Mike Eliason

@holz-bau.bsky.social

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cities need: car-light climate adaptive ecodistricts w/ mass timber passivhaus mid-rise buildings

architect & founder: Larch Lab.
Author, 'Building for People' (Island Press, 12/2024: https://www.larchlab.com/book/)

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Reply to

Mike Eliason

btw the entire chapter was authored by ben carson - trump's own HUD secretary.

from a personal/professional standpoint - this is incredulous our energy codes are already insufficient for what we are witnessing wrt climate change. las vegas's low was 98F last night. if they had lost power like houston - it would be a heat event. climate adaptive homes are an *imperative*

HUD funds a number of multifamily retrofit programs. remember all the wildfire smoke from last year? this isn't just energy efficiency retrofits - but air quality as well (passivhaus mandates when?). energy storage - so renters can survive in their homes during heat, cold snaps, and smoke events.

so uh on top of decimating HUD... project 2025 is proposing to kill the 30 year mortgage. good luck ever buying housing again

project 2025 also calls to kill missing middle zoning reforms, hold exclusionary zoning and economic segregation as sacrosanct, and promote endless sprawl. 'American homeowners... know best what is in the interest of their neighborhoods and communities' yikes.

uh, this is quite a footnote here 'Housing supply does remain a problem in the U.S., but constructing more units at the low end of the market will not solve the problem.'

the biden white house proposed using the Housing Supply Fund to ease rents for low and moderate income renters, and using the HSF to reduce barriers to affordable housing. Project 2025: 'Repeal the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation. Eliminate the new Housing Supply Fund.'

Reply to

Michael Tae Sweeney

sustained some heavy losses tho

Reply to

Mike Eliason

this isn't some far off event. last winter was CZ 4-ish for much of MN. ASHRAE's map already has portions of MN's climate zone map dropping from 7 to 6A due to (past) climate zone migration and warming. that data predates weirding from last decade, too.

nearly a decade ago, a NASA study showed that even at RCP4.5 warming scenario - could see climate zone 3A (that's Atlanta, folks) migrate all the way up to Minneapolis. public health outcomes of this would be disastrous. millions of buildings with significant issues. ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citation...

Reply to

Costa Samaras

incredibly low embodied carbon, virtually no cost to operate, doesn't get stuck in traffic, doesn't endanger pedestrians or cyclists, faster than transit, flattens cities, no road wear... it's incredible that there isn't currently a tax credit for this climate hero yes, please!

Bit of a hail mary... Does anyone have a decent photo looking down Rieselfeldallee - the main street (w/ grassy tram) in #Freiburg's Rieselfeld - preferably with trees and green facades in bloom? Please boost! Similar to this view. Have a quality issue w/ photo I was planning on using in the book.

still cannot get over how quiet and safe it was to navigate tokyo with the kiddos - a city of nearly 14 million... with right-sized trucks all over the place... cars that actually stop for pedestrians... car-light and car-free streets galore...

Reply to

Mike Eliason

This book is the culmination of years of research, advocacy, and knowledge share - building towards a vision of equitable, car-light, ecologically oriented neighborhoods. This has been... quite an effort. More on the details soon. What a wild trip.

Reply to

Mike Eliason

and other countries with less limiting building codes. here's a perimeter block proposed for zuerich by scheibler villard. darker polygons are stairs (10 total) 1-4BR units. incredibly different character than most any US multifamily www.scheiblervillard.ch/projekte/

in the US, point access blocks above 3 stories are illegal outside of seattle, NYC, and hawaii our starting point is units connected to a hallway that is also connected to two (or more) stairs. typically a double loaded corridor it leads to a fundamentally different way of designing housing.

talk to US architects who do multifamily buildings about the absurdities of unit layouts. invariably it becomes a game of just squeezing in as many units as possible. it's subtractive, rather than additive

we also don't regulate floor plate depth to degree other countries do - leading to bowling alley shaped units that are oriented perpendicular to street, and these diagonal... things. massive 1600sf 3BR with corner aspect (at best), no cross ventilation. that's a 4/5 BR in a point access block!

Reply to

Mike Eliason

even within this arrangement, there is a higher degree of flexibility than possible in US architecture. note that 2 of 3 cross ventilate. all bedrooms have windows. better daylight in kit/liv/dining areas too (wide v deep). german has lexicon for this as well. 'durchwohnung'

Reply to

Mike Eliason

in germany, for low, midrise, and even highrise buildings - you generally have 3 approaches you can utilize for planning units - each with different pros and cons. these are the single loaded (more common), double loaded corridor (rare), and point access block (most common)

had a last minute interview yesterday with a journalist about US multifamily housing, how our codes induce apartments that are far less family-friendly or livable than other countries, and we ended up down the building code rabbit hole. that's where it got interesting.

paris ecoquartier via bing's AI image creator

i will never understand why 'Transit Oriented Density' in the US looks nothing like this, and is instead still incredibly autocentric, with massive double loaded corridor buildings that can't adapt to changing climate, and low-quality public spaces...

Was experimenting with #Dalle3 trying to conjure up some car-light/free #bicycle #urbanism with my youngest kiddo this weekend, and we came up with some really compelling images... Why can't we have low-carbon places in the US like this?

Trying to get some decent looking car-light/free bicycle urbanism out of Bing's image generator - not as easy as it looks... But there's something fairly enticing about these...

perfection

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