Live-Work Planning and Design: Zero-Commute Housing

In Oakland, California In 1988, Thomas Dolan designed what is said to be the first new-construction live-work community in the US since the Great Depression. It was called South Prescott Village, and it struck a blow at the American fixation on separating the workplace from the home.

Not that there hadn’t been other individuals striking similar blows. In the 1970s, artists moved—illegally—into empty or nearly empty manufacturing lofts in New York, turning the buildings’ high-ceilinged, wide-open interiors into spaces where painters and sculptors could both live and work.

But that was an improvisational operation. The artists in the cast-iron-fronted buildings of SoHo tolerated a lot of discomfort in return for gaining cheap, flexible cubic footage.

Tom Dolan has created spaces for artists, but he’s also fashioned live-work structures for all sorts of other people—individuals, couples, and families who saw the practical advantages of being in one location for most of the hours of the day. Live-Work Planning and Design presents what he’s learned from 27 years as an architect of these mixed-use buildings, primarily in California and the southeastern US.

New Urbanism finds virtue in mixed-use at the neighborhood scale; Dolan brings that sensibility down to the individual building. In this generously illustrated (mostly black-and-white) book, he and a small number of outside contributors, including marketing specialist Jackie Benson and market analysts

Todd Zimmerman and Laurie Volk, cover a full spectrum of concerns: how live-work is treated by zoning and building codes, how live-works can fit into a neighborhood or town center, how they deal with parking, and what sorts of modifications are needed in old buildings, among others.

The nadir for working at home occurred in 1980, when only 2.2 million workers—2.3 percent of the nation’s workforce—worked at home, Zimmerman and Volk report, relying on Census data. The decline in working at home reversed by 1990, and by 2005, 11.3 million Americans worked at home, though only a minority of them did all of their work there. Given the increasing instability of corporate employment and the demand for near-constant communication, it seems clear that the number of people working at home will continue to rise.

Flexhouse potential

“The potential market for live-work consists not only of people who currently work at home full-time, or even those who work at home part of the time, but also those who would work at home if only their home could accommodate work,” Zimmerman and Volk suggest. The analysts see a strong potential for the “flexhouse,” a form of live-work that’s been integrated into many greenfield traditional neighborhood developments (TNDs), including Habersham in South Carolina, Kentlands in Maryland, and Glenwood Park in Atlanta. Generally, a flexhouse has a store, shop, restaurant, or office on the ground floor, fronting the street, and has residential space above. Depending on how it’s constructed and what the local regulations are, a flexhouse’s ground floor and upper floors can undergo many different combinations of uses over the years.

Flexhouses can be a means of jump-starting a downtown. They bring business activity to a street that may not yet be solidly enough established to support large retailers. Habersham has 33 mixed-use flexhouses arranged on two sides of a street, Dolan explains in one of the book’s many case studies. The flexhouses, he observes, “frame the main street very successfully.” Some are owned by businesses that occupy the ground floor and rent the upstairs to employees.

Dolan carefully explains the nuances of the various types of live-work buildings, including how decisions on matters such as fire protection—sprinklers or construction that slows the spread of fire from one floor to another—affect the ability to mix and change uses over the years.

The book has two chief flaws. First, Dolan likes terminology too much. Again and again, he tells readers that live-works fall into three categories: live-with (work and residence occur in one “common atmosphere”; live-near (work and residence are separated by a wall, floor, or ceiling); and live-nearby (work occurs outside the residence but on the same property). Those terms strike me as murky. “Live-near” sounds too much like “live-nearby.” By heavily relying on three such indistinct terms, the book sometimes seems a continual test of the reader’s recall. 

Second, the book uses too many methods of presenting the same information. There are sidebars, short tips, large tables, small tables—even an  interview of Dolan that was conducted in 1992. Hint to prospective authors: If you’re lucky enough to write a book, be careful about how many odds and ends you drop into it.

Sound advice

Nevertheless, this is a book that explores important territory and gives sound advice. Dolan was drawn to live-work by questions such as these: “Why do we leave our houses empty all day and our offices empty all night? Can we afford this kind of duplicative waste? What if deciding not to devote two separate locations to the two most time-consuming activities of our lives—living and working—actually resulted in happier people, better communities, and significant environmental and social benefits? What if the elimination of waste creates opportunities to build community?”

He contends that bringing living and working quarters near one another, sometimes in the same building, is likely to produce better communities: “Being in one place most of the time engenders an attachment to and pride in that place, and a demand for a more well-considered environment.” Good point.

Despite his enthusiasm, he is a realist, and recognizes live-work’s drawbacks. A chief problem: Individuals who work at home alone soon end up hungering for relief from their isolation. In his own projects, he tries to create opportunities for casual interaction and spontaneous socializing. He often provides a courtyard that people will pass through. If the entry path goes through a courtyard, residents will frequently see and perhaps chat with one another. Seating and gathering places should be installed nearby.

He emphasizes the need to skillfully orchestrate transitions and divisions between the public and private portions of a building or a unit: “Any residence or live-work space is subject to an ‘intimacy gradient,’ whereby the most public part is at the entrance and the farther into the unit that one penetrates, the more private the spaces become.”

Dolan identifies a number of common live-work mistakes. They include:

• “Acting on the mistaken belief that live-work can thrive in isolated, single-use situations such as a cul-de-sac subdivision or an isolated industrial district (unless it’s a pioneering artists-only project).”

• Placing for-sale or expensive rental live-work projects in a viable commercial or industrial area. The well-heeled new residents will immediately complain about noise or other aspects of the preexisting businesses. The residents (and the jump in real estate values) may drive old industries out.

• “Developing an individual live-work project aimed at artists or small-business entrepreneurs, then allowing the project to devolve into strictly residential; the result will be a greatly diminished sense of community within the project once tenants or owners are ‘only sleeping there.’”

Dolan’s book is an enormously knowledgeable guide to fitting work and living back together. It will be useful to architects, planners, builders, developers, and, most of all, urbanists.

John Wiley & Sons, 2012, 251 pp., $80 hardcover