Well you know how I feel about building standards, so I won't even go there since we are so in agreement. I think the only thing we disagree on is the need to rebut the "condos suck" argument. It's not that condos suck, it's just that apartments become occupied much faster. No need to rebut. And anyone trying to make this into a moral or ethical argument can't be serious. The real moral or ethical argument is whether the built environment is a healthy or unhealthy place to live, it doesn't get much more basic than that. What price point the market appeals to is just not a relevant consideration because I just want the market to appeal to some group, any group, whoever it is, however much money they have..
You know, a really funny thing I just realized is that the crappiest suburbs in the whole metro (think Moore or Del City) still have building standards for tract housing. Typically a city will require at least 40-60% of new homes have masonry in the...exterior walls (can't bring myself to call them facades/edifices). That's just commonly accepted. Actually, building standards are very good for when it comes to these crackerboxes in the burbs (it's just too bad that they're so devoid of character that they'll predictably deteriorate anyway). In Oklahoma, they have to withhold high winds, tornadoes, hail storms, blizzards, floods, droughts, now earthquakes, and more. So the EIFS crap we build in commercially-zoned areas is kind of funny, in that way..
If you compare tract housing in OKC to the siding crackerboxes of Kansas (i.e., all of Wichita or KCK burbs), obviously the materials used in Oklahoma are superior. Brick tract housing is nowhere near as prevalent elsewhere as it is in Oklahoma and to an extent TX and AR. Because there's a lot of clay in our soil, it's a local option for building materials, just as stucco is a local option for Arizona. But the point I want to bring home is that here is a prime example of getting better building materials for less. So it's hard for me to understand why/how brick could not be affordable in Oklahoma.
So I'm not concerned about the "you get what you pay for" argument. You can have affordable housing that isn't EIFS. It just depends on your definition of affordable (I think Deep Deuce is affordable), and you have to be willing to accept a 1 or 2 bedroom apartment. If you can't think in urban terms, and use space efficiently, then perhaps some people do just belong in a ranch house in Mustang, because they wouldn't be happy downtown. That's perfectly fine, and I would seriously hope nobody is arguing to wipe these places off the map. It's just that the bottom line is, we need some viable alternatives.
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