Its Not Easy Being Green and Big At the same time “green” is the buzz of the real estate industry, the size of American homes is getting bigger. While many are choosing renewable materials, the square feet of space and the amount of materials it takes to construct a home has continued to increase.

This is the result of viewing the concept as “green” as buying one thing instead of another—using bamboo instead of oak. What’s lost on this monster home greening is the space that needs to be heated increases, the footprint of the home increases and likely the distance it takes to travel to and from the home increases. That may be buying green, without thinking green.

I was in a hotel watching one of those real estate shows on cable. There was a house somewhere that had been remodeled and expanded using renewable materials like cork, stone and raw wood. The agent was excited because its easy these days get green for something that looks like green.

It was clear this home was three times the size it had been when the well-intentioned couple started down the green road, and it was located on a large, wooded lot that might have required owning an SUV to access.

According to the National Association of Home Builders, the average home size in the United States was 2,330 square feet in 2004, up from 1,400 square feet in 1970. That means we’re heating and air conditioning more than twice the space we did during the oil crisis of the 1970s. We have more wiring to such electricity, more gas pipes, more heating ducts, more spaces to insulate with green insulation, more appliances, more floors to vacuum, more countertops to clean with green products.

Green is not just about what we buy, it’s about how we live. Green is about how far we live from our work and shopping, its about how often we walk or use mass transit, its about how much space our home occupies and about how much energy we use getting around. Sure, being green is about buying and building with renewable resources, but its also about re-use and restoration and about being conscious not only of what we buy and do, but how much we use.

It’s a curious name, the Shrinking Cities Institute. Kent State University near Akron recently founded this initiative which is expected to address the problems of the minority number of big cities which continue to shrink rather than grow.

As you might have heard, Pittsburgh falls into this category.

A commentary by the Rand Institute’s Barry Balmat and Peter A. Morrison that appeared in the Post-Gazette in 2004 observed that Pittsburgh's population declined nearly 10 percent during the 1990s, in sharp contrast to the 13 percent nationwide population increase. Since 2000, the city's population loss has continued unabated.

That’s just the facts, not the commentary, however. The juice of the story is that it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

We’ll get to the why of that in a bit, but first a little on the thought about what to do with shrinking cities.

Pittsburgh has its problems, and those problems are exemplified in our neighbor, Youngstown, Ohio. Like Pittsburgh over the past half-century Youngstown has been presented with dramatic population loss. Unlike Pittsburgh which had somewhat of a diversified economy, when the steel industry left, the economy left with it. When officials released the Youngstown 2010 Plan (the last plan updated a 1951 plan in 1974) it didn’t cover the usual growth management, rather covering “managing decline.”

Finally, someone says it. The emperor has no clothes. It’s time to “begin drawing the map of a smaller city.”

The movement now barely known as “Shrinking Cities,” started in Germany. It wasn’t the slow decline of the steel industry there, rather the removal of a certain long-standing wall that left many East German cities virtually vacant. It gave Youngstown an idea American cities never had on their own. Why not shrink?

What does that mean exactly? A web page on a “Shrinking Cities” conference at Cleveland State University offered some insight. Shrinking a city could include the demolition or dismantling of under-utilized housing and other building stock, the removal of redundant streets, and downsizing of municipal infrastructure to correspond to declining population.” In Detroit, Saint Louis and other shrinking cities that may mean cutting off services to underutilized areas and giving people there incentives to move out then returning them to nature. In Youngstown that means considering relaxing zoning rules to allow small horse farms or apple orchards and offering incentives for people to move out of abandoned areas.

Is Shrinking something for Pittsburgh to think about? I don’t know the complete answer to that, but I could point out many streets where there are houses you can’t give away. I’ve spent several afternoons on the phone looking for someone to take a free house and have not yet been successful at finding a taker. Do we need so much space for so few people? Can we encourage “clusters” of nice urban areas and leave unused space for wildlife or even farms and orchards?

In Pittsburgh the downtown population is increasing even while the city and region continues to shrink (we’re apparently the only shrinking region these days—in other places only the cities shrink). That means people are moving around inside the region and the underutilized areas are continuing to depopulate. It would be an attractive option in my view to start returning some of these areas to nature.

What Shrinking Cities should not mean, however is a “suburbanization” of the city by tearing down every other house. That’s no more sustainable than a suburb or under-populated city. Cleveland had the right idea when it started to concentrate development in nodes like the Euclid Avenue district. Youngstown has gone a step further with a comprehensive plan for the nodes and the spaces in between with the goal of improving the sustainability and quality of life.

Back to the Rand Institute commentary mentioned at the beginning. Pittsburgh shrinking leads optimists to project a shortage of as many as 125,000 workers in metropolitan Pittsburgh as early as 2008. “What's noteworthy is that Pittsburgh's unfolding demographic future does contain opportunities.” Could that mean we will need the empty houses?

If we start eliminating homes there will be fewer and any economist will tell you smaller supply means more demand and higher prices. On the other hand, The Housing Alliance of Pennsylvania estimates there are approximately 18,000 vacant properties and land in the City of Pittsburgh, about 11.5% of the total housing units. If we start now to reclaim some of the land by “shrinking,” it would take quite some time to get to a small portion of the 18,000 houses.

Shrinking isn’t necessarily a solution, but could prove to be a practical and attractive component in preparing Pittsburgh for a new era as a smaller city.

New urbanist principles would have it that you can get everything you need within a five-minute walk. Most of Pittsburgh's city neighborhoods would not currently fall into this category. The exceptions of course are the city's most popular neighborhoods including Squirrel Hill and to a lesser extent Shadyside. Downtown seems to be quickly progressing to this level as well, however.


The developments on the North Shore, at least West of Federal Street are not shaping up this way. Many times housing has been mentioned as part of the mix, and all the proposed developments are certainly exciting, but housing hasn't played into the mix since the Heinz Lofts and Lincoln at the North Shore. That's unless you count Hotels as housing, which you really can't because the vacancy rates fluxuate with events limiting the extent to which we can achieve 24-hour neighborhoods.


Post-Gazette article on North Shore developments.

The first time I saw a Katrina Cottage I thought "wow, that would look great on Spring Hill." Spring Hill is a neighborhood in Pittsburgh that has many "shotgun shack" type houses on the sides of the hill where mill workers and others once lived. These were built in the Victorian era and often had ornamentation not unlike the painted ladies in San Francisco.

I also can't help but think that the same folks who want small condos and apartments might be persuaded to have an apartment with a little lawn otherwise known as a Katrina Cottage.



An article from a Congress for a New Urbanism explains: "Quality small-scale housing represented by Katrina Cottages is a much-needed alternative in communities determined to address affordability issues without downgrading the architectural character of neighborhoods. Together, these cottages can work as clusters and bungalow courts that can enrich old and new neighborhoods and provide safe, affordable housing for people who might not qualify for quality architecture in larger scale. Yet conventional zoning often precludes this alternative because of setback, lot size, and other restrictions that force only larger homes on larger lots."

I still have images of little Victorians lining Pittsburgh stairways with landscaped edging that would make for a great place to live and walk and really help redefine Pittsburgh as a walking city. Its hard for a city with Pittsburgh's geography to be a walking city, but hey, how many people walk all over Telegraph Hill? Is Fineview or Spring Hill so different? Not at all. A few flowers and some Katrina Cottages and our stairways would be a better, even great place to walk.