Coby Lefkowitz is a New York-based urban planner, developer, writer and consultant. In 2021, he co-founded a real estate development company, Backyard, specializing in gentle densification projects, aiming to create new affordable housing through bespoke siting and a popular aesthetic. Author of the book Building Optimism, published in 2024, he shares with us in this interview his main theses and his vision of an urbanism enabling more beauty, density and conviviality. He also discusses the housing crisis, the rent freeze debate and the American YIMBY movement.
You talk a lot about beauty. Can you maybe start by defining what you feel beauty is in terms of architecture and urban planning ? What is a beautiful city, a beautiful building ? Do you have any examples in mind ?
I think beauty is, at its base, a set of relationships between people and buildings, between people and spaces. It can be sort of a squishy subject that eludes some people’s grasp. And because of that, over the last century, unfortunately, it’s gone from something that was broadly perceived to be objective, if not easily definable, to something subjective or even verboten, that can’t be discussed because it’s so ungraspable or ineffable, really, that who are we to even try to define it ?
But I think we can define it, and in some senses, we probably can calculate these relationships. I don’t look at this from a mathematical perspective, though there is much work being done in the field of fractals in architecture to try to explain why certain places are more or less attractive to us.
But I think it is even more simple than that, which is that we have evolved alongside our habitats. We have shaped them towards our own ends. We perceive the places that are more in harmony with that evolution as beautiful because they’re more or less human.
What do I mean by that ? If you look at a traditional village or traditional city, these are places that aren’t all too different compositionally than our ancestors might have lived in a millennia ago or several millennia ago. There is almost a way in which you can take somebody from 16th or 17th century Amsterdam and move them into early 19th century Paris. Of course, the city would certainly be larger, there would be different architectural styles, different forms, but it would still be broadly legible.
But if you took that person from early 19th century Paris and put them into mid-20th century Brasilia, that would be a completely unintelligible and incoherent, and even jarring place for that person to be in because it is out of step with the evolutionary process which made us evolve alongside with cities, in a harmonious relationship.
I know that that’s not a tangible definition. It’s not the way we can define what a book is or a water bottle is, but I think it is probably the closest that we can get to a definition, by understanding what relationships have been developed over the course of many centuries and many millennia.
Do you have a specific example that pops in mind ?
Yeah, the example that I use is : something that doesn’t need to be described to you nor explained. A Bhutanese temple is extraordinarily different from a row house in St. Louis or Pittsburgh — these are very different places — but the core elements of these structures are, in fact, very similar. First, there are made with natural materials, and we as humans are biophilic. We have an innate connection to nature. That’s an important part of beauty. Then, there’s symmetry : the windows are aligned. If you’re in the row house in St. Louis or Pittsburgh, it’s far more modest than the Bhutanese temple, but there is still this relationship that I speak of in beauty that makes rational sense. You can also find some level of ornamentation.
One can look at the Doge’s Palace in Venice and understand that this is a place of extraordinary wealth with subsequent beauty that’s been imbued into the structure, but these small row homes can have a proportionate amount of beauty through perhaps a simple cast-iron cornice that has some level of detailing on the top of the structure. Maybe there is a pediment over the front doorway. Maybe there’s a set of pilasters that go up the front of the façade.
Let’s take a look at Marrakech to La Paz or even Kyoto : these places all look very different from the surface, but if you peel back some of the architectural veneers, they’re actually very similar. These cities are predominantly walkable. The relationships between the buildings and the streets are functionally the same.
You don’t need to be told or taught that these are wonderful places, and I think that’s the core of beauty. It’s an innate feeling that we as humans understand when we’re in a place that we perceive as beautiful, as opposed to some other places that have developed in the last century and — not dissimilar to modern art or the avant-garde — that one needs to have a wealth of knowledge before to even attempt to explain why they like it or to refashion their minds into liking it.
The easiest way to explain beauty, in the built environment is : a place that doesn’t need to be explained as beautiful. It’s something that you just feel.
French modernism, which you mention in your book, decided to cut out ornamentation massively. It is understood as the consequence of a change of technique (the uprising use of concrete) and of the necessity to cut costs in order to produce large amounts of housing units post war. This economic argument is still very much used to justify basic building architecture. But is ornamentation that expensive ? What is the true cost of beauty ?
Indeed, ornamentation disappeared in some architectural practice and it’s partly due to the rise of French modernism and, to some extent, American modernism. Louis Sullivan, in the U.S., is one of the earliest practitioners designing more rational structures. Originally, it was for sure some kind of a cultural response to what was before, but it was also technologically oriented with the rise of elevators and steel framing structures giving the opportunity to think about architecture in a way that historically it hadn’t.
These early modern buildings from the late 19th century, early 20th, look a lot closer to what we would now consider as a traditional skyscraper or traditional apartment house because there is still some level of ornament. There was not a deliberate movement against ornament as such that you would see in the French modern movement or with the continental modernists. For the latter, ornament was completely eschewed for sociocultural reasons. And at least in my reading of it, it’s entirely rational.
The whole movement was hyper-rational, specifically in the context of a post-World War I Europe that saw this unprecedented and unimaginable horrors of war that had not existed to that scale. It was a visceral rejection to the excesses and bacchanalia, one can say, of the world prior to World War I that led to that condition.
These were, what we could consider today, progressive people who are trying to pull away from that very regressive, highly inequitable society that led to this largesse. They were imagining an enlightened move forward. And it made sense, right ? If you have in mind World War I, the conditions of inequality and the real dread of the industrial cities of the 19th century, you cannot deny the modernist movement was very well-intentioned.
The problem that I see is when these buildings were copied away from the original masters, as you say, from the main showrunner : there’s a big difference between having Mies van der Rohe design your building or Steven Spielberg direct your movie and some amateur doing such. And when you lose that skill level, and it is now in the less capable hands of an imitator, that’s when things start to go wrong. And, unfortunately, we went further and further down that pathway.
Modernism was an architectural school, just like Art Nouveau was, or Rococo, or Georgian-style, Victorian-style architecture, even though those weren’t as coherent. And when it went out of fashion, there was nothing to replace it, but we lost the capacity for the rest of the crew to be involved, for the rest of the cast to be on the credits. Because we didn’t have the masons anymore. We didn’t have the highly skilled pilers or roofers who would imbue some level of beauty in the structure. We eschewed it all. And then once we lost the underlying rationality and guiding principle of modernism, we became totally unmoored. That is how we ended up seeing some places that are there for their own sake.
There was a reason why we did this in the early 20th century, and I think that’s a big reason why the buildings of that time feel so wrong. An ornament is often seen as an appendage, something to be added onto a structure, and because of that, it can be argued to be superfluous. It’s just excess, right ? This is pre-20th century modernism, and we need to eschew that. But really, when I think about the best buildings, it’s about a completeness, and without ornament, these buildings are barren, and they feel wrong. If you saw somebody walking around without a head, you would say, Oh, there’s something wrong about this,
right ? I think the same is true for architecture. If you see a building without a cornice or a mansard or a proper roof crowning the structure, you’re going to say something’s wrong.
I want to refashion the conversation away from ornament being this superfluous design element that’s just tacked on, rather to be something that serves a very important role beyond the aesthetic. Having a cornice is important so that water doesn’t drip down onto the facade, stain it, and potentially dislodge the bricks or the stucco or the masonry or whatever the material might be. The same with window frames aren’t just there to look pretty, they’re there to seal in water from going into the windows. Same with columns that provide structural support, etc. Ornament is not a luxurious add-on but an essential part of architecture.
As a planner and developer, how do you incorporate the cost of beauty and ornamentation ?
There are two answers to that. The first is a more long-term way of thinking that has regrettably gone out of fashion, again, for pretty rational reasons. Cost can be seen as the upfront expenditure of a building, but it can also be seen as the long-term maintenance of a structure. If you own a building for two years and you build it rather cheaply, who cares if it starts falling apart two years from now ? It’s not your responsibility. We see this a lot in American suburbs where the functional life of a building is less than 30 years, and in truth, those buildings start falling apart even faster than that. They’re very cheaply and shoddily constructed. That is a real cost.
We have this sort of highly consumptive culture in which seems normal to demolish and move on. Unfortunately, it makes far more sense if you’re a developer or an investor to build or to buy, and flip as soon as you can just so you can make money quicker, recycle that capital and then make more money.
The second answer is that ornament is not what is actually making buildings more expensive. Of course, there’s going to be some added cost, but it’s not like we are gilding the ceilings with gold or we’re adjoining the facades with marble. There are ways that we can make buildings more beautiful without adding on luxurious appendages. There is a cost. It’s not really monetary. It’s time. And for a lot of places or a lot of projects, that’s something they can’t consider because they have debt on the land or taxes they need to pay, etc., etc.
But there are very simple things that you can work on like should this building be set back 10 feet from the street or zero ? It’s an urban design question. It has nothing to do with cost. It’s just a line on a survey map. Should these buildings be 50 or 200 feet wide ? My back of the envelope math is that something like 70 % to 80 % of what we perceive as beautiful has very little to do with architecture and subsequently has even less to do with ornament. It’s just the relationship between structure and places. The best example is Tokyo. In Tokyo there is very little beautiful architecture. Many of the buildings in the city are bad, but it’s a fabulously attractive place, and it gets 80 % right. And that’s really important. Most places don’t get that right.
Now if you think about architecture and design critically, maybe you get up to 90 %. You can have a very stark structure that gets little things right. Maybe it’s not a large cast iron cornice, maybe it’s a very small parapet that has some design feature that makes the building feel complete. Maybe there’s framing around windows. The building isn’t too wide. The materials are quality, but they don’t need to be stone. And of course, in every region, these things are different.
It is not true that in order for something to be beautiful, it needs to be expensive. There are more or less expensive elements, but a lot of what we perceive as very luxurious costs that drive the structures were actually mass produced in factories in the industrial era. It’s not as highly bespoke as we might think they are.
Do you think that some explanation might also be that people just lost interest in living in nice ? In some countries in South West Asia, even if people are building their houses with bits and scraps, they make sure to had columns and sculptures. Maybe have we developed in Europe and in the United-States a more standardized relationship to our homes, or at least, their exterior ?
This makes me think of Alain Bertaud’s book Order without design. The slums in cities like Jakarta or Bombay, experience a lot of problems of course, but if you study them closely you also realize that they have their own rationality and that they are extraordinarily prideful. People take all that they have and they reinvest into their homes. I think there’s something to be said for places that people expect little of, having the freedom to go out and do whatever they want. This allows people to sort of imbue themselves into structure which is impossible in the West. Buildings are far too expensive. We have lost the culture of feeling as though we are active participants in shaping places.
You also mentioned the concept of the survivor’s bias
in your book. Can you tell us what it covers how it affects our perspective on beauty ?
People will often say we don’t build as well as we used to. Look at all these older structures, how robust they are, how muscular they are. They’ve stood the test of time. And as we talked about earlier, a lot of our more modern buildings are falling apart in 20 or 30 years because they were so poorly constructed.
There is a lot of truth to that, but I do think it comes from a survivor’s bias where the structures that have endured 100 years, 200 years, 500 years have done so for two reasons.
One, they may have been the best constructed. Part of it, as I note in the book, is also due to the fact that they have inspired the affections of some local stewards who want to maintain them. Because, buildings will start falling apart and if the capital isn’t there to maintain them, no matter how well they’re constructed, they will not last.
We can only, unfortunately, view the past through this very narrow lens of the places that still exist today, and it distorts our vision.
Coming back to the relationship people have with their home, I wanted to talk with you about the housing crisis that France is undergoing, but I think also the US. This concerns mainly young people who cannot project buying their own house anymore, even if they have a well-paid job. This lack of capacity to settle and build your home does affect young people’s relationship to work. Also, you talk a lot about the model dwelling of the 19th century looking at the intricacies between housing and employment.
Absolutely, I do think, in the West, our greatest challenge is housing affordability. Every other challenge is downstream of it. If one can’t afford — and this is true at every level of the income spectrum — a home or is spending a disproportionate amount of their income towards that, they have less time and less income that they can put elsewhere. So at the lower end of the spectrum, it may mean that one’s making choices between sending their kids to school in the morning or bringing them with them to a job interview.
There’s a fantastic book in the US called Evicted by Matthew Desmond that details this. Eviction comes if the tenant is not paying rent but also if the owner thinks he can get a better tenant. That is an issue of competition.
At the middle and even upper ends of the spectrum, one has to totally reorient their life and career around what they reasonably expect they can live off of. In New York, very unfortunately, I think we’ve lost a great deal of creativity and culture that will never be regained because the would-be film director or artist or cook goes into project management or consulting. It’s not immediately clear to me how much value those are accruing to society, but it is clear to me that we’re losing something significant when that would-be entrepreneur decides that she can’t open up a bakery. There are extraordinary aftershocks because of this. There have been some attempts at quantifying this empirically : it’s something on the order of trillions of dollars a year in foregone GDP but don’t have the exact numbers here.
How do we address it ? I look back at the 19th century model dwelling units in urban areas that were constructed to help the lower working and middle classes, importantly. I think in a lot of these conversations around affordable and social housing, we have a tendency to only think of the lowest income earners, which is important, but in America, at least, we’re already directing considerable federal and state dollars towards those outcomes.
A far greater concern for us should be what happens to the people who are teachers or firemen or janitors or street sweepers. They can’t afford to be in the city, and we are not making provision for them because we think they make just enough so that they don’t need help, but of course they don’t earn enough.
I do think we need to return to a model where the private market, in conjunction with the public market, takes a look at these working class, middle class households and says : We’re going to build a really lovely product for you that you can reasonably afford at some threshold of your annual income that’s not excessive
. Maybe it’s 30 %, maybe it’s 35 %, we shouldn’t have an idolatry towards a specific abstract number, but there are some thresholds that we can meet.
And, just as the social reformers did in the 19th century, we’re going to build places that are prideful, that you can raise a family in. Family formation is a huge challenge right now in expensive Western cities because you can’t afford anything more than a one bedroom. I think this is the defining challenge of the 21st century : provide reasonably affordable cities for people to live in, which is changing their careers, changing how they think about life and family formation.
In New York, you have the City of Yes plan
. How is it going ? Also, I saw that one of the running candidates for the next municipal election is campaigning on freezing rents, is that a good idea ?
The City of Yes is a step in the right direction, but it’s not a long stride. It is, I think, a rather circumspect and conservative step in the right direction. And that’s not the fault of the current administration or the city council members who worked hard to get it passed. There are just a lot of conflicting interests that are difficult to reconcile, and those parties need to be brought into communion with each other. It’s a good step, but the program ultimately calls for 80’000 homes over the next decade in New York. That’s about 8’000 homes a year in addition to whatever our baseline of building right now. That’s frankly not enough. We have about 3,7 million units of housing in New York. If you take this on a percentage basis, it’s 0,1 % of our housing supply. A healthy city should be 4 %, 5 %, 6 % per year, if not more, recycling their housing supply. And American cities are very low in this respect. So hopefully it provides a good foundation and can be a conversation starter for communities that were maybe fearful of increased density, but it’s not going to be enough on its own.
Regarding rent, which is the big issue of the day. I won’t mention the candidates specifically, but I’ll talk about the issue more broadly. We’ve been hearing these conversations for centuries, and we’ll hear them centuries from now. Rent control and rent freezing are a fundamentally flawed and idealistic yet well-intentioned proposal. It is likely the single most destructive housing policy that a city can take that has the veneer of progressivism. Of course except for demolishing every building in the city – that would be a very bad policy indeed – which we’ve experimented with, certainly in the U.S. in the mid-century through urban renewal. The intention is to help people at the bottom rungs survive, because the issue is that rent is vastly outpacing what people can afford, and folks are being displaced, which certainly is a grave challenge.
But freezing rent fundamentally misunderstands the balance of funding of a building. What do I mean by that? There is this myth that landlords are greedy, and they live in this rentier state, and most of the rent is accruing to capital. In that perspective, if we just froze rent increases and we placed limits on the rent, the state would be able to recoup that excess capital that is currently going to these greedy landlords, and avarice will be stamped out. Now, that’s a nice idea, but for anybody who actually runs housing, you know that there are a lot of costs. There are taxes. There’s insurance. There’s ongoing maintenance. There’s trash collection, etc., etc. There’s a lot of debt in order to acquire buildings because buildings have become very expensive. And so the returns — and you may have read this as well — on rental real estate in the U.S. are sometimes break-even, sometimes you lose money, sometimes you get 3 to 5 %.
In some cities, they’re much higher because the operating costs are lower. And funnily enough, these are in the most affordable cities in the U.S. So in a place like Detroit, you can make 10 or 11 % returns. In a place like New York, you can’t. You’re making 2 to 3 %, maybe, if you’re lucky. So what happens when you freeze the rent or if you control the rent ? That buffer, which is very thin — 2 to 3 % is an extraordinarily thin margin — goes away. And now you have deferred capital maintenance. And we’ve already seen this for the last several decades in New York, and it’s accelerated in the last five years. And it’s not just New York. This has been one of the few things that economists agree on : although it does not feel like it, rent control is bad and freezing the rent is bad.
We know empirically how to deliver affordability to cities, and it is not by capping the reserves that help buildings stand, because if we take those away, these buildings will fall down, as they did in New York in the ’70s, as they have around the world. You see a lot of this in Eastern Europe in stabilized structures, and the literature is very clear on this.
The American YIMBY movement is starting to make a lot of noise and several books have recently been published on the current housing crisis. Can you tell me a bit more about the situation in the United-States ?
There is a crisis nationwide. I don’t have the exact stats, but there was some graphic going around a couple years ago that 97 % of counties in the U.S. have a higher median rent than what would be considered affordable for the median wage earner. So it’s ubiquitous. It’s not just a problem on the coast. It’s certainly heightened on the coast, and most intimately felt, but it is pervasive.
So what is the YIMBY movement ? Very briefly : let’s build more housing because this is fundamentally a supply and demand issue
. For some reason, we understand this when it comes to oranges or books. If there are more books or limited edition sneakers, right, if there is an artificial shortage of a product, prices will go up. We understand that in almost every market except for housing, and Yimbies have identified this and said, We just need to build more housing,
which they’re right.
Nevertheless, there has been a recent pushback and I don’t think it’s unfair. I’m philosophically aligned with the Yimbies, but I think I’m one of the few people in the urbanist movement in the U.S. who is saying, Well, hold on a second. Let’s listen to the concerns of people who have some level of opposition to this movement.
You can assume that NIMBYs are racists, bigoted or classist, that they don’t want poor people or folks of different races living near them. I don’t think that’s right because when you just talk to these people, you realise how pluralistic the NIMBY group is. It’s not just wealthy white homeowners. But of course, these things are never so simple as people make them out to be. Most of the people are just concerned because their neighborhood, for better or worse, hasn’t changed in 60 years because of the underlying land use regulations and zoning and they feel as though a new seven-story apartment building would be too rapid of a change. They feel it is ugly and does not fit within the character of their neighborhood.
It’s funny because I think almost everyone in the country verbalizes these sentiments in varied ways, even if they don’t have the language for it. And there’s a couple of concerns there. One, there’s a fear that what’s going to be built isn’t good because much of what has been built has not been good. People want to preserve the quality of their neighborhood. When they moved here, they thought it was going to be a certain kind of place. Now it is becoming a different kind of place, which is completely fair. There’s no doubt about it. That is a societal failing that we have told people for several decades that if they buy into a community, it’s never going to change. And that’s ahistoric. Cities and neighborhoods have always changed. But moreover, it is a fantasy because places have to change in order to survive. If the streets were never improved, if the buildings were never upgraded, we would still be living in shacks along dirt roads. And even though shacks and dirt roads were at one point an improvement. So places need to be able to harness and then accept change in meaningful ways. I think we’ve done a very poor job in the US, of explaining that to people.
In that perspective, do you think the YIMBY movement should move part of the conversation on the topic of beauty ?
I think it’s the most important leverage that one can take. I am often accused of being naive in this respect. But it’s not naive if one just talks to the community. Activists and academics presume to represent the interests of the people or the populace but they don’t actually talk to the people. If you go and talk to people, they go : Oh, I don’t mind that new three-story building if it’s beautiful. It has a shop on the ground floor and my friend lives on the second unit with her kid.
That’s a good addition to the neighborhood. And I’ve seen this in town after town across the country. People that one would not perceive as being allies to new development immediately become so if they see it as a positive change in their community, a step in the right direction. And even if you live in a place that has been averse to any level of change, people like new things, they like nice things.
Let’s take the example of Santa Barbara in California. It is a fabulously beautiful place. Yes, it benefits from tremendous natural advantages being on the coast and near mountains. But the architecture is terrific and there are tensions there because it can be a very narrow funnel to approve a project there which makes everything become more expensive. But it’s almost universally beloved in America as a beautiful place. And we know that it’s thanks to the architecture because there are communities down the coast like Ventura or Oxnard, which nobody knows about unless you live there, and which have, if anything, better natural advantages than Santa Barbara. So there must be some differentiator. This is a place that many would conceive as very NIMBY, opposed to any new development. And it’s not true. They are just only in favor of a very narrow sort of development which matches with the character of their neighborhood.
North American developers have forgotten that the most expensive places in America do have the best architecture and the best street networks. The only reason they’ve been able to be as successful as they are is because we have a housing crisis so people sort of take whatever they can get.
Do you have a last word of conclusion to share ?
Beauty is fundamentally important and people innately recognize it. It’s why we visit Paris and not Milton Keynes. We have this broad housing challenge in cities around the world, certainly Western cities. So if we take those two things : the love of people for beauty on the one hand and the profound need to resolve our cities’ housing crisis, on the other hand, well, why don’t we marry beauty with this need for supply and put them together ?
I think one of the best housing policies that America adopted at a federal level is to plan on building several Paris or another Vienna, or Hoi An or Kyoto. Cities have always been in competition with one another and we’ve rested on our laurels for too long because we’ve been too restrictive here. Let us open up that competition and attract people by affordability, by beauty, by walkability, by dynamism, by opportunity. We should adopt an abundant mindset of yes and yes, let’s build beautifully. Yes, let’s build a lot of it. Yes, let’s build affordably. Yes, yes, yes. It is the romantic pragmatism I talk about in my book!
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