First Suburbs
Renewing Housing, Preserving Neighborhoods
CUDC Quarterly, 2:3/4 - Fall, 2002
The First Suburbs Consortium was founded in 1996 to stem disinvestment and outmigration from Cleveland’s aging suburbs. The Consortium now has 14 member cities with a combined population of 445,000, and it has become a nationally recognized model for local government action to work against the forces of sprawl. All of the member cities were developed in large part before 1960, and all rely heavily on housing for their tax base and economic vitality.
Seeking to strengthen the marketability and competitiveness of its residential neighborhoods, the Consortium began the First Suburbs Housing Intiative, now approaching its final phase. The goal of the initiative was to reinvent two under-performing housing types: the post-war bungalow and the two-family house. The initiative also includes ideas for improving the neighborhoods in which these types of housing are situated. Target neighborhoods for the initiative (see map left) are in Parma, Maple Heights, Garfield Heights, and Fairview Park (for bungalows) and Cleveland Heights, Shaker Heights, and Lakewood (for two-families). However, the results of the initiative will be transferable to other communities with similar housing stock.
Two-family houses in Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights.
The Urban Design Center has been working on the initiative in partnership with City Architecture and real estate consultants GreatLakes cb. The project is being funded by the First Suburbs member cities, the Gund Foundation, the Cleveland Foundation, several local banks, and Community Development Block Grant funds provided through the Cuyahoga County Department of Development. The initiative has three phases: a market study, neighborhood and housing unit designs, and an implementation plan.
Market Study: The first phase of the project was a market study conducted by GreatLakes cb. Current and former residents of bungalows and two-families were surveyed to determine which features of the housing and the neighborhoods keep people in place and which cause them to leave. A key finding of the market study is that—among people who moved away from bungalow and two-family neighborhoods—there were no improvements to either the housing stock or the neighborhood that would have caused them to stay. Although many former residents said they were happy in their first ring house and neighborhood, job or lifestyle changes had led them to seek housing elsewhere. No design change to their old home or neighborhood would have altered their decision. This implies that trying to bring the aesthetics and development patterns of newer suburbs to the inner ring is clearly not the formula for success. Instead, the market study findings suggest that First Suburbs could attract new residents by focusing on the unique and inherently desirable characteristics of their housing stock and neighborhoods to attract buyers who aren’t finding what they want in the outer ring.
Housing unit designs: Post-War bungalows abound in many first ring suburbs. These modest, one-story, wood-frame houses were built in huge numbers after World War II to house returning soldiers and their new families. While the small scale, neat appearance, and colonial detailing of post-war bungalows have a certain charm, these houses tend to be monotonous when they occur, as they so often do, in large numbers. The proposed bungalow improvements, developed by Mark Duluk at City Architecture, capitalize on the most desirable features of this housing type: a compact floor plan and a first floor bedroom. The bungalow designs show an expanded master bedroom on the first floor, a feature that has much appeal to prospective homebuyers. The designs open up the first floor living, dining, and kitchen spaces to create better flow and to maximize the flexibility and efficiency of these small houses. Bold modifications are proposed for the exterior facades, to overcome the "cookie cutter" effect that often occurs when neighborhoods have block after block of bungalows.
Two-family homes were once seen as the gateway to homeownership, since the income from renting one unit could subsidize mortgage costs for the homeowner living in the other unit. While some two-families are still occupied in this way, the more prevalent trend is for absentee owners to purchase large numbers of two-families in a neighborhood as investment properties. Often this leads to lower levels of maintenance, high tenant turnover, and neighborhood instability. The two-family designs developed by City Architecture focus on improving the market appeal of the owner’s suite, making owner occupancy a much more appealing option for a prospective buyer. The designs maximize the flexibility of two-families by providing ways that these houses can be reconfigured for a variety of household types, including unrelated individuals, extended families, and live/work uses.
One of the bungalow prototypes
before and after renovations.
Neighborhood designs: Context has a major effect on the market value of a house. A beautifully rehabbed bungalow or two-family house will still lack market appeal if the surrounding neighborhood is not attractive to prospective residents. With this in mind, the udc has been looking at potential improvements for each of the seven target neighborhoods. These range from simple things, like planting more trees onstreets that lack them, to more ambitious ideas such as introducing new types of housing into uniform neighborhoods. The UDC’s plans also focus on pedestrian improvements to parks, shopping and other amenities.
Implementation: With the design proposals largely complete, the implementation phase of the First Suburbs Housing Initiative is now underway. This phase will focus on developing the financial tools and technical assistance programs that will enable rehabilitation of individual properties. At the same time, the consortium member cities will be considering the public investments and neighborhood improvements that will help make the whole thing pay off. –Terry Schwarz
Bungalows in Parma after renovations to units and addition of a shared garden median.
Neighborhood Design Examples (Click on images to enlarge.)
Garfield Heights (Bungalow Neighborhood)
Shaker Heights (Two-family Neighborhood)
Beyond the Market Study
Great Lakes CB’s surveys for the First Suburbs Housing Initiative provided useful data on the housing choices and preferences of people who currently live in the target neighborhoods or have recently moved out, and the unit improvements by City Architecture faithfully respond to their findings. But how do we find out about people who aren’t there? nor ever have been? How do we identify the new markets that could be attracted to these neighborhoods –with the right housing product and area amenities? And are these even the right questions to be asking? Should we instead be looking somewhere beyond market studies for what makes the kind of home we think of with pride and affection?
Market studies, by their nature, are projections of the status quo; the data they produce are measures of the present and estimates of the (necessarily)near future. But building too precisely for the market of the moment is a recipe for speedy obsolescence and we need to develop prototypes that transcend local fluctuations in demand. After all, the most reliable trend in today’s housing market is an increasing diversity of household types. Instead of the ubiquitous Ozzie and Harriet family unit that spawned the post-war bungalow neighborhoods, we have become a nation of multifarious, often temporary, and sometimes bizarre household groups whose only predictable characteristic is advancing age.
Perhaps the most effective way to respond to such a heterogeneous market place is to focus on flexibility –designing units that work for many different kinds of households, rather than targeting any particular segment of the market. The flexible unit increases its marketability by appealing to a larger pool of prospective buyers which is a far less risky strategy than trying to carve out a specific market niche with a precisely tailored product. It also supports the goal of more sociable, sustainable neighborhoods which mix people of different ages, incomes, household compositions and lifestyles.–Ruth Durack
