"Building for People" by Michael Eliason

A book review

Building for People (Island Press, 2024) is the first book of Michael Eliason, the Seattle-based architect in large part responsible for the budding movement for single-stair reform in the United States. In the book, Eliason expands beyond his signature single-stair argument and treats urban development at the district level. The impulse in urbanist circles to bring European ideas to the United States is quite common, and is often met with counterarguments about feasibility and local realities, and warnings of the futility of “copy and pasting.” Eliason stays largely ahead of these critiques by offering transferable strategies and descriptions of the unique European governance structures that make eco-districts possible. The book functions as a sort of manifesto by bringing varied materials, approaches, and techniques into a single document — and for the most part avoids the breathless tone that manifestos can fall into.

He begins the book’s introduction with the following epigraph, a quote from Catherine Bauer’s 1934 classic, Modern Housing:

“Moreover, modern housing provides certain minimum amenities for every dwelling: cross-ventilation, for one thing; sunlight, quiet, and a pleasant outlook from every window.”

Eliason notes that this element of Bauer’s work is “one of the most prescient in her book” — and he’s right. Bauer’s concern with resident quality of life and unit orientation, a common impulse in Modernist urban planning shared by architects like Le Corbusier, is seeing echoes in our contemporary movement to legalize the single-stair buildings that allow for more pleasant, generous apartments. This is a concern that is simply not reflected in multifamily housing today, which is built along the lines of hotels and offer windows on only one side.

In a big-tent urbanist coalition set on optimizing urbanity and agglomeration effects in American cities by stimulating housing supply, Eliason represents those deeply concerned with what the BVILD scenario would look like if executed with existing building codes and planning practices. Eliason seems to be a leftist (probably wouldn’t call himself a YIMBY), and has drawn the ire of more supply-side types by explicitly arguing against the efficacy of market-rate housing in keeping rents down. Having seen, experienced, and worked on European projects with superior outcomes than what we’re seeing built here, making eco-districts work in the US has become his jihad.

His incisive commentary on the problems of American multifamily construction was first expressed via his podcast “The Livable, Low-Carbon City,” policy papers from his firm LarchLab, and zealous posting on Twitter and later BlueSky, where he has perfected a template for displaying sumptuous point-access block social housing projects. His public expounding has built him a large following who anticipated he would use his book as an opportunity to express his views in crystallized form.

In Building for People, Eliason continues with his structural critique of how the US regulates the design and construction of multi-family construction, consciously drawing heavily from European precedents. But his larger argument is that the European eco-district form, which he experienced and worked with during his years living and working in Freiburg, Germany, is the best way to approach urban development in the future.

Eco-districts are car-light, transit-connected districts with the density of a city but the characteristics of a village, which have largely been pioneered on brownfields and old airports in Northern and Western European cities. The eco-district approach is separate from infill development, which Eliason argues is necessary but insufficient for the challenge of rapidly increasing housing supply within a sustainable development pattern.

Eliason’s district-level thesis is complemented by valuable insights at the scale of the building (i.e. building codes, passive shading, and natural, low-carbon materials), and strategies for managing the realities of climate change like extreme heat, wildfire pollution, and heavy rainfall. “Building for People” is divided into four body sections: planning the eco-district, quality of life and public health, climate adaptation and nature, and building decarbonization.

He is quite comprehensive, spending time on architectural competitions, soundproofing, RFP processes, land disposition, rainwater retention, urban agriculture, cargo e-bikes for urban logistics, the Passive House standard, social integration, models for collective development and living (i.e. baugruppen), urban design, designing for the needs of women and children, passive solar protection, the “yes, and…” approach to community engagement, low-embodied carbon building materials, building reuse and future-proofing, the details of European window technology, water reuse, terraces, balconies, and loggias.

That Eliason simply asks asks all these questions and gathers these areas of consideration all under one roof is arguably just as important as the answers he provides. American planning is siloed in theory and practice, and Eliason resolves to chip away a this by exposing the reader to a European system that is more publicly-oriented and forward looking than (and perhaps intractably different from) the American system. He would only be accused of lacking cohesion by a reader that doesn’t see how all of the subjects Eliason treats are inter-connected.

Beyond the universal project of the book and into his writing, Eliason is at his best when explaining how double-egress rules constrain apartment layout, describing how to maximize occupant comfort, well-being and health, critiquing the American obsession with densifying arterials but not single-family neighborhoods, lambasting the American approach to Transit-Oriented Development, and communicating how select European governance processes work. He keeps peeling back layers of the built environment onion that most readers wouldn’t even know to look for. Eliason doesn’t hide his passion for his work and that he sees this book as an important landmark in his personal and professional life.

Eliason’s book is given its thrust and cohesion by the eco-district frame. It is engaging and digestible enough to lend to a city official responsible for housing or planning in the hopes that they might take inspiration. Indeed, he characterizes the book in the introduction as a “manual” that brings together answers to decades of questions he has asked himself about why America struggles to build the kinds of places increasingly common across the pond. He pre-empts critiques about cohesion by acknowledging the wide-ranging scope of this book and his effort to bring seemingly disparate themes together.

The impact of Building for People as a reading experience is somewhat diminished by a trend of typographical errors and seemingly lightly-edited paragraphs. For instance, the zone d’aménagement concerté, France’s legal structure for large-scale urban development, is misspelled as zone d’aménagement concrete. The book is complemented by a large number of beautiful images and diagrams, some of which seem to serve more as a thematic illustration than a “figure,” even when I would have liked to know the name and date of the project depicted. Finally, I would have liked to see Eliason to land the plane on the eco-district thesis just a bit more — perhaps with a more focused meta-analysis of European eco-districts and the governance structures that enabled them, policy levers for eco-districts in the US, and a map of existing and planned eco-district projects in Europe for the readers’ further perusal. I know that Eliason has strong views on the importance of non-market housing, and I would be interested to read work of his in the future that has a more explicit political valence, addresses challenges with multifamily lending, or goes all-in on critiquing the American model code establishment. A few more rounds of editing, and perhaps a clearer up-front communication of what exactly the book is and what it’s doing, could have made this document even more cohesive and impactful than it already is.

Michael Eliason’s Building for People is an invaluable bible of city-building strategies that quite effectively straddles the utopian and the practical. Even as the book expresses progressive ideas and is written by someone who would doubtless call himself a progressive, its argument has a small element of “standing athwart history yelling stop”, in the sense that what the average urbanist sees as progress — that is, new things; a new TOD or apartment building — is in fact entrenching low quality of life, car dependency, and low climate adaptivity.

If even a handful of big-city housing and planning officials in the US get their hands on a copy of Building for People, the movement for single-stair reform continues, and we see greater porosity of European building products and best practices into the US — then we might finally start getting it right.