The Need for Aged Buildings in Norwood (Part 1)

No new houses have been built in Norwood over the last ten years. The bulk of Norwood’s homes were built over the first three decades of the twentieth century.

Q: Is this a failure?

The Census Bureau’s estimates show a tiny slice of new homes built since 1980, which are completely erased when one looks at the potential margin of error. The homes built before 1940 represent a Pac-Man-sized chunk of the total pie.

Jane Jacobs posits that cities require diversity (referring to uses) in order to maintain functions such as public safety and cross-use. To obtain/retain this kind of diversity, one of the conditions is the presence of both new and old buildings, comingled.

New buildings carry higher costs. For commercial uses, this requires higher rents from established, high-turnover, and/or subsidized uses. Old buildings don’t just carry an intrinsic historical value, time has amortized their construction costs. Riskier or low-yield ventures need old buildings, if but only as an initial proving ground.

While the numbers displayed above only indicate the age of housing units, it is still an interesting case by which to unpack Jacobs’ chapter on “The Need for Aged Buildings.”

Newness, and its superficial gloss of well-being, is a very perishable commodity. “The Need for Aged Buildings” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p193)

Economies of scale in real estate development have conditioned us to accept large swaths territory with buildings of the same age or period as the norm. In many ways zoning (and building) codes prevent the natural, granular change that Jacobs identifies in healthy city districts.

Barring disaster, things stay the same. The impulse Jacobs fights is to wipe the slate clean and start again when a district sputters and fails. It only restarts the cycle.

The only harm of aged buildings to a city district or street is the harm that eventually comes of nothing but old age—the harm that lies in everything becoming worn out. But a city area in such a situation is not a failure because of being all old. It is the other way around. The area is all old because it is a failure. “The Need for Aged Buildings” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p188-9)

It is difficult to diagnose the “failure” of Norwood. Part of it lies with incomplete data, even among the housing unit data I’ve included. Imagine the total renovation of a dwelling through reinvestment. The “year built” stays the same, but the housing unit carries new construction costs.