Duplex, Fourplex, Sixplex, Eight! Isn't Middle Housing Great?

Aren't these houses cute? This is a sample of homes around my neighborhood. We have a nice mix of condos, small apartment buildings, duplexes, next to single family homes. They are known as middle housing. From the street they are similar in size to a single family home, but it's not obvious how many units are in each one.

There's everything to love about this middle housing mix, and nothing to fear. They allow more households and different types of people to live on a given block. But most of this housing stock was created before the 1970s, and my own block has been largely unchanged for decades. This begs the question, why haven't more of these types of homes been created?

The answer is that these homes would not meet current zoning and development standards. In the late 1970s, my city changed a whole set of rules, essentially making all the houses on my block "legally non-conforming." In other words, if you wanted to build any of these buildings new, from the ground up, you couldn't - they do not conform to existing rules. In 2016, Somerville, MA published a report noting that only 22 houses in the city were legally conforming. In 2018, I did a similar review of why houses in my own neighborhood were "illegal". Here's a sample of the reasons then:

Luckily, since 2018, both California state and my city have implemented some new laws which render some of these reasons moot (ie maximum density and parking requirements near transit.) But if we want to see more middle housing like this, there are still quite a number of things my city and others can tweak. (More later on what those tweaks can be, in the meantime some lessons can be learned from Somerville's 2019 zoning overhaul, their response to the 2016 report.)

In the last 10 years, ADUs or accessory dwelling units (aka granny flats, backyard cottages) have been normalized and re-legalized. ADUs now make up a significant proportion of new homes in California. The next frontier is middle housing. I want to normalize middle housing neighborhoods and share that people like me are already living very happily in them. Middle housing has the potential to create a lot of different housing types in our communities without creating huge physical change. It's also relatively inexpensive to build, which is important in this era of high construction costs.

Good news is the process of normalization and re-legalization of middle housing is starting to happen in California, and I want my next chapter of work to help accelerate this. So join me on my soap box and and chant: