Widening the Discussion about Boxy Buildings

Brian Williams is a Strong Towns member who blogs at RetropolitanBlog, where this article originally appeared. It is republished here with the author’s permission.

The architecture of the mixed-use, mid-rise apartment blocks currently plaguing Columbus, Ohio is sometimes described as Developer Chic or Fast Casual, but usually is derided as “boxy”—a term that provokes a lot of debate in urban planning/design publications and blogs.

The criticism is that all of these block-long, five-story, carton-ish (and cartoonish) buildings all look the same—even though they are clad in different materials and colors, and some have balconies, and others are designed to look like a bunch of different buildings squished together, and still others are U-shaped (except for street-level retail) with apartment windows looking down on a second-story courtyard “amenity decks.”

Other people welcome the new buildings as adding lively density to old neighborhoods that are much less dense than in decades past due to smaller households. They defend the boxiness by noting that the century-old buildings we revere today for their historic character were the repetitive boxy blocks of their day.

There’s something to that argument. But not enough. Today’s fast-casual apartment blocks actually represent a radical change in urban patterns.

What is probably the biggest change in those patterns over the past century; is at the core of most current development debates in Columbus, even though it is not identified as a problem; and is a factor that, if changed, could give residents of low-income neighborhoods a greater share as new value is generated?

The answer to this riddle is width.

In historic neighborhoods all over the city, where developers routinely get big tax breaks for their gallant efforts to meet market demand, opponents of new projects typically rail against the height of buildings.

“The zoning code says 35 feet,” they cry. “How dare you propose a building 42 feet high!” Or, “We shouldn’t grant a variance for 79-foot building in a 72-foot zone.”

The zoning code has all sorts of limits on the maximum height of homes, garages, and commercial buildings. But if width restrictions are enshrined in zoning codes, they tend to be minimums that assume homes will have attached two-car garages. Standard lot widths have been expanding steadily for over a century—to the point that valuable and desirable historic neighborhoods are illegal under current codes.

In fact, the city and other public entities go beyond allowing block-long hulks, and actually encourage them by favoring property consolidation for huge projects that require master developers—a single developer for an expansive, multi-faceted project.

First, a little background.

Columbus and cities across the country and around the world typically developed with small, narrow lots. Downtowns had shops cheek-by-jowl and sharing side walls. Even single-family houses in residential neighborhoods were only a few feet apart. As years passed and zoning came into play, there was more space between homes on residential lots. Later, boilerplate zoning laws became common, as suburban ranch homes made extra-wide residential lots the norm in zoning codes.

As commercial and office buildings got taller, they also got wider to provide a sufficient base for skyscrapers. Early skyscrapers of eight, 12 or 15 stories—such as the circa-1905 twin towers on Broad Street a couple doors east of High—were able to conform to the original lots. But by the 1920s, major developments such as Leveque Tower needed more space. In some ways, that was a Columbus version of Rockefeller Center in New York a few years later—a multi-use, master-developed complex.

In recent decades, smaller versions of master-developer sites have become more common in Columbus, such as the OSU Gateway complex and the campus-strip phases that have followed. A prime reason Gateway took 10 years to develop was the time, negotiation, eminent-domain threats, and expense required for Campus Partners to assemble and consolidate two blocks of High Street frontage on the east side and one block on the west—a total of 7.4 acres.

The seven buildings on the sites, mostly five stories, are below the 72-foot height limit for regional mixed-use under the current University District Plan. But the five-story buildings stretched to the full lengths of blocks and, despite varying architectural details to mimic the narrow-lot shopfronts of old, they have a broad, horizontal, boxy appearance.

Similarly, master developers are at work on the Scioto “Peninsula,” where the quasi-public Columbus Downtown Development Corporation (CDDC) spent years buying up property to turn over to developers. At 20 acres, the site is just two square acres smaller than Rockefeller Center. Originally, CDDC selected a single out-of-state developer for the entire site. When that didn’t work out, the first of three development phases—six acres across Belle Street from Dorrian Green, the “front yard” of COSI—was split among three developers.

Because those tracts are very large and will have block-long structures on them, they are pretty much guaranteed to remain in the hands of large developers or wealthy investors. Local merchants can rent space there, but have little or no hope of owning their business property.

That gives developers a huge blank slate to play with: no barriers except the street grid—and even that can be changed in major developments. It’s cheaper to construct a single building over an entire block. And if you own the whole block, why would you break it into separate buildings or separate parcels anyway?

And thus the buildings take on a more horizontal orientation than what had preceded them for decades or even centuries. In my view, it’s their scale, not their shape, that defines their boxiness.

Some challenge the criticism of boxy buildings, as in this article, which argues that boxy buildings have been the norm for centuries. The article presumes to define what people mean by “too boxy.” And “too boxy” is not the same as “boxy.” A refrigerator carton is boxy; a jewelry box is cute.

A block-long, six-story apartment building may have proportions similar to an American foursquare single-family home, but otherwise has nothing in common with it. Aside from a scale that makes it monolithic, the “too boxy” building requires significant land consolidation, which can have long-term consequences. What used to be a dozen or more parcels owned by a dozen or so people or entities is now a single parcel owned by a single entity. In the end, it’s likely to be more difficult for people of modest means to buy property. Only rich people and corporations will be able to own urban land.

Yes, many of our favorite and most functional buildings have always been boxy, and the styles change over the centuries. But the width of the buildings, the consolidation of parcels, and the switch from vertical orientation to horizontal is a new and radical departure from the way we’ve developed throughout history until the automobile age. These block-long sideways monoliths are an urban manifestation of the horizontal development patterns wrought by car culture.

This trend limits opportunities for the independent pizza shops or mom-and-pop corner stores that that can survive amid real estate booms only if they own their property. Not only that, but the tyranny of contemporary, five-story, mixed-use commercial blocks leaves no room for the funky little buildings that add character and make you smile—the buildings that were shoehorned into an odd-shaped or leftover lot.

Yes: the city and region are growing even as the number of people per household shrinks. We need more housing, especially affordable housing, and we need it in the cities rather than sprawling across the countrysides. We need greater density. And we even need growth that includes the kinds of boxy monoliths I dislike.

But even more, we need a mix of building types—especially affordable housing and affordable commercial space that allow their occupants to own some property and thus share in the economic growth. We need programs that incentivize renovations and allow residents of neighborhoods in decline to re-densify those places with smaller-scale projects that strengthen communities from within.

We need projects that cater to a community’s needs. We don’t need more opportunities for developers from another state to get tax breaks for plopping their business model into somebody else’s neighborhood.

We need to fix the city’s shortage of affordable and other housing, but we need more tools in the toolbox than the current hammer of horizontal homogeneity.

About the Author

Brian Williams, a recovering journalist in Columbus, recently retired from the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission and now is a consultant at Local Nexus LLC, focusing on food, agriculture and urban redevelopment.