might appear attractive in theory, their real-world implementation reveals these fatal flaws. In his brief stint as developer near the end of his life, Howard ran into the same problem traditional neighborhood developers do today—it’s hard to execute.

Anyone can come up with an idea, but an idea is worthless without the ability to turn it into reality. Talk is cheap.

These shortcomings, from economic impracticality and social isolation to environmental concerns and rigid planning, highlight the fundamental problems with Howard's vision. Modern urban planning must move beyond such dated and idealistic models to embrace the complexity and dynamism of contemporary urban life, fostering economically vibrant, socially inclusive, environmentally sustainable cities. 

Howard may have started a movement, but much work remains.

My mom died 20 years ago this morning.

After her passing, we unearthed stacks of her poetry, all written in the 1970s, which she apparently had never shared with anyone. Ten years later, I put her words to song, working with some of the best musicians in Durham.

The result was The Matriarchs Album.

Ma had an uncanny gift for language, and the production was extremely emotional and one of the more taxing processes of my life.

It was a way to get to know her, again.

I like to think she lives on through the work.

The complete album can be heard here:

There are probably lots of lessons here I’d like to discuss —the benefits of “narrowcasting”—creating art for a tiny band of loved ones, the need to practice expression, and the value of processing tough emotions through writing.

There’s a lot of overlap between music, in this form, and city re-development. It’s simply rewarding to take something beautiful that came before you—and molded you—and consciously build on it.

But this morning, I have a heavy heart for the loss.

And I am grateful for the man that Sally Lubeck made me.

In this forthcoming series on building better suburbs, I will convey learnings from my recent architectural trip to England.

Last week I got back from England. The trip was part pleasure and part work, which often overlap for me. I love the work I do, so it doesn't feel like work, and I try to parlay it with some family time or social touring. My brother lives with his family in London, and I got to take my daughter - who recently expressed an interest in pursuing architecture - along on the trip. This was special because the trip was the National Townbuilding Association's first international trip, so we collectively studied British midlands and Hertfordshire-style housing with some of the best traditional architects and developers on the planet.

The specific theme of the trip was Garden Cities, a concept put forth by Ebenezer Howard in his 1898 book Garden Cities of To-morrow.

The topic of fixing America’s land use problems is a vast one. I will make no attempt to tackle it all in this series. But we will study the origin of much of today’s thinking and the progressive move to create idyllic new places—neither city nor country—for the purpose of human flourishing. 120 years later, it’s clear the original thinkers got some things rights and some things, well, not so much.

In this series, I will attempt to answer:

• What are Garden Cities?

• Why do they matter?

• Are Garden Cities a perfect combination of urban opportunity and nature? Or just a sanitized suburb?

• Are there ways to achieve the benefits of Garden Cities without the downsides of sprawl, isolation, and car dominance?

• Were Garden Cities a net bad or good for society?

• What can modern practitioners learn from Garden Cities?

The essays will include:

1. What Ebenezer Howard Got Right and Wrong

2. How Pre-Car Towns Prove That Cars Ruin Everything

3. Why Messy Incrementalism Always Wins Against Top-Down Master Planning

The series should roll out through the summer. Stay tuned, please share, and remember to subscribe, as it helps the publication grow.

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© DPZ contributed images to this piece.

Last month, my friend Coby Lefkowitz (@cobylefko) published a widely read piece entitled “Why small developers are getting squeezed out of the housing market”. Both technical and even manifesto-ish, it underscored many of the same points I have been saying: localism is dying, there is an unholy NIMBY alliance that is underwriting crony capitalism, the zoning and financing system is broken, and our cities are threatened by all of it.

I met Coby at last year's I'on Dialogue, where he was one of a half-dozen millennial developers studying Charleston's old and new successes in the hope of finding precedent for their own fledgling careers.

Coby is a talented writer, and I have admired his optimism on social media. Juxtaposed with my own sometimes Eeyore-meets-Lewis-Black tone, he reminds us all that cities are incredible places where extraordinary things happen. His positivity is contagious, and it resonates through his prose.

Coby has skills and experiences that I do not have—an architecture degree, institutional investment experience, and a large readership—all of which make him a novel read. Most importantly, he is a fledgling young developer. By throwing himself out of the stands and into the arena, he makes his views and viewpoints valid and essential.

Here are my thoughts on his.

1 URBANISM IS WINNING

Coby begins by underscoring that Urbanism is winning. Rather than the constant whining that has engulfed public discourse this century, urbanism offers real solutions for affordability, dynamics, and resiliency. Through grassroots activism, Urbanists are healing cities through reforms such as the abolition of single-family zoning, form-based codes, parking reform, and single-stair reform.

Still, there are no silver bullets; citybuilding is a journey, not a destination. New York City is forever. It has no final boss. There is no utopia to be obtained. Only a more perfect union.

One area where Coby stands out is finance. His recent conversation with Geoff Graham on The Yeoman Podcast explained how changes in finance and building codes over the last 20-30 years have completely formed the built environment we know and hate today.

Specifically, credit markets and tax policy have tilted the playing field in favor of institutional interests at the expense of local practice (and thus against local architecture, local flavor, and local culture). Zoning regimes—cookie cutter, boilerplate, and placeless—have only worsened it. Combined, these organizations form a modern machine, a Private Public Pariah (Geoff Graham identifies the culprit as Dodd-Frank, but that's a story for another day).

The squashing of local practice undermines everything. Institutional interests are pressured into the monolith. The Machine doesn't do scrappy coffee shops, punk clubs, James Beard restaurants, or small retail.

The Machine can only do big, and big is almost exclusively dumb.

Between punitive finance and punitive zoning, small developers struggle to get loans, the industry's lifeblood. It’s becoming harder and harder to do even one project. Deprived of access, no one new can enter.

The situation reminds me of what is known as “The SAG Card Paradox.” SAG stands for Screen Actors Guild, which requires its members to carry a membership card. Functionally, this means that you need a SAG card to act in movies. How do you get a card, you ask? The only way to get one is to act in a movie. Well how is anyone supposed to play that game?

Relieved of perpetual competition, the industry consolidates and becomes more and more hostile to outsiders over time, particularly upstarts and independents.

One might call this century of real estate development "The Great Consolidation". Coby writes:

"These imperatives privilege a concentration of the most well-capitalized firms who have done the most projects before. In 2022, nearly 25% of all multifamily units started in the country (more than 132,000) were commenced by just 25 developers. That's a strikingly high percentage in a country of more than 60,000 developers."

What’s fueling the centralization of power? One thing is the efficiency of size. It's far preferable to arrange debt financing on $100 million rather than $1 million. The same amount of work, coupled with a much larger fee.

This reminds me of my (more incremental scale) conversation with Canadian developer Sean McAdam of Land Lab: "Sean, call me crazy, but I think it's easier to build ten houses than it is to build one." He said, "It's absolutely easier to build ten houses than it is to build one."

2 "With more big buildings, there are fewer small buildings."

We should care about the institutionalization of real estate. For Coby, this is, first and foremost, a qualitative concern:

"It's my belief that it's better for the health of a neighborhood if more buildings are constructed by the people who live within it, or at least in the area. Fewer local developers, the corollary follows, diminishes the health and character of a neighborhood."

Notably, NIMBYism attacks the local developer, not the corporate one. Why? Some of this is just straight sadism. The local developer is the devil-you-know. Jerry Smith of Smith Construction is here. He’s in your city. You can yell at him in person.

You can drag Jerry’s name through the mud on Nextdoor, and he'll hear about it at church. But the institutional developer? You can’t. He hires an engineer or lawyer for all the public touchpoints and has no local social circle available for the NIMBY to leverage. This reality further tilts the playing field away from localism.

3 LOCALISM FOSTERS PRIDE

Survey your city, and you will find that only locals build with pride, while institutions do not (this is true across the country). "5-over-1s" are soulless buildings, the inorganic architectural equivalent of being dead on the inside. They are McMansionism on steroids. Texas Donuts proves Mitt Romney wrong—corporations are not "people too." They are machines, as Coby explains by detailing how these projects are financed.

These $50-100m apartment complexes are typically backed by insurance companies and pension funds. That luxury condo you hate? It's paying for some 75-year-old teacher's retirement. So that's good, but that teacher has no idea what this apartment is, how good it is, if it creates a place, fosters community, or adds any flavor to the city. They probably do not even know where the property is. And they do not care.

And that, Coby posits, is a big part of the problem.

"When you build in your own neighborhood, a pride imperative materializes. If you have to go by a project frequently, you want to feel good about the fruits of your labor."

The canary in the coal mine? I can show you the last ten big apartment buildings built in Downtown Durham in the last ten years; none are locally owned. Localism is on the retreat, and this matters.

4 ONLY THE SMALL LOCAL CAN DO SOCIAL GOOD

Small developers diverge from large ones when it comes to returns as well. They tend to be less motivated by squeezing every last dollar out of a project than creating somewhere they can be proud of. Institutional developers have to hit a specific rate of return to satisfy the needs of their Limited Partners, who are pensioners, insurance recipients, scholarship students, and sophisticated high-net-worth individuals, all with zero qualitative or moral motivations.

Coby starts a section with the phrase, "When you build in your own neighborhood, a pride imperative materializes." You see it, you touch it, you show it to your children. "Institutional developers rarely build in their backyards," and that matters.

Validating the thesis, I visited Charlotte for CNU 31 last year and noticed that The Queen City's multifamily projects look consistently better than the Triangles. Why? Charlotte is a banking town, and much of the equity for these projects is local. Even though the demographics and wealth of Charlotte and RDU are nearly identical, Charlotte is building better stuff. Why? Because it's local.

That Charlotte banker will talk with their kid someday about what they built. They want it to be decent, so they take the time to make it better. If that same investment is in some place they'll never go—Huntsville, Ft Collins, or Jupiter—they simply care less. As distance away from vested interest increases, qualitative factors decrease. Design is worse. Localism matters.

I know local property owners who rent at 50% market rate because they want to support someone who needs it. Another builder holds a duplex empty to host families undergoing traumatic treatment at Duke. Another group is planning to host cancer patients in medium-to-long-term care at Duke. All for free, and all local.

Institutional investors will never do this. Localism matters.

The most ambitious green projects—the LEED projects and the NetZero projects—are all local. The best affordable housing projects (real affordability via lower cost, not fake affordability via subsidy) are all local. The best co-housing communities, encouraging unprecedented levels of intentional community through design, are all local.

Small builders also continue the spirit of a local place, the spirit of historic preservation. I recently retweeted a great quote from Witold Rybczynski's book Charleston Fancy:

"The builders who create – and preserve – a city's everyday fabric are as important as the founders and city fathers, for it is CONTINUITY that is the key to effective city building."

His point is that institutional developers will never enhance localism. Definitionally, they subscribe to the one-world church of modernism, where the same off-the-shelf glass box or 5-over-1 apartment building works in Chicago, Charlotte, or Constantinople.

As it turns out, if you want Charleston to look like Charleston you need people from Charleston to keep it that way.

As Coby says, "We have institutionalized our communities and drained the charm and soul out of them."

5 CENTRALIZATION IS THE CURSE

Coby is extraordinarily knowledgeable about finance, which is perhaps the final frontier of reform (too few people are working in this space). He writes extensively on finance in this piece, which I will try to cover in another post later. The short summary of his thoughts is that the centralization of financial decision-making, a consolidation that resulted from the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, has benefited institutional interests at the expense of localism.

We need to switch it back, which is virtually impossible. That leaves the dwindling number of local developers left with bad and worse options.

I am on record with leaders in the Congress of New Urbanism and National Townbuilders stating that the movement has failed to produce its next generation of great developers, a “Townbuilding Farm Team”, so to speak. The lack of a bench is an existential threat to the urbanist movement and American cities.

Coby is right to identify the squeezing of the small developer as kind of a big deal.

When pressed to identify young urban development talent, I would put Coby on that list. Keep an eye on his work. Not only is he a great writer, he’s driven and trying to develop cities. Most of all, he is young. And when trying to reproduce and continue movements, that matters.