Kenneth Namkung of Monument Office | Suburbanism Exhibit in New York City | The Origins of Mass Produced Housing
Transcript
Announcer 00:02
Welcome to American Building, a weekly recorded show whose mission is to share an alternative perspective of what we build in America, and why. Together we discover how the work of the real estate industry connects to every American. In season two, we focused on how buildings changed as a result of the pandemic. In this season, we're revisiting conversations from previous seasons, to see where Americans put their heads down at night. Together, we will discover the many definitions of home across the New York City metropolitan area, which includes over 23 million Americans. Each week, we'll visit a new building and explore complex and confusing issues related to housing access to see what they can teach us about ourselves, and our country will meet those who work to develop in thoughtful and impactful ways, who build neighborhoods to be more sustainable, affordable, accessible, or inclusive, who labor to create thriving communities, and transform the lives of generations to come. Through their stories, we will humanize often polarizing topics. Profound, surprising, and hilarious. This show is for developers and builders with boots on the ground for innovators trying to find ways to improve our industry, for the policymakers and public employees. And for any person who has walked by a building and wondered why. And now your host award winning architect turned developer and startup founder Atif Qadir, AIA.
Atif Qadir 01:53
This is American Building. And I'm your host, Atif Qadir. I'm the founder of Commonplace. Join me as it take a drive by the skylines and strip malls, crosswalks, and rail crossings, balconies, buildings and boroughs to discover a new generation of housing. Let's build common ground.
Atif Qadir 02:26
In this episode, you will learn about the history of single family developments in the New York City area. The Long Shadow Levittown casts on housing and who lives in suburbia, then and now, you'll join me in learning about the suburbanization installation. Influenced by this history. Massive single family home developments can be traced back to World War Two construction materials shortages and the labor drain from 16 million Americans or 12% of the entire US population. Fighting abroad meant that few homes are actually getting built. Access to capital was difficult with most mortgages requiring 20 to 50% downpayment and requiring repayment in as little as five to seven years. Many Americans were poor and couldn't afford the homes that were available at the financing terms that were prevalent. In fact, 6 million American families were doubling up with relatives, and half a million were living in barns, garages or mobile homes.
Atif Qadir 03:37
After World War Two, the federal government went in big on economic intervention. Through the Federal Housing Authority and Veterans Administration, they guaranteed and purchase loans offered by private lenders. Together these agencies accounted for a whopping 51% of the single family home purchases by 1950. They required just a 5% downpayment and had 30 year amortization periods. Not only that the loan programs had minimum lot sizes and setback requirements that effectively excluded urban multifamily homes from being eligible for this once in a lifetime Geyser of socialism. The federal aid Highway Act of 1956 Literally paved the road to suburbia for single family home developers and the buyers of the homes they built.
Atif Qadir 04:34
In the 1950s. Suburbs on Long Island and New Jersey, were growing at 10 times the rate of downtown areas in New York City. Levittown is the quintessential American suburb. It totaled 17,400 homes, built on 4000 acres of potato fields in central Nassau County on Long Island. The These homes ranged in style from the classic Cape Cod and later colonials, ranchers, and country clubbers. The Levites brought standardized manufacturing to the construction industry, allowing them to achieve low cost and high speed. So what does this have to do with race? Levittown seemed to perfect, but the loan programs I mentioned, had race based underwriting guidelines, and race based deed covenants that shut out blacks and other minorities, including veterans who had fought for our country abroad. These practices were even held up as constitutional by the Supreme Court before they were eventually overturned. In a great article for curbed. Writer Patrick C. Sun says many of the pressing urban planning issues we face today, sprawl, excessive traffic, sustainability issues, housing, affordability, racial discrimination, and the persistence of poverty can be traced back to this boom.
Atif Qadir 06:08
There's nothing wrong with a government promoting homeownership, as long as the opportunities it presents are open and accessible to all. The link to the article is in the show notes. The classic 1961 book Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates tells the story and pre sages the decades of evolution of New York City suburbia, into as some may say, wastelands of conformity and empty malls, pushing boomerang re urbanization and the skyrocketing prices of urban housing of the last decade. As a side note, the book was terribly remade into a romantic drama in 2008. With Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. Today, New York City's population is 8.5 million people. They are 28% Hispanic, 23% black and 14% Asian. In contrast, the suburban and rural areas of the metropolitan region of New York City are home to 15 point 1 million people. They are 18% Hispanic, 10% black and 6% Asian.
Atif Qadir 07:24
In this episode of American building, I am sharing an edited version of the conversation I had in April 2022 with Kenneth Nam Kham. Ken is the founder and designer at Monument office, a research and design firm based in Brooklyn. He specializes in the interplay between architecture, public space and memory. He is also a senior associate at Perkins, Eastman. Previously, he worked with n BBj, Design Studio link arc. And he had architects and Santiago Calatrava. He started his career at Rafeal, the newly architects where I did my first internship, he is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Virginia, enjoy the conversation. Thank you so much for being here with us.
Kenneth Namkung 08:22
Thank you, it's an absolute pleasure to be here. It's really an honor to participate. So what I did for this project was I started with that kind of global movement as sort of a jumping off point from the design. They went online, I just Googled suburban house plans, I found I pulled up the first one that I could find, I made a digital model of that, you know, put the floor plans to can or what have you. One of the things that that really kind of led me into this notion of dealing with the suburban experience, honestly, was, you know, for me, it's less nuts. It's partially about, you know, growing up in the suburbs and moving to New York City, that's one thing. But also, as a first generation immigrants, you know, I'm not coming from a culture that really comes from a suburban sort of history.
Kenneth Namkung 09:14
Right. So in other words, you know, when I'm growing up in the suburbs, you know, I, you know, we as as, as a Korean immigrant family, we are occupying suburban space differently. We are occupying suburban, you know, the suburban house differently, it's a slightly different attitude towards the domestic environment towards the front yard towards the backyard. So, there's actually, you know, there's this this kind of additional cultural layer that for me is sort of applied to this as well. And what's also interesting is that we do start to sort of move a little bit away from sort of architecture, but for reasons that I'm not going to get into here, my own connection to Korea. You know, my nominal homeland is actually pretty weak. I've only been back you know, two or three times and for various reasons. And I'm not, I'm not really going to get into here, you know, going back as will not be an option for some time, right? So what ends up happening is that you're in this kind of suburban space, right? But you're occupying it from through the lens of a completely different culture. And you also occupied through the lens of culture that you don't fully know yourself. So there's a sort of, I wouldn't call it discomfort, but it's this kind of feeling of like, not entirely, being there or sort of feeling, you know, being feeling like you're really 100% a part of this. So, you know, for me, this exploration is, you know, there's a lot of psychology and love and memory here as well.
Atif Qadir 10:37
There's so many interesting parts. To this, in particular, what you're describing feels like, it couldn't be the experience of the children in malaria, the Oscar nominated, I believe Oscar winning movie that was last year focused on the experience of Korean immigrants to Arkansas, which is, I think, the extreme even beyond suburban America, and this idea of trying to put oneself into another culture in time and space and physical environment, and the awkwardness and the beauty that that does come from that. So I think I definitely appreciate that. And I would imagine, for Indian, Pakistani and other Asian immigrants, this idea that the the often the unit of measure that we use, foundational in our culture is the community, it's not the nuclear family, it's not the individual. So the notion that you have a house that is built for a nuclear family on a separate law that is not attached to another, and that each person typically will have their own bedroom is of a different scale, and a different notion that I think that people from these backgrounds are familiar with. And I think it's not as if there is a solution to be made or an answer to be found. It's more just the strangeness of being that that ends up creating.
Atif Qadir 11:57
So I feel like there, there's definitely something really evocative and what you're saying. And what repeatedly struck me was when you talked about this idea of memory, and the idea of creating not the space itself, but the defining the area around it in order to emphasize what was not there anymore. And in particular, I think that that is a tool that is one that could be similar to photography of photographing historic monuments. For example, I saw a recent installation of photographs of historic monuments that were destroyed during the invasion of Syria over the past couple of years. So Greco Roman, and ottoman and beyond historic monuments. And I think in particular, the what I saw over the past few years is the use of web three type tools to recreate in virtual worlds, what someone isn't able to access or experience anymore. So for example, students at MIT recreated the entire campus, if you know in Roblox, so essentially are Minesweeper one of the two.
Atif Qadir 13:04
And I think this idea of, of recreation or of memory, being written in many different ways feels like something that is particularly evocative in a time where people may not be in their typical situation, either physically or mentally, the other way. And I think to be to take a dark turn towards that I think this idea of favoring, or perhaps looking back at a childhood memory of home versus a present reality is a really evocative metaphor for millennials. So we are the poorest generation in American history. We are the first ones where our parents, parents generation actually have a greater level of living than our generation does. And in particular, we have the lowest rate of homeownership. That has been the case at our maturation process of our generation in modern American history. And there's this reality that there are millennials and plenty of them that can't afford the home that they grew up. And if they were to try to attempt to purchase it now, namely, because over the past several years, the incredible influx of AI buyers, in markets, like say, for example, Phoenix, where this past year 25% of the home sales went to essentially six different companies that bought them through algorithms. And I think this notion of memory, particularly for millennials, I think is going to become stronger and stronger, as more and more so that that transition happens to homeownership. And perhaps what we're able to buy is a lot more modest than what it was that we grew up in.
Kenneth Namkung 14:41
Right, right. The funny thing about this is that, you know, when you think about, you know, this notion of the suburban home in his history, this memory in some ways, like you're right, this could also be understood, as you know, effectively the ghosting of it because he Nietzsche, this almost talks about something unattainable not necessarily just history, but You know, something that is never going to be a reality. And one thing that, you know, that that dawned on me as as we were having this conversation was that, you know, a lot of the you know, I grew up, I grew up in kind of one of the older suburbs, the house I grew up in was built in 1978, something like that, right. And when you think about it, a lot of the political decisions, a lot of the kind of governmental decisions that kind of lead us to our current state of income inequality.
Kenneth Namkung 15:29
This, you know, this huge amount of money coming into a residential, coming into a residential construction, residential architecture, a lot of those decisions that, that that led to our current condition are actually happening in the late 70s, early 80s. No, that sort of thing. Right. So, you know, this was really doesn't relate anything. But you know, this adds just to kind of another dimension to that discussion, right? I'm basing this on a suburban floorplan, but it easily could have been built in 1980. So I think so
Atif Qadir 16:00
That this idea that the idea of home is one that is tied with both reality and imagination, fact and fiction, and the haves and have nots, and that essentially, is the story of suburban America, and help us understand. So we now we understand the location, we understand the material, we understand your design process and the scale, walk our listeners through what they would see and feel as they were walking along, for example, 32nd street into Herald Square, and what they would see in and around them at the suburban ism installation.
Kenneth Namkung 16:44
Right? Well, the larger idea, obviously, is to sort of, you know, is to be occupying this urban space, that was, you know, in the idea was to create a new kind of urban space that's created by the negative, the negative form, generated, you know, by this by this house floor, right. So the idea is really to as lightly as possible to create something that is spatial without being excessively physical or architectural. So when you're, when you're inside the space, you have this very, very light roof over you, that gets back to this notion of history that gets back to this notion of memory. And to further this connection to the American suburbs. So what I did was I I'm proposing occupying the space beneath and adjacent with this sort of type of wire mesh furniture, that effectively is sort of actually derived from various suburban archetypes, you know, you've got, let me pull it up here.
Kenneth Namkung 17:38
You know, I just randomly took a couple of amps, urbanites, suburban ideas, and sort of combine them and recombine them in different ways. So there's, you know, there's a wire mesh version of like, the Easy boy lounge chair, there's a, I've done some something similar to like the large sort of sectional sofa that got you know, you're kind of backyard recliner, you know, that's been kind of rendered in the sort of ghostly white mesh material as well. So the idea is, you know, to, really, in terms of the occupation of this urban space, you're, you know, you've got the ghost of the suburban house above you. And then you've got this sort of suburban furniture, which allows you to sort of occupy the space of the city in a different way, in a way which sort of helps people remember, you know, the suburban life before New York City. And the idea also is very much to sort of create a lively and active public space. And you know, one of the great things about the city is that the second you put out a place for people to sit.
Atif Qadir 18:37
People suppose it. Like, we're like pigeons, basically, humans are like
Kenneth Namkung 18:44
that. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And one of the things I do like about that that's been happening in the Herald Square area recently is that the city has made efforts to bring more street furniture, there's, there's the Queen tables and chairs and those little light metal things, they've put up ping pong tables, now there's no they have a live music playing there on a fairly regular basis. Some of it is comes from the city, some of it, some of it is just random people, you know, we're playing for money, but it all, but it makes for a what I would consider a very, very lively space.
Atif Qadir 19:19
So the term suburb literally means below urban, referring to the lower density of these places, typically located in rings around your city. In your opinion, what is the suburb and how has it changed over time? And feel free to use any measure of time to go all the way back to the Eastern Han Dynasty, which I think was the first suburbs recorded human history to anything more more close.
Kenneth Namkung 19:45
So how have suburbs evolved? It's quite interesting. The one thing that I have noticed is that, you know, when I was growing up, I think you can sort of see that, well, the suburb I grew up in Yorktown, Virginia was you know, fairly sleepy little place very much sort of, there was a bit of a connection to, you know, the older southeast Virginia, the older Tidewater area that that has been there for, you know, 200 years. And, you know, when I was growing up, there was still a very, very strong connection to the local culture. Right. And I don't know that that was the case for every suburb. But you know, a lot of the first ring suburbs, outside new cities like Pittsburgh, outside cities like Boston, you know, there is something of a connection to the local history of the place. And my own family, our center of gravity has moved from southeast Virginia, to around the Washington, Washington DC area. And to me, it's a much more it's much newer, at least, at least what you know, where my parents lived. And in some ways, it's a much more sort of anonymous suburb, right?
Kenneth Namkung 20:53
You know, the buildings are fancier, but they're, you know, they're just, they're much more generic, it's a much more, you know, they're in some ways, like, there's so much more emphasis on curb appeal, you know, so it's, in other words, it's, it's, in some ways, the new American suburb, or what I see now is, it's much more about looking like something, as opposed to actually being something that makes sense. Another thing that I found, though, is that at least, you know, in the suburb, you know, where my parents live, now, the shopping centers have become, they're starting to be based around based in some ways, like they're starting to mimic more, kind of what we will consider in urban conditions.
Kenneth Namkung 21:32
So you've got, you know, your little sort of public street, you know, where people are interacting a little bit. And then but but that's surrounded by, you know, like, seven acres of parking. So in other words, it's, you're starting to see kind of the reverse movement from Rochester, where, effectively, the suburbs, the suburbs, shopping sprees, starting to kind of become a simulacrum of what we will consider a modern urban condition. So it's so I guess the way I would see it is that this the suburb to me, seems much more, you know, I don't want to use the word fake, but I think it's, you know, people are really trying to sort of evoke something that, that that really wasn't there in the past. Another thing that I do find interesting is that, you know, my father, you know, before he passed, was in a retire was in sort of a suburban kind of not quite a retirement community, but it was, he was in a community that was geared towards kind of older, older homebuyers, right?
Kenneth Namkung 22:34
And what the funny thing was, in that particular where he lived, you know, the space he occupied was much more spatially kind of ambiguous, like, you know, much more open than, then than any other suburban house I've ever I've ever lived in, you know, to the point that, you know, because, you know, it's designed for, you know, your older, you know, your older residents who may be not walking as well, you know, they may be wheelchair, so there's certain amount of openness that sort of required, you know, which makes things well, effectively, it's just remarkably informal, right. Yeah. So So I think that's been interesting.
Atif Qadir 23:11
I think, in particular, the this idea of an architectural style, and that typology that attempts to evoke something that isn't there, or it tends to be representative of an imagined existence. And I think that there is no thing more emblematic of what you just described, than the McMansion. And I think that's a term that folks from under Street and obviously you from outside of it, have heard, but the history of that term, I think, is one that is so fascinating as a corollary to the transformation of the American suburb over the past 30 to 40 years, and I think particularly the key elements of a McMansion. One of them is this jumbled design language that includes things like steeply still sloped roofs, multiple dormers, mansard roofs, really detailed mixed material palettes, the stones and coins, and weird, different types of cladding that ends up resulting in this idea that you can't figure out if you're looking at something that like a reduction of something Palladio designed, or something that looks like a Levittown and it's essentially this this mishmash in between, and the origins of McMansions actually start in the 1980s in California, and the idea was that it was meant to be a type of a house that was somewhere in between a typical tract housing, suburban housing and somewhere between a suburban gated community or a golf course.
Atif Qadir 24:46
So generally smaller lots, but wanted to explore that similar to the lower level ones, but we wanted to give the impression of grandeur of the larger level homes. And that's why this notion of this fast food reference And the supersizing of these homes is something that has become a design language of their own. And now they're essentially pejorative to be negatively described a genetic is negatively describe the homes, think some other terms that are often used are a Hummer houses. I've heard that very occasionally a starter castle, and executive homes, I think that they all tend to be key parts of the design language of the American suburb. So help our listeners understand the things that resulted in the American suburb being created.
Atif Qadir 25:34
Because this cannot happen in a vacuum, there are certain cultural, political, and even transportation conditions that made suburbs expand rapidly in the United States, give us an overview of what some of those issues are, and we're for the American suburb,
Kenneth Namkung 25:53
from what I gather, you know, there's this, there's this needs to you know, a lot of this is coming from post World War Two, the GI Bill, there's a need to house all these soldiers who are coming back, I think that there's this push to, especially after World War Two, there's a bit of a push to establish something of an American identity separate from sort of, you know, the, the immigrant cultures that exist in the cities. So there's this, you know, effectively this desire to kind of create almost an American sort of town style tradition, which, you know, it evokes sort of the English country, you know, these English, country homes, that sort of thing. And it's all part of this larger sort of, kind of endeavor to kind of create, you know, the American lifestyle. There's a certain aspect of, you know, as I've mentioned, sort of maybe not wanting to be associated with, with these immigrant cultures, which are primarily in cities, there are certain aspects of class and race where, honestly, it's my understanding that, you know, suburban houses were effectively designed to be economically out of reach for very specific groups of people. And you know, that that's, I don't I don't know how well known that is, but but that's very much my understanding.
Kenneth Namkung 27:09
And on top of that, there is this larger, you know, this is all happening in conjunction with the creation of the American interstate system, which is obviously working to connect people in places, there's a certain thought of, I believe, trying to get people out of the major population centers, because this is also the start of the Cold War. So, you know, again, I don't know how, how much is one factor versus the other. Great, but, you know, it's, you know, all these things come together to create an urban in our architectural condition, which is very, very specific to America.
Atif Qadir 27:40
And I think that there are many different aspects, and I'll add a few more that might help color listeners understanding. In addition, it's the growth of the commuter railroads, particularly those around Metro New York City that allowed people to effectively work in New York City and live elsewhere. It's you mentioned earlier, the tax codes as being an integral part of the existence of the suburban, particularly the 1980 tax code, which created the mortgage interest deduction, which actually made it more lucrative to be a homeowner than to then be a renter, and the various levels of federal government and municipal government interactions in the 70s and 80s. That led to cities being drained of funding.
Atif Qadir 28:30
And particularly, I think, one that is the most well known is this concept of redlining, which was created under the FHA under President Johnson. And the idea was that high minority areas would not be able to be subject to or be allowed to get bank financing that is backed by a federally backed mortgage insurance, which made it very difficult for people that were in certain areas to get the full value of their homes, and for those people to move to other areas as well. So a lot of these social, cultural political issues come together in this amazingly toxic soup that created the American suburb that we have today. So I'm really curious about what your thoughts are going forward on a few issues. So one in particular, so with COVID, New York City lost an estimated 5% of its population, which is about 440,000 people, so other dense urban areas have experienced the same thing.
Atif Qadir 29:34
And by scrolling through Instagram, it seems that everyone moved to Miami for a hot minute, New York Times and particularly looked at municipal data around car registration, and found that most people actually move just a few hours from their home city. So how do you think places like Montclair, New Jersey, Huntington, New York, Greenwich, Connecticut, are going to benefit from COVID in the long term and like context of the suburban typology. Well,
Kenneth Namkung 30:03
it's actually sort of interesting. The one thing that I think that happens during the pandemic was that, you know, people learned that they could work from home and be much more productive. So two things. Number one, yes, the city lost a lot of people. But number one, many of the people coming back, that's first thing, but I think people are coming back into this with sort of an understanding of that, that they can live and work from almost anywhere now. So I do think that this ability for people to you know, even if they're nominally based in in places like New York, but are living in the suburbs, you know, like you said, Montclair, Huntington, I think that effectively, you know, people will, a lot of people will be maybe spending more time, you know, in their home county or in their, in their suburban locations.
Kenneth Namkung 30:50
And effectively, what that does is that I think it takes a lot of the urban activity of New York, it takes the population. And I think it spreads that out to these different towns. So I think that this potentially, could be very good for a lot of the cities and allow the neighborhoods just outside of New York City, I have a colleague at a company called database actually, which it's a co working space that caters specifically to that. So the idea is to create sort of a second space or third space, actually, where, you know, it's a co working space that's effectively designed for small, smaller cities, smaller towns, you know, a little bit more of a suburban occupation. So I think potentially this could you know, what's coming out COVID Is that this new leaders, redistribution of of our work activities could actually become a tool for revitalizing or bringing more energy to towns outside New York City, it's not the new calculus is that is not just New York, or nowhere. But it's New York, and all of these other places, which I think is quite fascinating.
Atif Qadir 31:55
I agree. And I think as leasing and sales for class, a office in urban core areas continue to be challenged. It's the suburban office that is doing quite well, right now, both on the leasing and the sales perspective, I think it's this notion of what he described as the third or fourth space is particularly interesting to Office tenants right now. And I think a couple of the things that listeners might look forward to or keep their eyes open for is I believe that these smaller cities are going to benefit exceedingly from relatively well heeled New Yorkers now moving their tax domicile to their cities. So that I think is going to be allowing for a greater flow of funding to smaller cities. And you're probably going to see demand driven improvements in terms of retail.
Atif Qadir 32:41
So if someone's expecting all the retail that they saw in Hoboken to be in the cities an hour away, that I think over time, locations, like the ones in western New Jersey will start being able to rise up and and address some of those demands, I think you're gonna probably see changes in housing stock. So namely, to include, for example, like you talked about office spaces within the home, so totally cool to wear sweatpants there, maybe not in the database, maybe elevate a little bit from the sweatpants there. But I think also we think about the movie Minority the sort of uncomfortable place that the grandmother had in that home, there wasn't really a place for her there. And I think that as the population of the United States looks a bit more like me and you that there are going to be alternate visions of what a suburban home actually looks like, in terms of the consideration of multiple generations living under the same roof.
Atif Qadir 33:42
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