The second of Pete Saunders’ nine reasons why Detroit failed is “poor housing stock,” particularly its overweighting towards small, early postwar cottages. Here’s a sample:
Here’s what Pete had to say:
Detroit may be well-known for its so-called ruins, but much of the city is relentlessly covered with small, Cape Cod-style, 3-bedroom and one-bath single family homes on slabs that are not in keeping with contemporary standards for size and quality…..The truth, however, is that Detroit may have one of the greatest concentrations of post-World War II tract housing of any major U.S. city….True, Detroit has more than its share of abandoned ruins that negatively impact housing prices. But it also has many more homes that simply don’t generate the demand that higher quality housing would. That is a major contributor to the city’s abundance of very cheap housing.
I have often been struck by the same thing in Philadelphia. There are some districts of great buildings, but most of the city is made up of mile after mile of two-story, very small row houses. Here’s a snap I took in the Kensington neighborhood that provides a sample.
This is decent density of these to be sure. However, keep in mind that most of these row houses contain a single unit. The Upper West Side brownstone I live in has been converted into ten units. Also, many of these rowhouse units are extremely shallow. Here’s a picture I found online that illustrates a typical depth.
Photo credit: Flickr/pwbaker CC BY-NC 2.0
As it happens, there has been some redevelopment activity in Kensington, both in residential and industrial spaces. (Some neighborhoods nearby are seeing significant redevelopment).
Someone I know recently bought and renovated a rowhouse in the neighborhood, so I got to tour it. It’s a two-bedroom unit, but very small. It’s barely bigger than your average one bedroom apartment. Unsurprisingly, the person who bought it is in her 20s and single.
As nice as this unit was, it’s basically a starter home, much like those Detroit Cape Cods. Cities need to have housing like that, but if it is overwhelmingly dominant, that’s not healthy.
It’s similar to how so many downtowns are seeing tons of Millennial targeting apartment construction. Older families can have trouble finding housing in these areas because there isn’t great housing to take you through your full lifecycle.
Philadelphia should be fine in the near term. The city has great bones and I really find it compelling in a lot of ways. But I wonder if this type of housing stock is one reason the city has seen less demand than other old major tier one urban centers with great transit.
I put out a poll on Twitter about this and most people didn’t seem to agree with me on the potential negative of being overweight very small rowhouses. We will see how this plays out for Philly.
This is very evident to me when comparing Indianapolis (where I live) and cities with similar demographics / location / culture like Louisville or Cincinnati. Those cities both have wonderful, relatively inexpensive historic homes near the center of town; Indy does not, and suffers as a result. I believe this is a huge reason why Indy’s millennials (I am one) move to the suburbs once they are married – there just isn’t acceptable housing stock to keep them around.
I looked at some of those Detroit Cape cods and they are small internally also. Great starter home only.
small lots also 34×100
Baltimore is also overrrun with row houses
major problem in all older cities is a lack of parking…
As a Philly resident and recent homeowner, I disagree with your thesis. The housing stock in this city is one of the things that most appeals to me — and I like the Detroit-style cottages too, though obviously other factors make Detroit a very different place to live.
The small, densely packed rowhouses are a unique asset in my mind because they make it possible to have dense, walkable neighborhood combined with single-family housing stock at an accessible price point. I live in South Philly, in a neighborhood that checks all new urbanism/Jane Jacobs boxes: there is a vibrant streetlife, neighbors talk to each other and hang out on the stoop, everything from the grocery store to fine dining to live music is within walking distance, downtown is easily accessible by transit, etc etc.
But I also get the benefit of single family homeownership: potential for price appreciation and autonomy from landlords, no HOA fees, no one with whom I need to share a front door or who will stomp on the ceiling, a (small) backyard all to my own, etc.
There aren’t many other markets that combine these two things, and Philly’s housing stock makes it possible. In other East Coast cities, dense neighborhoods with the same level of amenities and walkability would have been primarily converted to rental and/or condo housing, or the single family stock would be prohibitively expensive. Conversely, most other areas with primarily single-family housing are considerably less dense, and more car-centric.
Sure, my partner and I are in our mid-20s without kids, and things might look different when the time comes to start a family. But we do intend to raise our kids in the city, as generations have before us, and would gladly trade in the extra square footage of the burbs for the benefits of city living. We might not come to the same conclusion if city living meant being lifelong renters, as in, say, New York.
And it’s worth noting that Philly does have many family-oriented neighborhoods that, while still being dominated by rowhouse architecture, also feature larger parcels and more spacious homes, at either a slightly higher price point and/or further from downtown. Neighborhoods like Mt Airy, Overbrook, Girard Estates, Roxborough and so forth offer a sort of hybrid between city and suburban living — you can get both a walkable, local commercial corridors and Philly stoop culture, but also 3-4 bedrooms and a driveway. The footprint will still be less than suburban housing, but many families are willing to make that tradeoff.
I think the reason Philly has seen less demand than other tier 1 East Coast cities is its weaker job market. The housing stock is one of its prime assets counterbalancing that. Anecdotally, I know that whenever my NYC friends come to visit, see my rowhouse and hear that it costs significantly less than the shoebox they’re living in, they invariably say something to the effect of “man, I should really move to Philly, if only my job wasn’t in New York…”
I was writing my comments below at the same time, from the perspective of a former resident and sometime visitor, and largely agree with your take. It’s a homeowner city; back in the 70s when no one wanted to live in the city, that was a problem. Today, I think not so much.
Your photo shows what appears to be a “double wide”, similar to a freestanding 4-square with 4 rooms down and 4 up. More common all over Philly is the shotgun style (one room plus a hall in width) with 2 or 3 rooms down and the same number up, though there is a category of “tiny house” called the Philadelphia Trinity (one room on each of three floors) featured in Atlas Obscura. A key take in that story:
The trinity is Philadelphia’s version of the age-old problem of low-cost, high-efficiency urban housing….designed for the poorest workers, and usually rented. In other cities, they remain rentals, but, says Suzanne Dreitlin, a trinity owner and proprietor of Rowhouse Magazine, “Philly is very much a house city.” Philadelphia is the only major city in the northeast where home-owning is common, largely thanks to the comparatively low house prices.
The row houses in West Philadelphia near Drexel and Penn had been cut up into apartments when I lived there at the end of the 70s. I suspect that with gentrification, by now new owners may have converted some “student efficiencies” of my day back to single residences. An example of a rowhouse street is the 3900 block of Pine St., though it has been partially eaten away by the Penn Dental School. The original floor plates there are 45×20, and almost every house has a first-floor extension on the back with another 20-25 feet so they would be 4×3’s. The structures lend themselves to modern open first-floor plans since they are so narrow.
Farther out in West Philly the standard plate is more like 20×60 per floor. At two floors, these are substantial houses, as big as many suburban homes on half-acres in the region.
Kensington, Fishtown, and other near-northeast neighborhoods were a little more working class (close to industry and waterfront) and so offer smaller houses more like the old Trinity, though often with more rooms. West Philly, Germantown and Mt. Airy offer larger places while Roxborough and Manayunk offer a mix of sizes…and it is no coincidence that those neighborhoods are a bit more gentrified.
Exactly – there’s a range in size/quality among rowhouses, just like all housing types. Cherry picking a Kensington block in the image is a bit misleading because that’s the epitome of a historically working class neighborhood, so of course the housing stock is smaller. In other cities, in place of those small rowhouses you’d have a big tenement apartment building. I’d much rather own the small house.
While acknowledging their deficiencies, I would still express a preference for the “cape cods” over the horrors of cul-de-sac postwar house design?
The neighborhoods in the photograph offer more charming streetscapes than the typical suburban megamansions one sees out in the burbs??? But, I guess the market demands large, hard to heat and cool open floor plans with extra rooms and three car garages to fill with junk. 🙂
As I approach retirement, I will probably end up buying something similar. Hopefully not in the Midwest (don’t like the climate or the landscapes) but in a market more affordable than Northern California.
Aaron, Philly’s row-house housing stock is not meaningfully different from NYC’s. Yes, there are places with higher end development, such as the Upper West Side or Park Slope (and Philly has Society Hill and Rittenhouse – smaller, yes, but it’s a smaller city). Go to Ridgewood or Corona or Sunset Park or even parts of Astoria and Greenpoint. The housing stock is very, very similar to the first photo of Philly that you posted, give or take a few architectural details.
I was struck by the same thing when I went to Pittsburgh. I was expecting a city I could really like, but thought that personally I wouldn’t want either the housing or the neighborhood.
The reality is that you can remake any kind of housing if there is sufficient demand from people with money in their pockets and the desire to sweat a renovation. Just look at London. And the size isn’t that much of an issue, particularly for younger home buyers who don’t have a lot of cash to furnish the homes with, or two raise more than one or two kids.
The bigger issue is whether the place outside is worth it when you are done on the inside. A lot of these older neighborhoods don’t have parks or nice open spaces nearby, so you’re left living in an ugly place with nowhere to go. Yes, street trees could make a difference, but they take decades to grow, lots of money to rip up the sidewalks, and consensus to get a whole neighborhood covered in them. A recent survey of young professionals in Seattle found that the majority would swap a backyard for a more central city neighborhood if they could walk 10 minutes to a park. The problem is that the older neighborhoods were built so cheaply the first time around that they simply don’t have those parks. The revitalization message? Make sure the setting is good before you try to draw people back to the private real estate.
“The problem is that the older neighborhoods were built so cheaply the first time around that they simply don’t have those parks. The revitalization message? Make sure the setting is good before you try to draw people back to the private real estate.”
Have you taken a look at the typical post-war suburb? Not aging very well, in many cases. Plus, there is no more cheap old growth redwood (west coast perspective) with zero logging restrictions, so you get “engineered” construction products now.
I know the houses at least have the backyards, but the neighborhoods may only have access to 1950s/1960s strip commercial that is arguably even more horrific than the city neighborhoods. As an anecdotal observation, it is amazing how poorly used the sacred suburban backyard is in many working class California suburbs. We are talking bare dirt, star thistle, and maybe a sad toy or two. (Along with a woebegone pitbull or two).
I don’t know if I buy your premise here, Aaron. I would argue that the relative strength of the metropolitan economy affects “urban revitalization” (read: gentrification), and that the quality or the type of housing stock available may affect things like geographic distribution of people and jobs and home prices, but all in all, there are neighborhoods in all kinds of U.S. cities that are revitalizing, or already quite vital (and downright affluent), regardless of the type of housing stock. I’d point to established Philly rowhome neighborhoods that are full of new residents who choose to not only buy but also raise families in the city and do the whole walk/bike/transit lifestyle. To the extent that Philly hasn’t morphed into a global talent magnet like Boston, New York, or Washington, it’s because it historically has not been home to the kinds of industries that attract from all over the country. To the extent that Center City and its environs have done extremely well at attracting the educated and affluent, large swaths of the city will remain working class or distressed and impoverished absent some kind of revolution. So Philly has ended up in many ways resembling a slightly smaller version of Chicago than anywhere else – a very strong core, with tremendous poverty and crime afflicting many outlying neighborhoods and some inner ring suburbs, victims of disappearing low-skill, high-wage jobs for the millions who relied on them. Just as Chicago’s downtown has attracted global headquarters and continues to draw in new residents and skyscrapers, while its overall metro region has, as a whole, largely stagnated if not declined, and the Delaware Valley region’s story is similar. No amount of Eds/Meds, high-tech, or new media will ever be enough to solve the ills plaguing parts of Philly and Chicago, not to mention the cities that have been overrun by their poverty and distress, like St. Louis. And while Philly is cheaper than New York, firms that leave places like New York or San Francisco for cheaper locations are looking toward the more business-friendly climes of the Texas and North Carolina metros, Denver, Salt Lake City, Nashville, and the like. I don’t have the answer for Philly (or Chicago) – I suppose New York City went through all that in the 70s and 80s and through sheer economic forces of limited supply, high desirability of the city, and concentration of certain prestige industries (arts, fashion, publishing, not to mention finance and banking) essentially gentrified its way out of the economic dumps. I’m not sure that’s repeatable in Philly or even Chicago, and definitely isn’t in the more forlorn Rust Belt metros. But little to do with what kind of houses or apartments people live in.
Also, check out my blog, Pole Shape, to which I post things sporadically about my observations about metro areas:
https://poleshape.wordpress.com/
The rowhouses give Philadelphia low priced ownership opportunities that other cities don’t have. For those who want a bigger unit, they can combine two trinities (or “father-son-holy ghost” houses, as they were once called) or buy an already combined house. I think the rowhouses are a feature, not a bug.
While that is true, Philadelphia isn’t the only city with affordable homes in it. I also believe that most people, even urbanites, when pressed do not prefer rowhouses.
I think Aaron has a good point here. While there are many factors that go into a city declining or rising, I don’t think that the actual city of Philly is very attractive to most families.
I also think that comparable cities like Boston or Chicago offer much more appealing housing stock. I also like the housing in NYC better, but even if you argue that NYC doesn’t have superior housing to Philly, it is still NYC.
Compare Philly to Chicago:
South Philadelphia:
https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9285517,-75.1792948,3a,75y,306.45h,82.24t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sNwoHv_yelOhl–mIEjF7hA!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo1.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DNwoHv_yelOhl–mIEjF7hA%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D175.5%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656
West Philadelphia:
https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9630786,-75.2262541,3a,60y,202.28h,83.13t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1swkRgOV-ubLn2Rb95PKLxww!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
Germantown:
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.0281658,-75.1692751,3a,60y,121.82h,81.91t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sjz7OI6P5R2D07gWld5yuMA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
Chicago:
West Garfield Park
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8820215,-87.729813,3a,60y,244.84h,85.83t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sGS8vK-S8jHDRlMyNSj6_zg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
Chatham:
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.740678,-87.6130315,3a,60y,333.38h,85.51t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sq_fgvjmEjcWSNgGg1ftnyQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
Chicago Lawn
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.7747968,-87.6920607,3a,60y,173.07h,87.9t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sHS2fhFzJVZI-i6R3vJdG0A!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
Crime aside, these Chicago neighborhoods are all much more attractive than their Philadelphia counterparts. The small Chicago bungalows are still bigger than the row homes and the presence of green in the form of trees and small lawns make them much more attractive to me at least.