AFFORDABILITY | Tackling Atlanta’s Housing Crisis
Attainable, amenitized, walkable: An innovative development delivers on the holy trinity of infill.
Written By Eric Kronberg & Phil Veasley
I. Backstory
In 2019, Kronberg Urbanists + Architects was approached by the owners of two houses in Atlanta’s Edgewood neighborhood that had long been rentals. They liked what we had been up to around the corner at our 2017 pocket community development at La France Walk, and they were curious if we were interested in buying their lots before they put them on the open market.
As urbanist architects, we dug in to see if we could come up with a solution to two vexing problems we’d been wrestling with:
What type of project could deliver workforce housing options, without subsidy, and do so without requiring rezoning, variances, or other forms of community approvals—all while retaining the existing houses and as many trees as possible?
Could we create a by-right cottage court development that incorporated existing housing and trees—and hit the rent levels targeted?
Enter Finley Street Cottages. Design started, as it always does, with sketching out a site plan and running a project pro forma to determine if we could achieve a feasible project while providing workforce housing rents. We had to analyze the site design and cost implications in tandem to determine a viable path forward. Our diligence revealed that there wasn’t one within conventional approaches; this essay outlines what we did to make the math work and deliver on our commitment to affordability.
DEFINITIONS
DEFINE: BY-RIGHT DEVELOPMENT
A by-right project complies with existing zoning standards, removing the need for discretionary review.DEFINE: PRO-FORMA
The term pro-forma means “for the sake of form” or “as a matter of form.” When it appears in financial statements, it indicates that a method of calculating financial results using certain projections or presumptions has been used.DEFINE: AREA MEDIAN INCOME (AMI)
The area median income is the midpoint of a region’s income distribution, meaning that half of households in a region earn more than the median and half earn less than the median. A household’s income is calculated by its gross income, which is the total income received before taxes and other payroll deductions.DEFINE: WORKFORCE HOUSING
Most cities define workforce housing as housing attainable for folks making somewhere between 80 and 120 percent of AMI. The City of Atlanta defines workforce housing as costing between 60 and 80 percent of AMI for rental dwellings and 80 and 120 percent for for-sale dwellings. At the time of writing, a studio or efficiency apartment in Atlanta renting at 60 percent of AMI would cost just over $1,000 per month. In contrast, affordable housing is typically associated with various forms of subsidy for people making 30-60 percent of AMI.
II. The promise of Finley Street
In Atlanta, as elsewhere, citizens are suffering due to a lack of attainable housing. Options that do exist are farther and farther away from public transit, which is making housing less affordable at twice the rate. Advocates are often shocked to learn that building low-cost housing is functionally illegal. Still, Southern cities are gradually changing that, and Atlanta is making incremental steps toward better outcomes. Finley Street Cottages is a development that such efforts made possible.
As a pilot project that started brewing in late 2019 and that is quickly nearing completion,* Finley Street demonstrates the attainable rental housing possibilities that are achievable through incremental zoning reform. Specifically, it was made possible via modifications to Atlanta’s zoning to allow accessory dwelling units (ADUs). Reduced parking requirements were also critical to maximizing housing opportunities in this existing two-family zoning district. The savings achieved by providing no off-street parking will be passed on to the residents. These savings are a key piece of the affordability puzzle, because even when rents are set through Inclusionary Zoning (IZ), parking mandates on workforce housing make the total cost of living unaffordable. Currently, the cost of car ownership in Atlanta averages over $1,000 per month. In this context, mobility-rich projects like Finley Street have an obligation to maximize housing options that leverage transportation alternatives—and capture the true costs savings they provide.
How does Finley Street stack up? The Cottages are located just outside of Downtown Atlanta and within walking distance of two MARTA stations, multiple bus stops, and the Edgewood Retail District.** Not only that—nearby bike paths allow for a 15- to 20-minute ride to Ponce City Market, and the ride to Trader Joe’s comes in at 20-25 minutes. The location of this project allows residents the freedoms needed for a car-free lifestyle. These freedoms are vital, and although they are rare throughout the South, they are not unique to Atlanta. Similar developments can succeed anywhere the right neighborhood ingredients are present. Let’s look at what those conditions are, how they are intertwined, and how they contribute to affordability.
III. What makes a neighborhood?
A healthy neighborhood is an ecosystem. One critical component of that network is the ability to access amenities. Whether someone is buying groceries, going out for tacos, picking up beer, enjoying an ice cream, attending a house of worship, looking for a place to exercise or play, utilizing the library, going to school, or seeking out something else entirely, the key is this: In thriving neighborhoods, people can comfortably access such amenities without having to get in a car.
We’d need approximately 23 units of housing per acre for stores to have enough customers living in walking distance to support them.
There’s a lot to unpack within the idea of mobility. It means streets with dignified sidewalks and street trees. It means slower traffic so that people feel safe riding a bicycle, without fear of death. It also means enough households living within walking or cycling distance of goods and services, reducing the need for outsized parking lots to serve commercial amenities. If businesses want to rely on the surrounding community for a sustainable customer base, single-family-only housing fails to provide the level of density required.
DEFINITIONS
DEFINE: STREETCAR-STOP NEIGHBORHOOD
A streetcar-stop neighborhood is a first-ring suburb developed in the US in the years before the automobile with electric trolley or streetcar-based travel in mind, allowing residents to move beyond a central city’s borders.DEFINE: PLATTING
Platting means the filing of the drawing, map, or plan of a site or a replatting of such, including certification, descriptions, and approvals with the proper county or city officials.
To put this into perspective, we can reference some basic math from urban retail development expert Bob Gibbs. Speaking in terms of units per acre can be intimidating, so we’ll introduce some examples in a moment.
A typical commercial convenience center in a streetcar-stop neighborhood typically tops out at 30,000 square feet. These centers tend to get larger if anchored by a grocery store, and it takes approximately 2,000 households to support one at the size of 30,000 square feet.
Although the standard distance for walkability is a half mile, a quarter mile is a much more realistic distance to walk for groceries. In a map with the Finley Street Cottages at the center, much of the Edgewood Retail District fits within a quarter-mile circle. This circle has an area of 125 acres. Assuming 30 percent of that is public, 88 acres remain private development. If all that land were dedicated to housing, then the math would be simple: We’d need approximately 23 units of housing per acre for stores to have enough customers living in walking distance to support them.
How easy is it to reach this target? A single house with an ADU on a 7,500-square-foot lot is 11 units per acre. If that house had two ADUs—one basement ADU and one detached—it would be 17 units per acre. If we can provide a duplex and two ADUs, we get to 23 units per acre. That’s on track. Ultimately, though, if you have a minimum lot size of 15,000 square feet, a single-family home, and no ADUs, the best you’ll ever get to is three units per acre. With typical Southern densities, our goal of 23 is nowhere in sight.
WHY DON’T WE SEE MORE COTTAGE COURTS?
In our experience, lots of community activists, planners, and city leaders gravitate toward the idea of cottage courts. They don’t look too big, the cottages are cute, and they seem like the kind of development that could and would integrate into a neighborhood development pattern with more single-family homes. But municipalities often make the mistake of only allowing cottage courts in the same zoning districts that allow townhomes. We argue this is a mistake, because a townhouse development can typically fit about twice the density as a cottage court. Twice the density tends to mean you can pay at least twice as much for the land and potentially make twice the profits on the development. As long as these circumstances persist, developers will not be likely to build a cottage court on land zoned for townhomes, and they’ll miss an opportunity to offer more attainable housing.
To overcome the development math challenges listed above, cottage courts need to be explicitly permitted in single-family districts. There are specific cottage court ordinances that can be pursued, but Finley Street demonstrates what you can do with an effective two-family zoning district layered with accessory structures permissions. For instance, you can start to assemble a cottage court out of a couple individual lots. The biggest shortcoming of this approach is that the cottage court is limited to being a rental community, as single-family zoning typically does not allow for separate platting of individual cottages that do not conform to lot frontage and area requirements. Durham has passed a zoning update called Expanding Housing Choices (EHC) that provides more ways to tackle cottage courts with more ownership opportunities, largely through small lot codes and reduced pole flag lots.
When the Finley Street Cottages were approved, the reaction of neighbors was to downzone the whole area so no one could duplicate this type of project in the future. Finley Street is one of the few new-construction, non-IZ workforce housing options in Atlanta, but the hope is that it will reduce “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) angst, encourage more cottage courts, and allow for further zoning reforms in mobility-rich portions of the city.
In practice, not every lot will maximize all the available units. There will (and should) be a range of densities. Having a six- or twelve-plex on a corner lot at a higher density can help balance out multiple lots with only a house—or a house with an ADU. When you look around older neighborhoods (built 1880-1929), you might see the image above as a typical development pattern.
By eliminating unwanted-but-often-mandated amenities, Finley Street rents are 20 to 60 percent more affordable.
Amid all this math, it’s important to remember a more qualitative ingredient all thriving neighborhoods need: connectedness. Traditionally, porches and vibrant streetscapes have helped facilitate connection. Another way to achieve this type of space is to design cottage courts. These developments are typically an arrangement of differently sized cottages around a private green—a setup that provides more opportunities for porches and stoops. In other words, cottage courts offer more chances for human interaction. As a result, they help build better neighborhoods.
IV. Why cities need to recalibrate their neighborhoods
Like most other major cities across the country, Atlanta is facing a steep housing crisis. Early in 2022, Dan Immergluck, Professor of Urban Studies at Georgia State University, told Axios: “In the last year or so things have gotten much worse, both in terms of rents rising a lot and home prices getting increasingly out of reach for modest-wealth families, especially many Black and Latinx households.” This situation has a few contributing factors. One, simply, is that we have built far less housing than needed over the past decade. This is easily blamed on the Great Recession and its aftereffects. According to FRED, at no point in since the Great Recession has Atlanta built nearly as much housing as it did during the early 2000s.
A second component to this crisis deals with modern household structures. Currently, over 70 percent of American households are not nuclear families, but the bulk of households only have one or two members in them. Meanwhile, the bulk of our housing stock offers three to four bedrooms, and the average Atlanta apartment is nearly 1,000 square feet. We need more smaller homes. This housing mismatch decreases affordability, forcing people to either rent more house than they need or bridge the gap with roommates. The solution is clear: Rightsized housing options mean that people can choose their housing size relative to their budget. So, why is accessing that choice so hard?
One natural design fix would be to provide smaller units, such as studios and one-bedrooms.*** These unit sizes are easy to envision in larger-format, multi-family complexes, but they’re harder to slot into existing neighborhoods. Traditional project types are readily understood by zoning officials and the financial markets, and they’ve become the main alternative to single-family housing. Although we see such projects as one critical piece of addressing house supply, we also see many people hoping for an alternative housing choice. For instance, they may be fine with the lower square footage, but they might not want to live in a complex of 200-300 units or be able to pay a premium for its amenities. Others simply prefer a more neighborhood scale.
“Missing Middle Housing” has become a prevalent topic over the past few years. The term, conceived by Daniel Parolek in 2010, encompasses all the housing options that exist between a detached house and a large apartment building. NIMBYs still argue against Missing Middle Housing, but the mismatch discussed here shows that these options are urgently needed. What’s more, these smaller-format buildings better integrate into the more compact lots typically present in existing residential neighborhoods. As such, Missing Middle Housing tends to be comprised of infill projects with fewer total units. But that shouldn’t minimize those projects’ potential. Designed well, they can become communities unto themselves while also connecting residents with the surrounding area.
A key goal of creating more Missing Middle Housing is to offer more rental dwellings for a lower cost to the tenants. That invites an obvious question: How can we maximize development savings? One answer lies in parking. On average, it costs developers over $25,000 per parking spot to build a decked structure and $5,000 to $10,000 per spot for a parking lot. And yet, the choice to provide a dedicated, off-site space to store cars isn’t just about the cost of building a parking lot (or garage). It’s also about the lost opportunity cost of land dedicated to vehicle storage. This choice means fewer housing options, of course, but the tradeoff is more complex than that. By not providing dedicated parking, those funds can instead be used to construct more units, leading to even lower rents. Parking adds costs and reduces revenue. Both make attainable housing less viable.
To put these savings into perspective, we keep an eye out for rental rates at nearby larger format apartment complexes that offer the amenities described above. The cost of providing those amenities translates to a rent increase of approximately $300-$600 more per month, per unit compared to the rents at Finley Street Cottages. In other words, by eliminating unwanted-but-often-mandated amenities, Finley Street rents are 20 to 60 percent more affordable.
These savings amount to a significant benefit for residents. But what Finley Street Cottages offers is greater than that. Yes, it’s lower-cost housing with access to amenities and mobility options to employment. But it’s also dignified housing. It’s community. And it’s part of a better future for Atlanta.
For more detail on the relationship between workforce housing and workforce transportation, check out this Explainer.
Eric Kronberg is a zoning whisperer. He uses his skills for good as a principal at Kronberg Urbanists + Architects, leading the firm’s pre-development efforts by combining skills in planning, development, architecture, and zoning. @EricKronberg
Phil Veasley is a multimodal transportation engineer working on projects throughout the Southeast that build places for people to move and thrive. Follow him on Twitter @Urban_Connector
*The Finley Street Cottages ribbon cutting happened in December 2022—shortly after this piece went to print.
**At Edgewood Retail District, area residents can find just about everything—groceries, restaurants, home goods, banking options, medical care, pet supplies, cleaners, professional services, and more.
***For example, the R-5 District in Atlanta allows for attached single-family homes—i.e., duplexes—plus an accessory dwelling unit per duplex unit and a guest house unit per duplex unit. At least in theory, that translates to 6 units of housing per lot.
All images courtesy of Kronberg Urbanists + Architects. This piece was originally printed in Issue 1 of Southern Urbanism Quarterly.