5 Over 1 Buildings & Battles For Dense Housing
A creation in California, and a battle over aesthetics & gentrification across the country.
New In Town
If you live in a medium to large size West Coast city, you may be familiar with a somewhat new type of multi-family housing structure: the 5 over 1. If the rather bland name escapes recognition and fails to conjure up an image in your mind, here’s one.
As the name implies, the building consists of 5 residential units over 1 commercial unit, although the exact number of residential and commercial floors fluctuates depending on zoning regulations, which often limits heights due to fire or earth quake concerns.
While this building may come across as boring, uninspired, and perhaps a bit arbitrary, there are concrete and deliberate reasons for its existence. It all starts with a Hawaiian beach, Tim Smith, and Little Tokyo.
Birth of a Building
Tim Smith, a Californian architect, is an important figure and originator of this housing style. In the ’90s, the story goes, according to a Bloomberg piece, Mr. Smith was relaxing on a Hawaiian beach, reading updates to zoning regulations when he noticed an important change. New adjustments were made that allowed for fire-retardant wood, a cheaper alternative to other conventional building materials.
While there perhaps have been other buildings with a similar layout before Smith, he’s the first to create the 5 over 1 in a deliberate, mass-producible way.
“Let’s put it this way, no one has challenged me to say that they did it first.”
Tim Smith
This led to the birth of the very first 5 over 1 building in Little Tokyo, LA, not even 30 years ago. Upon realizing that this rather historic building wasn’t that far away from me, I took the liberty of visiting the site myself to capture it for this post.
Was it worth the 1 hour drive to capture? Sure, but not quite because of its appearance. Staying to the theme of being rather blocky, blending in with the environment, the façade of Casa Heiwa isn’t particularly remarkable, outside of little quirks.
But, like most things, it’s the inside that counts. The importance of the 5 over 1 is its cost effectiveness. The cheaper materials allow the structure to be easily & affordably produced, as well as being relatively dense by American city standards. Because of these traits, they play a big role in increasing the supply of housing in America, something in dire need of fixing.
Housing Inventory In United States
This building was extremely consequential for modern urban housing in the United States. Over the past 20 years or so, 5 over 1’s have been popping up across the country, especially on the West Coast.
In particular, mid-size cities like Eugene, Oregon have been able to take advantage of this, getting to higher density levels in a college town without large high rises. The Pacific Northwest in general is fond of 5 over 1’s, sprouting up all over in Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver. However, another strength of the structure is it’s very inoffensiveness, which gives it the ability to blend in to many different cities across the country.
However, perhaps because of their proliferation, they’ve also garnered much disdain in some circles.
Critiques
There are two main critiques that I will be focusing on
Aesthetics
For perhaps understandable reasons, many people don’t like the repetitive, same-y look that comes with the structures. While this may seem like a somewhat surface level and subjective critique, it’s not always treated as such.
In an article on Common Edge, a publication dedicated to architecture, a post proclaims that the expansion of 5 over 1’s are a “pandemic” and “a plague”. While the author mentions other critiques, such as price level (which I could not find a source for), he’s mainly focusing on the appearances.
Liking the exteriors of a building is a completely subjective matter, but when we talk about urban planning & housing economics, we need to keep in mind the actual purpose of housing. Function should always be over form.
“The ungainly boxes often have a number of tricked-out exterior elaborations, with applied aesthetics to make the buildings feel comfortable in a small New England city—but in the end they are as dead and deadly simple as any modernist block.”
Dickinson
He acknowledges the utility of this dense housing: to make living comfortable in a city, yet discards it in the end for a rather vacuous description. This isn’t the fault of the author, but it’s the consequence of critiquing housing purely because of its appearance rather than its utility.
Unfortunately, these perspectives actually do end up preventing new housing from being built, in favor of keeping the character of the neighborhood over increasing the housing supply.
I could bring up many other examples of this, however there isn’t much more that I can say to this point specifically without it spilling over to the next. As I mentioned above, the aesthetic critique is sometimes used as a prop to talk about other issues, such as pricing & gentrification.
Gentrification
Another common critique is that building this type of housing, and density in general, causes displacement, gentrification, and rising home prices.
Oddly enough, one of the major sources of this perspective is TikTok. In an article from Vox, they cover a trend that involves pointing out new 5 over 1 type buildings and calling out gentrification. However, again this comes from a purely aesthetic preference, ignoring whether or not such buildings actually cause displacement.
The problem with this conflation became clear when I looked into the building depicted in the aforementioned Camden TikTok video. Branch Village isn’t a “gentrification building.” It’s actually an affordable housing project funded in part by low-income housing tax credits.
Jerusalem Demsas
This is the case for many 5 over 1’s due to their cheap construction costs, making them good candidates for affordable housing.
But even if new housing going up for the specific purpose of being affordable, there’s evidence to show that just the creation of new housing alone has a deflationary effect on prices. In a study Asquith, Mast, and Reed, Supply Shock Versus Demand Shock: The Local Effects of New Housing in Low-Income Areas they show that building new market rate housing (yes, market rate, not affordable) decreases local housing costs by 5 - 7 percent.
This is in contrast to many commonly held beliefs about housing. In an article by Noah Smith, he details one of his experiences in having this conversation:
“I was talking to a friend the other day, a San Francisco anti-eviction activist, and said that allowing more housing construction in the city would be a great way to lower rents. She looked at me in horror, blinked and asked “Market rate?” I nodded. She was speechless.
My experience was far from unusual. To my friend and many others, it has become an article of faith that building market-rate housing raises rents, rather than lowers them. The logic of Econ 101 — that an increase in supply lowers price — is alien to many progressives, both in the Bay Area and around the country.”
Noah Smith
The position that more housing needs to be built is unfortunately at odds with some groups who have the same goal of lowering housing costs; they focus more on price controls, such as rent control, and fear that increasing supply will also increase demand.
Where does this position come from?
Most likely, this comes from an induced demand-type reasoning. induced demand is the economic phenomena that, when supply is increased, demand increases as well. The common example is adding more lanes to a highway; regardless of however many lanes you add, they will always be full. This is because people respond to an increase in supply by a parallel increase in demand.
That makes sense, why isn’t it the same as housing then? Well, roads are common goods while housing is not. That is to say, driving on a road is free and purchasing a house costs money. Put more succinctly by UCLA Professor Monkkonen on this very same question:
This comparison is not apt, because freeway access is free and housing is not. Congestion occurs when the absence of prices causes a shortage. A housing crisis occurs when a shortage of housing causes high prices. This crucial difference means that new supply is almost useless in the former and incredibly important in the latter.”
Monkkonen
This reinforces the earlier point that, even if the new housing isn’t specifically meant to be affordable, it will still have downward pressure on local prices.
Closing Thoughts
I believe it’s clear that 5 over 1’s are extremely important in adding density to many American cities in dire need of it. They are unique in their ease of production and adherence to zoning laws, often built to be affordable and still deflationary when they’re not.
One way that we could address the issue of bland façade’s is to loosen up zoning laws so more types of housing can be built. It’s often very hard to build anything other than single family housing in American cities, with very limited zoning for density.
Much of the literature on housing, density, and prices is relatively new in the academic world. Because of this, we can see the ripple effect of the debate continue to play out over the coming years, one notable example is Oregon.