The classic story...with a Strong Towns twist.
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Accessory Commercial Units spur entrepreneurship and build a city’s prosperity. The problem? Many zoning laws make them functionally illegal.
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As senior care facilities are hit hard by the pandemic, homebuilders say interest in ADUs—and other multigenerational housing options—is exploding.
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This is Part 1 in a three-part series about why our cities deserve better than cookie-cutter, state-level land use reforms.
Read MoreAccessory Commercial Units spur entrepreneurship and build a city’s prosperity. The problem? Many zoning laws make them functionally illegal.
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Why does a healthy pond suddenly become overrun with algae? And what can the natural principle behind this help us understand about how change works—or doesn’t—in cities?
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Lexington, Kentucky recently proposed an ordinance that would allow accessory dwelling units. Nolan Gray explains how ADUs are good for renters, good for homeowners, and good for the city — and why Lexington’s ordinance is (almost) perfect.
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The growing movement to end exclusive single-family zoning—as Oregon just did in its cities—is not a radical or untested experiment: it’s a return to a historical norm. The actual radical experiment is the strange notion that a neighborhood should be required to contain only one type of home.
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Trying to navigate opaque bureaucracies, just to get permission to build something that used to be legal everywhere, is like eating Jell-O with chopsticks: tedious and unsatisfying. No wonder people find pragmatic work-arounds instead.
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Building an accessory apartment is one of the gentlest ways you can increase the housing stock in your town. But does that mean that states should be the ones making the rules about how you can do it—even if those rules are permissive?
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In this episode of our podcast It’s the Little Things, Jacob chats with Caitlin Bigelow—Founder of Maxable Space—about how you can build an accessory dwelling unit (ADU), including how to check the required zoning, encourage your peer that ADUs are a strong way to build your neighborhood, and discover the benefits beyond passive rental income.
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Let’s walk through what it actually takes to build a small rental apartment on your property in Austin, Texas. It’s a lesson in how the city’s existing code stymies gentle, incremental, small-scale development.
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Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) are a quintessentially Strong Towns approach to urban growth and affordability issues: bottom-up, decentralized, incremental, scalable and adaptable. Unfortunately, a litany of restrictions often makes them an unappealing option even where allowed.
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In your town, is an owner of a single family home able to get permission to add a small rental unit onto their property without any real hassle? If not, you've got work to do.
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There’s probably no panacea for housing affordability. Here are 5 immutable laws of affordable housing that cities must recognize if they want to move forward. Plus 3 strategies for doing so.
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Accessory dwelling unit legalization represents a low-profile free-market solution that requires little from government actors beyond getting out of the way.
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Three simple tactics could expand affordable housing options in Lexington, KY and other midsize cities like it.
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The White House takes aim at some of the our cities' worst development practices.
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My attempts to build a tiny home have been thwarted by a hostile regulatory environment at every turn. So here's what I did instead.
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Zoning is often explicitly biased against renters. This creates challenges not only for the renting population, but also for small-scale developers who would like to build rental housing.
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