Missing Middle Housing with David White

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• David White and CivicWorks
• AARP Livable Communities, Discovering and Developing Missing Middle Housing, ADUs: Model State Act and Local Ordinance
• Missing middle housing (wikipedia)
• Listen: The City is For Children to Use

David is the Principal & Founder of CivicWorks. Under his leadership, the CivicWorks studio has established a reputation for design integrity and great city-building across a range of development typologies and scales of planning practice. His work is centered on leading multi-disciplinary teams through complex projects — negotiating community, political, and regulatory processes to achieve celebrated outcomes for a variety of land use and development scenarios.

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Journey With Purpose: [00:00:00] what is middle housing?

David White: A middle housing it’s a range of building forms that are host scale 23 stories in height. It is grade oriented housing. So typically you’re front door you walk out and you’re at grade it’s been missing. And so the middle part of the story is because it’s been mostly prohibited by zoning and policy you know, since the 40s 50s, and it typically is less dependent on parking.

So it looks at transit and alternative modes. travel as choice that at least a portion of the folks that will live in the middle housing will use as opposed to a , private automobile.

Journey With Purpose: Welcome to journey with purpose. This is episode 27. I’m your host, Randy Plemel. We haven’t met. I’m a former architect and owner of a small, but mighty design firm called expedition works where we help the public sector design better experiences for people.

In today’s episode, From our friends to the [00:01:00] north in Calgary, Canada we speak with David White. He is part of civic, works, a design and building company that is all about creating a wider and more integrated set of housing. And we’re going to speak about middle housing and what causes our cities to look the same. And what might we do about it? Surprise surprise. We can make cities better with this one simple trick. And let’s find out what that is today.

David welcome to the show. Can you tell us who you are, where we’re speaking to you and what do you do?

David White: Dave White, founder and principal of an urban planning consulting shop here in Calgary. Alberta and we focus on growth and change for the private land redevelopment community. And so we’re at the forefront of redevelopments in our city. So, not necessarily, you know, new growth or, what some folks call Greenfield, but it’s where people already live and thrive and we’re [00:02:00] proposing change, like taller buildings, more homes and things that end up having a more animated conversation than other types of urban planning work. ,

Journey With Purpose: From your point of view, I’d love to hear about what are the benefits to those taller houses, more density, more people. What’s good for people and then what’s also good for say like your neighborhood and the city.

David White: middle housing in the Calgary context is really important because it’s about it’s about options choice and it’s about affordability. So, some of the most desirable neighborhoods in our city have a an existing development pattern that’s often single family detached home predominant and, , we do have various vintages of middle housing which is a spectrum of things from, a single house to, clustered row houses, stacked row houses, you know, walk up apartment style buildings, lower scale, say, 4 stories and middle housing has been relatively speaking, really challenging to see developed [00:03:00] for zoning rule and policy reasons until more recently.

But without a doubt folks are interested in living in places that have really good amenities, kind of main streets, walkable high streets, access to better transit, proximities to other things like where they’re going to work and if there are not options, mostly in the spectrum of affordability. Which relates to household size and, age and stage of life bigger place, bigger family, kids, things of this nature.

If those options aren’t in those communities, then it’s really challenging to talk about complete community building, diverse and inclusive. It’s a big conversation we’ve been having in Calgary in, say, the last decade and in just the last few years made big strides through policy and zoning to make it, A heck of a lot more enabled in terms of that kind of change.

And it’s usually one application, one developer, one builder at a time in the redeveloping context, but it’s slowly happening. So it’s pretty [00:04:00] exciting.

Journey With Purpose: So my sense, and I’d love for you to confirm or complicate this, is that at least here in the States, we used to be able to build a wider range set of housing and buildings, and then, 70, 80 years ago, that started to change. And for a variety of reasons. I’d love to hear your take of how we got here, And why do you think sort of set of policy building lifestyle is got us to this situation.

David White: It’s a great question. there’s a Calgary story to it, but it’s I don’t think it’s wholly dissimilar from a North American perspective. we have examples kind of pre 1940s, 50s and an era there was an absence of certain kind of regulation zoning that by a more organic market driven perspective, you would see things like middle housing developed different types and forms and scales.

The shift to [00:05:00] more prohibitive zoning and policies, which , arrived in , the 1940s and then, got increasingly toothier with time.

If there was one big development form driving regulation that started to shift the ability to do a more diverse range of middle housing, it would be the relationship to minimums on parking. The minimum parking relationship because it’s a land hungry consideration on any parcel size or shape whether that be for the primary, secondary or visitor relationship to the dwelling on the site, it really created a challenge to be able to enable, , more homes, stacking homes, more optimal utilized use of land for things other than parking.

And for middle housing, things like underground or structure parking. It’s just really not an option. It doesn’t pencil. So, once you require the parking, you de facto really minimize the number of doors you can put on a site.

then, you know, that’s the kind of the [00:06:00] nerdy answer. But I think there’s a vintage even in Calgary a certain kind of, instruments and other mechanisms that were registered on land titles or parcels in the Canadian context that ended up prohibiting the development of more than, say, a single family detached home on any 1 parcel.

And that was an earlier form of prohibitive zoning, but I think combination of that, and then more widespread thinking around auto dependence and parking minimums really curtail the ability to see more diverse forms in that middle range.

Journey With Purpose: So I think it’s important to stop here and take a moment to think about the framing of a lot of this conversation. A lot of times people might say let’s get rid of single family zoning. And oftentimes that is a shorthand for saying, let’s get rid of only requiring single family zoning.

The goal isn’t to make single family detached homes, illegal that’s furthest from the truth. I [00:07:00] believe, and I feel like a lot of people in this space are ultimately saying, Hey, we used to build a wider range of homes. And let’s allow ourselves, the ability to build a wider range of homes and shops and places for people to work. Allowing us a greater freedom of what people can build on their sites. Because fairly recently for a variety of reasons we came and said, we’re going to restrict what you can do. We’ve made it harder to build the types of housing and the types of neighborhoods that were built a hundred years ago. And so our housing stock, is not resilient enough.

And our families don’t look at all like this idealized family unit from the 1950s where there’s a man and a wife and two kids. The woman stays home and takes care of the house and the kids are obedient. The father goes and drives here and there that’s just, that wasn’t necessarily true [00:08:00] then at all. And it’s definitely not true now.

And when I work with AARP, they’re very interested in both livable communities, aging in place about creating housing that is both more adaptable to our changing lifestyles and to the families that exists now, and the ability to build a wider range of unit types from studios to single family homes that are attached that are detached. Multiple family dwellings housing that you could have a main house up front and accessory dwelling unit in the back so you can either rent it out or you can have a family member live there.

Now I’d like to get your point of view from the Calgary perspective is this a marketing problem, a policy issue, or sort of a yes. Issue.

David White: It’s a good question. my 1st reaction to it is I think certain parts of North American city building industry set a set [00:09:00] up a kind of a market perception about exclusive enclaves of a particular type of real estate and lifestyle and there are parts of North America that took it much further through other controls, mechanisms, and all kinds of good stuff we could talk about, but just generally speaking in Calgary, there were, you know, wholesale predominant, single family detached home communities built around lake amenities and the other things and that whole.

Perception and that buying into that community lifestyle, I think has carried over, even generationally to a degree as, you know, boomers move on, but, you know, younger families move in. I think that’s part of what’s happened in terms of this fear of what these policy shift towards enabling more middle housing means to some folks, and they get a lot of anxiety about that change, but whether it be these options, because you’re different ages, stages, wages, whether, it be just strictly, you affordability piece were, those types of communities are [00:10:00] problematic for all kinds of smart growth infrastructure, triple bottom line reasons.

The conversation we have locally, and I have it all the time.

And I don’t win any hearts and minds, but that is the single family detached house in the city of Calgary is not an endangered species and it won’t be for 100 years or more and it’ll always be part of the mix. And, middle housing is, you know, relatively speaking, two and three story house scale forms do more households thrive next door to you at your single family, detached home, white picket fence and garden lot.

With some of these changes over the course of time. Yeah. Do they have externalities like maybe more traffic, more activity, maybe a little less privacy, little more shadow, a little more overlooking. Sure. But you know, you’re also. Welcoming, more types of people, more diverse household types into your neighborhood.

Does that resonate for people? Typically not.

I don’t think you’re going to see a single family detached house disappear [00:11:00] anytime soon. And it’s a gross exaggeration to think that it’s under threat in terms of being part of a healthy part of the mix in most major north American cities.

Journey With Purpose: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. I think if we look to say like biomimicry and nature, like a good ecosystem is a balanced and interdependent and broader set of, things in that ecosystem. And so it seems to me that allowing middle housing allows you to maybe create a thriving main street or a , walkable district or maybe it allows you to create a little bit different, both housing forms, but also different, places across that age and stage of people’s lives. If you could wave a magic wand to say, change a piece of policy or a piece of economics or something like that, that think could help build more middle housing. What could those policies look like?

David White: the simple one, which [00:12:00] we’re already headed towards at rapid speed, I think it won’t be much more than 2 years from now is, basically, there are no parking minimums for any use category across the whole city. It’s all market driven and short of accessible visitor parking some policies around, the future of, ever increasing EV, charging parking stalls and a few other things.

And the market will deliver some parking on most projects, but it just won’t deliver what those minimums prescribed And can they can be really toxic to pro-formas and development forums, and they can do all kinds of goofy things if they’re overly prescriptive.

to link to what you were describing about what are some of the benefits, it’s a common question we get in when we’re out in communities, talking about an application for some type of development, growth and change. There isn’t a good enough correlation, at least in the city of Calgary, but they’re getting better at the city hall level, whether that be an elected official or the [00:13:00] bureaucrats in linking investment, in amenity, new open space, park space, , better sidewalks new infrastructure whether it be libraries, rec centers, things of this nature linking investment to targets around intensity of people and jobs in a particular geographic area. So if that community sees growth and change and is welcoming of growth and change, and is increasing in terms of its population base. should be linked with investment.

Some of the more city building minded elected officials here we’ll talk about with density must come amenity and that requires public investment. So I think if I were to fill with some of the.

Budget priorities and policy at the local level, we’d make sure that folks see that demonstrated investment as kind of the upside and the trade off to seeing, you know, change and more people living in their neighborhood.

Journey With Purpose: I think that’s a really good point that, getting rid of parking minimums won’t get rid of all parking, [00:14:00] even if maybe you secretly want to do that or a group of people secretly want to get rid of parking and get rid of cars Like that’s not going to happen but I think there’s something interesting here when we’re starting to densify a neighborhood Or area there’s, you know, people are concerned about say more traffic or how people are going to get around.

Have a lot of empathy for people when they look at change and they try to imagine themselves in the future, because we have not a lot of great tools to help us imagine into the future. Especially if you’re not trained in this area that you don’t understand. Deeply how the economics work and the building. And construction industry work and how long it takes.

David White: yeah, it’s a tricky balance. When some of those other really important forms of mobility those infrastructure investments aren’t there, bike lanes, good transit, frequent, convenient service. So it’s kind of a car, poor horse, chicken and egg thing, . For the city of [00:15:00] Calgary, they are, if you’re proximate to good transit , active modes infrastructure, like regional bike lanes and all kinds of good stuff , there’s a lot less regulation on things like parking.

There’s a lot less regulation on certain other considerations. So it’s more permissive, but as you’re further away from it, they do encourage sometimes more vehicular parking being required, and they also really ramp up things like high quality, adequate bike storage associated with, say, even, a primary dwelling or with secondary suite, anything of that nature.

So there’s a lot of things to do with active modes. In the past, we’ve also for projects that are seeking to say, provide less parking, we’ve negotiated , investments on title through the development process that say. For the 1st year the occupants of these homes they will be gifted transit passes to encourage different behaviours and have different choices. So it’s a kind of an [00:16:00] investment in alternative and transit supportive measures.

You know, so, again, it’s a balance. I think it over time, as infrastructure gets better, you don’t need those incentives and tools. But for now, at least city Hall considered as some best practices transitionally. And I think industry can get their head around it here and there.

Journey With Purpose: This is where in some of the popular culture, things like SIM city, I think is a net negative. In the wider understanding of how neighborhoods are formed, how buildings are built. Because in some city. you can just click the R button, the residential button, you can click it on the grid of space and you can zone it. And then all of a sudden buildings and things pop up and it seems magical because, you don’t want to spend years waiting for something to pop up there. It’s a game. But

I think it’s undoubtedly impacted how the popular culture thinks about these things.

Because if you rezone something, if you [00:17:00] change the zoning overnight new buildings. Aren’t just going to pop up. Like we know that’s not going to happen. We also know that over time. It is going to be quite uneven, but change will happen. So I’d love to get your perspective on how we can help people imagine that future, that just isn’t all the negative externalities, but help imagine a more positive set of outcomes that density people, businesses, bring with it.

David White: We’ll often characterize growth and change and the scale relative to an annual perspective, whether that geography be the whole city or say, an individual neighborhood and say, well, let’s just look at what’s happened year over year for the last 10 years in your neighborhood and say, you know, all things being equal, this kind of pace of growth and change.

Will be likely and then we will do our very best to point to the best examples [00:18:00] of what a taller building might mean to the average person. On their local Main Street, and always talk about the perceived and real. So the. The net measurable urban design impact. So, oh, my gosh, 6 stories sounds like a really tall building.

That could be really scary and a lot different than my, you know, single or 2 story, you know, home neighborhood. So we try to contextualize and talk about that in plain language. And then again, just the relative. The relative scale of growth and change.

I think that urban planning type folks have gotten a lot better at talking in plain language and looking at the big moves over the right time scale. So Nodes and corridors, know, main streets and avenues, , where will the greatest intensity be? And,, why is that important to your neighborhood? And, , that pace of change and relative growth perspective. So We borrow from the same types of conversation spaces that we see with a lot of [00:19:00] the folks in the public sector driving this type of policy.

Does it resonate for everyone? Not always, but I think some folks, if you can have a slow plain language conversation can get it and it makes a big difference in maybe taking some of the anxiety about what change really means to your neighbourhood out of it. And then when you see the long term and the relative pace of change folks will joke that, you know, they’ll be dead and gone or they’ll have moved on anyway in that, you know, 20, 30, 40 year horizon. So again, the anxiety comes down.

David White: My name is Dave White. I’m an urban planner based in Calgary, alberta, Canada. Founder and principal of a company called Civic Works. Civic Works is a group of urbanists based here in Calgary that are doing a lot of good work on growth and change and we are happy to be in one of Canada’s largest cities.

Journey With Purpose: All right. My thanks to Dave white for sharing the Canadian perspective on middle [00:20:00] housing. It always seems to be about cars, doesn’t it? So, if you remember our last episode, episode 26, we spoke to two researchers from Montreal who showed in the research that car focused streets, which allow cars to drive way too fast reduce children’s mobility by 75%. Make sure you understand it. These are designed. Somebody made a decision to design streets so that cars can zip pass at unsafe speeds, anything above 20 or 25 miles an hour in an urban context is unsafe.

And here we find in Calgary that mandating parking, that requiring of homes for cars over people increases the cost of these homes while homogenizing those homes to all look and function the same. And I think we intuitively know that that’s not a great outcome.

This isn’t some conspiracy against you owning or having a car. I own a car in New [00:21:00] York. It’s silly, but we use it for a variety of reasons. But on the daily we walk, we scooter, we bike, we go about our day. Acknowledging that the car, while it is a great tool, shouldn’t and isn’t the solution to every mobility problem, especially in urban areas. And mandating homes for cars over people creates really bad outcomes at the societal level.

There isn’t anything natural about a car based neighborhood. We in fact spent thousands of years without them and some of our most beautiful neighborhoods in the world and in north America are tight, compact walkable neighborhoods. You go to Disney world and Disneyland. It’s a walkable neighborhood.

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