Last year, the folks over at Kronberg Urbanists and Architects put together an amazing Homelessness & Incremental Housing Toolkit for Chattanooga, TN.

It’s a really incredible book, with the section on proposed housing type standing out as a wealth of information for congregations looking to build housing on their land. This section includes a number of house plans that are flexible enough for infill development on small or strangely shaped lots, perfect for faith-based housing.

For this article, I’ve selected 4 plans that would fit well into any faith-based housing development. There are many more included in the toolkit, and I encourage you to dig deeper for even more options.

Studio Cottage

This studio cottage is an ideal option at the smaller end of the spectrum.

At only 14’ by 22’, it can fit into small lots and be the perfect home for someone experiencing housing insecurity, a college kid, or a young adult who wants to live affordably and doesn’t need much room.

This is solidly within “tiny home” territory, which may mean it’s not great for most long-term residents. Yet it’s important to have options in this range because they are both affordable and attainable on small lots.

It can also be paired with another studio to create a duplex, which might fit in better aesthetically when surrounded by larger homes.

1 Bed Cottage

The 1 bed cottage is a step up from the studio, offering more private space and permanence. This house would be ideal for a young person or couple. It is also a good option for an older person who wants a bit more room, especially given its one-story works well for aging in place.

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The porch is a great addition, making the house feel bigger and offering a nice place to socialize.

1 Bed Cottage (2-story)

The 2-story version is also a great alternative that could fit into a narrower site. While less ideal for an older person, it would still be great for younger people or single folks who don’t need a big house.

This one can also be a duplex option, again a great variation for a setting where a larger house would be appropriate. I also like the bigger porch on the duplex option, which feels practical while being attractive.

2 Bed Cottage

This 2 bedroom cottage is a great option for a small family, a couple who wants an office, or two roommates. This plan really wins on its flexibility, retaining a small size that could easily slot into its surroundings while accommodating a range of living situations.

Takeaways

These housing plans offer a ton of options and flexibility for studios, one and two bedrooms, duplexes, and more. Not only are they beautiful, but they also offer an attainable housing solution for those who need it, whether that be young people looking for a temporary place to stay, older folks who want to age in place, or people experiencing housing insecurity.

An important thing to keep in mind when looking through these plans is that any project would be wise to include a mixture of these housing types in order to foster a diversity of options. That makes for stronger, more resilient communities that allows residents to remain in the neighborhood through many life phases.

Faith-based housing is not just about building homes that are affordable. It is also about strengthening community by offering better places that people enjoy living in. Well-designed houses and sites are crucial for accomplishing that mission.

Next month, we’ll cover some sample site plans that use these housing types to get an idea of how they can be arranged to maximize common space while retaining privacy.

Written By Aaron Lubeck

The paint was barely dry on the newly requisitioned pickleball courts on Duke’s East Campus where two tennis courts previously existed. Less than a month after conversion, the pickleball courts were filled to capacity while the remnant tennis courts lay fallow. Like housing in the South, pickleball is booming. The number of players has doubled in seven years, fast outpacing its lumbering uncle. The sport’s growth has triggered an associated land grab, which makes it an apt analogy to explain the region’s housing shortages. 

In North Carolina’s Triangle, those who manage tennis courts have been tasked with building pickleball facilities to meet demand. They have acted quickly, but their response has been somewhat bizarre. At Hollow Rock, all three tennis hard courts were converted into temporary pickleball courts. At Duke Faculty Club, two courts were converted into four pickles. In Chapel Hill, public courts are consistently being taken over by the paddle people.

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The Faith-Based Housing Initiative, where this article originally appeared, is a program of Southern Urbanism that trains faith-based organizations to build mission-based housing on their land.

Soon, Caldwell Presbyterian in Charlotte, North Carolina will move tenants into 21 studio apartments next door to its main sanctuary. Over the past seven years, the congregation has navigated the development process to successfully convert a 100 year old auxiliary building into “Easter’s Home,” which will house low income people in a supportive community.

If you search for faith-based housing projects, you will not find many projects like Easter’s Home.

What you will find are scores of large buildings, often five or six stories, developed by affordable housing developers. These buildings usually have dozens if not hundreds of units, requiring a hodgepodge of government grants, tax credits, and outside funding to finance projects costing tens of millions of dollars. Often located in large cities, these low or mid-rise buildings are the primary model for the ever-growing YIGBY (Yes in God’s Backyard) movement, which promises to both alleviate the housing crisis and help struggling congregations with much needed cash they need to survive.

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Yet if the YIGBY movement is to be successful, it will need more flexibility.

Hundreds of units are not appropriate in all settings, especially for rural and suburban churches, and out of scale development can (and does) trigger community backlash. Neighborhood scale village style developments offer an alternative that is far more adaptable and attainable in a variety of settings. Also, churches are interested in missions more than affordability, including senior housing, developmentally disabled housing, refuge housing, etc. These smaller scale projects can be tailored to a neighborhood and its surrounding housing needs, making for a style of development that could be more resilient, personal, and effective.

A Clear Problem: Churches Are Not Developers

The primary reason faith-based housing projects of the past have been so large is because faith-based institutions find it difficult to act as developers. Churches lack the expertise to navigate the complicated development process. If a house of worship does decide that it wants to enter into the housing market, it typically concludes that it will need to lean on established developers. In many cases, this means that the congregation takes a backseat in the process, losing some amount of their influence. Such a partnership varies from case to case, but usually involves the church either signing a long-term ground lease or, most commonly, selling the land outright to the developer. This means that the congregation risks losing control of the project and the future of their community.

Developers want to build big. Often they have to.

Most importantly, these partnerships have a high threshold for entry, requiring larger projects to succeed. Developers, especially affordable housing developers, need to build big to make their numbers work. A larger project offers a larger return with marginally more work, making the decision to build big easy, if not required. Affordable housing developers typically rely on the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), a government program which encourages projects over 50 units. This means that these developments are fairly uniform nationwide, with similar size and aesthetics. It also means that the price tag is giant; one project at Central United Methodist in Arlington, Virginia cost $84 million, requiring a complicated patchwork of tax credits, philanthropy, and loans which are inaccessible to most churches.

Affordable housing developers are very good at what they do, managing to navigate government programs and red tape in order to provide as many units as possible at affordable rates. Their priorities require using economies of scale and complicated financing schemes like LIHTC to build dozens or hundreds of units per project. In an urban area like Arlington, 144 was an appropriate size project for its surroundings. Because the partnered faith-based institution also wanted to prioritize affordability and scale, the developer agreement worked out.

The Flip Side

When faith-based institutions have priorities incompatible with large LIHTC developments, forming partnerships with affordable housing developers becomes more difficult. Projects as simple as building a small community for their parishioners or converting an existing building are not attainable under the large-scale model. The reliance on “capital A” Affordable Housing and its baggage has stifled innovative projects suited to their surroundings, making it difficult for churches to build an intentional, unique community. It is simply not worth the pain and expense of navigating the LIHTC process for anything smaller than 50 units.

In fact, the sheer scale of today’s macro faith-based housing can have a negative effect on building intentional community and, in fact, few of the faith-based developments built recently have any physical connection to their originating church. When congregations are primarily presented with the LIHTC model, it becomes harder to envision creative, tailor-made solutions for their specific needs.

Alternatives (Easter’s Home)

So what, then, is the alternative? The few churches that do manage to succeed in building smaller projects, such as Easter’s Home in Charlotte, North Carolina, do so because they have expertise within the congregation. Easter’s Home, a project of Caldwell Presbyterian Church, recently converted an old building on-site into 21 units for low income people. Though they received assistance from developers, the congregation was the driving force of the project, a critical differentiator from how most Faith-Based Housing is being done today. Self-performance ensured that the project stayed on track and centered their priorities.

Because they did not turn their land over to a larger developer, the Caldwell congregation will retain control over the ownership and operation of Easter’s Home. This will facilitate greater interaction with the residents, offering more support and community than a large scale project. Furthermore, the small scale meant a $6 million price tag that pales in comparison to the tens of millions typical of larger faith-based development. They were able to raise this money through philanthropy and grants, avoiding more complicated financing and finishing the project debt-free.

Easter’s Home is the exception, not the rule. Yet it shows that there are options outside of an affordable housing partnership where the faith-based institution simply provides the land. This is not to say that affordable housing partnerships are bad, but rather that they are problematic in many settings. In order for the YIGBY movement to realize its full potential, we need a rapid expansion of smaller projects like Easter’s Home. These projects will be more adaptable to the needs of a congregation and neighborhood, providing an unprecedented diversity of models to learn from and ultimately more success in the long run.

Written by Evan Bille Magen.

The Faith-Based Housing Initiative, where this article originally appeared, is a program of Southern Urbanism that trains faith-based organizations to build mission-based housing on their land.

Imagine someone who spends their day poring over old documents trying to find a new perspective to make a vision come alive. They constantly run into hurdles from authorities and fiercely compete with their colleagues. They devote their time to sketching out the vision and laying a foundation in the hope it will come together in the future.

I’m describing, of course, theologians. And housing developers. They share a lot in common, as it turns out. As faith-based housing becomes possible in more communities, we will see more interaction between these unlikely kindred spirits.

For the possibility of faith-based housing to become a reality on a church’s campus, a motley crew of clergy, parishioners, funders, and developers need a shared foundation.

We need a theology of building.

Most arguments for housing, particularly religious arguments, are ethical appeals.

They advocate for an ethic of building based on pre-existing theologies of loving our neighbor, Christian charity, social justice, or local mission. However, communities interested in faith-based housing based on these broad, ethical commitments ultimately build their houses on sand, to borrow from Jesus’s parable in Matthew 7:24-27. When the rains of raising capital descend and the flood of bureaucratic resistance comes, and the winds of congregational anxiety blow and beat upon the dream of housing, it will fall.

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The long, complicated, and expensive process of building housing incentivizes churches to discern God’s call to do literally anything else. Churches will find every other possible way of loving their neighbor before developing their property. This is not to blame congregations. There are serious, if not insurmountable, legal and logistical hurdles to building housing. Congregations possess the rare combination of opportunity and perseverance to build, but I wonder if our current theology lets us off the hook.

The Church overall has a rich tradition of responding to poverty (if we follow it is another matter!), but poverty and shortages are two different but interrelated problems. Poverty is a demand-side phenomenon where people do not have enough income necessary for human flourishing. The solution is to increase income, whether through better-paying jobs, SNAP, or housing vouchers. In the case of poverty, the faithful response is to give (or redistribute, train, etc.).

But shortages are a supply-side issue:

Our community does not have enough capacity for humans to flourish within it. If we lack the units, the voucher is useless. The solution is to increase the supply of housing.

The faithful response to shortage, then, is to build.

Right now, a growing number of congregations are building in response to housing shortages in their communities. They have done so in spite of, not because of, a social theology that primes believers to address poverty, not shortage. In response to their communities’ cries and trusting in a God bigger than any theology, an increasing movement of churches are building their community’s capacity for flourishing by transforming their own campuses.

When theologian Walter Rauschenbusch wrote his groundbreaking Theology for the Social Gospel over a century ago, he began by saying, “We have a social Gospel. We need a systematic theology large enough to match it and vital enough to back it.”

Churches are already building.

We need a theology bold enough to meet them and deep enough to back them. A theology of building will help Christians find new meaning in the parts of church properties we tend to overlook. It will draw new insights from scriptures whose material details have been subordinate to the spiritual, as if they both cannot be sacred.

When we build as a response to God’s creative action, we learn more about ourselves and our Creator. It is in the learning and work of building that God draws us into relationship.

This theology of building is exemplified throughout scripture:

Throughout the Hebrew Bible, the Hebrew verb bara’, “to create,” appears 55 times. God created (bara’) the heavens and the earth. Only God bara’s. Humans never bara’. We were created (bara’)— emphasis on the passive voice.

Humanity is both creature and image-bearer of the Creator. Humanity does not create, but we are creative. We take what has been created, and from these finite materials, we build. The Hebrew verb banah, “to build,” is used in scripture when pre-existing pieces or raw materials become something new through the work of someone’s hope, vision, and skill. This is the essence of building. In contrast to bara’, God only banahs once— when God “fashioned” Eve from the pre-existing human’s side (tzela).

Building is fundamentally human.

When Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob wanted to give thanks to God, they built altars. Building is inseparable from blessing. Banah receives its most frequent use in the Hebrew scriptures regarding altars, but it is used elsewhere for building cities and houses. It is a conduit between God’s creative initiative and human response.

God creates, so that we might build. I offer this not as a comprehensive theology, but an invitation. The work of theology is constructive. We fashion meaning from the wideness of experiences, environments (built and natural), and relationships that God has given us. As Christians, our task is to develop these raw materials through the witness of scripture to God revealed in Jesus Christ.

This theology invites people of faith to start building. Do not wait for this theology and its ethic to build. Dream and draw what your church’s campus could be. Listen to the needs of your community from a supply-side perspective. Attend the property committee meeting as a spiritual practice. See Christ in who you might build for.

Build the theology that your community needs.

With gratitude to the God who creates, each action we take might move us toward a theology of building.

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Evan Bille Magen lives in Durham, NC and serves as the Director of Missions and Community Outreach at the Kirk of Kildaire. He is a recent graduate of Union Presbyterian Seminary and candidate for ordination in the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA). You can find his Substack “Public Goods” here.

The Faith-Based Housing Initiative, where this article originally appeared, is a program of Southern Urbanism that trains faith-based organizations to build mission-based housing on their land.

For the first eleven years of their existence, the Episcopal Church of the Advocate in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was a nomadic congregation. They moved around, worshipping in synagogues, other churches, and community centers before finally buying fifteen acres of land in 2014, placing a 100-year-old Carpenter Gothic chapel from a nearby town onto the land. It didn't take long before the small but mighty congregation became eager to do more with their space.

Their minister at the time, Reverend Lisa Fischbeck, was approached by four recent graduates of the nearby University of North Carolina who had worked with the local homeless population. Their proposition was a simple one, but it struck a chord.

The Church of the Advocate would be the perfect host for a few tiny homes.

“They had this idea of building tiny homes on church property that would provide a sense of community and dignified affordable housing,” Rev Fischbeck recalls. “We'd always said that if we ever have land and building, it'd be for the good of the community and not just for ourselves. That's why our governing body was really quick to just say ‘yeah let's see if we can do it.’”¹ They began exploring possible designs, and decided that they had the capacity to do three homes.

It didn’t take long to run into a few challenges. First, the Episcopal diocese didn’t fully understand their vision. Since the land was owned by the diocese rather than the church directly, there were concerns about how the homes might impact property values. Somewhat understandably, church leadership wanted to be prepared for the worst-case scenarios and needed to the final plans to mitigate those risks as much as possible. It took awhile to convince them, but ultimately they gave the project their full support and even contributed financially.

The second major challenge was funding. They initially estimated that they would need $120,000 to build three tiny homes, but the final cost slowly increased to nearly $170,000. To raise the money, the four recent graduates helped the church establish a separate nonprofit to handle fundraising, with Rev. Fischbeck chairing the board.

They first approached the town of Chapel Hill, explaining their mission and the nonprofit experience of those involved. The town responded positively, ultimately agreeing to give them a grant of $70,000. A business professor at UNC heard about the project and started a fundraiser through one of his classes, which raised another $35,000. The rest of the funding came from the Diocese of North Carolina, which gave $10,000, and various family foundations and philanthropists in the area.

Once they had raised the money and obtained the necessary permits, construction began. New obstacles didn’t take long to emerge. They discovered that the property had been used as a dump a century earlier. Though the waste was buried ten feet underground and did not pose any risks, it did mean that they had to dig the footers deeper, something that cost $30,000. Chapel Hill’s stringent fire codes also posed a few issues, but each roadblock was successfully navigated and residents moved in in June of 2019, an impressively short four years after their journey began.

Three individuals earning less than 30% of the area median income now call them home, giving some of Chapel Hill’s most vulnerable residents both a roof over their head and a community that cares for them. Each resident pays one-third of their monthly income in rent, with the funds split between management costs and a resident’s equity fund.

Each of the tiny homes is approximately 320 square feet—about the size of two parking spaces. Cleverly designed large windows and lofted ceilings manage to create a sense of spaciousness. Despite their small footprint, they are fully equipped with a bedroom, bathroom, living room, and kitchen. One unit is even ADA accessible, allowing residents to age in place.

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The nonprofit created for the project has since expanded its model, using the Church of the Advocate project as a blueprint for future developments. Named after one of the original residents, Pee Wee Homes has since built two additional similar projects nearby.

Projects like this exemplify the best of faith-based housing.

Not only do they provide shelter for those in need, but they also foster community and a sense of belonging. Pee Wee Homes has demonstrated a relatively affordable and efficient model for housing that could be replicated nationwide. If even a few houses of worship in each city follow the example set by the Church of the Advocate, we have the potential to dramatically increase the housing supply across the country.

Follow along as we cover more exciting stories like this one!

Eli Smith is the Director of the Faith-Based Housing Initiative. He is a recent graduate of Dartmouth College, where he studied Religion.

1. Special thanks to Rev Lisa Fischbeck for talking with me for this story!

Everyone knows about the housing crisis—it’s well documented in political and media circles—but less often acknowledged is the crisis of purpose, which many equate with a crisis of faith. Congregations are shrinking in both numbers and commitments, and with it, we are seeing a decline in charity and civic participation. These twin crises are feeding what can best be described as a crisis of loneliness. Never have Americans been so disconnected, so isolated, and for many, so profoundly sad.

That’s why we created the Faith-Based Housing Initiative, a program designed to train twenty congregations to develop their excess land into intentional housing communities. While solving the crises mentioned above is ambitious, to say the least, there are few opportunities to address all of them together. We believe the FBHI offers that opportunity.

Congregations, especially in the South, have no shortage of land. In Durham County alone—one of the smallest in North Carolina—there are more than 500 faith-based parcels, totaling 2.25 square miles. Across the state, there are more than 1,500 Methodist churches, and even more Baptist congregations. You get the idea.

The scale of underutilized land is enormous and practically limitless.

This land represents an opportunity to foster true community. Not just housing, but homes with meaning—places where residents’ values are reflected in the built environment. In this model, residents can support the congregation, while the congregation supports the residents. That reciprocity is the essence of how cities have always been built, and a model modern development has strayed mainly from.

THE PROS + CONS

Congregations are uniquely positioned to meet these crises. Unlike market-driven developers, they carry a mission beyond profit, which allows them to pursue lower-cost housing. Most faith institutions own their land outright, free and clear of debt. If developed under a non-profit model, they can also deliver housing exempt from property taxes. Together, those benefits alone can reduce costs by 30 to 50 percent compared to the market. No other type of development starts on a more stable financial footing.

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But churches are also uniquely challenged when it comes to building housing. For the most part, they are not developers, and they don’t know how to navigate the process. The consensus-based decision-making structures common to many congregations often prove toxic in development, where thousands of decisions need to be made quickly under pressure. Someone has to be at the helm; roundtable governance cannot substitute for leadership.

Churches are also naturally risk-averse. They are sensitive to financial exposure, wary of social critique from members and neighbors, and challenged to find lenders, since banks hesitate to finance church development. The broader ecosystem of church lending is nearly nonexistent. These are all solvable problems—but they have to be solved with intention.

PROGRAMMING

Our program is designed to solve these issues. It is a six-month intensive training for twenty congregations across the country. It includes world-class site planning under the direction of architect Thomas Dougherty, world-class development training with Alli Quinlan, executive director of the Incremental Development Alliance, and community capacity-building events, such as a speaker series and film series with Chris Elisara’s Better Cities Film Festival.

By the end of the program, each congregation will walk away with a full suite of deliverables: thoughtful research, beautiful site plans, solid business plans, and the readiness to put shovels in the ground.

RESURRECTING HOUSING MODELS

What gives me confidence is that this is not a new model. It is, in fact, an old one—just one that has been dormant for several generations. Faith-based housing is subject to what Jane Jacobs once called “mass amnesia,” meaning there is virtually no one left alive today who knows how to do it.

But historically, for most of human existence, faith congregations have been providers for people on the margins: orphans, the elderly, the infirm, the mentally ill, the homeless, and refugees. Churches carried that responsibility for millennia, long before government bureaucracies crowded them out. The capacity of faith institutions to serve is still there, and in many ways, more reliable than our strained local, state, and federal governments.

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Development is about more than delivering the most product for the least cost.

Congregations are uniquely positioned to break the mold. The truth is, homes must be more than housing. People on the margins deserve dignity. They deserve inspiring places to live, not just roofs over their heads. Faith institutions are uniquely positioned to offer both.

We stand at the cusp of something big, and through this initiative, we intend to re-prove the already proven model.

Learn more at faith-housing.org and fbhi.substack.com

Aaron Lubeck is the founder of Southern Urbanism. He is a designer and builder in Durham, North Carolina.

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The Faith-Based Housing Initiative, where this article originally appeared, is a program of Southern Urbanism that trains faith-based organizations to build mission-based housing on their land.

Earlier this year, Strong Towns founder Chuck Marohn wrote an article on his Substack called ‘We Need to Crash the Market for Entry-Level Homes.’ His thesis is a fairly simple one:

In order to lift ourselves out of the housing crisis, we need a surge in bottom-up, incremental development.

Marohn is right, and his insights are especially relevant to faith-based institutions that are trying to build housing. Incremental development, by its very nature, is locally-driven and bottom-up. Not only does this approach produce stronger, more vibrant communities, but it also creates longer-lasting investments and delivers desperately needed housing units faster. Many of incremental development’s values- localism, quality, and civic pride- align well with those of houses of worship, and faith communities would do well to embrace this model. By doing so, we could see a wave of faith-based housing that complements the broader movement toward incremental development.

Large Projects Won’t Cut It

An incremental approach, Marohn claims, is not slow. In fact, building large-scale developments like towering apartment blocks or expansive subdivisions is the slower approach. Incremental development, on the other hand, is “fast, nimble, and nuanced in a way that scales to our challenge.”

This is as true (if not more true) for faith-based housing projects as it is for general housing development. Most large developments that are undertaken by houses of worship take extraordinarily long. It starts with months (or years) of discernment, talking with lawyers and affordable housing consultants, then fundraising, and applying for tax credits and subsidies. A project like that can take a half dozen years before any permits are approved or ground is broken. Many of these steps are necessary, especially for a large project in a dense urban environment. But it's impossible to deny that they’re slow and expensive.

An 8 story, 144-unit project in Northern Virginia took over a decade and $84 million to complete. That works out to almost $600,000/unit. If not for intense subsidies, this simply would not be ‘affordable’ housing.

Compare that to Caldwell Presbyterian in Charlotte, NC, which converted an unused building to 21 units for less than half the per-unit cost. Another upcoming project at Greater Refuge Church in Durham, NC promises to build 6 units for $150,000 each. On the extreme low-end, Sacred Settlement in St Paul, MN is building tiny homes on church properties for about $35,000.

I’ve written about the issues with this large-scale model before, but Marohn’s article brings in a crucial point. Incremental development is generally cheaper, faster, and more locally-responsive. Those elements make an incremental philosophy far more appropriate for most religious organizations than the large-scale one.

Incremental development not only creates resilient places, but it creates resilient institutions and stronger houses of worship. If we want a broad-based movement of churches across the country getting involved in improving their built environment, we need houses of worship everywhere asking what the next incremental step looks like for them.

Building Incremental Development Expertise

The next point that Marohn makes concerns what he calls the “hockey stick chart.” It shows how an idea gets tossed around before being implemented. It’s experimented with at first, before broad adoption that compounds into widespread change.

“When it comes to bottom-up housing,” he says, “the tinkering phase is done. We know the types of units that can be scaled and we know how to build them. Turning millions of spare bedrooms into low-cost rental units, building cottages in millions of backyards, and building a million starter homes between existing homes and on empty lots are all easy to do. There are people out there doing this work.”

This is true for many small-scale developers, but it isn’t true for faith-based institutions–yet.

Plenty of houses of worship are tinkering and building one-off projects, but there has not been a broad-based national movement that shares lessons and advises churches on how to have success with incremental development.

That’s where the Faith-Based Housing Initiative comes in. We’re connecting houses of worship with experts from the Incremental Development Alliance, Southern Urbanism, Innerblock Design Studio, and Proximity Project, helping them to make the next incremental step forward. Through a four-part curriculum featuring guest speakers, film nights, and design and development workshops, we aim to equip churches with the knowledge and tools they need to engage with the development process effectively. This preparation increases the likelihood that their projects will find success.

These efforts will ultimately enable faith-based housing to enter the next phase in the hockey stick model, leading to more widespread adoption and creating amazing places that are anchored by religious institutions.

The Faith-Based Housing Initiative blog serves as the launching pad for our Initiative, sharing stories and building a knowledge base on which to do this work. Subscribe to receive weekly updates and stories about the faith-based housing movement. This movement has great potential to shape the south and the country, and we look forward to sharing it with you.

Let’s build amazing places together.

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Eli Smith is the Director of the Faith-Based Housing Initiative. He is a recent graduate of Dartmouth College, where he studied Religion.

Southern Urbanism has partnered with Building Optimism and Building Culture to bring you the best stories from the people who build our cities.

Hi! I’m Austin, Founder of Building Culture. I’m building a holistic real estate development company from the ground up, with a mission to create a more beautiful, resilient, and thriving world through the built environment.

Last year, I attended Reconvene in Santa Monica – a real estate private equity “un-conference,” as they describe it. It was a great experience. The venues were stunning – like dinner-on-the-beach-stunning – the food and drink were top-notch, but most importantly, the people were really impressive.

Combustible Collisions

The guest list was curated, mainly consisting of developers (GPs) and investors (LPs), but also a smattering of architects, brokers, and other industry professionals. While everyone there had put together at least one deal, there was a wide range of experience, from people early in their real estate career to people who have been doing it for forty years and have billions in AUM (assets under management).

For me, it was an amazing opportunity to learn and network. I’ve been running a design + build company for eight years, but I’m still relatively new to the GP and syndication game. Spending a few days with people who are further down the path is one of the best ways to grow. If you want to get better at something, hang out with people who are already doing it.

Reconvene is called an “un-conference” because the formal talks are minimal and optional. Instead, most of the value comes from organic conversations. With over 220 people in attendance, Moses (the host) takes the time to curate the guest list and even arranges small group meals based on questionnaires to foster the right connections. It’s thoughtful — and it works.

Groups like this have a high probability of combustible collisions – actionable relationships that can lead to all kinds of exciting things.

How Twitter Changed My Business

Here’s the crazy part. This all started on Twitter. Yes, Twitter. I only created my personal account on Twitter in October 2023, literally one year ago, and stumbled upon what’s known as “ReTwit,” a community of top real estate investors and operators who share insights, deals, and sometimes even raise money on the platform. It also happens to be the origins of Reconvene.

It’s an incredible network of knowledge and people.

This is where I first came across Moses. I stumbled upon his account, and his pinned investment philosophy immediately caught my attention:

Our strategy is simply to do what smart families have always done:

1. Acquire great assets in supply-constrained markets

2. Leverage them conservatively

3. Steward them well

4. Refinance them opportunistically to return capital tax-efficiently

5. Hold them indefinitely

Simple, but powerful.

Fast Money = Fast Architecture

In today’s world, there’s a rush to chase high IRRs (Internal Rate of Return) and quick exits. But something about Moses’s approach feels….timeless. It’s not about flipping properties or quick profits – it’s about long-term stewardship. And that really struck a chord with me.

Internal Rate of Return (IRR) didn’t rise to prominence as an investment metric until the 1950’s with the rise of corporate finance. Isn’t that right around the time everything in the built environment started going to hell?

I’m no academic or historian, so please take this with a grain of salt, but I absolutely think there is a correlation here. Of course, many other factors contributed to the decline of our cities since the 1950’s as well – such as authoritarian zoning practices and government-sanctioned segregation and destruction of inner cities through Urban Renewal. More on that another time.

But finance, no doubt, plays a large role.

Form Follows Finance

R. John Anderson, a leader in the New Urbanism movement, often says of architecture and development, “form follows finance”. I couldn’t agree more.

Our financial systems and incentives dictate much of what gets built today. I’ll be writing more on this topic in the future, but if you want to dig deeper now, I highly recommend the book Escaping the Housing Trap by Chuck Marohn and Daniel Herriges. It’s an eye-opening look at how financialization has transformed our built environment – much of it government mandated.

You Can’t Build Timeless Architecture Without Timeless Financial Principles

At Building Culture, we’re all about timeless principles – whether it’s in design, construction or investment. We believe in blending the best of the old with the best of the new.

When I saw Moses’s investment philosophy, it struck me as a timeless truth. There may be other ways to invest. There may be other ways to make (and lose) money faster. But they’re often much higher risk and extractive. Yet people have been using Moses’s strategy for hundreds of years to build real wealth, not just for themselves, but for society.

Moses is doing this with value-add multi-family in California. Why not apply the same thinking to ground-up, mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods here in Oklahoma?

That’s exactly what we are going to do.

Pivoting to a Long-Term Hold Strategy

As many of you know I’ve been raising money for Townsend, a ground-up, mixed-use infill neighborhood. Originally, the plan was to sell everything within five years – a typical time frame in today’s market.

But a couple of months ago, I went back to our investors with a new idea: let’s pivot to a long-term hold. We’ll sell the residential units, but keep the commercial spaces long-term. We meet all of Moses’ requirements for investment:

1. Quality real estate? You bet. We are developing, designing and building it ourselves, and you all know our product.

2. Supply constrained market? Absolutely – urban infill is tough, difficult to replicate, and inherently constrained.

3. Steward it Well? We plan to manage it ourselves to curate the right tenants over time, and move our Building Culture offices into one of the spaces so we can participate in the community.

4. Conservative Leverage? That’s what we baked into the pro forma.

5. Refinance opportunistically? Rather than sell, we can capture rent appreciation and pull out equity via refinancing, providing tax-free returns to our investors – in addition to normal cash flow and pass-through depreciation/interest deductions.

6. Hold indefinitely? While nothing is truly forever, downtown Edmond, where our project is located, is only going to improve over time. We believe in the success of Edmond long-term, are adding to its value with Townsend, and get to be stewards in the community of some of the premier real estate in downtown.

Looking Ahead

This is by no means a thorough analysis of our investment strategy or the financialization of the building industry. I’ll be writing more about all of this in the coming year – so stay tuned!

For now, consider this a teaser. And if you’re curious to learn more or have thoughts to share, check out some of the links above, or hit reply and I’ll see it in my inbox.

Thanks for reading, and let’s keep building toward a more beautiful, resilient, and thriving world!

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Austin Tunnell is the Founder, CEO, and Head of Product at Building Culture, a holistic real estate development company dedicated to creating beautiful, resilient, and thriving places.

Announcement

I'm excited to announce the launch of The Building Culture Podcast website! We’ve added a Resources section, where I share valuable workshops, organizations, books, articles, and other materials to help you on your own journey in real estate, architecture or construction. I’ve just begun to curate that page, so be sure to check back regularly as we continue to add more content.

Podcast

I recently got to sit down with Sara Bega, Town Architect for Las Catalinas – possibly the most beautiful town built in the 21st century. You can listen on Apple, Spotify, or stream from your Desktop.

Las Catalinas

We cover:

• Creating a car-free, kid-friendly community allows for independent exploration and fosters curiosity and connection with nature.

• A pedestrian-first environment benefits not only children but also adults and families, creating a sense of community and connection.

• Las Catalinas is a successful example of a car-light community, with a mix of houses, flats, hotels, and shops built on a 1200-acre site.

• The town architect's role is to oversee the design and planning of the community, ensuring a balance between privacy, walkability, and optimized views. Creating a sustainable and adaptable community requires prioritizing human experience and connection.

• The legal structure of a town should allow for flexibility and adaptability over time.

• Trust in human intelligence and the ability to solve problems is crucial for the success of a community.

• Creating a sense of place involves considering the local climate, using natural materials, and designing for the long term.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading everyone. Talk to you again in a couple weeks. Hit reply if you want to leave a note!

Austin

Every August in college towns nationwide, streets that had been quiet for the summer welcome thousands of students weighed down by boxes, mattress toppers, and hopes for an incredible four years. These students need housing, but renting to them requires a unique approach.

College towns are communities dominated by their university populations. The university is often the economic center driving development, research, and employment. Businesses across these towns tend to cater to the average undergraduate student rather than a typical suburban family. The immediate neighborhoods around campus tend to be pseudo-urban areas, where walkability is prized, and residential density is higher to accommodate thousands of students.

Renting to university students is often seen as a gamble. Teenage rowdiness is the antithesis of the quiet, family-friendly neighborhoods most landlords prefer. Not only that, landlords have to communicate with residents and their parents, tripling the number of stakeholders per bed. And, to top it all off, annual turnover is inevitable as students graduate, leading to higher wear and tear on living spaces. Between those factors and higher insurance costs, providing student-oriented rentals is no easy feat.

Enter anonymous X user @StudentRentalPro (SRP), a college-lover turned real estate developer who focuses on off-campus student housing. He rents unique houses to over 200 students each year. Most of these properties are within a 2.5-mile radius of the university, scattered across 12-13 neighborhoods. These properties have a mix of densities, from single-family style homes to quadplexes.

Rather than resisting the boisterous nature of the average college student, SRP embraced it. "Students love college and want to be here, so rent gets paid." Students who can afford college typically have the means to pay some amount of rent, whether through parental support or loans. For SRP, this means that out of 2000+ renters over the years, no more than seven failed to pay up every month. This also means college students are not as price-sensitive as other renters, so changes to monthly rates scarcely impact a property's rentability.

So, how do you rent to a demographic in these circumstances? SRP has a unique approach: "Students have to envision a place where they'll have fun. They're vibes-based customers." For him, this means embracing placemaking principles to create nice-looking, memorable spaces where students will want to spend time, hang out, and throw parties. Homes with empty gray walls feel bland, and students are not nearly as attracted to them. "I don't often work with apartments, though I have a few. Apartments sell amenities, but houses sell freedom," SRP commented.

For SRP, freedom is exemplified in his design choices. He emphasizes creating houses with interesting outdoor spaces and unique interior details. "Something as simple as a breakfast nook can make all the difference," SRP shared. Using outdoor murals, colorful backsplashes, string lights, and fences, SRP's properties have a unique college-like feel, making renters feel like the cast of a coming-of-age movie.

Not only that, typical urban planning concepts such as walkability or tree cover play a huge role in his work. The closer to campus or other points of interest, the higher the rent. SRP noted that students often pay a premium to be less than five blocks from their destinations. Even 500 feet makes a huge difference in perceived distance for this demographic. Similarly, tree-lined streets are prettier and more welcoming, as difficult as they can be to manage in the fall. Though students may not explicitly consider these factors, they are among the characteristics that SRP takes into account when purchasing a property.

Despite walkability being a significant factor, SRP also shared that selling a property without parking is nearly impossible. Visitors and the students themselves need ample parking space. Parking constraints have an impact on the perceived "fun" of a property as well, impacting who can visit and when. However, there are still students who prefer walking to worrying about designated drivers or commute times.

On a larger scale, SRP's experience is a great case study on the psyche of college towns, which tend to have more urban-style developments than similarly sized municipalities without a university anchoring them. Though his experience as a developer is not universally transferable to every large university, SRP's lessons on placemaking, walkability, and the finances of college students can be a useful learning tool for others hoping to invest in similar projects.

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Sonia Birla is a student at UNC Charlotte majoring in Finance, Geography, and International Studies. She is the James Hardie Fellow for Urban Development Spring 2024.

Written By Kyle MacLellan

The City of Raleigh and its Office of Strategy and Innovation is seeking to further its public-private partnerships. The latest effort was an ADU Pitchfest, which occurred in Downtown Raleigh.At the event, four teams pitched their plans to develop more accessory dwelling units (ADUs). The judging panel—consisting of Sarah Kirk, Dan Bagley, Nyki Hill and Dhanya Sandeep—assessed the feasibility, creativity, and overall impact of each plan. 

In the end, the winning team earned $5,000 from the Kauffman Foundation, and a partnership commitment from the city to assist in the implementation of its plan. Several intriguing pitches with varied approaches were shown during the event.

Jenn Truman and Rob Baumgart of American Dream Unlocked Consulting (ADU Co) pitched their “matchmaking and management” service. Consciously seeking to keep Raleigh’s diversity, equity, and inclusion measures at the forefront, their startup seeks to consult with homeowners and match them with compatible renters. They take inspiration from companies across the nation such as Dweller in Portland, Oregon, and Studio-Shed in Boulder, Colorado. The ADU Co Team is currently constructing multiple ADUs in the Raleigh area.

Dexter Tillet of DEXFT and Tiny Homes Raleigh proposed to provide consultation to homeowners for the construction and property management of their ADUs. His pitch centered around incentivizing homeowners with cash bonuses for installing an ADU. While ADUs are seen as a means of creating affordable housing, Tillet says “affordability is relative.” DEXFT plans to build first, then talk about affordability. Naturally, the more stock you have, the lower the prices will be.

Joe Trapp of Third Estate Analytics explained their pitch for easy-to-access automations that inform homeowners of their potential to build and own an ADU. The team utilizes its nonprofit partners and data analytics to catalyze the building and management process of having such a unit. The group operates under an impact-based fees system, meaning if they are unsuccessful, they don’t get paid. The program can be run without an initial investment pool and would enable the city to reach out to property owners who are not Raleigh residents. 

CollabADU’s Shaun Smith and Rhett Fussell presented their team’s one-stop-shop plan to build and manage ADUs. Operating under a land lease between their organization and homeowners, the group plans to use kit homes to save on construction costs. The pair acknowledged that “no one can do it by themselves” and shared their goals of partnership, uplifting underrepresented communities, and constructing quality affordable housing.

Raleigh urban design supervisor and judge Dhanya Sandeep stated that “affordable housing has been a constant challenge,” which is no surprise with the amount of growth the Triangle has seen in recent years. For Sandeep, the most important aspects of ADU development are increasing the general housing supply, creating gentle density, and designing with quality. 

The City of Raleigh Strategy and Innovation office’s Senior Manager Heather McDougall pushed their core values of thinking boldly, working collaboratively, empowering others and fostering impact. Operating from a co-creation model, the office’s job is to “foster and spotlight innovation that’s already going on within the city.”

Considering innovation as a cross between people and ideas, McDougall asked Raleigh’s community to “come help [them] think boldly.”

CollabADU was the winner of the Judge’s and People’s Choice awards. They will now be able to implement their pilot program and develop four ADUs of varied floor plans across different parts of the city. One of these homes will be in association with a nonprofit partner to kickstart potential training and residential programs in the future. 

The Pitchfest was a major success, perhaps a model for more collaboration between public and private entities in the Raleigh area. 

Kyle MacLellan is Southern Urbanism’s Journalism Fellow for Summer 2023.

Written By Luca Gattoni-Celli

In early December 2021, the blog Marginal Revolution linked to a study showing that NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) sentiment and hostility toward density are quite popular.* I was not surprised, since earlier in 2021 Pew released polling showing that, in the U.S., only a clear majority of liberal Democrats prefer walkable communities and small homes to car-dependent sprawl and big houses. Yet the blog commenters did surprise me by totally ignoring three important factors that are also absent from most debates about housing: The gravity of the affordability crisis, consumer demand for dense housing, and car dependency.

Without wading into the reasons why (which include status quo bias), I concede that many  Americans prefer sprawl. However, the MR commenters, who are obnoxious and contrarian on a good day, broke heavily in favor of single-family zoning and, in turn, sprawl and density restrictions. It was bizarre to see ostensive free market proponents defend a status quo of mind-numbing municipal regulation as a valid “democratic outcome” or a kind of social contract. Their basic reasoning was that Americans have demonstrated a preference for spacious, quiet homes. Despite their arch sensibilities, they trampled is-ought distinctions to defend the suburban wasteland.

“I don’t like it” is not a valid reason to support regulating or banning something.

I found the same kind of hostility toward density on Boxing Day 2021 in a neoliberal Facebook group, a pretty similar online space that leans left politically. I had shared my own reframing of this alarmist post depicting a massive Hong Kong apartment complex:

“I don’t get the neoliberal obsession with forcing people into oppressive apartment blocks,” one fellow groused. Then there was a classic response I found pretty funny: “Thanks, I hate it.” Which brings me to my thesis: “I don’t like it” is not a valid reason to support regulating or banning something. Apartment buildings and other forms of dense housing should be allowed to exist regardless of personal preference.

The comment chatter also echoed typical public debates over housing by neglecting three critical points:

• Expensive housing is a real problem worth solving: To my bafflement, hardly any status quo defenders acknowledge there is a housing affordability crisis, not to mention an underlying shortage. NIMBYs and their apologists almost never offer a solution to these realities. If anything, they might complain that the problem is unsolvable. Some housing advocates note parallels with Albert O. Hirschman’s book, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy.

• Many people want the option of high-density housing: Barely mentioned is the counterfactual of letting the chips fall where they may without land use restrictions, beyond accounting for basic public health and safety. A few MR commenters mentioned Coasian bargaining, but the externalities they pointed to were mostly trivial. Dense housing can be built in a manner that prevents neighbors from disturbing each other. I live in a townhouse with soundproof shared walls. What about apartments? Can they be humane? A YIMBYs of Northern Virginia member shared her own high-rise living experience in our Facebook group:

Families can live quite pleasantly in small square foot spaces. In America most people think they need a lot of stuff and all sorts of rooms for different activities. We think we need yards and garages. But living without a bunch of stuff and living close to a lot of things is actually a really great life.

• Car dependency is a prescriptive policy choice: Perhaps the most consequential omission from the discussion is auto-centric transportation infrastructure. Whether or not most Americans want to drive, they are forced to. Poor sidewalks and a default absence of protected cycling routes are not “the free market at work.” Most problems attributed to density are automotive: traffic congestion, air pollution, and noise pollution, not to mention about 40,000 Americans killed annually by cars. As urbanists know, the density required to make housing affordable precludes residents driving everywhere. Cars take up too much space.

  Walkability should not be a luxury amenity, for the simple reason that human beings are meant to walk outside. Being able to do so safely and comfortably is a reasonable expectation. A large minority of Americans live in rural areas where driving is a true necessity, but even America’s small towns historically grew around a walkable core. We should return to that land use pattern and reclaim the social connections and community ties that come with it.

Dense housing lets enough people live in the same place to sustain a resilient, hyperlocal economy and vibrant shared spaces. People are entitled to choose the kind of home they want, based solely on their own preferences.

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Luca Gattoni-Celli is a fast-learning urbanist and (social) entrepreneur. He founded YIMBYs of Northern Virginia (yimbysofnova.org) in 2021. He is a Catholic former federal tax reporter with an economics background.

*Disclosure: Marginal Revolution cofounder Tyler Cowen awarded me an Emergent Ventures grant. This piece was originally posted by Luca Gattoni-Celli on Medium.com on December 26, 2021.

We know that zoning restrictions have a price: When housing is harder to build, it means that the housing shortage continues, that housing and rental prices rise, that only the wealthiest can afford to buy a home in a desired area. But the group that benefits from the housing shortage tends to be the same one that is staunchest in its NIMBYism: homeowners. 

Generating equity through rising home values is nothing new. Real estate is one of the top assets for creating generational wealth. But just how much homeowners are making off of the housing shortage may surprise you. 

In September of 2022, the New York Times ran a piece detailing the increase in home values in cities across the cities over the previous decade—and how that increase translated into daily earnings for homeowners. “Imagine finding $266 stacked up on the coffee table every single day from 2011 through 2021. That’s one way to envision price appreciation in San Jose, Calif., which had the greatest gain of all metros when measured in actual dollars,” wrote author Michael Kolomatsky.

That figure is not far off from the average earnings in Durham, North Carolina. In 2022, the average sales price for a single-family home in the city was $441,348—an increase of 14 percent from the year before. That means that, from 2021 to 2022, the average homeowner in Durham earned $54,062 simply due to the rising costs of homes. That amounts to $148 stacked on the coffee table, every day, from doing nothing. 

It’s no wonder that NIMBYism is so strong among homeowners: They directly benefit from the housing shortage. When cities capitulate to NIMBYs and fail to allow more housing to be built, housing costs continue to rise, and homeowners continue to profit. It’s the duty of cities to combat NIMBYism and make housing more accessible rather than listening to the loudest—and often the most self-interested—voices.

Zoe Tishaev is the Duke Initiative for Urban Studies Fellow on Transportation Alternatives and University Development.

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Written By Ryan Puzycki

When my husband and I first toured the East Austin house we’d eventually call home, we were enchanted by its front-porch view of the Texas Capitol off in the distance. Little did I know that, just one year later, I would be roaming the Capitol’s subterranean office blocks advocating for the rights of other Texans to secure their own slice of the Lone Star State. When pro-housing bills, including Senate Bill (SB) 1787, missed the final Texas House of Representatives deadline by just a few hours, I could take some comfort in knowing that I had been a small part of the fight for housing affordability here. Here’s how we almost won that fight.

After moving into our new home, we began to observe a strange pattern of development in our neighborhood. Central East Austin is literally within walking distance of downtown sites like Stubb’s, Waterloo Park, and, of course, the Capitol—so we couldn’t understand why all the newer developments were boxy McMansions or renovated bungalows with big yards and price points north of $1 million. Wouldn’t developers want to build as densely as possible on such favorably situated land?

As we would learn, this phenomenon was not the result of market forces and developer choices but of Austin’s outdated zoning code. Austin imposes residential lot size minimums of 5,750 square feet, compared to just 1,400 square feet in Houston. With land values comprising around 25 percent of the total cost of a home, the consequences of large minimum lot sizes are clear: At just $340,000, the median price for a single-family home in Houston is significantly cheaper than Austin’s $570,000. The pattern holds throughout Texas: Homes in large-lot Dallas (minimum 5,000 square feet) cost $414,000, while homes in small-lot San Antonio (minimum 1,250 square feet) cost only $275,000.

Introduced by Houston Senator Paul Bettencourt, SB 1787 sought to bring Houston-style affordability to counties with more than 300,000 people by prohibiting municipalities from requiring lot sizes to be larger than 1,400 square feet. The bill was part of a suite of pro-housing legislation introduced this session to address skyrocketing home prices caused by a severe housing shortage all across Texas, which has reduced housing affordability and threatens the economic model referred to as the “Texas miracle.” 

The bills were backed by groups including Texans for Reasonable Solutions, Appleseed, Urban Reform Institute, Texas 2036, Texans for Housing, Habitat for Humanity, the Texas Conservative Coalition, and the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

In part, the way a bill (almost) becomes a law is through person-to-person persuasion and compromise.

As submitted, SB 1787 would have affected the 18 most populous counties while exempting properties with rules or deed restrictions imposed by homeowners’ associations (HOAs). The bill also limited municipal regulations on small lots with respect to unit density, lot dimensions, setbacks, building heights, parking requirements, and permeable surface areas.

The bill would have allowed homes to be built on lots less than one quarter of the size required under current regulations in Austin and on lots less than one third of current minimum sizes in Dallas—reforms that would have been striking for two cities experiencing some of the sharpest drops in affordability in Texas.

Perhaps too striking, for some.

At the same time, an identical companion bill, House Bill (HB) 3921, was working its way through the legislative process when it got stuck in the Land & Resource Management Committee. Up to that point, I had been learning about housing politics from afar, but I responded to a call to action from the groups supporting the bill. That call led me down into the bowels of this process and into those of the Capitol itself, where most legislators’ offices are housed in an underground annex. While stalking the halls, I tried to convince staffers working for members of the committee that HB 3921 deserved to be voted out of committee and brought before the House of Representatives. 

It worked. Sort of.

The bill that emerged from committee had some key changes. It limited the impact to municipalities in the state’s top six counties and changed the lot size minimum to 2,500 square feet. Meanwhile, SB 1787 appeared before the equivalent Senate committee, which updated the bill to expand protections for HOAs while also adding exemptions for property owners—safeguards that attracted enough votes to advance that version out of committee.

Nevertheless, the clock ran out on HB 3921, and it died before ever reaching a floor vote in the House. The Land & Resource Management Committee instead took up the new version of SB 1787 and passed it out of committee on May 18th.

And then the nail-biting began. 

With only days left in the legislative session, SB 1787 advanced to the House Calendars Committee, which has the power to decide whether and in what order the House will vote on legislation. As the last date for Calendars to schedule bills arrived, and pushback from skeptical representatives mounted, the bill’s sponsors agreed to increase the minimum threshold to 3,500 square feet in cities with populations greater than 500,000 in counties of more than 1 million people. The compromise excluded cities like the Dallas suburb Arlington but was enough to survive Calendars, which voted to place the bill on the House’s General State Calendar for May 23rd.

Where, of course, it died awaiting a floor vote just hours away.

This experience of watching pro-housing bills work their way through a once seemingly opaque process was eye-opening. Though I still think it’s somewhat arcane, the episode demystified some aspects of the process by demonstrating that, in part, the way a bill (almost) becomes a law is through person-to-person persuasion and compromise.

Although it’s tempting to focus on SB 1787’s failure, pro-housing reformers should take heart that such a bill made it so far in the legislative process. Importantly, the coalition did pass a permitting reform bill which will revolutionize permitting timelines for projects—saving 5 to 25 percent on home prices. With the legislature out of regular session until January of 2025, the onus of addressing the state’s housing affordability crisis falls back onto local governments for now. Helpfully, cities like Austin are beginning to wake up to the consequences of housing unaffordability after decades of inaction.

As the local reform movement gains steam, I wonder if I can see City Hall from my front porch…

Ryan Puzycki spent nearly a decade building and managing Montessori schools on both coasts. He is currently working on a new venture in Austin, Texas.

Written By Aaron Lubeck

I-35 has traditionally divided Austin in every way: rich from poor, downtown from neighborhood, white from non-white. As the city has boomed, “East Austin” and “gentrification” have become synonymous. But the story of Austin’s future doesn’t have to be one of displacement.

Rainey Street lies just west of this divide, on a development peninsula southeast of downtown. In a city marked by radical and fast transition, no corner of Austin has seen a more dramatic transition than here. Long following the logical path of development, it was (until recently) filled with small, residential bungalows. A 2005 rezoning allowed for flexible uses, which caused an immediate boom of creative restaurant and retail businesses shoehorning their commercial uses into these residential forms.

The boom was so fast, on such a scale, and so close to downtown that it attracted the interest of larger developers, who are now in the middle of a major skyscraper building boom of their own in the corridor. Seven are already built, and more are in the works; at the north end of the street will be the Waterline Tower, scheduled to be Texas’s largest.

Such brisk change and upscaling always garner a knee-jerk negative reaction (Displacement! History! Gentrification!). But this sort of transformation might actually be good—not only for Austin in general or the occupants of those (assuredly luxury) towers but for preserving lower-wealth East Austin as well.

The Yuppie Fishbowl (or fish tank, if you prefer) was a term coined by Noah Smith in a 2018 essay. His thesis argued that if wealth is present in your city, more is coming, and your city is growing; it is best to allow your city to develop housing options that cater to this niche.

If you do not, the holders of that wealth will inevitably find their own housing. Trying to stop the wealthy from obtaining housing is like trying to stop water from flowing downhill. You can make efforts to obstruct it, but eventually, it finds its way through.

If the high-wealth buyer’s only choice is to occupy older, existing housing, they will do that. Failing to enable new high-end housing is certain to accelerate the displacement of older housing and its lower-wealth citizens.

In short, the Yuppie Fishbowl provides supply and isolates demand for high-wealth housing. You can see its inhabitants. They can see you. The tower does not displace the remainder. Everybody wins. In other words, it might be the most desirable real-world housing solution we have.

The objection to this argument is that a city should be focused on providing housing not for the wealthy but for the rest of its citizens. But that line of thought is flawed on a few levels:

• First, with rare exceptions, cities do not provide housing at all. 

• Second, builders build what is desired (via the market) and possible (legally and financially). New affordable housing is rarely financially viable, particularly in the South’s exclusionary regulatory regimes. 

• Third, affordability comes from light use. Affordable cars are not new cars. It’s the same with housing. So, for a metro to stay affordable, particularly a fast-growing one like Austin, newness must be perpetually built.

The receipts are in on this last point: Booming metros that have prevented new homes from being built simply make million-dollar homes out of shotgun shacks, ensuring the displacement of all but its wealthiest residents. The most extreme examples of civic moratorium, particularly in the Bay Area, have seen such a dramatic drop in minorities that some in the press refer to it as an “ethnic cleansing.”

So, what can we do to prevent radical displacement? The Twitter account @YIMBYLAND points out that the 450 homes provided by one proposed new building, Wilson Tower (to occupy the former site of Avenue Lofts), would house the equivalent of 60 blocks’ worth of residents in East Austin.  

Let’s think for a moment. The total gentrification of 60 blocks? Or one super-tall tower? Faced with a real “either/or” scenario, which outcome is preferred?

The Yuppie Fishbowl is the better of the two choices. Is it perfect? No. Should an entire city be built of Yuppie Fishbowls? No. Is it the best of the immediately available alternatives? Absolutely.

Yuppie Fishbowls serve the clear and present need of housing the city’s wealthiest—efficiently and at little financial or social cost to everyone else. Rather than criticizing these towers, neighborhood advocates (yes, even defenders of the status quo) should be celebrating them.

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Aaron Lubeck, Jacobs Columnist, is a new urban builder and land planner in Durham, North Carolina. He is the author of Green Restorations: Sustainable Building in Historic Homes, and a children’s book on Accessory Dwellings entitled Heather Has Two Dwellings, and host of the National Townbuilder Association’s “Townbuilder’s Podcast”. Follow Aaron at @aaron_lubeck 

NOTE: The Wilson Tower, in the article, recently announced a reduction in height and units from 450 to 350 units, citing increased lending and construction costs. The principles still apply.

Written By Kyle MacLellan

For the formerly incarcerated and homeless, there are few realistic options for housing. Monte Anderson’s shotgun-house model may help solve this problem—with no subsidies needed. 

Monte Anderson is a townbuilder and development consultant operating in South Dallas. In 2017, he was acting as a consultant for a shotgun house renovation in Bonton, Texas.  He heard personal stories of the local homeless population stuck alternating between spending a week in a hotel and a week living on the streets.  Anderson was tasked with finding a solution that provided constant shelter for around $250 per month, the same amount the tenants exhausted on those intermittent hotel bookings.

Monte asked the team the simplest of questions: “How do we get them a place for $250 per month that’s nice?”

The result was the classic shotgun house, divided into mostly private spaces, and extended to allow for an additional two units to the rear of the home. Differing from the ordinary shared-housing layout (separate bedrooms with shared living space and amenities) Anderson’s design has outside access for each of the living spaces, and each has its own bathroom.  Only the laundry is shared, and that requires keyed and scheduled access.

Anderson’s project was priced at $110 per square foot. Extending the roofline and adding the units to the rear of the structure proved more cost-effective than constructing detached ADUs.

In this case, the shotgun house was to be owned by one resident and rented to the other two. The monthly cost of ownership after completion was $928. After receiving income from two renters paying $250 per unit, the homeowner’s actual monthly costs decreased to a net of $428.

While it may have been otherwise impossible for an occupant with rent-worthy income to purchase the home, this model of passive post-renovation income makes that a viable possibility. 

According to Monte, the model is better for use in the urban setting, but he and his team have developed a suburban model as well.

The structure is practical, making a singular space more functional and affordable for all who live there. So why isn’t this being done more?

Anderson’s model was created for a single owner and their occupants. Real estate investors who do not occupy the property alongside their tenants were not the targeted clientele. “There is very little margin to make money,” and where there is less profit, there is less interest. 

But as stigmas continue to surround affordable housing and subsidized developments, privately renovated homes of this type serve as a necessary alternative. 

The builders in South Dallas are currently working on three more residences using the shotgun model. Incrementally, they are changing the affordability, and accessibility, of constant shelter for the struggling population of the region.

Kyle MacLellan is Southern Urbanism’s Journalism Fellow for Summer 2023.

Written By Marshall Hines

I’ve spent the last six years serving on my fast-growing town’s Planning and Zoning Commission. I’ve gotten the chance to review more zoning cases than I can count, been involved in two major Comprehensive Planning efforts, and seen many thoughtful ordinances passed and just as many bad ideas codified. Here are a few lessons I’ve learned.

1 – The Devil is in the details.

Cliché or not, it’s the truth. Whether it’s a requested zoning change, a variance case, or a text amendment to an existing code, the way that these changes affect your built world usually comes down to small details. As an example—here is a rendering of a project that we saw for a “mixed-use” development:

And here is what it looks like built:

Why don’t these images look all that similar? Because we don’t zone based on renderings. The building size, footprint, and placement are identical to the zoning language. What was not in the zoning? How these buildings interfaced with the public realm, and how this development implements its connections to surrounding properties. It’s easy to be swayed by pretty pictures, but it’s important to separate what the renders show from what is actually required by the zoning language.

And by the way, where is that super cool food truck park? Well, it doesn’t exist because it would reside on city-owned property unrelated to this actual project. This was obvious when the case was reviewed—but some commissioners were swayed just by the idea of a mythical something “fun” being in town.

2 – Everything we build has to be maintained.

Every road, bridge, rail line, stormwater system, electrical substation, and traffic signal has to be maintained in perpetuity. That is expensive.

Who pays to maintain these things? We do, through services fees or property and sales taxes, and the maintenance bills come long after the initial buildout starts. That means it’s easy to find ourselves in a financially unsustainable position at a time far removed from the infrastructure being installed.

Another way to put this is to recognize that we, the citizens of our cities and towns, are “developers” just as much as the company building a strip mall or neighborhood full of houses. Our town builds/develops the roads and traffic signals and is responsible for maintaining them. We, the citizens, pay the taxes that pay for that. Every piece of built infrastructure has a cost associated with it, both immediately and over its lifetime, to keep it running correctly.

When a company builds, they consider how much every decision they are making will cost, both short and long term. A residential builder will not build 20 extra houses “for future growth” if they aren’t certain that there are buyers ready to buy them. And why would they? Maintaining an empty house doesn’t make financial sense.

Thoughtful decisions regarding infrastructure improvements can be used to generate wealth for our community, but careless building simply creates a liability that the existing community foots the bill for. To expand the metaphor, building a road “for future growth” is shortsighted for a city, just like the extra houses were for the homebuilder.

3 – Land is a finite resource.

Obvious? Not as much as you’d think. Land use planning is as much about determining how we don’t use land as it is about directing how the built environment inhabits it.

Humans universally like natural, open places. In the decades after World War II, Americans were sold the promise of their own little slice of nature in the form of a rolling and lush lawn. This built us the suburban ranch house and the neighborhoods that much of Gen X and the majority of Millennials grew up in. When everyone lives on a quarter acre, you run through your finite land more quickly, and building moves ever more quickly out.

As a result, the idea of bringing people closer together on less land in a denser pattern of development feels anathema to many people who have only experienced the curving suburban streets and cul-de-sacs of the past 60 years. But doing so brings with it some incredible benefits. Most people living reasonably close to a major city will have access to a large Cadillac park. This is the jewel of the city—it’s the place everyone brags on and pines for when they are away from home. These places are smaller than you think. Take a look next time you’re browsing around Google Maps: We can have a network of large, undisturbed park spaces if we are willing to build our homes and communities in a more compact way.

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4 – The Planning Professionals have gotten it wrong, many times over.

We should feel comfortable enough as citizens to question the wisdom of the professionals. There is a long history of boneheaded decision-making because a small group of people decided it was “proper.” The list is long, but let’s hit a few big ones:

• Euclidean zoning categorizes every use and separates each one, forcing us into our cars for even the most basic of needs.

• Restrictive covenants were used originally to racially segregate our communities and apply the thinking of previous owners to the future of a place.

• Highway building through the center of communities broke up the connected nature of cities in the service of moving people “through” your town as quickly as possible.

• Disposable architecture that no one loves and thus no one wants to maintain.

Why did many of these things take hold so fervently? I’d argue that most often, it was because the people who inhabit and are most closely connected to their cities and towns were removed from the decision-making process and told that the “professionals” knew better.

5 – There are lots of places to learn from and lots of people who want to help.

In the Information Age, we can learn a lot from the mistakes and successes of the communities around us. And we can learn a lot from the iterative improvements we have made around the world throughout recorded history. Here are a few places that I have found to be good resources for learning about how and why we build cities the way we do:

• Strong Towns

• CNU

• Planetizen

Ultimately, we all have to take part in making our communities better, healthier, more financially resilient places. If you try to do this by serving on your local planning commission, then remember that you can bring something novel and unique to the job: your personal experience and your connection to the place you live.

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Marshall Hines is a Creative Director focused on Urban Design and Placemaking. Follow Marshall at @marshallhines

NOTES

• This piece was originally posted on Medium in 2021.

• Images 2-7 via the author.

Written By Dave Olverson

With Parts One, Two, and Three of this series under our belts, Part Four returns to Erwin Apartments and addresses one final reason it could not be built under present-day regulations.

Erwin Apartments sits on a 0.28-acre lot. That’s not a lot of room to work with. However, just over a quarter of an acre is clearly enough physical space to erect a beautiful building with 31 units. That is, it’s enough as long as you don’t further reduce the area you can build on.

Zoning codes often prescribe setbacks, or distances from the edge of the property line that cannot be built on. I find this practice especially silly when it comes to front setbacks . Buildings are required to be a certain distance from the front property line, but there is no standard for how far the front property line must be from the sidewalk or road. So from the word go, building setbacks are arbitrary. What’s more, why do cities allow a property to contain land that can’t be used?

Setbacks aren’t only perplexing in concept, though. They can kill good projects like Erwin Apartments.

Apartment buildings in the “urban tier” of Durham, where the Erwin Apartments structure is located, are required to have street yards (i.e., building setbacks) of 5 feet, side yards of 8 feet, and rear yards of 20 feet. In other words, take the boundaries of the lot’s 0.28 acres and squeeze them inward by 5, 8, and 20 feet, respectively.

Erwin Apartments sits on a corner. It was built about 15 feet back from North Buchanan, the street that it faces. However, at its closest points, it is about one foot back from its West Trinity Avenue property line and less than a foot from the property line of the neighboring lot on North Buchanan. Meanwhile, it is less than the required 20 feet from its backyard neighbor. In other words, it would be illegal to build the Erwin Apartments footprint on this site today.

In fact, when applying today’s Durham setbacks, this 0.28-acre lot only has about 0.19 acres of buildable space, making the Erwin Apartments infeasible.

This series has examined three barriers preventing Erwin Apartments from being constructed today. There may be others. Even if you could find a creative solution for one of these challenges, there would be two more after. That’s why Missing Middle Housing is not being built in Southern cities today.

Dave Olverson is a budding incremental developer. During a career in marketing

and licensing, while living in New York City, he fell in love with the built environment. He moved to Durham, North Carolina, had three inspiring children, and earned a planning degree from the University of North Carolina. Since then, he has worked for various local developers in Durham and is building his own first project on the same block as his family’s home. @dolver

Written By Dave Olverson

Parts One and Two of this series laid the groundwork for what Missing Middle Housing is, why it’s important, and what its absence means for Southern cities. Part Three returns to Erwin Apartments, a Missing Middle building featured in the last installment, and delves into another issue that makes it impossible for the City of Durham to build more structures like it.

Despite some cities repealing minimum parking requirements, most cities across the United States still dictate how much parking a project needs to have. The concept of a city requiring a minimum amount of parking has always confused me.

In today’s world, residential and commercial buildings need parking. Car usage is the dominant form of travel, and people need a place to store their cars when they go home, go to work, do errands, or go out for fun. As a result, it makes sense that builders and developers would come up with a solution to meet the parking needs of the building’s occupants. But why should a city dictate how much parking is needed? Why would a city want to make sure that a minimum amount of pavement or cement is poured on a site? If anything, I would understand city parking maximums, but not parking minimums.

Durham does not have parking minimums for its downtown core, but they continue to exist everywhere else.

The parking minimums in Durham used to be worse. Slowly, the City has introduced ways to reduce the parking minimums for new projects. If Erwin Apartments were being built today, the base level of parking required would be 2 spaces per apartment. However, with the reductions (and hoops that a developer may or may not be able to jump through), it would be more like 1.5 spaces per unit.

That means the original Erwin Apartments would have to provide 47 parking spaces under today’s guidelines. A conservative assumption is 325 square feet per parking space, which includes the space itself and driving aisles. With that estimate, surface parking would take up 0.35 acres—almost 1.25 times the size of the entire parcel. In other words, just to comply, there would need to be multiple levels of structured parking. Most likely, the project would not be financially viable.

Even if it weren’t cost-prohibitive,  the building would have to make room for parking at ground level on an already small lot, making the walking experience in the neighborhood worse. The building itself would also be uglier than the actual Erwin Apartments, which is considered a local gem.

Parking minimums are a problem. But they aren’t the only thing standing in the way of building future iterations of Erwin Apartments. Next in the Missing Middle series, we’ll get into one last issue that acts as a barrier to creating more small multi-family housing.

Dave Olverson is a budding incremental developer. During a career in marketing

and licensing, while living in New York City, he fell in love with the built environment. He moved to Durham, North Carolina, had three inspiring children, and earned a planning degree from the University of North Carolina. Since then, he has worked for various local developers in Durham and is building his own first project on the same block as his family’s home. @dolver

Written By Dave Olverson

In the first post from this series, we examined the definition of Missing Middle Housing and the reasons why its absence is a problem for Southern cities. In the second part, we examine a Missing Middle building that was constructed in 1930 and one reason it couldn’t be built today.

Erwin Apartments is a beautiful and beloved building that, before being converted into condominiums, was a 31-unit apartment building. It adds to the neighborhood character of Trinity Park and fits in nicely with single-family homes nearby. It is now illegal to build this building.

Erwin Apartments at 312 North Buchanan Boulevard in Durham, North Carolina, sits across from Duke University’s East Campus. It is on a 0.28-acre parcel. For many residential zones in Southern cities, this lot would be too small for even a single-family home. Yet Erwin Apartments was built with 31 units. You can see from the picture above that it is at a much smaller scale than many of the 150-400-unit apartment buildings that you see being built in downtowns across the country today. It fits in with the neighborhood, while still providing a good amount of housing per acre.

How much housing per acre? Let’s do the simple math:

31 units divided by 0.28 acres equals 110 units per acre.

Outside of Downtown, Durham’s zoning ordinance allows for a maximum of 20 units per acre on RU-M parcels (Residential Multi-family). That’s more than double the density of the standard urban zoning that now only allows only eight units per acre, representing a reduction of 88 percent from pre-1969 zoning.   

Not only is Erwin Apartments illegal to build today—it wouldn’t even be close. A density of 110 units per acre would be dismissed out of hand. It would be ruthlessly opposed, even by neighborhood advocates and historic preservationists. Suburban density has become the norm, even in urban places.

However, even if you fixed the zoning code to allow for more density, there are other roadblocks that make Erwin Apartments illegal to build today, as we will see in the next installment of the Missing Middle series.

Dave Olverson is a budding incremental developer. During a career in marketing

and licensing, while living in New York City, he fell in love with the built environment. He moved to Durham, North Carolina, had three inspiring children, and earned a planning degree from the University of North Carolina. Since then, he has worked for various local developers in Durham and is building his own first project on the same block as his family’s home. @dolver

Written By Dave Olverson

Planners, urbanists, and housing advocates bemoan the lack of Missing Middle Housing. But what is it? And why is it so vital?

The term “Missing Middle Housing” was coined by architect Daniel Parolek in 2010, and ever since it has steadily gained popularity. At its core, Missing Middle is a response to a severe lack of housing types and options. Close your eyes and picture a home. Did you imagine a free-standing, single-family house? That form has come to dominate popular culture. When we think of people who live in cities, maybe a high-rise or mid-rise apartment building comes to mind.

Across the country large apartment buildings are built, single family homes are built. But it remains rare to see new construction projects with between 5 and 40 units.

The image above contemplates many more types of housing from duplexes to small multiplexes and live-work buildings. There are courtyard buildings and townhouses, triplexes and cottage courts. The Missing Middle types shown in this image are by no means exhaustive, either. There are many possibilities. Yet it is rare to see any of them being built today.

These housing types can be found, though. You just have to look at buildings that were erected decades ago; there used to be much more diversity. Throughout the South, small multi-unit residences were built. That construction stopped in the second half of the twentieth century. What happened?

Euclidean Zoning happened.

Rules were put in place that made these forms illegal. Sometimes they were made explicitly illegal through the establishment of zones where only single-family homes could be put up. In other cases, they were made infeasible.

Some might argue: “So what’s the big deal? People seem happy in single family homes or large apartment buildings.”

That may seem true. But the lack of Missing Middle Housing in southern cities is killing affordability. Look at the density of single family zoning. If only one family is allowed to live on a half-acre parcel of land, their city is going to run out of desirable land quickly. Prices will get bid up and only a select few will be able to afford to live in the most desirable neighborhoods.

Conversely, large apartment buildings are allowed in downtown areas, but these are at a scale that require large institutional developers to build. They are out of reach for the citizen-builders or local developers that want to create housing for their community. These new apartment buildings end up being “too little too late”. There are too few projects in the hands of too few developers and rents remain expensive.

Southern cities, which have developed relatively recently, feel this strain more acutely than older cities elsewhere in the country. Older cities have more Missing Middle Housing that was built a long time ago—before it was made illegal. Meanwhile, Southern cities have more single family home neighborhoods and only in recent years have a few downtown apartment buildings been built. These are big construction projects, so it may appear as though a ton of units are forthcoming, but when new units are concentrated in a few big projects, there still isn’t enough being built. The result: The housing supply in the South is distinctly less diverse.

In the next post from this series, we look at a beloved Durham apartment building and how it would be illegal to build it today.