Saying Yes to All Types of Housing in Your Community
(Source: Unsplash/Liz Sanchez-Vegas.)
Many American cities are facing a housing crisis, caused or exacerbated by zoning rules that prohibit building types that have historically been the core of a diverse housing market. Fortunately, there are policy changes that could bring back duplexes, triplexes, and accessory dwelling units to North American neighborhoods, and developers ready to tackle such projects.
You’ll hear about both sides of the equation in a Strong Towns Local-Motive session, “Saying Yes to All Types of Housing in Your Community,” on October 5 at noon CT. Strong Towns Senior Editor-in-Chief and housing policy expert Daniel Herriges will join Alli Thurmond Quinlan, principal architect and landscape architect at Flintlock Lab, to explain why it’s so important that your city says “yes” to more housing types, and what benefits it may experience if your leaders do.
Quinlan was featured in a recent Strong Towns profile championing smaller, infill projects in the cities where she works. She is also a board member of the Incremental Development Alliance. Quinlan argues that “there are good reasons to build small, and you can make small homes nice,” and says many factors have converged to make the “minimum viable product” in the housing market an oversized single-family home on a quarter-acre lot.
Herriges, who is currently working on a Strong Towns book about the housing crisis, has written and spoken frequently on housing policy. He’s explained the benefits of accessory dwelling units, duplexes, making normal neighborhoods legal again, and organically evolving neighborhoods.
Together, they’ll help you learn how to advocate for policy changes to spur missing-middle housing development in your community, and what conditions local developers need to profitably pursue small-scale, infill projects.
Join the discussion, and find other fascinating sessions on Strong Towns core campaigns on the 2023 Local-Motive Tour.
Join us September 14–November 2 for 10 online workshops that will help you take action and build a stronger town. Sign up now!
Ben Abramson is a Staff Writer at Strong Towns. In his career as a travel journalist with The Washington Post and USA TODAY, Ben has visited many destinations that show how Americans were once world-class at building appealing, prosperous places at a human scale. He has also seen the worst of the suburban development pattern, and joined Strong Towns because of its unique way of framing the problems we can all see and intuit, and focusing on local, achievable solutions. A native of Washington, DC, Ben lives in Venice, Florida; summers in Atlantic Canada; and loves hiking, biking, kayaking, and beachcombing.