#plex housing

Dense Housing That Fits In

As we race to reduce our CO2 output, we’re also facing an affordable housing crisis in our big cities. The cost to live in desirable, walkable neighborhoods near city centers has shot up past most people’s ability to pay, forcing them out to new developments in car-dependent suburbia, and further increasing their CO2 footprint.

When people think of dense affordable housing, they may think of grim public housing projects, or towers that loom over single-family neighborhoods. But this is mostly an issue with zoning; if most cities had Montreal-style row house triplexes and duplexes, they could add a lot more housing in less space, without it feeling overwhelming or unpleasant, and still have space for trees, more space for local parks, etc. 

And the other part is design; modern purpose-built condo buildings look distressingly alike, a set of cheap glass and concrete boxes with snap-on cladding. This clash of visual styles is often a driver of NIMBYism. 

It doesn’t have to be like this. New infills can borrow from vernacular styles and materials, like this townhouse development in Denver, that in theory could be a set of five duplexes, putting 10 homes where nominally only two might fit before.

Or they can adopt striking new forms, like Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 apartments, built for Expo 67 (picture at top) as a demonstration of compact, prefab modular units that stack together, giving everyone ample light, space, air, green views, and terraces. The units are highly desirable today, not least because of the views of the river and downtown from their site at the Old Port.

Or they can take the form of the traditional missing-middle duplex or stacked fourplex. Here’s some from Portland.

As a street gets closer to a larger commercial avenue, a larger, mixed-use corner apartment building with ground floor shops can be appropriate. But that’s not to say that in-neighborhood shops should be banned - everyone should be just a few minutes’ walk from a convenience store or coffee shop, at least, so these uses should be permitted. 

The bonus here is that, in the space that a traditional single-family neighborhood would take up, you can have 2x-4x the population, which means lowered shared costs for infrastructure and services, enough potential riders to make public transit viable, and with commerce within walking distance, it can cut down on the majority of car trips (which are under 3 miles).