How Setbacks Kill Missing Middle Housing
In the final installment of the series, Part Four asks why developers can’t make the best use of the site at hand.
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