“In an effort to encourage denser development, Gov. Jared Polis signed a new bill into law on Tuesday to allow smaller apartment buildings in Colorado to be built with a single staircase, instead of the two previously required by building codes.”
#UrbanPlanning #DensityDesign #Cities #MultifamilyHousing #BuildingCodes #SingleStarcaseBuildings #FireSafety #MissingMiddleHousing
https://denverite.com/2025/05/13/denver-colorado-single-stair-apartment-law-passed/
Really cool, interesting, and informative presentation tonight by Teass\Warren architects for NJ SFx about Missing Middle residential design. Made me think a lot. And that's always a good thing.
Really makes me regretful for not being in a firm like that anymore, and doing interesting and beneficial work.
And, at the same time, thinking about how to connect with firms like that, who aren't on big recruiting platforms.
94% of #MissingMiddleHousing permits issued by Arlington under EHO were in majority-White tracts.
Anyone trying to make a social-justice argument for status-quo sprawl zoning, which the NAACP calls "an integral part of a segregationist system", is a fool and a charlatan.
@ferranc96
As a developer, I don't actually care about undercutting my neighbors on price -- provided my costs are lower. I'm building $500K houses across from where others built $900K houses, because my city has rezoned to allow #MissingMiddleHousing Developers and landlords are not a single class.
So one of the "winning" arguments that has (for now) halted #MissingMiddleHousing in #ArlingtonVA was... sewage impacts. Which is a red herring!
https://www.arlnow.com/2024/09/27/breaking-judge-overturns-missing-middle-zoning-changes/
Notably, #MissingMiddleHousing does not need "filtering" to deliver lower housing prices. It can cut prices immediately by allowing families to share land and walls, and economize on square footage with houses better tailored to their needs.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/paytonc/53977898610
Cost per unit for housing types - Payton Chung, a photo at https://www.flickr.com/photos/paytonc/53977898610/. Payton Chung posted a photo:
Combination of lower land cost and smaller units, hence lower hard cost per unit #MissingMiddleHousing
Cost per unit for housing types - Payton Chung; Combination of lower land cost and smaller units, hence lower hard cost per unit #MissingMiddleHousing - a photo at https://flic.kr/p/2qeQQGj
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53977898610_e2d1702545_b.jpg
In an airport security line with an accidental #MissingMiddleHousing celebrity: Henry Winkler, actor who played The Fonz, who famously lived in a "Fonzie flat" #AccessoryDwellingUnit
What if... you could make smaller/cheaper houses a renewable resource, rather than a declining, finite, zero-sum resource?
Also, note the goalpost shifting; before #MissingMiddleHousing passed, they were saying the resulting units would be *more* expensive
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/07/08/single-family-zoning-lawsuit-arlington-missing-middle-trial/
This gReEdY DeVeLoPeR used to sell $1M+ houses, but after #MissingMiddleHousing Zoning Reform, he now sells houses starting at $399K & "is seeing the same profit margins as before but on more revenue, resulting in a healthier bottom line".
Yes, lower housing prices DOES make money -- if housing costs are lower, too.
https://www.builderonline.com/land/planning/how-eliminating-single-family-only-zoning-will-impact-builders-and-developers_o
Stephen Smith: "The problem with elevators is a microcosm of the challenges of the broader construction industry — from labor to building codes to a sheer lack of political will."
A key issue preventing #MissingMiddleHousing is that building codes are written by industry, for industry. The Herbert Hoover system of setting policy through regulatory capture is bad!
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/08/opinion/elevator-construction-regulation-labor-immigration.html
Adam Ozimek: "For every obvious bad law on the books [i.e., single-family only zoning], there’s going to be 20 to 30 less-obvious bad laws that are also blocking supply" = building #MissingMiddleHousing isn't just a matter of "One Weird Trick"
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/07/labor-shortage-aging-workforce-economy-job-market/678840/
When Zoe Todd finally got her #TinyHome settled onto a new property with her father & sister in #Nanoose, she breathed a sigh of relief.
It had been quite the journey from where they had all lived in #Errington. With her dad on a fixed income & a COVID-related health scare that had her feeling vulnerable, they all had a vision of trying to find somewhere big enough where they could live in community & look after each other.
Though sometimes described as #MissingMiddleHousing, tiny home living is effectively #illegal in many regions, including Nanaimo.
Years after first investigating the possibility of permitting tiny homes as a solution to the #HousingCrisis & even advocating for their use at the 2022 #UnionOfBCMunicipalities convention, the #RDN appears to be backtracking — cracking down on residents like Todd & more clearly defining a six-month limit on those living in RVs in parks & campgrounds.
https://thediscourse.ca/nanaimo/regional-district-of-nanaimo-tiny-homes-and-rvs
#Nanaimo #NorthCowichan #BCpoli #NanaimoPoli #VancouverIsland #LetPeopleLiveInTinyHomes #SupportTinyHomes #HousingIssues #VanIsle #BritishColumbia #Canada
This house on Wisconsin Ave. NW was demolished by greedy high-rise developers — no, wait, it was merely moved around the corner to face Macomb St. The high-rise is actual infill, in that it fills in what had been a square of grass. Keeping the house (which might have been part of a bargain with the neighborhood) can help to recoup most of the land acquisition cost.
Infill, rather than demolition, was pretty typical of how “missing middle housing” was originally built in its early 20th-century, pre-zoning heyday. It’s also how middle housing development generally pencils in the present day: “the best way to make an infill project work is to avoid demolition.”
Even though houses in locations like Upper NW DC are expensive, houses’ yard space is some of the lowest-valued land in cities. Moving a house on its lot is a way to buy just the yard while leaving the use value of the house intact. (I had hoped to take a similar approach with my Redgrove project by building just within the backyard, but alas couldn’t get zoning permission to retain the house. Instead, the site has to be all townhouses, and the original house will be demolished soon.)
A century-old example is the Coolidge Corner section of Brookline, Massachusetts, where my grandparents once bought a triple-decker and where John F. Kennedy grew up. The NPS website for the JFK house includes this Sanborn insurance map slider, which shows how Coolidge Corner’s building stock changed between 1907 and 1919 — including both the Kennedy’s house and my grandfather’s triple-decker.
The maps shows that flats (shown on the fire insurance maps in red, as they were built out of fireproof brick) were usually built on vacant, but already subdivided, house lots. Sometimes, a wooden house (shown in yellow) would be moved on its lot to make room for flats–e.g., the two circled houses at the corner of Harvard and Green Streets were rotated away from Harvard St. to make room for shops on the same lot. A ~1919 photo shows Jack and Joe Kennedy Jr. standing amidst a half-built suburban subdivision. Few houses were demolished entirely to build just flats — though some were for larger buildings, like the mixed-use complex in the obtuse corner.
People like Rose Kennedy, who moved into a new-ish wooden house in Coolidge Corner in 1914, did not approve. In 1973, just after my family arrived, she called the area “built up now… congested and drab” (pg. 33). Keep in mind that Joseph Kennedy Sr. moved there as a bank president. Single lots and detached houses in Coolidge Corner in the 1910s were already a luxury, perhaps because restrictive covenants required a minimum house value.
Despite those covenants, this pre-zoning suburb was demographically mixed—because nuclear-family SFH-owners like the Kennedys were the exception, while extended families & renters were the norm. The 1920 Census found the Kennedys’ block was 68% renters and had 47 unrelated boarders! Roomers and live-in servants were surprisingly common in many urban and suburban neighborhoods into the early 20th century, until early zoning advocates forced them out. In that sense, my grandfather bringing his multigenerational family (and renters) to the area wasn’t anything new, even in a rich suburb like Brookline. Also, every neighborhood has always been changing forever and always will, the end.
The town just required me to double my budget for sidewalks by requiring elaborate but unnecessary underground planters for street trees. Probably a $200K streetscape.
Meanwhile, the teardown McMansions down the street bask in their detached-house privilege without either required sidewalks OR street trees.
#MissingMiddleHousing
One of the innovations at Colonial Village in Arlington, the original FHA-insured middle-income garden apartment complex, is that it's laid out as "point access blocks" of #SingleStair segments. Pertinent to VA SB 195, #MissingMiddleHousing, @Lyle. From Arch Forum, Aug 1935:
Cul-de-sac Tempe turns out to be a good example of how #MissingMiddleHousing falls into the Valley of High Parking Requirements, as I called it in Henry Grabar's book "Paved Paradise" (illustrated by Alfred Twu).
It didn't pencil as either mid-rise with a garage, or as low-rise with parking lots. So instead it's low-rise without parking!
https://arch.gatech.edu/redesigning-cities#carfree-urbanism-and-missing-middle-housing
#MissingMiddleHousing reforms can potentially reduce costs across the entire budget (hard costs, soft costs, land costs).
https://westnorth.com/2023/06/02/what-a-planner-learned-by-developing-missing-middle-housing/
I'd somehow never noticed this lovely original-built triplex in Boulder before -- on tony Mapleton Ave., no less. We have few of these so every one is precious.
#MissingMiddleHousing
