The Morrisville Twins
Multifamily houses done in multiple different ways
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When I was in Kindergarten, I remember our teacher giving a lesson in the uniqueness of each individual. To illustrate her point, she asked the identical twins in our class their favorite food.
Emily liked pizza. Her sister Natasha liked spaghetti.
The teacher’s message was received: even people that are seemingly identical on the outside are different on the inside. They have unique personalities, unique tastes, unique ideas.
As I mentioned last week, we spent some time over Thanksgiving renting a house in Morrisville, Pennsylvania. Here’s what our house looked like from the outside:
It’s a Dutch Colonial that Zillow says dates to 1926. From the outside, it looks like a typical old house, but the inside has actually been subdivided into two units. Once inside the front door, in the original foyer, there are some added doors to section off the downstairs unit (which we rented) from the upstairs unit (where the building owner lives with his young family).
I doubt this was originally a two-family house, and it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when it was divided or why. Solely based on the condition of the house and when it was last renovated, my hypothesis is that a family raised kids in this home, but once the kids left, it was more house than the owners needed. Rather than downsize, they opted to split the house in half, allowing a tenant a place to live while helping split the living expenses. It also could have been divided to allow space for grown children to return as adults or for aging parents to be nearby.
It’s not a bad arrangement, but converting a single family home into a duplex is often a difficult challenge because of zoning laws that only permit single family usage in much of the country. There’s a major affordability crisis when it comes to housing, and allowing for more creative use of existing structures may help to ease some of that. Aging Baby Boomers could stay in their neighborhoods longer while younger people for whom homeownership seems out of reach may have a more viable path, either through renting in a nice neighborhood or through purchasing a home where the mortgage can be split with a tenant.
In Morrisville, these zoning concerns seem to be less of an issue, as there are many multifamily homes, all from roughly the same 1920s time period. Like the Dutch Colonial we rented, some are spectacular houses that are barely distinguishable as multifamily dwellings from the outside. Here’s one such house, a riff on an American foursquare with Craftsman vibes, built in 1928:
Aside from the two front stairs, two front doors, and the small fence dividing the front yards, this house blends in with its single family neighbors. It’s composed of different building materials: brick below and green shingles above, yet they are complementary. The overall effect is consistent, harmonious, coherent.
Just around the corner, there’s an entire block of duplex houses that I thought were worth some deeper study. Here’s a quick survey of the block:
At a quick glance, these houses look nearly identical in form. They are also vaguely foursquare-ish, with their hipped roofs, large front porches, and front gabled dormers. They were likely all built at the same time, possibly by the same builder. Like the twins in my kindergarten class, my guess is that they once looked nearly the same too. But over time, that early preference for pizza versus spaghetti has manifested into two wholly different people.
Let’s take a closer look at some of these homes, starting with perhaps the most extreme example.
The property lines are very clearly delineated on this house, with the owner on the left opting for brown shingles with yellow trim and the owner on the right opting for green shingles with white trim. The house is beautifully symmetrical architecturally, yet it clashes aesthetically. But it’s not alone on this block.
This house is not only divided left to right, but also top to bottom, with different color siding used to denote the first floor from the second. Their adjoining neighbor has clad their side in green shingles and opted to enclose their front porch and added an awning. Though you can’t see it in the above photo, the lower floor on the left side is also white siding, meaning there are at least three different exterior treatments on this house (four if you count the vertical boards on the gable of the dormer).
The result is a hodgepodge of different aesthetics. Oddly enough, the attic dormer remains one consistent color despite the property line falling right down the middle.
The above house sits on the corner, so the unit on the right has a wrap around porch and an additional dormer. While most of the other homes had superficial distinctions between units: wall color, siding versus shingles, this one has an even bigger distinction. At this home, the porch roofs were rebuilt at one point, except they were done with completely different roof pitches and elevations.
The left side unit’s porch roof sits taller on the home and pitches steeper, while the wraparound porch roof is lower and shallower. I’m curious why the choice was made to build these roofs separately, and whether or not the differing aesthetics affect the function. Are there more leaks as a result, or does rain flow off the roofs in an erratic way?
There’s one more house on this block that absolutely fascinates me:
The above house is a fourplex, made up of two of the duplexes seen elsewhere on the street, only smooshed together into a quad. The two left units are more consistent, with yellow siding giving that side a single feel. The third unit from the left has white siding and an open porch, while the right unit has tan siding and an enclosed porch. It’s four (or three-ish) distinct homes from the outside, but they essentially all share a single structure.
This block of homes may seem unremarkable, and in a lot of ways they are. To an extent, it feels obvious that each homeowner should be allowed to live in whatever style house they choose and that they can make any improvements they desire, from changing the shingles to siding to enclosing a porch. Yet, at least in my experience traveling the country (and for 15 years of that, doing so specifically through the lens of housing), this block is worth a deeper look.
In the Boston area, multifamily homes from this same era proliferate, yet they are often stacked units with one unit on the first floor, another on the second floor, and sometimes a third on the top level. In nearly all cases, the exterior is consistent. Oftentimes, homeowners in these multifamily buildings are part of a condo association, even if that “association” just involves two neighbors under a single roof. They pay a small fee to cover some common utilities (exterior or basement lighting for example) and to also cover shared maintenance costs, like replacing a roof, siding, or exterior painting.
Side by side multifamily homes, especially in the older neighborhoods of the Northeast (parts of Boston, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Baltimore, DC, etc), are often made up of an entire block of conjoined homes, so even with small individual expressions, the overall effect still has some consistency. Many of these blocks are brick row houses too, which further helps ground a block of houses, despite small personalized touches.
Yet these homes in Morrisville are wood construction, standalone duplexes, with seemingly no consistency even under a single roof. It’s hard to see in my photos, but sometimes even the roof shingles are different on a single house- not just in color but in age too.
In an odd way, these houses seem to speak to something uniquely American which is especially true in this moment in history. We tend to romanticize rugged individualism and believe that every human deserves an unconditional right to do whatever they want, consequences be damned.
That American myth ignores the fact that humanity is a collective exercise. There is no such thing as true freedom, because nearly every action one partakes in has some effect on other humans.
“I’m going to replace my roof, whether or not my attached neighbor will” ignores the fact that rainwater doesn’t respect property lines. You both live under the same roof, and a leak on their side might end up caving in your ceiling. But we don’t think like that, and thus we end up with houses that are split down the middle, King Solomon style.
This style of thinking can get expanded in very destructive ways, from the individual “I’ll drive my jumbo, polluting SUV because I can afford to” to “So what if we’re exploiting labor and environmental regulations in the Global South, I have shareholders to respect and quarterly numbers to hit in order to receive my bonus.”
On the flip side though, this block of houses seem unique to a time and place and are unlikely to be found in most of America today. Zoning laws separate single family homes from multifamily homes. A legacy neighborhood like this one in Morrisville has them all integrated, but that is rare in newer neighborhoods. New multifamily construction is also more likely to be denser than standalone duplexes.
Even more significantly, the roughly 30% of people that live in neighborhoods dictated by a Homeowners Association (HOA) would never be allowed to have such aesthetically varied houses. Many HOAs dictate the types of exterior cladding that are appropriate to a neighborhood and sometimes even specify a color palette of acceptable paint colors. Roughly 60% of new construction is happening in HOA governed neighborhoods, so that level of restriction will become increasingly common.
This neighborhood of 1920s houses in Morrisville is a product of its times. It is dense, walkable, on a logical grid, and has sidewalks. But it also shares a lot in common with a town a few miles and a generation away: Levittown.
William J. Levitt first brought assembly line style construction to Long Island in 1947. His second project was Levittown, PA, just down the road from Morrisville and started in 1951. Levitt, it should be noted, was also a racist that excluded people of color from his neighborhoods.
Levitt focused on building small, nearly identical houses quickly that were affordable, especially to soldiers returning from World War II. His homes were built to be expanded over time, as money and need dictated.
The result is that driving through a Levittown today, one sees an endless variety of houses: some small ranches and Cape Cod style houses, but also some larger colonials or other rambling forms which are the product of additions, expansions, and renovations over the years. The houses are customized to the owners needs and wants.
This presents the question of what’s the right answer for the multifamily homes of Morrisville? Is the consistent brick foursquare that I showed at the beginning preferable, with its singular facade? Or is that quad of all colors and changes over the years perfect as is?
Should the homeowner have full dominion over their four walls, as is the case in Morrisville, or should the aesthetic concerns of an entire neighborhood govern individual choices, as in an HOA? If it’s the former, who is liable for a problem like a roof leak?
Walking around Morrisville last week seems to have presented me with more questions than answers. Even though these questions seem solely aesthetic on the surface, they also hint at bigger questions of community, interdependence, and what we owe to one another. That’s the funny thing about housing. It is the largest purchase most people will make, can be tied to identity in myriad ways, yet can also be easily trivialized.
How we feel about housing, the laws that govern what we can and can’t do with our abodes, and the choices we make about how our houses look and function reveal a lot about our society and some of the more fundamental questions of what it means to be human.
At the end of the day, as my kindergarten teacher eluded to all those years ago, we are all unique, complex, and long for our own expression of our identity.
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