How Density Standards Kill Missing Middle Housing
Part Two of this series explores what stops cities from constructing buildings people love.
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