Alicia: So in your opinion, the responsibility for systemic solutions to housing affordability lies with the public, for example, the municipality?
Kuba: It seems to me that there is no other way. I also think that some of the housing and most of the social infrastructure must be built in a different logic than the market. In my opinion, models in which developers build everything and the state and cities build nothing are hardly sustainable. In California, for example, business builds everything, the public sector builds nothing. Developers create housing estates and then give some of the spaces to public housing. The ownership design of such buildings is very complicated, usually generating some sort of legal-ownership-spatial Frankenstein, plus conflicts and stigmatization by, for example, separate entrances. In my opinion, a much better model is one where housing is built in parallel in different systems: state, municipal, private, cooperative. We have a choice of really many ways of building and types of ownership, but in Poland it is difficult to find something between a developer who builds a multifamily building and a self-built house in the countryside.
Alicia: In such a system, I think we should insist all the more that the developer take the lead in solving social problems.
Kuba: I don't know what the expectations of Poles really are. On the one hand, a huge part of the population has no faith in the public sector (we belong to the same club as the United States and the rest of Eastern Europe). On the other hand, developers are widely regarded as bloodsuckers: whatever is proposed, the masses of people will still be dissatisfied, because it's a "developer." So it's hard to say from whom Poles expect to solve social problems. On top of that, we have a deregulated housing market. More demand than supply means that everything will sell on the stump, so this kind of market game, in which developers compete for customers with a better product, doesn't quite work. The product can be poor, because they will still buy.
Warsaw Brewery, view of the café gardens at the Lodge Cellars
Photo: Juliusz Sokolowski
Alicia: All right, then let's give positive examples.
Kuba: Three mixed-use developments have recently opened in Warsaw: Elektrownia Powiśle (designed by APA Wojciechowski Architekci), Browary Warszawskie (designed by JEMS Architekci) and Fabryka Norblin (designed by PRC Architekci). In my opinion, Browary Warszawskie stands out on the plus side: refined, diverse public spaces, landscape design, thoughtful tenant mix, i.e. a mix of services and food and beverage. The result is a cool functioning piece of the city that you can walk through, that creates added value for the city. In Wola, where public spaces are scarce, an open private-public space has been created where one can stop, meet, spend time. And yet, whoever I talk to from the Polish "commentary group," they all equally criticize all three projects as unworthy of a developer's attention. The moment "#developer" appears on anything, the discussion is immediately turned off. And yet developer can also be valued. A discussion about what the Norblin Factory gives to Wola and what the Warsaw Brewery gives to Wola would be very interesting, other developers would certainly listen carefully and draw conclusions for their next projects.
Alicia: Well, okay, but developers get away with a lot, for example, they are not responsible for selling a bad product.
Kuba: Of course, it's appropriate to vilify developers for selling a blemished product or cheating their customers, but I think these are details. In my opinion, the most important part of the discussion is that the whole system is suboptimal. The system for creating local plans, vuzettes and so on is badly conceived and badly designed - on this I think everyone agrees. The zoning law was adopted in 2003; so for two decades everyone has agreed that it's bad, but nothing can be done about it. The famous lex developer was criticized, but it allowed negotiations between the city and developers, and opened up the possibility that something more could be done. It showed that a change is needed at the level of the playing field itself. Today we have the problem that housing is so expensive. From what we understand, many people with capital are fleeing into hoarding. They don't want their funds to melt away, they don't believe there will be any kind of pension system and buying an apartment is a way to secure themselves for retirement. It's systemic problems like this that lead to pathologies. When a developer cuts down a beautiful old tree to build something, my heart breaks every time. But the root of the problem is bad regulation. In this case, the lack of inevitability of severe punishment for such a tree killer.
Alicia: Will you defend developers at all costs?
Kuba: I try to coldly analyze reality and approach it with moderate optimism. For example, in the discussion about Solpol, which I am defending, I think the design value of this building is amazing. I defend it, even though everyone is against it, wants to demolish it. And it seems to me that it's the same with developers. Not everything they do is wrong. I suggest changing the optics to one that allows you to have a discussion at all. It's worth untangling this developer knot, seeing what it's made of and where you can actually expect quality solutions.
Warsaw Brewery, view from Krochmalna Street
Photo: Juliusz Sokolowski
Alicia: I understand that you have concrete grounds for such optimism?
Kuba: I studied in the development department at Berkeley to understand and learn how to think like a developer. I noticed two important trends. As recently as a decade ago, a development product was simply an apartment. Whereas today, it's a certain kind of lifestyle, of which housing is a part, almost on par with the coffee shop downstairs, a well-designed street or bike paths. All these things brought by the urban planning discussion, which, by the way, hasn't changed a bit in the last twenty years, and everyone is still talking about Jane Jacobs, the fifteen-minute city, Jan Gehl and so on. The public's idea of what the ideal city should look like has become part of the developer's product. And there has been an ambition among the more committed developers to create apartments that will sell because they are part of such a city, a space that has quality and that is livable, interesting and comfortable.
The second trend is that until now there has been a huge gap between the academic world, which has the city well thought out, and the developer world, which is simply in the business of building it. This has not been due to ill will, it's just that until now there hasn't been such a window of opportunity for these two worlds to meet. The aforementioned ambition to create a product as a city, not just an apartment, allows these two worlds to come together. Not fully, of course. But, importantly, the flow of ideas, knowledge has begun, the space for a change in thinking has appeared. If we are lucky, in the medium term this will lead to the fact that these developer products, i.e. new neighborhoods or quarters, will be of higher quality, better integrated with the city, more diverse, more interesting - they will be places where you will want to go and where you will live better. However, this requires creative work from each party.
Alicia: Thank you for the discussion.
