#missing middle

[ersatzpenguin]

What if… 🙈 we both had houses 👉🏻👈🏻… and they touched? 😳

[the-city-in-mind]

About Here (Uytae Lee) looks at why the double-staircase building code limits apartments to one-bedroom or studios, meaning family-sized multi-room apartments can’t be built.

[cnu-newurbanism]

Great Idea 2: Missing middle housing

Increasingly in demand today, missing middle housing forms the backbone of the quintessential American neighborhood. Read more.

[archi-playground]

"Stealth Density", "Disguised Density", "Gentle Density"

How Architects tactfully design and pitch infill housing that responds to context and the politics of upzoning.

[sasquapossum]

I know I've beaten this drum before, but here we go again: "everybody move to the city" is not the solution to car-culture and urban-design problems. In fact, I think it's part of the problem. Allow me to explain.

tl;dr it's all about the votes

First, let's figure out what "the city" means. Most large cities consist of two parts: a very dense core, and outlying areas which are practically the same as suburbs. Still vast tracts of single-family detached homes, sliced apart by "stroads" that isolate more than they connect. (For those who don't know the term, it's a portmanteau of "street" which is a place of commerce and "road" which is a way to get from one city/town to another. Stroads combine the worst of both, separating what's on either side with high-speed traffic.) A classic example is Detroit, which is one of the largest US cities geographically. The stroad near us when we lived in Detroit was actually worse than the one near us in an adjoining suburb (Hazel Park), in both we were surrounded by other SFD homes, in both we had major highways nearby, a dearth of stores, and so on.

So, "move to the city" can mean one of two different things: moving to the core, or to the outer areas. If you move from the suburbs to an outer area, that's what we in computing call a "no-op" - an instruction that does nothing. Neither the place you left nor the place you went to has or will change, except for a few exceptions I'll get to later. Most importantly, nothing has changed for you. You're still living in basically the same environment (except maybe a bit dirtier and with fewer trees). On the other hand, if you move to the core - the only version of "move to the city" that really means anything at all - you might have well improved conditions for yourself, at the expense of making that core even less affordable. You will also have added to the infrastructure challenges there. "New urbanists" like to talk about the infrastructure costs of sprawly suburbs, but for electrical power in particular there are equal challenges for dense urban cores. The optimal distribution is actually somewhere in between. This effect is somewhat attenuated for other kinds of infrastructure such as fresh water, food distribution, and waste disposal, but we still have to ask: how many more upstate New York communities have to host New York City's trash? And where do all those garbage trucks go at night? Hint: it's not near the people whose trash they're hauling. Another "externality" imposed on adjacent communities so that the core residents can forget about it.

If everyone tried to move from the suburbs to denser urban cores at once, it would be a disaster even for the cities themselves for all the reasons above, but there are other problems as well. What would happen to all of the abandoned buildings and infrastructure back in the suburbs? To get an idea, take a tour of the "Rust Belt" some time. That will show you quite clearly the human and ecological toll of emigration on such a scale. What a waste. With disasters at both ends, how is that a solution?

This is where we get to the other ill effect of people moving to the city. Everyone who leaves from a suburb to a city is leaving their vote behind. That leaves even fewer voters to do anything about zoning and other policies that make suburbs the way they are. I've seen it over and over; the people who care about creating walkable neighborhoods and reducing car dependence leave, so policy remains in the hands of people who want to keep things the same. That is, quite directly, why most suburbs have town centers that are sterile and useless - if they even exist. Too many suburbs don't even have a real center, just one or more extended strip malls.

What we need is not more 15-minute cities but more 15-minute towns. Thousands of them. Reconfiguring and repurposing existing structures, where people already live and will continue to live, instead of abandoning them and building even more in the cities. Mixed use, mixed income, medium density. The missing middle according to some. To achieve that goal, people need to stay and vote (or, even better, serve on town zoning boards and such). The day when the cities could absorb the nearer suburbs - as Detroit did once, to become so big - are gone. No suburb would submit to such incorporation in the current milieu of property values and school funding and so on. The weight of numbers from city dwellers can't be used to force change anywhere else at anything less than the state level. How well does that work? Again, Detroit - ringed by more prosperous suburbs - tells us the answer: not at all. Detroit has no influence over poor suburbs like Hazel Park or River Rouge, let alone rich ones like Birmingham or Bloomfield Hills.

Every town (or small city) that has succeeded in reversing the process of suburban sprawl, in creating walkable and pleasant but still affordable and ecologically sustainable neighborhoods, has done so through the efforts of residents who stayed and did the work. "Move to the city" is a religion among the privileged few (who must be few for it to work at all), not a solution for the many. As long as it's the mantra among self-styled "new urbanists" we will all get exactly nowhere. Let go of that idea. Embrace strong towns instead.

[threadatl]

Good news from Decatur! This week, the city voted to allow duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes to be built on parcels currently designated only for standalone homes. Will it truly have an effect on affordability? Yes, in context: Decatur has become a bubble of expensive housing even middle-income families can't afford. This move is expected to make housing more attainable by those groups. For lower income households, Decatur has other initiatives in the works (such as a community land trust) to target deeper affordability. It's part of a multi-pronged effort to break up the solid block of expensive housing & add diversity. One big benefit of legalizing missing-middle housing: it should slow down the massive rise in resale values of existing homes. According to the Atlanta Business Chronicle, the median home price in Decatur has risen by a whopping 92% since 2017 -- something that's influenced by the static supply of homes in 'hot' districts. Adding new homes in those places will help broaden supply and lower that rate of increase on median prices.

[robpegoraro]

Arlington should stop discriminating against duplexes, and so should other counties and cities in America

While the Arlington County Board started hearing out hundreds of citizens at its Saturday meeting about its “Expanded Housing Option” proposal to liberalize zoning regulations and enable the construction of multiple-family residences in more of the county, I went on a bike ride that took me through several of those single-family-zoned neighborhoods on my way to the Donaldson Run trail. Many of…

[hobo-pedestrian]

ADUs in Cleveland. My tour of American cities continues.

[dkaufmandevelopment]

Watch the progress at our East 31st street project! We are thrilled to be developing affordable workforce housing that is well-located and designed with the human experience in mind. Our mission is to support the health of communities by providing critical service providers with the opportunity to live where they work. We partner with cities, community stakeholders, and local employers to create affordable housing for working families.

We use modular construction techniques and highly efficient templated design to drive affordability at scale, all while remaining focused on the human experience. Our goal is to accelerate infill development of workforce housing for the “missing middle”.

Are you interested in learning more about our exciting project? Feel free to message me here or visit our website at www.dkaufmandevelopment.com.

[magicaljarofbeans]

Adding onto this, urban infrastructure in the US and Canada is such a waste of space (coming from someone with a special interest in city design, car dependence and cycling infrastructure etc.). There's this thing called the "missing middle". Due to stupid zoning rules only certain types of houses can be built in certain places. This has led to swaths of single family homes in suburbia (the death of cities) or high rise apartments. But you're missing this middle type of house. Smaller houses, that perhaps are joined together, or are close together. The perfect kind of house for the majority of people!

Unsurprisingly it all boils down to money. It's not cheaper for the government to do this, but it is for car and gas companies...

This might sound like a side tangent but it isn't! The more separated people are (suburbia) the more car dependent they are, so car and gas companies make more money.

This is also the case with road layout and design. But I could go on for a while and as I'm writing this it's very late and I should be asleep not talking about infrastructure 😅

(NotJustBikes and ClimateTown are good YouTube channels that explain these issues in an interesting way, so I highly recommend checking them out)

Our use of land in the USA is such a mess. Some of our land we struggle endlessly to cause it to produce resources, and with other land, we expend resources on sterilizing it.

[cnu-newurbanism]

A primer on Missing Middle Housing

AARP, an interest group representing older Americans that claims 38 million members, has increasingly become involved in housing issues (including ongoing work with CNU on code reform). AARP has released a useful primer on “Missing Middle Housing,” with architect and urban designer Dan Parolek of Opticos Design. 

The report, called Discovering and Developing Missing Middle Housing, is available as a free download. The report explains missing middle housing, why it is missing, its benefits, and tips on its planning, design, and development in communities. 

Read more.

[spkyart]

Specialist

[zephyrchama]

Spotting Beelzebub alone on a couch is a very dangerous trap that must be avoided at all costs.

He may appear to be minding his own business, sitting there innocently, scrolling his DDD. Maybe chewing on a mint. But make no mistake, this is a trap.

Should you choose to sit next to him, your fate is sealed. Beelzebub may put a hand around your shoulder or pull you towards his lap. He may just remain still. Yet every single time, Belphegor will appear. Very swiftly, very silently.

Belphegor will sit so close to you that he's practically on top of you and will proceed to squish you into his twin. He throws a leg over your knee, over Beelzebub's too, and lets his body go slack. Gravity takes care of the rest as he topples into you like a domino. He's heavy. Arms cover your head as you disappear from view.

Shout as you might, Beelzebub allows this to happen. With his hands on either side, there is no escape. You sink down and your cheek winds up pressed against his naval while Belphegor cozies in close, his breath flooding your nose. You can flail your lower legs until someone gets tired of the squirming and holds them down. The twins will cuddle you until they feel satisfied.

The Attic Club Sandwich shows no mercy.

[robpegoraro]

Dead-ender litigation won't make housing more affordable

I don't know what will make housing less expensive around me, but I am sure that a ticky-tack ruling from a judge won't help matters.

It will take a little longer for a slightly freer housing market to provide some possibly cheaper new homes in Arlington now that a judge has thrown a stop sign in front of my county’s attempt to allow multiple-family housing on lots formerly reserved for single-family housing. Retired Fairfax County judge David Schell (picked by Virginia’s Supreme Court after all of Arlington’s active judges…