Housing Policy

More like this? Rooming houses in the MedQuarter district

The Cedar Rapids Gazette headline Sunday ("41K in Iowa Fear Eviction as Moratorium Nears Its End") is overblown, but the reality is scary enough. According to the U.S. Census Bureau Housing Pulse Survey, about 11000 Iowans say they're very likely to be evicted from rental housing in the next two months, 21000 say they're somewhat likely to be evicted, and 9000 say they're somewhat likely to be foreclosed on property they own. Even 11000 is a lot of homeless people, relative to available housing stock in our state. Similar results are posted for other states. How about 1.2 million for a national figure? All told about 7 million renters owe accumulated back rent that has been estimated in a range of $11-53 million, according to Mary Cunningham of the Urban Institute (Urban Institute 2021, slides 16 & 19).

Despite a surge in construction both of single-family and multi-family dwellings in the last couple of years, the United States remains about 3.8 million units short of where it needs to be, and existing housing has accumulated $45 billion worth of needed repairs, according to the annual report just published by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies (Sisson 2021). Rapidly rising home prices (Nicholson, Merrill, and Sam 2021) have helped existing owners while creating obstacles for first-time homebuyers and renters; other issues include racial and generational inequities and lack of housing near jobs.

The Census Bureau and Harvard Center reports testify to the persistence of housing issues in America, as well as to their complexity. Those challenges can be sorted into three or four buckets: affordability (supply of housing at the right price points); connections to jobs and the larger city, and the avoidance of concentrations of poverty; and stability amidst threats of job loss or displacement through gentrification. The physical condition of existing housing might be a fourth set of issues.

1. Affordability/Supply

Nationally, the home price-to-median income ratio is rising; currently it's 4.4, though that contains a wide range of differences. San Jose, California, leads the country with a ratio of 10.9, and cities like that face a different set of problems than cities like Cedar Rapids, where it's about 3 metro-wide, or Iowa City where it's about 4 (Hermann 2018). Everywhere the market for for-sale homes is "red hot," said Daniel T. McCue of Harvard at the report's June 16 rollout, with demand overwhelming supply as millennials enter the market, resulting in higher real prices than any time this century. 

Rental prices are also up nationwide as well, with well over half of those making less than $50,000 a year paying more than a third of their income on rent, meaning they're one setback away from eviction. Rental vacancies have increased in high-rent urban areas, though that seems to have peaked. Sociologist Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted [Crown, 2016] showed a chart at a Bipartisan Policy Council webinar showing that median rents have doubled in the last twenty years while incomes are steady: 

I can't get this chart out of my head...

In locations like Cedar Rapids, discussions of housing affordability focus on people at the low end of the pay scale, those with disabilities, and those with criminal records. A 2017 forum noted federal funding Section 8 vouchers don't come close to covering all those eligible, local resources for those experiencing homelessness are limited, and non-profits like Habitat for Humanity have limited production capacity. Those landlords who do accept Section 8 vouchers are subject to extra mandates and inspections, and might could use funding to help them with repairs and updates. Beyond this, there might still be different kinds of issues higher on the income scale; unlike in San Jose, teachers and firefighters in Cedar Rapids can afford homes, but do they face different financial issues once they've bought them?

Urbanists have long advocated making accessory dwelling units (sometimes called "coach houses" or "granny flats") legal; Chicago enacted a three-year trial run this year with impressive response so far. Narrower streets would allow more land to be put to productive use (Merrefield 2021)--among many other benefits. Cambridge, Massachusetts passed an Affordable Housing Overlay ordinance in 2020 that loosened zoning restrictions on construction citywide (Gibbs 2021).

Shane Phillips argues increasing supply while maintaining affordability and stability requires some form of government intervention in the housing market:

A well-regulated private housing market can serve a large portion of our population, and tenant protections paired with rental housing preservation can assist even more. But there will always be people who are left behind by these efforts—sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. Acting through the collective will of our local, state, and federal governments, we have a responsibility to provide support to those who need it and to live up to our professed belief that housing is a human right. This may take the form of rental assistance, publicly subsidized housing construction and acquisition, and a host of other programs (2020: 33).

Awareness of policy consequences is important: Cities can avoid San Francisco's infamous tenant protections that are blamed for constraining supply, but prices--and displacement--have also risen in less restrictive cities like in Texas and Washington even though housing supply has increased (Phillips 2020: 24-28).

Anthony Simpkins of Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago told an Urban Institute panel that rental housing won't close the racial wealth gap, but homeownership policies will.

Affordable rental housing does not generate generational wealth. It's never going to close the racial wealth gap.... Today, in a high-cost city like the City of Chicago, a homeowner can pay less for their mortgage than they pay for rent. But when you look at the rules and regulations [related to affordable housing policy], they all skew towards supporting rental housing. There's very little room and very little ability to use these resources to build and expand homeownership among people of color.... It's all about access to capital (Urban Institute 2021, at about 59:48)]

2. Connection

A great deal of the new construction is in the suburbs and in non-metro areas, where it's easier to develop by the batch, and where zoning favors single family homes. You can also get more home for the money, although the savings can get eaten up by transportation costs; in metropolitan Chicago, for example, the closer a median-income household is to the city center, the less their total housing-plus-transportation costs. (See also the interactive maps at the Center for Neighborhood Technology website, including total driving costs by location, housing + transportation affordability index, and access to jobs by transit.) 

Apartments in the former Monroe School rent for $695 a month,
but the Walk Score is 34

Residential concentrations of poverty are problematic for children, who do less well in life than those raised in more socioeconomically mixed areas (Chetty, Hendren and Katz 2016). They are problematic for adults, who have less access to economic opportunity as well as lower life expectancy (Ludwig 2014). Distance from affordable housing to jobs creates the transportation nightmares particularly for the poor and near-poor that Steven Higashide (2019: 92) calls "mobility redlining." 

Simpkins talked about "building communities that have been left behind" as an essential part of remedying the racial wealth gap (Urban Institute 2021, at about 1:01:50). Most areas of concentrated poverty have not gentrified since the 1970s, but in fact have gotten worse off (Cortright et al. 2014). Can cities provide incentives to locate jobs that pay well near low-income areas, and discourage large corporate campuses in remote locations? Or to encourage developers to build affordable housing near areas of economic growth? 

Options for cities include zoning reform that allows a greater variety of housing in a given area (Cortright 2017); Inglewood, California is planning zoning changes to allow more housing and commercial space near Metro rail stops (Sharp 2021). (See this post from 2017 for more on these issues.)

This four-plex is four blocks from my house.

So is this two-plex. If they were even closer, would I be less wealthy?

Cities can reform zoning codes to allow the production of small fourplex apartment buildings ("missing middle" housing) in residential neighborhoods (Holeywell 2016, McGlinchy 2017). Access to capital can provide "ladders" for those with very low income, as well as attracting middle class people to disinvested neighborhoods (Simpkins, in Urban Institute 2021). The national government can revisit the mortgage interest income tax deduction (Quednau 2017), as its value for most filers was eliminated by the 2017 tax act. 

Local transit connections can be improved almost everywhere, and certainly could be in my city. Dharna Noor (2021) points out "investing in public transit isn't just a good idea for the climate and commute times. It's also a good way to ensure everyone has access to opportunity, including the opportunity to relax. Imagine if access to parks and lakes weren't limited to those who can afford to buy, maintain, and park their cars. That could go far in improving access for exploited, poor communities who are disproportionately harmed by highway pollution." 

But is a ridership model compatible with where Cedar Rapids is currently building affordable housing (Pioneer Avenue, Johnson Avenue, Blairs Ferry Road, e.g.)? I would think not.

3. Stability and Gentrification

As land values rise, and incomes do not, evictions have soared: Desmond cited a figure of seven evictions per minute nationally in 2016 (Bipartisan Policy Council 2021). Annually there are more than a million more evictions than there had been foreclosures at the height of the housing crisis, with many associated bad effects on individual lives. Black [and Latinx] renters have about twice as high a rate of evictions as white renters. Evicted renters bounce from place to place because (quoting Desmond) they "are already living at the bottom of the market, in places they can't afford."

Stagnant incomes are one cause of housing instability; another is gentrification. Gentrification occurs where some circumstance has changed raising the potential value of housing far above its actual price (known as a "rent gap"). Recently middle-class demand for urban living has risen as amenities have improved, crime has decreased, and frankly fashions have changed. Gentrification can be good for places, and the people that live in them; at best it improves economic opportunity, public services and facilities, and the tax base. At worst it raises costs for those who stay, and drives others to less connected and less-well-off places (Florida 2015b; see this post from 2016 for a more detailed review of the debate). (For an argument that a focus on gentrification misidentifies the cause of problems with affordability and stability, see McMillan 2021.)

As rents go up, or property taxes rise on homes, some residents are forced to move to more affordable areas. Shane Phillips recounts one California experience: "A $5 billion stadium was proposed in Inglewood and rents and home values skyrocketed nearly overnight; even if the city had allowed for infinite development to meet the growing demand, thousands of households would be displaced before relief ever arrived. These changes were entirely outside the control of local residents, and yet they were the ones to suffer the consequences" (2020: 13). 

Alexander Garvin's book about downtown areas discusses the displacement of people along the way to prosperity: "Increasing demand led to increasing rents and the inevitable gentrification. The rental tenants, who had pioneered loft living and could not afford to remain in the area, were replaced by occupants who demanded and received better fixtures and services for their higher rents. But condominium occupants either remained in a much-improved neighborhood or profited from selling their residences at the appreciated value" (2019: 37). Increasing housing supply might mitigate gentrification "if the citywide housing supply is increasing faster than population growth" (2019: 159), but resurgent value of districts like Cincinnati's Over the Rhine seems to depend to a frustrating extent on getting rid of the "undesirable people" (2019: 134). Either way, as places gentrify, their former residents are going somewhere, and where they go should not be a matter of indifference to policy makers.

Rising values create incentives for property owners like MidCity Financial Corporation in Maryland to convert low-income housing developments into mixed-income mixed-use (Milloy 2021). At the Harvard report rollout, Gary Anthony of the National League of Cities argued that construction of one- and two-bedroom apartments is not an answer for families who have been priced out of their single-family homes, and advocated for "race-specific anti-displacement policy."

Cities could improve access to transportation and other amenities more broadly, to reduce the value premium on accessible places (Florida 2015a). Washington, D.C. is redeveloping a closed hospital in the Congress Heights neighborhood with affordable housing as well as an entertainment facility anticipated to create jobs (Steuteville 2021). Other options include inclusionary zoning requiring developers to include below-market-rate housing (S. Williams et al. 2016, Kaplan 2014); improving housing choices by loosening zoning restrictions in order to provide more options like living above your shop (Marohn 2015); limiting increases on property taxes (T. Williams 2014); and mitigating culture clashes by facilitating communication between the recently-arrived and long-term residents (Saunders 2016).

Conclusion

Shane Phillips argues for balancing the many interests involved in housing policy: 

We must design pro-housing policies that target development where it will benefit the most people (such as where housing costs are highest or job concentration is greatest) and that discourage it where it may do the most harm (such as on sites where dense concentrations of renters already live, especially in lower-income communities and communities of color). 

We must design pro-tenant policies that protect renters living in affordable homes while ensuring that development remains a profitable venture on sites where tenants aren’t threatened and it can do the most good. 

We must increase spending on rental assistance and affordable housing construction, and complementary zoning reforms and renter protections must be in place to make sure those funds are spent effectively (2020:42-43).

But he makes an exception to all that balancing by prioritizing affordability, even though, for many current owners, increased supply threatens the value of their property. It is an inescapable fact that home equity represents the major if not the only source of retirement savings. "Owning a home is integral to financial security for most families in the United States, and rising home values continue to give the government cover for skimping on retirement programs such as Social Security and pensions," but "ever-growing property values are completely incompatible with long-term housing affordability" (2020: 61). So, at the fundamental level, focus on broad affordability and the many social and quality-of-life benefits that would bring, and figure out some other way for people to accrue wealth.

In the 19th century, Jacob Riis depicted squalid housing conditions in New York City.
An exhibit of his photographs is now at the National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library
in Cedar Rapids.

SEE ALSO

Bipartisan Policy Council, "Eviction Prevention Now and After COVID-19" [webinar], 23 June 2021 #harvardhousingreport

Alexander Garvin, The Heart of the City: Creating Vibrant Downtowns for a New Century (Island, 2019)

Annie Gowen, "She Wanted to Stay. Her Landlord Wanted Her Out," Washington Post, 28 June 2021

Steven Higashide, Better Buses, Better Cities: How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit (Island, 2019)

Norman Van Eeden Petersman, "Could You Move in Next Door?" Strong Towns, 23 June 2021

Shane Phillips, The Affordable City: Strategies for Putting Housing Within Reach (And Keeping It There) (Island, 2020)

Prevention Institute, "Healthy Development Without Displacement: Realizing the Vision of Healthy Communities for All," July 2017

Urban Institute, "Stable Housing is a Critical First Step Toward Racial Equity" [webinar], 29 June 2021 #liveaturban

The housing conundrum

Almost a decade removed from the foreclosure crisis that began in 2008, the nation is facing one of the worst affordable-housing shortages in generations. The standard of “affordable” housing is that which costs roughly 30 percent or less of a family’s income. Because of rising housing costs and stagnant wages, slightly more than half of all poor renting families in the country spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing costs, and at least one in four spends more than 70 percent. Yet America’s national housing policy gives affluent homeowners large benefits; middle-class homeowners, smaller benefits; and most renters, who are disproportionately poor, nothing. It is difficult to think of another social policy that more successfully multiplies America’s inequality in such a sweeping fashion.— MATTHEW DESMOND (2017)

35 years ago, I worked at the public library in Naperville, Illinois. There was a proposal to build affordable housing somewhere in town that was quite controversial, and which was ultimately rejected by the city council. This was a good thing, a library staff member explained to me, because the new housing would have negatively affected the values of the properties around it. I had no long-term plans to stay in Naperville, but if I had planned to stay my housing would have had to have been "affordable." It seemed even then that property values could be, and possibly were being, used as justification to keep people down.

What do you buy when you buy a house? According to the title, you’ve purchased a dwelling and the land on which it sits, as well as additional property as specified. And one would be foolish to make the purchase without ensuring that both are in sound condition: the yard drains properly and is can accommodate your pets or children; there’s a secure place for your car(s); the roof is in good shape, the basement doesn’t flood and isn’t filling up with radon, the kitchen’s up to date, and such like.

Most people take additional factors into account, which aren’t included in the title to the house: the qualities of the neighborhood, access to parks and schools, and the view from the living room window, for example. Change happens, and none of those amenities are legal entitlements, but they can be sources of powerful emotional attachment. 

Perhaps more importantly, for most American homeowners, their house is their major asset, representing by far the largest portion of their material wealth. According to the Federal Reserve Board, housing wealth in the United States is about one half of overall household net worth. Mess with the monetary value of housing and you're into people's pockets in a big way.

So it’s entirely understandable that homeowners react defensively when they hear of new development in their neighborhood, whether it’s low-income apartments, live-work spaces or even adding a sidewalk while narrowing the street. It's too easy to imagine change will involve noise, traffic, crime and/or drainage issues that are hard to fix once they're established. One of the costs of seven decades of bad development is that all development gets perceived as bad.

But "density doesn't have to be scary, if it's done right," says Bay Area designer Karen Parolek (Holeywell). A fourplex like this...

Fourplex, Portland OR (Source: Wikimedia commons)

...wouldn't look out of place in my streetcar suburban neighborhood.

The problem with protecting our neighborhoods from changes is that it harms the ability of other people to enjoy the quality of life we want to enjoy, and leaves them worse off.

• Everyone has the right to shelter. I doubt I could convince you if you believe otherwise, but it seems fairly basic.
• Children in areas of concentrated poverty do less well than if they live in more socioeconomically mixed areas (Chetty et al. 2015). Adults in areas of concentrated poverty have less access to economic opportunity and lower length and quality of life (Kneebone et al 2011 esp Box 1, Ludwig 2014).
• Governments are nowhere fiscally flush enough to build the infrastructure that would allow people to live in enclaves. This hasn’t stopped them from doing it for the last several decades, of course. Between intracity highways, the home mortgage interest deduction and an unwillingness to address the externalities of driving, governments at all levels have been giving big assists to their better-off constituents. (Because you have to claim more than the standard deduction to make the mortgage interest deduction worth it, more than 80 percent of tax expenditures under it go to households making more than $100,000 per year.) The federal government spends more money on the home mortgage interest deduction ($71B in 2015) than on housing assistance—even before the latter’s 13.2 percent cut in President Trump’s FY18 budget. This has reinforced disparities in wealth dating from the original discriminatory form of housing programs (Desmond 2017).

Source: nationalpriorities.org

So what should we do about housing policy in America? There are some ideas out there...

• Zoning of neighborhoods should be inclusionary not exclusionary: Economist Joe Cortright (2017) notes “having a wide variety of housing types and sizes can also make room for people of a wide variety of incomes.” Ease the permitting process for multi-unit “missing middle” housing (as is being attempted by CodeNEXT in Austin, Texas)
• Government can resolve the market’s failure to build “missing middle” stock, either by directly providing public housing, or by providing incentives to suppliers and/or buyers (Cortright 2017, Thompson 2017)
• Reduce the home mortgage interest tax deduction by capping it at $500,000 instead of $1 million (Thompson 2017), so housing policy tilts less to the well-off and reduces current incentives to overbuild and sprawl (Quednau 2017, Distorted DNA 2016).

Suburban sprawl has been incentivized by the mortgage interest deduction
(Google screen capture)

The success of any of these policy approaches depends on their political feasibility--in other words, us, and in particular the more politically-powerful portion of us that owns big houses and gets tangible benefits from current policy. We need to leave the door open, or the ladder down, or whatever metaphor you like, for the people who come after us. This means promoting more inclusive views of the city and the neighborhood, and understanding our inherent connections to them. "No man is an island," wrote John Donne, and no house can truly be, either, but only by affirming our connection to other people and commitment to opportunity for all do we become truly a "fairer city." (For more on that concept see the provocative essay by Engelen et al.)

SOURCES
 Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren and Lawrence Katz, "The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment," American Economic Review 106:4 (2016), 855-902

 Joe Cortright, “Why America Can’t Make Up Its Mind About Housing,” City Observatory, 16 May 2017

 Matthew Desmond, “How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Inequality,” New York Times Magazine, 9 May 2017, MM48ff
 Distorted DNA: The Impacts of Federal Housing Policy (Strong Towns, 2016)

 Ewald Engelen, Sukhdev Johal, Angelo Salento and Karel Williams, "How to Build a Fairer City," The Guardian, 24 September 2014
 Ryan Holeywell, "How the 'Missing Middle' Can Make Neighborhoods More Walkable," Urban Edge, 29 March 2016
 Elizabeth Kneebone, Carey Nadeau and Alan Berube, "The Re-emergence of Concentrated Poverty: Metropolitan Trends in the 2000s" (Brookings Institution, 2011)
 Jens Ludwig, "Moving to Opportunity: The Effects of Concentrated Poverty on the Poor," Third Way, 22 August 2014

 Rachel Quednau, “The Problem with the Mortgage Interest Deduction,” Strong Towns, 31 May 2017

 Derek Thompson, “The Shame of the Mortgage-Interest Deduction,” The Atlantic, 14 May 2017

What is a form-based code? and other mysteries of zoning

Zoning map from 1920s Winnipeg (Source: Wikimedia commons)

One of the forces that has gotten us into the fix we're in--sprawl-wise and society-wise--is single-use (Euclidean) zoning, which originated over a hundred years ago with the idea of keeping polluting and noisome businesses (factories, slaughterhouses) well separated from where people were trying to live and raise children and such. I don't want to live next to a smokestack anymore than you do, nor do I want to live next to a slaughterhouse, nor when it comes right down to it a baseball stadium or an amusement park. So far, so good.

This laudable beginning, however, led to more dubious efforts to classify and separate. As Andres Duany and his co-authors explain:

This segregation, once applied only to incompatible uses, is now applied to every use. A typical contemporary zoning code has several dozen land-use designations; not only is housing separated from industry but low-density housing is separated from medium-density housing, which is separated from high-density housing. Medical offices are separated from general offices, which are in turn separated from restaurants and shopping. (2000: 10)

Local zoning laws, long helped by federal housing policies, have contributed to the state of the American landscape that is familiar to nearly everyone reading this: large-lot subdivisions located from far from anything anyone does; shopping malls and strips on congested roads; much of the day spent in motor vehicles, stuck in traffic jams or running errands in "Mom's taxi;" a vast sea of parking lots; inner city slums isolated from productive places; the gradual disappearance of third places; and financially-pressed cities and states scrambling to keep up with it all.

Nowadays we know a lot about how these systems work. The public may not be pushing for change: there's a tendency to regard this landscape and the burdens it places as part of the natural order of things, and those with a disproportionate share of economic and political clout may well be glad to be well away from everyone else with all their problems. Duany et al. note: "It has been well documented by Robert Fishman and others how racism was a large factor in the disappearance of the middle class from the center city ("white flight"), and how zoning law clearly manifests the desire to keep away what one has left behind" (2000: 11n).

But there are signs of change. Younger people are showing more interest in urban living, and city governments want to make their places both more appealing and more financially-solvent. Now the same zoning codes which were used to sell development are seen as obstacles. Their rigid rules and formulae restrict individual choice and community adaptation. Whatever to do?

One trend is to wider use of form-based codes. The Form-Based Codes Institute, a non-profit planning organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., defines this concept as

a land development regulation that fosters predictable built results and a high-quality public realm by using physical form (rather than separation of uses) as the organizing principle for the code. A form-based code is a regulation, not a mere guideline, adopted into city, town, or county law. A form-based code offers a powerful alternative to conventional zoning regulation.

In other words, a form-based code focuses on outcomes like the look and feel of a place, rather than on what goes on there. Of course, a community could decide that it prefers the look and feel of a large-lot subdivision, but presumably the motivation to adopt a form-based code would be to seek to achieve an integrated vision not possible with single-use zoning. Cincinnati, Ohio, whose code won an honorable mention from the organization in 2014, provides for a city-wide network of walkable neighborhoods, with standards for building and frontage types, based on the transect (see below), but encouraging neighborhoods to produce their own plans. More recently, three first-ring suburbs of Chicago collaborated on form-based building standards for Roosevelt Road, a highway that runs through all three. In a 1.5-mile stretch, there are pedestrian zones and transitional zones, as well as an auto-oriented zone close to Harlem Avenue, but all emphasize pedestrian safety:

Roosevelt Road form-based code (swiped from formbasedcodes.org)

The FBCI sites includes examples of codes, webinars and opportunities to register for more intensive conferences.

Communities can consider the natural flow of the transect, which is one way that a form-based code can be organized. The transect is a series of gradual transitions from open/rural spaces to the dense urban center, intended to model a natural transition from, say, seafront to forest. The zones are based on character, form and intensity of development. Basing city zoning on this concept is intended to "provide the basis for real neighborhood structure, which requires walkable streets, mixed use, transportation options, and housing diversity," instead of forcing people to drive great distances to get to separated uses. "The T-zones are intended to be balanced within a neighborhood structure based on pedestrian sheds (walksheds), so that even T-3 residents may walk to different habitats, such as a main street, civic space, or agrarian land."

Source: Center for Applied Transect Studies

The Center for Applied Transect Studies website includes model transect-based codes and modules, as well as--particularly useful for non-planners like me--a photo gallery of examples from the different T-zones. While CATS focuses on municipal zoning, I think this concept would be more relevant to metropolitan regions where there still are natural and rural zones.

Cities may also seek to encourage development of missing middle housing. Designer Daniel Parolek coined the term "missing middle" to denote "a range of multi-unit or clustered housing types compatible in scale with single-family homes that help meet the growing demand for walkable urban living." These are "missing" because of unmet demand, estimated by Arthur C. Nelson in a 2014 conference paper at 35 million units. Missing middle housing includes duplexes, fourplexes, small multiplexes, bungalow courts, townhouses, courtyard apartments, carriage houses, and apartments-attached-to-workplaces. (See website for examples as well as advice to designers.)

Source: missingmiddlehousing.com

Single-use zoning leads to the lack of such development. Parolek notes: (1) codes usually skip from single-family detached homes to apartment complexes which tend to be large; (2) they don't allow for blended densities; and (3) lack of flexibility in parking and open space requirements discourages smaller units. A form-based code, on the other hand, can create a range of housing types compatible with the community's vision.

Then for each form-based zoning district a specific range of housing types is allowed. For example, in a T3 Walkable Neighborhood a single-family detached type, bungalow court, and side-by-side duplex may be allowed, or a urban T4 Urban Neighborhood zone would allow bungalow courts, side-by-side duplexes, stacked duplexes, fourplexes, and the multiplex: small type, even though the densities of each of these types can range dramatically. Each type has a minimum lot size and maximum number of units allowed, thus enabling a maximum density calculation as the output. (missingmiddlehousing.com)

Cedar Rapids, which lost a lot of housing and commercial buildings to a massive flood in 2008, may have more opportunity than most cities to remake its landscape. Even here, change will come slowly. The main idea is to remove from the law persistent obstacles to traditional, human-scaled development, and where possible to use the zoning code to shape development in the community interest.


WORKS CITED
Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (North Point, 2000)
Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (Basic, 1987)
Arthur C. Nelson, "Missing Middle: Demand and Benefits," paper prepared for Utah Land Use Institute conference, 21 October 2014

WEBSITES  
"Center for Applied Transect Studies," http://transect.org/

"Form Based Codes Institute," http://formbasedcodes.org/
"Missing Middle: Responding to the Demand for Walkable Urban Living," http://missingmiddlehousing.com/

JUST PUBLISHED! Ryan Holeywell, "How the 'Missing Middle' Can Make Neighborhoods More Walkable," Urban Edge, 29 March 2016