Mike Eliason talks about his book, Building for People, and the massive opportunity we have to create better places through being more intentional and thoughtful.
Mike Eliason (photo credit Heather Eliason)
Interview with Mike Eliason
Mike Eliason is a researcher, writer, urbanist and architect. He is also the founder and principal of Larch Lab, a socially responsible firm working at the intersection of the climate and housing crises. Based in Seattle, Mike is the author of Building for People: Designing Livable, Affordable, Low-carbon Communities.
A year working in Germany laid a foundation for Mike’s career
Based in Freiburg, Mike was part of a wide variety of projects: detached houses, multi-family housing, some public work, some laboratory work. He lived in a suburb that was heavily pedestrianised, and which he describes as, “the quietest place I’ve ever lived.” And he got to know the districts of Vauban and Rieselfeld, where self-build, multi-family housing, Passivhaus and mass timber construction were all present.
The concept of Baugruppen (“group build”; involving residents in decisions to foster community) was also well underway. Even though Mike was not absorbing these ideas fully, he felt a desire to take them back to the USA. Many of those memories have come to the forefront for him in the years since – and the ideas are finally starting to become more mainstream, two decades after he was first exposed to them.
New development needs a rethink to shift its priorities
Mike’s work started by advocating for better multi-family housing, similar to what he found in Germany. That connected him with a broad network of advocates and politicians who want to achieve better housing and public developments. But they don’t have resources they can show to elected officials and say, “This is how things can be different.”
The book aims to ‘formalise’ what good looks like, and support advocacy work by adding to the broader discussion of how development in the USA needs a fundamental rethink to prioritise public health, community, affordability and sustainability.
He sees the problem playing out in Seattle, where transit infrastructure is being redeveloped without open space, without affordable housing, and without features to mitigate the urban heat island effect or deal with storm deluges.
Housing in the USA is not fit for purpose
There is little variation in housing, with no real breadth of options between townhouses and large multi-family apartment buildings. Compared to the rest of the world, Mike describes the USA and Canada as “an anomaly” in this regard.
He believes that often it’s like living in a hotel: corridors down the middle of large buildings, with units either side. The units are really deep with a window at only one end (“like living in a bowling alley”), unless you’re fortunate and live on a corner. The buildings are not climate adaptive – there’s no opportunity for cross-ventilation, and solar protection is not a common feature.
The units tend to be large, which makes them unaffordable, but with only enough space to fit two bedrooms. If the designs tried to accommodate a third bedroom, it would have no window. “Really, they’re designed for roommates rather than families,” says Mike.
Floor plan for Larix, a proposed six story Point Access Block, allowing for family-sized homes, units that cross ventilate, and bedrooms positioned on the quiet side of the building (Credit: Michael Eliason/Larch Lab)
Achieving better outcomes starts with a better vocabulary
Mike describes the lexicon that people have for talking about housing and buildings in the USA as “stunted.” Feedback about his book often centres on how it has opened the reader’s eyes to certain concepts, which he attributes to expanding the vocabulary people can draw on in those conversations.
In structuring the book, Mike pulled together concepts he was already researching and writing about, in a way that tried to make sense of them all. That led him to including topics like low carbon housing, eco district design, human centred places, and nature and open space.
Proving concepts can start with a single home
While the aspiration is to apply the concepts to large developments and entire districts, they can be just as readily pulled together in a single development – even just one house.
Development in the USA is antithetical to outcomes like being community-oriented, being adaptable and climate resilient, and providing comfort and protection. While that remains the case, it’s important to highlight the differences compared to European housing as a way to explain why the outcomes are so different.
Passivhaus and mass timber have demonstrated that change can happen
People in North America talked about Passivhaus for years. But until there was a tangible project to use as an example for politicians, architects and developers, it was hard to show why it was better than the status quo. Mike has experienced the same with mass timber, for which he is a big advocate. Now mass timber projects have been constructed, others can see and feel the difference.
Freiburg’s car-light Vauban ecodistrict is filled with numerous Baugruppen (photo credit: Payton Chung)
Ecology, affordability and community are at the heart of eco districts
The concept of an eco district is about developing places where people can live a low carbon lifestyle and thrive. Often, they are developed on brownfield sites (Vauban was a former military base, for example).
At its simplest, an eco district is a place where you don’t need to drive to accomplish daily tasks – they are walkable and bikeable, with low-traffic streets. They prioritise green and open space, there is more opportunity for community, and they are low stress. “Imagine an entire neighbourhood that isn’t prioritising the car?” says Mike. “It doesn’t really exist in much of the USA.”
Another common feature is a higher level of affordability, to create a good social and economic mix. In the USA, there are token affordable housing projects but it is mostly market-rate housing.
US arterials and highways are the types of streets where dense affordable housing is legal (photo credit: Michael Eliason)
Planning around cars is not conducive to people-friendly places
Often, developers in North American cities will just build parking because they think it’s what the market requires. Even transit-oriented development contributes to the problem. Districts then become very car-centric, and public health, open space, nature and community are not priorities.
There is some connection between reducing the number of cars and enabling places to be a little better, but it’s quite a ‘chicken and egg’ scenario. Mike feels it needs a developer to say they want to do a district with no cars, then prove that the model for a car-light place is possible.
One developer in the USA, Culdesac, is building multi-family developments that don’t require parking. Instead, they provide spaces for the community to walk in – pedestrianised streets or alleys, places where cafes can spill out, where community events can be held, or you can just run into your neighbours. It’s harkening back to a way of life before cars became the overwhelming mode of transportation.
Creativity should be at the heart of regulations
Regulations can either be written more creatively, so they permit or incentivise new ideas rather than block them. Or they can be written in a way that encourages people to respond to them more creatively. Mike sees this creativity as essential.
“If we’re just pumping out the same thing over and over again … okay, we know how to do it, and we can maybe do it well, but it might not be the right thing for somebody else. We need places that offer more variability.”
In the USA, for example, most cities have residential zoning that only allows detached houses. Multi-family housing is impossible, because it’s illegal! By contrast, Brussels has a regulation requiring Passivhaus, and provided incentives and support before the requirement became effective. And France has a 50% bio materials mandate for new construction, which is driving more straw panel and mass timber buildings.
There are so many solutions to improving housing affordability
The Netherlands does small districts of self-build housing with around 15 to 30 lots. The cost of infrastructure and management is lower because they’re paying the city rather than a developer, and the city is not seeking a profit. The houses are all designed and built by different people and, in Mike’s words, “the neighbourhoods are amazing. They’re incredible. We should be doing more of that in the USA.”
The Baugruppen model is a hybrid between market-rate development and cooperatives or even social housing.
Mike is a fan of cooperatives, especially the Swiss model for them. It uses a cost-based rent that has created some of “the most fascinating and innovative housing” that he has ever seen.
The Mietshäuser Syndikat – the rental house syndicate – came out of Freiburg while Mike was living there. An umbrella organisation effectively co-buys multi-family property with the tenants and owns it in common. The building then can’t be sold without everyone coming to an agreement, because it’s a 51/49 ownership split. Everything is managed by the residents, who contribute to a solidarity fund to help grow the organisation and help other entities develop projects.
However, the lack of variability in the USA – with very little public housing, cohousing or cooperatives – means it’s going to take a lot of support to grow that ecosystem.
Operable exterior shutters prevent unwanted solar gain in summer, and provide additional privacy year round (photo credit: Michael Eliason)
Housing that responds to climate change is essential
Understanding the impacts of a changing climate is essential. How do we deal with the sun and overheating? Wildfires and smoke? Rain and floods. For this reason, Passivhaus is the starting point for any project that Mike works on. He loves Passivhaus because it’s comfortable and balances high tech and low tech. If you need heating or cooling, it’s the smallest amount possible.
Gaskets and tape help to keep out cold drafts, moisture, and wildfire smoke. (Photo credit: 475 High Performance Building Supply)
More rain will lead to more mould in properties, and Passivhaus de-risks mould to a greater extent. In extremes of heat and cold when you lose power and can’t run cooling or heating systems, Passivhaus increases survivability. Mike cites studies in the USA where buildings designed to the minimum standard of regulations were only habitable in a deep freeze situation for half a day at most. After that, pipes started to burst. Whereas a Passivhaus was relatively warm and habitable for several days.
The climate is an issue whether you live in a bespoke, detached house, or a multi-family building. All of these things are going to affect people, so understanding the most optimal ways to adapt or mitigate the effects is really crucial.
A people-first street in Vienna’s Seestadt (photo credit: Lukasz Karnas)
Better housing can also help to address social isolation
The IPCC has previously talked about the benefits of cohousing and other forms of community-oriented housing. It’s not just that you know everybody in your building, though that day-to-day social connection is important. If you’re also designing a building together then you have similar values and things that you’re prioritising.
There’s a fundamental difference between developing huge, anonymous buildings with 200 or 300 units and smaller buildings. It’s easier to know people and easier to ensure that people are okay if there’s a climate event. Many people who died in the heat dome event in the Pacific Northwest were elderly residents who didn’t have a social network, who didn’t have people who could check on them.
We don’t need to reinvent the future
We already have what we need to create better places. Active solar protection, Passivhaus buildings, low carbon construction all exist in the world. Mike’s message is that, “we can use our imagination to reconfigure them to the condition, spaces or places that we would like, but we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Everything that we need to build low carbon places already exists. We just have to really prioritise them.”
There’s a huge network of people who already know how to do so many of these things, who talk about different ways of building and living. Finding ways to tap into each other’s knowledge and experience is crucial. Then, we can start to change the status quo bias, and the attitude of, ‘things have been this way forever, so why change it?’ By spreading the knowledge about what is possible, we can provide shelter that is moderately affordable, so that, as a society, we can stay connected and stay in the community.
Find out more
Buy Building for People: Designing Livable, Affordable, Low-carbon Communities
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