Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 565

As many of you know, I am working on a new build in Park City, Utah. One of the things that I have had to get up to speed on are earth retention systems. Building in the mountains is challenging. Here are a couple of photos from this morning of a new single-family home under construction near the lot that I am working on.

It looks to be a combination of cast-in-place concrete and precast blocks (right side). We are looking at a similar strategy. To give you a sense of the magnitude, some of the concrete blocks we are looking at are 1,800 lbs each. As is the case with many construction projects, a lot of the costs here end up going towards things that most people won’t ever see or think about.

Nice places to live — however you want to define that — tend to be expensive places to live. There are all sorts of reasons why this might be the case. Perhaps it’s on a body of water, next to a park, or it has some other redeeming qualities.

Daniel Herriges of Strong Towns makes a cogent argument, here , that when it comes to nice and desirable places it usually comes down to one thing: scarcity. Demand > supply. But on top of this, he argues that in most cases, the supply constraint is artificial.

Here’s an excerpt:

In fact, our shortage of nice places is almost totally self-imposed. And it's precisely because 98% of the North American built environment is so blah that the 2% of places that are really well-designed environments quickly get bid up by the rich and become inaccessible to the rest of us. The solution to this isn't to stop creating such places, but to create vastly more of them.

He goes on:

The same story applies to the countless row house neighborhoods of the Northeast, Chicago, and San Francisco. In city after city, the mass-market, working-class housing of its time has acquired a distinctly bourgeois reputation today. In all cases, the reason lies in economics, not design. What's abundant becomes culturally coded as middlebrow; what's scarce becomes culturally coded as elite.

We have talked before on the blog about how tastes change over time and how housing that was previously undesirable can sometimes/oftentimes become desirable given enough time.

My sense is that there are a number of factors at play here and it’s perhaps a bit difficult to decode where new “cultural coding” truly starts. But I very much appreciate Daniel’s scarcity argument. Scarcity drives so much in markets (just look at the NFT art market right now and the fixation on rarity tables).

But let me be the devil’s advocate. If we were to be successful at building no blah and all nice stuff, wouldn’t the rich just seek out a new 2% rarity? And if so, would the 98% still seem just as nice?

Either way, more nice places to live should always be the ambition.

Architecture school has a way of indoctrinating you with an appreciation for the past. One of the ways that is done is through architecture history and theory classes.

In my case, I was taught to appreciate the work of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Adolf Loos, and many other influential architects from the 20th century.

It was okay to disagree with their ideas, but you at least had to learn about all of the important stuff that they had done and/or thought about. It’s a standing on the shoulders of giants kind of thing.

But as Witold Rybczynski argues in this recent post , it’s important to keep in mind that history and theories are written after the fact:

“Some buildings are, in a sense, experiments, and when something works, and is taken up by others, it eventually becomes a rule of thumb, perhaps even a theory.”

For me, this is yet another reminder that the world moves forward as a result of doing, creating, and making new things happen.

Sometimes you’ll get it wrong and do the wrong things. But sometimes you’ll do something wonderful that nobody else has thought of before.

And when then happens, the world will have moved forward such that it’s then possible to look back at what happened and make sense of it all.

As Witold puts it, “first you build a flying machine, and later you discover the aerodynamic theory that supports flight.”