The Dwelling Complex II. The Live-Work Unit; D. Transition to Places for New Work

The “American Dream” has always included not only owning your own home but being your own boss. It is odd therefore that not nearly as much thought, effort, and money have gone into how to provide affordable workspace as into achieving affordable dwelling. If there is actually no right to decent housing for all, there is widespread recognition that its provision is highly desirable. The same ought to be true of good workspace, especially of the smaller, business-startup variety. As previously discussed, a live-work unit provides affordable workspace by including its cost within the overall mortgage. The problem is that some would-be business owners cannot afford the dwelling in the first place. A community’s economic health over time necessitates that somewhere within it there is a starter market of places affordable by new, often fragile businesses. To renew itself, every community must have some “cheap space,” as Jane Jacobs bluntly and accurately observed in 1961 in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs had in mind recycling out-of-date buildings in older industrial-era cities. Four decades later, in many places such buildings are either demolished, where Jacobs’ wisdom was insufficiently heeded, or already cycled back up into expensive fashionability, or — in the country’s post-World War II sprawl suburbs — they never existed in the first place. The truth of Jacobs’ analysis abides, but must find other more currently available building types. Utilizing outdated office parks One promising situation is out-of-date office parks. Old suburban office buildings are often similar to the thicker varieties of late nineteenth-century factory buildings that made good loft conversions two generations ago. In both types the extreme plan depth (about 90 feet) is problematic, but redeemed by ceiling height. With hung ceilings and old mechanical and lighting systems removed, the outmoded office building’s dismal eight-foot spaces often prove to be eleven feet high or more. Equipped with new, decentralized, mechanical systems, such buildings may provide a widely available source of cheap, serviceable startup space. Wherever this occurs, zoning should be changed so that it is permissable to put housing on the vast surrounding parking lots invariably present; the urbanism of a complete community should always be in mind. Where recyclable buildings do not exist, new-built cheap space, embedded in urbanism, should be created. There is an American tradition of false-front cheap commercial buildings that make good streets. It is the building type of film westerns: shacks with billboardish fronts that still define an adequate Main Street. Modern prefabricated metal buildings, with decent false fronts and arranged to form linear street frontage, can make a provisional first-generation town center good enough for any community. But the inexpensive false front is still a building, and even shared space within one may be too firm a commitment for a new business. Historically, the bottom level for any business was the pushcart; more than one great department store began in a pushcart or kiosk. But these are inherently limited in the types of businesses (and weather) they can sustain. Between the false front and the pushcart, though, is still another type: the public market building. Many towns used to run a market for the use of small merchants and producers. Markets were often not weatherproof, being essentially a set of roofs, varying in permanence and cost, under which each sales stand could operate on an individualized basis. Once businesses were successfully stabilized they would decant into a nearby “proper” commercial building. Some of these markets survive and remain popular, and new ones have been constructed. In principle a municipality could extend the idea of the public market into providing cheap space, with short leases, for any sort of small enterprise that otherwise could not afford to start a business in town. The time has come both to update old methods of providing cheap workspace via building recycling and to reintroduce still-useful building types that also offer such space. The great dumbing down of postwar suburbia discarded or marginalized both the techniques and the building types. In so doing, not only was the past lost but the future put at risk. u