What's the deal with "missing middle" housing?

[jmecklenborg]

The bragging about the "missing middle" is an urbanist trend I didn't expect to catch on. It started about 10 years ago and at some point took on a life of its own. Urbanists insist that this building type (plus bike lanes and everything else) automatically creates a virtuous social outcome but they're quite selective about which small multifamily areas they point to.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

The bragging about the "missing middle" is an urbanist trend I didn't expect to catch on. It started about 10 years ago and at some point took on a life of its own. Urbanists insist that this building type (plus bike lanes and everything else) automatically creates a virtuous social outcome but they're quite selective about which small multifamily areas they point to.

All of America's most functionally urban big cities also happen to have the highest proportions of missing middle housing, whether it's philly rowhouses, or boston triple-deckers, or chicago 3-flats, etc.

The correlation is undeniable.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

The bragging about the "missing middle" is an urbanist trend I didn't expect to catch on. It started about 10 years ago and at some point took on a life of its own. Urbanists insist that this building type (plus bike lanes and everything else) automatically creates a virtuous social outcome but they're quite selective about which small multifamily areas they point to.

Where is missing middle housing being built?

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Where is missing middle housing being built?

The lion's share of my job is producing construction docs for vacant lot infill missing middle housing on Chicago's south lakefront. Over the past 3 years since starting my new job, I've drawn about 100 2-8 unit flat buildings down there. This past thursday I got the green light to proceed with two 6-flats on adjacent vacant lots down in south shore.

It flies under the radar because it's not shiny brand new 50 story towers or whatever, but IMO the south lakefront nabes from the stevenson down to the calumet river constitute the most interesting part of Chicago for urban development right now. There are still thousands of vacant lots to go down there, so it will very much remain a work in progress for a good long time to come, but the "missing middle" ball is rolling on Chicago's south lakefront!

[Docere]

Toronto constantly gets slammed by "urbanists" (whatever that means) for being "nothing but detached houses and high rises" and having no "missing middle." Even though there's more missing middle units in city limits than detached houses.

[Docere]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

The bragging about the "missing middle" is an urbanist trend I didn't expect to catch on. It started about 10 years ago and at some point took on a life of its own. Urbanists insist that this building type (plus bike lanes and everything else) automatically creates a virtuous social outcome but they're quite selective about which small multifamily areas they point to.

I don't think Montreal's plexes or Philadelphia's rows, say, were built for the purpose of "a virtuous social outcome."

[biguc]

[Eating my dickish words]

Now, like in the Montreal thread, the point you're missing about missing middle is that it's missing. This is a zoning problem. People point to nice mid-density neighbourhoods and say, this should be legal.

That's the deal

[JManc]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Where is missing middle housing being built?

Here in the Houston area, they are being built in far flung suburbs. No where close to the city center and if they are, it's in low income/ high crime areas.

[biguc]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

I peeled jmeck's comment out from the montreal thread into this new thread because it was gonna take the Montreal thread too far off topic.

Ah my bad; I retract my statement. Thanks for keeping things on track

[craigs]

How many units before a building is no longer considered "middle-sized?"

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by craigs

How many units before a building is no longer considered "middle-sized?"

From google AI:

Common Types of Missing Middle Housing:

- Duplexes and Triplexes: Two or three homes attached side-by-side or stacked on a single lot.

- Townhouses and Rowhouses: Narrow, multi-story homes sharing side walls.

- Bungalow / Cottage Courts: Groups of small, detached homes arranged around a shared central garden or courtyard.

- Small Multi-Flats: Low-rise buildings with two to six apartments (similar to Chicago’s classic two-flats).

I've always considered anything above detached SFH and under 10 units as "missing middle".

But the 10 unit thing might just be my location bias, because in chicago, all of the rules* for MFH change once you get to 10+ units.

That demarcation line might be different in other jurisdictions.



(*) construction type, elevators, ADA, sprinklers, affordability reqs., etc.

[craigs]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

From google AI:

I've always considered anything above detached SFH and under 10 units as "missing middle".

But the 10 unit thing might just be my location bias, because in chicago, all of the rules* for MFH change once you get to 10+ units.

That demarcation line might be different in other jurisdictions.

(*) construction type, elevators, ADA, sprinklers, affordability reqs., etc.

Per the same source: "Approximately 18.5% to 19% of all residential units in the City of Los Angeles consist of 2 or more units but fewer than 11 units." That's not great, but it's decent considering we don't have small, abandoned lots to work with. Most new construction is in large multifamily formats; approximately 38% to 39% of all residential units in the City of Los Angeles are located within properties that contain 11 or more units.

[The North One]

People are sick of condo high-rises and 5-over-1s.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by craigs

Per the same source: "Approximately 18.5% to 19% of all residential units in the City of Los Angeles consist of 2 or more units but fewer than 11 units."

Here's the City of Chicago housing unit breakdown:

- detached SFH: 25.6%
- attached SFH: 3.5%
- 2 - 9 units: 39.3%
- 10 - 19 units: 4.6%
- 20+ units: 27.0%



And more specifically, here's my "missing middle" haven of Lincoln Square:

- detached SFH: 14.8%
- attached SFH: 2.0%
- 2 - 9 units: 56.3%
- 10 - 19 units: 11.1%
- 20+ units: 15.7%

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by craigs

considering we don't have small, abandoned lots to work with.

Yeah, that's one "resource" rustbelt cities will seemingly never run out of.

Chicago's south lakefront is home to 225,000 on 16.5 square miles.

It was once home to 2x that (~550,000) 75 years ago. A good deal of that was due to severe overcrowding and larger HH sizes back in the day.

Let's say there are now 10,000 vacant residential lots in the area today (I dont know the actual number, but it's in that realm), if we could build an average of 4 units on each of those lots, with 2.5 PPH, that's 100,000 new people, taking the average density from its current 13,600 ppsm, to nearly 20,000 ppsm, without needing a single large-scale MFH building.

The multyliplying math of this stuff, when done at scale, can really move the needle.

[Docere]

Never quite sure what number units or stories represents the upper end of missing middle?

[llamaorama]

It fits into gaps better. It's more walkable that superblocks. It seems more resilient than large apartment complexes.

Also, if you've ever lived in a typical suburban sunbelt apartment complex you know how lame they are. Weird rules on parking, lots of fees to pay for amenities you don't use because trashy people hog them, having to drag your trash all the way down an alley to a dumpster or pay for valet trash that never shows up or leaves notes saying they wont take your items, walk all the way to a mail building to pick up amazon packages from a locker you have to pay to use because they can't just come to the door because of "security", etc.

In contrast I think a lot of renters would prefer if given the choice to live in a small low-rise apartment facing a public street mixed into something more like a normal neighborhood.It would feel a bit more like getting to live in a house, it's just that your house is physically stuck to 3 or 4 other houses. Park in front of your building, have a trash can, a mailbox, etc. Have a diversity of neighbors who live in conventional single family homes, have a corner store at the end of the block, etc. Instead of paying a hidden $50 in my rent to have a pool that's out of order because someone threw chairs in it I'll just pay taxes to a city that has municipal recreation centers or something. You get the idea.

But, the way capitalism works nowadays, it seems like all real estate development happens only in big chunks. A corporation builds an apartment complex, a corporation builds a subdivision, and so on. You see comparatively less fine grained development.

Personally I don't understand why, in the 21st century, a property management company couldn't handle having units spread out across a city in different locations. They could always outsource maintenance to third parties that operate a certain area as if they aren't don't. Similarly, why can't construction happen in a more geographically decentralized way since it's easier now with modern tech for supervisors to communicate with workers and for loads of materials to be dispatched intelligently, etc.

[SIGSEGV]

I guess Bucharest is an example of a city with virtually no missing middle built since WWII.



even the new shit being haphazardly built in surrounding communities is like this


And sadly much of the pre WWII stuff was demolished for more commie blocks...

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by llamaorama

It would feel a bit more like getting to live in a house, it's just that your house is physically stuck to 3 or 4 other houses.

Yep.

In fact, whenever my kids speak of our condo unit in a traditional Chicago 3-flat, they don't say things like "our condo" or "our apartment" or anything like that, it's always simply "our house" (that just happens to have two other families living upstairs in the "houses" on the 2nd and 3rd floors).

It's an immensely intimate, cozy and "neighborhoody" way to do MFH.

[jmecklenborg]

So I googled "how many 2-family homes were built in 2024 in the United States" and it said 24,000 of the 580,000 multifamily units completed in 2024 were in 2-4 unit buildings.

So the answer is a statistically insignificant number of small multifamilies are being built in the United States at present. Urbanists/Twitter losers can go on and on all they want about zoning but the bottom line is that they're bad business in most contexts. As urban infill they're fine but have to compete with infill single-family homes, which are almost always more profitable. And on a greenfield site, there is no reason to build 25 4-families when you can build 1 100-unit building for a lower cost per unit both to build and to manage.

2-4 unit multifamilies were popular in the past because they were much easier to finance than large apartment buildings. For example, a developer wanting to build 100 units total could be given phased loans to build 5 4-families at a time. In the area I grew up, hundreds of small multifamilies were built from 1950 until about 1970, when they stopped completely. That corresponded with changes to banking and mortgage laws, not zoning. Plus, a wife's income was suddenly able to be included in a construction loan, which is why/how suburban houses started getting much bigger.