http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2008/05/bayonne_boxes_days_are_numbere.html
Bayonne boxes' days are numbered in Newark
By Bruno R Tedeschi
May 07, 2008, 6:41PM
George McNish/The Star-LedgerAn example of a box style home in Newark.
Bayonne boxes -- the narrow, three-story homes that sprouted up all over Newark during its recent housing boom -- are facing extinction.
After architects and city officials scrutinized the design of the dwellings, Newark has released a different set of criteria to make future homes built in the city less boxy. The city council plans to vote on the regulations at its next meeting on May 21.
If it is passed, then the new law will go into effect within 30 days of the vote.
"I hate Bayonne boxes," said West Ward Councilman Ronald C. Rice. "I'm glad we're changing the zoning so we can prohibit them."
The houses cropped up like weeds in the 1990s, accounting for most of the 11,000 new houses constructed in Newark in the last decade, said city planning director Toni Griffin. The houses were popular in urban areas because they provided home ownership to city residents said Carlos Rodrigues, the New Jersey director of the Regional Plan Association, which worked with Newark on the ordinance.
"They are cheap and easy to construct and they provided to ability to have a rental unit, which allowed for the owner to help underwrite the cost of the mortgage," Rodrigues said. "It was a proven product in the real estate market."
The traditional type boxes are stand-alone homes built close to eachother and feature a garage or driveway jutting out in the front. Most contain two or three separate units and are set further back from the sidewalk than older homes. Critics, including Mayor Cory Booker, say the cookie-cutter homes lack character, are bad for the environment and draw too many cars to the area.
In other parts of the country, they are called triple-deckers. In New Jersey, the name Bayonne box stuck because these homes cropped up in Bayonne after World War II.
Rodrigues said Newark joins Jersey City in targeting the box-style housing. The backlash, he said, began when neighbors complained that the boxy homes were replacing historically important or architecturally interesting ones.
The revised Newark regulations call uniform setbacks, additional windows, narrower driveways, larger backyards and increased space between houses. The city is proposing that the setback of all new houses must match the neighboring house that is closest to the sidewalk. For instance, if the house to the left sits 10 feet away from the sidewalk and the house on the right is 6 feet away, then the new home in between must be set back 6 feet.
If there is no other development on that block, the front yard setback must be 6 feet.
The city is also encouraging balconies, bay windows, stoops and porches and is calling for 30 percent of the front of homes to be filled with windows.
The minimum gap between houses will also be increased from two feet to three feet, offering more breathing room for residents and homeowners who may need to do maintenance work on the property.
The city is also recommending significant changes for driveways and parking. In order to encourage mass transit, officials plan to wave the 1 space per dwelling requirement if the home is within 1,200 feet of a station for the light rail, PATH train or New Jersey Transit bus station.
It is also decreasing the parking requirement from 1.5 spaces per unit to 1 space. The difference, they said, should shrink the size of driveways which dominate the front of the homes. Under the new ordinance, all parking spaces will have to be either inside the home, to the side or in the rear.
Driveways will also be capped at 10 feet in width and must include either mulch, gravel or grass in order to absorb water runoff. Griffin said the current designs, where the entire driveway is an impervious surface, leads to flooding in some areas.
http://dailynewarker.com/blog/2007/11/bayonne-box-symbol-of-newark%E2%80%99s-ill-planning/
Bayonne Box: Symbol of Newark’s Ill Planning
November 25, 2007 · Posted by Zemin Zhang
The three-family, triple-decker, aluminum-sided, front garage-dominated housing type, known as the “Bayonne Box,” has become the default housing type for new construction in Newark. Even the 2004 Land Use Element of City Master Plan urged to “provide more land which allows two-, three-, and four-family detached housing, which has become the housing choice for both public and private sector builders.” Meanwhile, the city has started to suffer from the devastating effects of the Bayonne Box proliferation. In its 2006 Newark Vision Plan, the Regional Plan Association called for alternative designs. In his first State of the City address on last February 8, Mayor Booker requested the city to “identify and encourage design alternatives to the ‘Bayonne Box’ model for two- and three-family houses.” The new Director of Community Development Toni Griffin is organizing a housing design symposium next Wednesday to introduce better design models and higher design standards (see below). What is wrong with the popular Bayonne Box? Is it just aesthetic embarrassment and construction defects?
To find out the genesis of the box, I called the reference librarian of the Bayonne public library last summer. She responded angrily, “People like to make fun of Bayonne.” Only after learning that I am a Newark resident, she pointed out, “We have moved away from that kind of development.” It is true that the small town of 61,842 residents has become much more forward-looking in its physical development. For instance, its redevelopment of the former naval base alone will create over 6,700 high density housing units, 750 hotel rooms, 340,000 square feet of retailing space, and 242,000 square feet of civic space. Many apartment developments have long included underground parking. “Newark Box. That’s what you should call it,” the librarian added with some satisfaction.
h4. Automobile Obsession
Over the course of last century, the American home, as well as all aspects of the society, has been designed to focus on automobile usage. The treasured machine takes a great space in repose, as well as in motion. As soon as technology improvements made the automobile less explosive and flammable, architects moved it out of the old carriage house and into the integrated living space. Frank Lloyd Wright was among the first in the 1920’s to design attached garages for his beloved Lincoln Continentals in his Chicago Oak Park house. Architects Keck and Keck’s 1926 modern structure, a forerunner of the Bayonne Box, featuring a dominant three-garage front with a wide curb-cut, was even named as a Chicago landmark in 1994. The garage has become the most massive exterior feature of new homes. Some New Urbanists call it “garagescape.”
The impact of a brutal garage, a paved front driveway, and a twenty-foot curb-cut in front of every new home can be devastating. In the case of Bayonne Box, planning for the most direct vehicular access, the frontal driveway location, and obtrusively parked vehicles destroyed the fabric of a healthy pedestrian-oriented neighborhood. In Ironbound’s Sumo Village, while negotiating with big cars on the sidewalk, pedestrians are often forced to witness the selfish display of a junk closet through those open garage doors. Furthermore, the Bayonne Box loudly promotes a destructive way to organize all aspects of life in our city and beyond through automobiles.
Some design remedies might try to mitigate the visual impact of the Bayonne Box through such means as a rear access lane or alley. However, the popularity of the box design among Newark developers is related to antiquated city ordinances for the minimum parking requirement, which required five to six parking spaces for a three-family structure. Many city planners call for adoption of a “maximum” parking standard, which restricts one parking space per 1000 square feet development, compared to four spaces now in Newark. Jersey City currently has an even lower ratio than the suggested maximum ratio for Newark. Given the mass transit advantages enjoyed by the city, homes with transit village designs will not only break the Bayonne Box model, but will also attract many different home buyers, who tend to commute to work by train.
h4. Urban Sprawl
With land of only 24 square miles, Newark is among the cities with the highest density in the country, even after the drastic decline of its population in past decades. However, those who pass by Newark along the Northeast Corridor are often amazed by row after row of Bayonne Boxes plopped up swiftly in the Ironbound section. Another missed opportunities for higher density urban redevelopment, which is ideal for creating jobs, bolstering city revenue, and improving the state’s energy efficiency if replacing these structures with sufficient office capacities. Some prominent transportation planners such as Martin Robins and Jeffrey Zuppan predict, “Nearly 11.5 million gallons of gasoline a year would be saved by increasing the number of jobs in downtown Newark, essentially doubling them, instead of locating them in the suburbs.” The city has to immediately stop building Bayonne Boxes here and to establish financial and zoning incentives for developers to build higher density units, and encourage companies to those locations where public transportation is readily available to their employees.
h4. Risky Finance
These expensive Bayonne Boxes rely on risky finance and count heavily on rental income for the owners. Some Ironbound developers are known for delivering a “secret” extra rental unit with all water and gas pipes hiding behind sheetrock for an easy do-it-yourself conversion. According to recent census figures, Newark is among the highest percentage (over 40 percent) in the nation where homeowners spend more than half their income on housing. Attracted by the American Dream in these multifamily Bayonne Boxes, working families have taken various risky loans to buy much more housing than they need, betting unrealistically on continuing increase in value of their properties and personal income. When these conditions failed to materialize and rental incomes fell short, many owners of Bayonne Box multifamily homes suffered from ruined credit, foreclosures, and broken hopes.
h4. Visionless Uniformity
Jane Jacobs espoused that a vital urban life rests on preserving neighborhoods of mixed-uses, mixed-users, and mixed-styles, with active residents and pedestrians as eyes and ears of a safe community. Newark has its own example of a lively neighborhood along Ferry and Wilson Streets, with vertical mixing uses in buildings, with a focus on retail on the ground floor and street level, and residential on the upper floors. The enlivened community creates an exciting presence of economic and social activities not only during the day, but also in the evening and on weekends.
Some early “Bayonne” design, such as the 1940’s garaged row houses on Holland Avenue of Bronx, at least paid great attention to the Tudor gables, façade details, chimneys, terraces, and stoops, in order to establish an individual identity for each house. However, the quick construction of Bayonne Boxes in Newark deliberately stands for a soulless uniformity, which leaves out any architectural details and street amenities. As the result, these houses effectively turn streets solely for automobile storage and movement. In one of the Sumo Villages off South Street, a great number of identical multifamily houses share a small corner play area for children, with dusty and broken equipment. Oh, Bayonne Boxes, what a community killer!
h4. Political Corruption
A majority of Bayonne Boxes in the city were built by three politically connected large real estate developers, who acquired public land with a deep discount, together with easy zoning variances, tax-abatements, and other perks. Other crony-turn-developers, such as Jackie Mattison, Emilio Farina, and Tamika Riley, who had little or no development experience, all had a hefty share of the 5,000 parcels of cheap city land. These cookie-cut shoddy constructions were often done by workmen under the condition that they got paid only after the houses were sold. While the current city administration is ready to lift the moratorium of land sales and to settle with developers, future public subsidies should not be on the land, but rather directly on affordable and sustainable housing that agrees with the city’s strategic plan and high design standards.
A Chinese proverb says, “It is not too late to mend the fold even after some of the sheep have been lost.” Some cities, such as Portland, Oregon, have adopted strict ordinances to guide development. For instance, three-quarters of a house façade must be house but not garage. Some economists and planners have long argued that the property tax is antiquated; for reasons that not only is wealth now held in many intangible forms, but also development in depressed urban center has been discouraged. Instead, some forms of land tax may encourage proper urban land use policies, discourage land speculation, and prevent shoddy constructions on cheap land. Obviously, the city has to go far beyond toothless and suggestive design alternatives to battle the Bayonne Box phenomenon.More links.