Sprawl Recovery
Sprawl is an addiction fueled by cars. A century ago when there were few cars, they did little damage, like a person who has a couple drinks and calls it an evening. But we’ve been bingeing on cars since WWII and it might be fatal if we don’t recover from sprawl soon.
Sprawl Recovery is America's greatest physical challenge. Most people living in the subdivisions of sprawl can't afford to walk away from their life's largest investment, but suburban decline has been sucking the value out of their homes in many places in the US since the 2008 Meltdown coupled with the suburban exodus of millions who finally rediscovered the magic of the city. 2020 flipped the trend for awhile, but those working from home in suburban sprawl lack the urban amenities they enjoyed in the city, and we see this as a potentially huge driver of Sprawl Recovery in coming years.
Some planners consider everything outside the central city to be sprawl, but such a narrative could hamstring Sprawl Recovery for years, which would be a huge mistake. Sprawl is a pattern, not a location. Recovering from sprawl with an extreme makeover dramatically changes the pattern of a place in ways that are far more sustainable.
If you have a great Place Recovery idea, share it with a university. Many of them are looking for ideas to test, and may provide a lot of support to your initiative. But don’t count on that; be sure it stands on its own with no outside support. Because of the massive stakes for Sprawl Recovery, Place Recovery ideas focused on sprawl likely has the best chances of support.
The Gathering Storms
Today, four storms are gathering, any one of which would be ample to change our world. But all four working together virtually guarantee that our world will be irrevocably altered. And all four represent imperatives for succeeding with Sprawl Recovery.
1. The Meltdown
The meltdown of 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession have already happened, but their after-effects continue to shake the development and construction industries like nothing we've seen in our lifetimes. The imbalance of housing types alone, now constrained to just single-family homes and mid- to high-rise condo towers, has left us with a housing crisis and spawned the Missing Middle Housing initiative.
2. 2.9 Billion People
in China plus India, 2.9 billion people are moving from a low-impact agrarian lifestyle into the city. If they do three times as well as the US with their need for cars in the city, there will still be over a billion cars on the road soon that didn't even exist a few years ago. And there are other populous countries as well that are going through this same migration. Once, the American middle-class lifestyle was the world's biggest ecological problem. Today, the export of the image of that lifestyle has increased its impact by an order of magnitude. And with demand for fuel spiking like this at a time when supplies are stressed, there is little doubt as to the future acceleration of fuel costs.
3. Climate Change
Charles III, King of the United Kingdom, has been the most prominent world leader to vigorously push for altering our climate change trajectory, pointing out that irrevocable worldwide changes are not far down the road. Soon, we may be faced with mitigating the unmanageable so that we don't have to face the unthinkable.
4. The Demographic Bomb
The Demographic Bomb wasn't even on my radar screen until recently, but it should have been. We have had net purchasers in the US housing market since the end of World War II because the young are usually buying and the old are more often selling, and because we have been demographically young for decades. Beginning about 2012, we have had more sellers than buyers for the first time, continuing as far as the eye can see. This means that real estate price pressures will be downward for the first time in our lifetimes, and for the rest of our lives for most of us.
Sprawl Recovery Principles
The unsustainable patterns of sprawl affect the economic health, environmental health, and public health of a city, and the economic impacts of sprawl could kill the city, while the public health impacts could kill us. The 12-Step Program for Sprawl Recovery charts a path that could help us recover from these health problems.
Sprawl Recovery can be implemented at the scale of the city, town, quarter, or neighborhood. The municipality is the managing entity, with day-to-day work being managed by the Director, who is analogous to Town Founders in the New Urbanism.
Economic Health
Continuing to build in the patterns of sprawl can eventually bankrupt a city, as Strong Towns and Urban 3 have decisively demonstrated for years because sprawl always has a negative ROI. In other words, it never generates enough tax revenues for its own maintenance, and is by far the biggest Ponzi scheme in US history. But we can turn that around with Sprawl Recovery.
One of the actions of Sprawl Recovery is building neighborhood centers composed at first of ephemeral Single-Crew Workplaces like food cars and shop sheds. Make it insanely easy to get started, not hard like it is now.
Maker spaces are morning’s first light for the revitalization of a neighborhood. But when the neighborhood recovers, the space will be too expensive so the maker space must move elsewhere and start with another neighborhood. Encourage them!
The best thing a town can do is to foster the creation of more small businesses. The benefits are many and intertwining. The first step in doing so is giving people hope. Show them how easy it is to get started in your town.
Environmental Health
We lived on South Beach for 17 years, and while "sunny-day flooding," where sea level reached higher than street level just a couple block from home wasn't even a thing when we first moved there, it was very much a thing before we left. There are varying opinions on the causes of sea level rise, but I've seen it happen with my own eyes, and have filmed it as well. The Farmers Almanac, published since 1818 (80+% of US history) has strong evidence of climate change; just look at their planting zone maps, which have long been moving northward.
The problem with dying downtowns is that once they start dying, people say "it's because we don't have enough parking" and so they tear down more buildings for parking lots, accelerating the decline. Downtown parking lots are death to downtown, and are serious contributors to urban heat islands. When these solar collection devices (especially the asphalt lots with their dark surfaces) totaling over 15 million acres of US land, mostly in cities and towns, absorb that much heat, it makes those cities and towns a lot less walkable so people drive more, use their air conditioning more, and need a lot of other mechanical help, consuming more fossil fuels so long as they remain our dominant sources of energy. Connect the dots.
Public Health
I have many pictures of people with obesity problems, but instead of picking on them, I'll pick on myself. This is me on the left in 2002, clinically obese at 245 pounds after 42 years mostly spent living in sprawl. I was a tired old man, and likely would not have lived until now had I continued that course. On the right is how I looked just a couple years later, after moving from a land of sprawl domination to highly walkable South Beach. People talk about the South Beach Diet, and while I did go low-carb in the months while I was losing 60 pounds, the real South Beach diet is just living there and getting around on foot or bike every day except the rare ones when it's storming.
Of all the addiction battles behind which the American Medical Association could throw its weight, none is more important than the battle for Sprawl Recovery because the addiction of sprawl affects more Americans, and in more ways, than any other addiction. Walk Appeal is one of the keys.
The 12-Step Program for Sprawl Recovery
Exit 13 for sprawl is similar to File 13 in the office: the destination for throwaway things. And the throwaway nature of much of sprawl, especially the commercial buildings designed only for their lifespan as determined by the cap rate, is the secret advantage of Sprawl Recovery. Who wouldn't want to exchange disposable buildings for long-lived assets that can pay for themselves many times over in time, unlike what they're replacing?
Step 1: Civic Space
Civic space must be the established in the beginning for two reasons: The economic engines will grow in the beginning from civic spaces, so it is essential to know where they are. Also, when the neighborhood is thriving again, large land purchases are more difficult. Start by looking for vacant lots which could become the neighborhood square; it can be smaller than you think, maybe as little as 75 to 100 feet wide.
Principles
A neighborhood is a place inhabited by neighbors who know each other. The post-WWII practice of dividing up all the land for private lots leaves no commons where people can meet. This is essential to restore where it does not exist, or enhance where it exists already.
Patterns
Civic spaces need not be anywhere near as large as a courthouse square. Technically, the very smallest civic spaces could accommodate just two or three people meeting together, and you can find civic spaces where two or three dozen people can gather distributed across great cities worldwide.
Products
Civic Space Strategies will be a white paper outlining the methods of creating each type of civic space. It, like every other product that follows, will be written in a plain-spoken, common-sense way, and meant to be understood by everyone. It is essential to avoid jargon and other technocrat-speak; these are documents for the people.
Step 2: Thoroughfare Recovery
Thoroughfares are both the greatest perpetrators of auto domination, and also the greatest victims at smaller scales, so extreme thoroughfare makeovers should begin early in the Sprawl Recovery process. The following principles should be embedded in the thoroughfare recovery process:
Multi-Modal Transport
Most discussions of multi-modal transport deal primarily with mechanical transport, but they miss the most important point: There are many great streets where nobody drives, but no great streets where nobody walks or bikes. Thoroughfare recovery should focus first on the self-propelled modes walking and biking which burn fat and save money, as opposed to driving, which burns gas and makes us fat.
Car-Damaged Frontages
There is much auto domination damage to be repaired in thoroughfare recovery. This is a classic sprawl subdivision street, with driveways interrupting the sidewalk multiple times per block. Yes, backup cameras help you avoid running over a kid or a pet in your driveway, but how about kids running or biking down the sidewalk at right angles to your car as it backs out of the driveway? Could you stop in time as they zip in from the side view of your backup camera?
The goal of a place with Walk Appeal is to serve buildings (residential and mixed-use) from the rear. Do this, and sidewalks will be uninterrupted by cars.
Insert Alleys & Rear Lanes
Building rear lanes to take cars off the sidewalks in front sounds impossible, but consider this: Do the rear lanes one block at a time, beginning with the block where residents are most in favor of the transformation. Propose this: If you give up the back ten feet of your lot, you will get permission to build a carriage house, rear workshop or other home workplace with up to a 25 foot wide footprint by right. Ten feet either side of the rear lot line creates a twenty foot rear lane right-of-way, from which everyone benefits. Once the first block demonstrates the benefits not only of beautiful driveway-free frontages, but also of getting all the messy stuff around back, other blocks are far more likely to join the transformation.
Frontage Recovery
Here's what a recovered frontage can look like once a block is served by rear lanes. Compare that with the car-damaged frontage above and ask yourself whether this is a worthwhile trade. Most people would agree that it is.
Consider also that walkable neighborhoods are now the most coveted real estate in markets across the US. If beauty in front and keeping the mess in back and keeping driveways off your block's sidewalk isn't enough, would a substantial increase in the value of your home change your mind?
Fences, Hedges, and Walls
Having a fence, a hedge, or a garden wall at a street frontage makes walking along the sidewalk more interesting, especially where there are multiple frontage enclosure types and designs along the block. Granted, few people sit out in their front yard because it's too public to feel comfortable to most. But so long as you have a frontage gate, it keeps the pets and (probably) the kids in the yard instead of wandering away. And if your frontage garden is partly or entirely edible, it keeps your fruits & vegetables mostly in the family except for whatever part of your bounty you want to share with your neighbors.
On-Street Parking
Look closely at the tiny sidewalk cafe just beyond the palm tree. See the white-haired woman having dinner there? Without the on-street parking, what are the chances she would sit down to eat there with cars zipping by at lethal speeds just a few feet away? I wouldn't; would you?
I realize that 2020 spurred widespread debate over the merits of on-street parking, but it is a necessary middle step between the deadly danger of arterial or even collector thoroughfares in sprawl and a fully-recovered place that sprawls no longer.
The Fragility of Walkability
Walkability can be difficult to maintain in places with extreme conditions like the heat of this Dallas downtown street or frigidity further north. One would think Walk Appeal would be even more fragile, but consider this: if you make a walk appealing enough, you'll likely find more people walking there than if it's merely walkable.
In any case, once you believe your thoroughfare recovery is complete, test your work by going out and seeing if it passes the People Test. And test every path in the Thoroughfare Recovery test area. Disconnected areas of Walk Appeal don't bode well for people getting around the entire area on foot or bike. And the top two considerations are comfort and safety; miss these, and people tend to stay inside.
Patterns
Sprawl has three thoroughfare types in the city: Arterial, Collector, and Local, from most heavily traveled to lightest, plus expressways in the country, although expressways, after being brought into the city when Eisenhower's original vision was ditched in favor of Robert Moses' vision of expressways everywhere, can be even deadlier than arterials if access to anything other than motor vehicles isn't firmly restricted. Sustainable urbanism has a stronger toolbox, usually incorporating most if not all of these types:
Highway (includes Freeway)
Road
↑ Rural ↓ Urban
Boulevard (high-capacity, moderate-speed thoroughfare, often with landscaped median)
Avenue (high-capacity, low-to-moderate speed urban center connector, often with landscaped median)
Commercial Street (optimized for high pedestrian activity supporting mix of uses; includes Main Street)
Street (low-speed, highly walkable)
Drive (thoroughfare along edge between urban and natural, such as park or waterfront)
Rear Alley (low-speed access thoroughfare in city or town center contexts)
Rear Lane (low-speed access thoroughfare in less urban contexts than alleys)
Passage (pedestrian-only, often mid-block)
↑ Urban ↓ Specialized
Trail
Route
Products
The SmartCode (see the Center for Applied Transect Studies) is the best regulator of sustainable thoroughfare types, and is also a development guide with a built-in Form-Based Code (FBC).
Step 3: Accessory Units
Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) are the easiest way to invite more neighbors into your neighborhood because most of them occur in spaces or even guest suites that are already part of existing homes. The apartment over this garage, for example, may have originally been built as an over-the-garage storage room. Because neighborhood business prosperity builds with each new neighbor, ADUs are local business amplifiers. And when rented, they help the homeowner with mortgage payments.
Backyard Cottages
A backyard cottage may have been built for a number of non-residential uses, including as a home office, home workshop, storage shed, artist's studio, author's retreat, or musician's shed. Or it may have originated as a granny flat, teenager's cottage, or any number of other residential purposes. Whatever the original use, a backyard structure can usually be converted to an ADU. As designers of a number of Katrina Cottages, Wanda and I have done cottages as small as 170 square feet, so tiny structures creatively redesigned may be candidates.
Upstairs Apartments
An upstairs bedroom suite can be converted to an apartment if large enough. The tenant needs outdoor access, with the classic means of access being an outside stair. This works best when the house is gabled with the ridge running side-to-side so the front door of the apartment is on the side of the house, as in this example. Another alternative is stair access from a vestibule, either at the rear or the front of the house.
Rear Lane Cottages
Urbanism served by rear lanes may have cottages opening onto the rear lanes like this one. Or if not, the municipality may have provisions for building them on an existing building lot. If they need persuasion, point out that ADUs facing the rear lane are security devices because they put eyes on the street (Jane Jacobs' term) or on the lane, in this case. Because of the intimate scale of a rear lane and almost nonexitent traffic, people feel comfortable sitting on the front porch of a cottage without the usual fences, hedges, or garden walls as called for here.
Mews Courts
Mews units originated centuries ago in London as quarters for horses and buggies on the ground level and the horse grooms above. Since the end of horse-drawn transportation, they have become highly desirable living quarters across the city and in locations around the world. Because of their simplicity of massing and typical low-maintenance masonry shells, they should be affordability champions in locations where their values have not already been bid up, like in London. They require a 30 foot right-of-way, and typical London mews are often about 28 feet deep, so these dimensions should be taken into consideration with any blocks looking at alley insertion.
Carriage Houses
A carriage house is essentially a freestanding mews unit, or from another perspective, a garage with an apartment above. This example is in Poundbury, Charles III's town that is an urban extension of Dorchester, England. They work best if served by a rear lane, but can also be accessed from a side street depending on urban code requirements.
Products
I wrote Gulf Coast Emergency House Plans, which was the first book of Katrina Cottages. Most of the designs could be built as ADUs. The book may be downloaded free as a PDF; working drawings may be purchased from the designers, who are noted on each plan.
Step 4: Gifts to the Street
Gifts to the Street are part of the Walk Appeal initiative, with several types illustrated at the first link in this sentence. There are eight general types of gifts to the street; those that shelter us (like arcades, galleries, and awnings), refresh us (like a street fountain or sidewalk cafe), delight us (like a beautiful frontage garden, including this one), direct us (like a goal in the middle distance), entertain us (like an good storefront), inform us (like a clock or sundial), help us remember (like a memorial), and give us a place to rest (like a street bench). A Gift to the Street doesn’t have to be expensive or time-consuming. Some of these gifts probably cost very little and could be done over a weekend, like the frontage garden gift in this image. If most buildings gave gifts to the street, think how much more appealing it would be to walk there! Good urbanism thrives on gifts like these. Gifts to the Street are listed this early in the twelve steps because it's important for a place recovering from sprawl to start building a better culture of walkability early in the process.
Products
Wanda and I are now working on the Walk Appeal book, which is near the top of our list of books to release.
Step 5: Edible Gardens
Like Gifts to the Street, Edible Gardens are another step that is important to start early in order to build the culture of planting edible things in a place recovering from sprawl. Many Homeowners Associations (HOAs) have long opposed anything edible being grown in their subdivisions. This stems from long-running attitudes that everything between a building and the front property line should be solely ornamental, but in a Nourishable Place, edible plants should occur in many places around town.
Nothing in the frontage garden above is edible, but why could it not be both nourishing and beautiful? The Agricultural Aesthetic proposes a new look based on edible gardens which is designed to be charming.
Patterns
The following Outdoor Rooms are each suitable for certain types of edible plant material:
Frontage Garden: fruit trees and berry bushes are least likely to offend the HOA if laid out with beauty in mind.
Orchard Run: code-mandated side yard setbacks are useful for very little except fruit trees and a place for dogs to run, so why not combine the two uese?
Green Wall or Fence: suitable for vining berry plants and other vining edibles.
Kitchen Garden: this type is best tucked into a less-visible location if you're looking to raise mostly vegetables, which for some reason tend to trigger HOA busybodies.
Hearth Garden: this is the outdoor living room, usually wherever the fireplace or fire pit is located; it's best suited for potted edibles.
Coffee Cove: a small room for two or maybe three people to enjoy morning coffee; potted herbs with which to flavor your coffee work well here.
Breakfast Terrace: smaller than the Dinner Garden, but similar in plant types to the Coffee Cove.
Dinner Garden: the outdoor dining room is best located close to both the Outdoor Kitchen and the Kitchen Garden (see above).
Couple's Garden: a completely private outdoor room; berries or whatever other edible plants you enjoy here should never be visible by anyone except you two.
Secret Garden: if you have one, it should be as invisible as the Couple's Garden so you should have no HOA problem here.
Window Garden: a tiny charming herb garden that if properly designed can make a great Gift to the Street.
Children's Maze: berry plants are best, so long as the stems are thorn-free.
Products
The Outdoor Room Design book is in the top half of our list of books to release.
The Agrarian Neighborhood Manual will be a pamphlet laying out basic considerations and rules of thumb for all elements that involve more than just a single house lot.
Lovable Edible Gardens will be a booklet focused on eliminating a problem with vegetable gardening that gets it banned in many places today: because it’s thought of as a utility function, it can be very unsightly. As a result, there are regularly stories of people being fined or even arrested because of vegetable gardens in their front yards. This document will lay out a number of techniques for making edible gardens with visual appeal.
Step 6: Places to Eat & Single-Crew Workplaces
The first five steps of Sprawl Recovery address basic deficiencies of the patterns of sprawl: civic space, thoroughfares, accessory housing, celebration of walking, and food in the city. This step, which is the beginning of risk-resistant commerce, depends on recovery from those deficiences and paves the way for subsequent steps leading to full recovery.
Principles
Urban agriculture brings food production into the neighborhood. Agrarian urbanism goes a step further, making food part of the culture of the place. Benefits abound. There is no fresher food than that grown nearby, and it doesn’t have to be genetically engineered to be tough enough to endure three weeks of jostling in the back of a refrigerated truck like Industrial Food Chain food-like products must do. Raising your own food can save a lot of money. Why should your yard lay fallow while you spend more of your money at the grocery store? And creating a foodie culture in a place draws people in from other places to eat at local establishments.
Cool new restaurants are great signs in a recovering neighborhood. Restauranteurs are usually good cool-hunters because their success depends on it, and if the location is a bit edgy, that contributes to the vibe.
Count the number of food carts, grocery sheds, and other temporary business structures in a place recovering from sprawl which has never before had a proper town center. The more, the better. They tend to be owned by those with lots of hope but little means. The latter will change. You might want to join them.
Without saying as much, Walmart and other retailers to the poor have convinced millions that cheap is better than free, even though many homemade (free) things have far more value, charm, and meaning than mass-produced cheap things. Homemade things, town-made things and region-made things have good stories to tell. Even if something made in China has a good story, it’s one we likely will never hear.
Patterns
Scales of agriculture: employing farm (just outside the neighborhood), family farm (at the neighborhood edge), community garden, edge yard garden, courtyard garden, roof garden, arbor garden, wall garden, balcony garden, and window garden, with the last seven occurring on individual lots.
Business types supported, in approximate chronological order of emergence (see below for more detail): food carts, light-fare/sandwich shops, restaurants, and cottage-industry food processing businesses to create local specialties, culinary school. Specialties in Louisiana, for example, would be items such as pralines, andouille sausage, etc. The culinary school might seem far-fetched, but consider the model of the Clara White Mission in Jacksonville, Florida. This century-old institution feeds around 500 homeless people every day. They also started a culinary school in 2003 where they train the homeless to cook and house them as well. Since the program began, they have placed over a thousand graduates in employment in food service and hospitality in the region, and that employment almost always is the first step out of homelessness.
Food Carts
This is Seaside's original food cart. It has multiplied into a food cart pod that extends across the full width of Central Square. Business settings built for incremental growth do this expertly. Food carts are usually Single-Crew Workplaces, making them great places for people to start building their business dreams.
Food Shacks
A food shack is one step up from a food cart, usually resting on a foundation instead of rubber tires. Often open-air like this, food shacks are the simplest of construction, and are places to which an entrepreneur often graduates from food carts.
Food Cottages
A food cottage is the next step up from a food shack, and is usually built of enclosed and conditioned construction. It can be a small grocery, deli, sandwich shop, or some combination thereof. This one has a good story; when I took this picture, it was occupied by Roly Poly as the flagship establishment that has blossomed from this one location to 19 today, scattered across the Southeast and slightly beyond from Dallas on the West to Terre Haute on the North to Raleigh on the East to New Orleans on the South. Businesses maturing and growing like this are exactly what town or neighborhood centers recovering from sprawl can do because they encourage many grassroots startups. While you never know which ones will bloom like this, if you plant many good seeds, several are sure to take root and thrive.
Third Places
Your First Place is home, your Second Place is work, and your Third Place is where, in the words of the Cheers tagline, "everbody knows your name." It's a place where, like this woman in a Miami coffee shop at Wynwood, you can bring your laptop, buy a cup and a snack, and sit down and work awhile. There are countless other angles on Third Places like Cheers, which was a bar or the Rum & Bean on Amerbris Caye in Belize, which is a coffee shop (the bean) in the morning and a rum bar in the evening, also serving light fare throughout the day.
Culinary Cottage Industries
Cottage industries are often built around local delicacies, like Central Grocery in the French Quarter and its now world-famous muffuletta. Other delicacies, such as beignets, gumbo, jambalaya, étouffée, po' boys, boudin, and pralines (just to name a few from Louisiana) have slipped the bonds of their points of origin and spread broadly in their home regions.
Cottages have no place on the Industrial Food Chain, which has no conception of small. In order to cultivate culinary treats like these for which people will travel long distances to enjoy, you need seedbeds of small, the best of which is a place committed to Agrarian Urbanism as described earlier.
Regional Ingredients
Some of the best regional delicacies are made of ingredients grown in the same region as where the delicacies are made. This shop on the outskirts of Beuvron-en-Auge in Lower Normandy, France is one of many in the region and elsewhere throughout Europe. Except for regions like the Louisiana Gulf Coast, the US has a lot of catching up to do in order to develop regional food enthusiasts.
Step 7: Bed & Breakfast
Principles
Accessory Units in Step 3 and Cottages just below in Step 8 can be smaller if they are not burdened with the need for a guest suite. A guest bedroom in the US was once somewhere in the vicinity of 150 square feet and shared a bath with other bedrooms. Recently, guest accommodations have ballooned into a larger bedroom with an en suite bath and sometimes even a full walk-in closet, which can tip the scales at 300 square feet or more. This is a real burden on accessory units and cottages. The ability of a neighborhood to add smaller dwellings mean that more people can live in the neighborhood, increasing the number of customers for neighborhood businesses and making the neighborhood a more interesting place to live. A bed & breakfast in every neighborhood removes the guest suite burden from the neighborhood.
Patterns
Tiny Inn: Four guest rooms staffed by one person who serves as host, cook, and housekeeper.
Small Inn: Eight guest rooms staffed by one person who serves as host and cook, and another who is the full-time housekeeper.
Large Inn: Sixteen guest rooms staffed by a host, a cook, and two housekeepers.
Products
Bed & Breakfast Guidelines will be a short pamphlet laying out the basic considerations of starting an inn for those who have no previous experience.
Step 8: Cottages
Principles
Most places recovering from sprawl have been desiccated by suburban zoning codes, removing many residents in the rush to create all-single-family districts. This doesn’t just make the place more bland, but reduces the chances of success of neighborhood businesses because there are fewer potential customers nearby. Adding accessory units as in Step 3 helps, but they are limited to the lot size of the hosting residence, so the number of accessory unit dwellers on any particular lot is relatively small, and the units are mostly rental.
The term "cottages" is used loosely here to mean dwellings that are larger than accessory units and that can be either for sale or lease. Multiple such dwellings can also be located on a larger parcel of land, whether detached or attached. Available parcel sizes determine the type of dwelling arrangement below that will work for the site.
Patterns
Cottage Court: Four or more dwellings arranged around a common courtyard.
Mews Court: Mews units arranged along a court that is usually thirty feet wide as described briefly above.
Pocket Neighborhood: Eight to one hundred twenty dwellings arranged around common courtyards and squares.
Missing Middle Housing: Buildings larger than single-family dwellings and smaller than mid-rise condominiums which include a wide range of dwelling units from two in duplexes to dozens in larger buildings. Missing Middle Housing Upper buildings may be mixed-use.
Urban Courtyards: Block-size structures normally composed of point-access, corridor-free liner buildings surrounding courtyards which are usually lushly planted. Much of the fabric of European cities is composed of urban courtyard buildings, and they are widely known as being great places to raise a family because the courtyards are like a huge backyard. This is not dissimilar to the suburban setting where I grew up where backyards were not yet fenced in the 1960s and 1970s, creating a common backyard that was hundreds of feet wide. Same amount of play out the back, but with great urbanism in front, something the sprawl street I grew up on never had. For a wealth of information on urban courtyard buildings, follow Alicia, Courtyard Urbanist on X/Twitter.
Step 9: Live/Work Units
Principles
America was built by people living over the shop; live/work units were only banned after World War II, when planners decided to segregate homes not only from factories, but from everything else as well. The ability to make a living where you’re living should be a basic human right, as it was for almost all of human history.
Patterns
Work Within (home office/workshop)
Live-Above (the classic Main Street type)
Live Within (apartment in larger workplace)
Work Behind (workshop in the back yard or on the rear lane)
Live Beside
Live Nearby
Products
There are a few excellent books on Live/Work units, but there is a need for a more streamlined booklet that can be much less expensive or maybe free. Live/Work Guidelines will be this document.
Step 10: Neighborhood Market
Depending on the scale of the market, it may arrive as early as Step 3 or Step 6. The earlier, the better.
Principles
The neighborhood market marks the end of a food desert in most places. Built small enough, it can be a single-crew workplace with just one grocer (which helps get it earlier). Even if larger, it should be significantly smaller than most supermarkets today so that it can better serve the neighborhood. Supermarkets need to stock a huge number of SKUs in order to pull people in from greater distance to support their industrial scale. Neighborhood markets, on the other hand, can focus on the preferences of the surrounding neighbors, who can walk to the grocery store.
Patterns
Tiny Grocery: A single-crew workplace operated by one grocer out of a store the size of a cottage. There can be more than one Tiny Grocery in a neighborhood in the beginning. Once one of them prospers enough to open a full neighborhood market, the others might choose to specialize in items not carried in the larger market, or more likely may convert into a combined grocery/deli that still sells a limited number of grocery items but also serves food as well.
Neighborhood Market: A grocery that also sells other items, such as the household goods and other utility items often found in a convenience store. But unlike the convenience store, which usually sells only processed foods, the neighborhood market would be encouraged to sell mainly fresh fruits and vegetables instead. And those other items make the Neighborhood Market more like the classic general stores that provisioned US communities for most of the nation's history.
Products
The Tiny Grocery will be included in the Starting Impossibly Small Handbook.
Step 11: Dedicated Workshops, Offices & Retail
Principles
By the time the previous steps are well underway, the neighborhood recovery will become robust enough to support dedicated workshops, office and retail space beyond the scope of live/work units. These will be neighborhood-scale operations, ideally owned and staffed as much as possible by neighbors so that more residents can make a living where they’re living. The total cost of owning and operating a car in the US averages from $7,000 to $10,000 per year depending on location. For the economically disadvantaged, this creates a condition known as Automobile Poverty, which can actually lead to homelessness. Removing the need to own a car in order to be economically viable by creating a place that has a strong mix of uses is one of the most empowering things the recovery effort can produce.
Patterns
Dedicated workshops, office, and retail typically attract traffic from outside the neighborhood, so they are best located on major thoroughfares surrounding the neighborhood rather than at the neighborhood center so that neighborhood streets remain slow and quiet. One of the Director’s most important roles over time will be the cultivation of local businesses. The setting is very different, but the principle is the same: Seaside, Florida has incubated and cultivated over 200 businesses since 1980. Daryl Davis spearheaded this; she was always on the lookout for people who would be good at a business she had in mind. Sarah and Charles Modica, for example, had already retired, but Daryl persuaded them to come out of retirement and open Modica Market. With a Director dedicated to looking for skills in the neighborhood, a robust local economy can be built that can help transform many lives.
Products
The Town Center Toolkit is a book that we’ll publish digitally at first, and then probably in print. It is mostly complete now, and will guide the design of the buildings in this step.
Step 12: Civic Buildings
Principles
This is a step that starts at the very beginning usually with a modest meeting hall on civic space established in Step 1, and there are likely some existing civic buildings such as small church buildings and other types of civic buildings as well. But as the neighborhoods grow and prosper, others will be added, with the most impactful ones being constructed toward the end of recovery.
Patterns
Civic building types include: church buildings, meeting halls/town halls, schools (such as craft and trade schools, ideally with local heritage craft instructors), libraries (ideally with a collection of local heritage items you can’t Google), and other buildings where the public can gather.
Products
Public perception of civic buildings is often of large, ornate structures. Inaugural Neighborhood Buildings is a booklet which will lay out modest beginning points for civic institutions, much as the Starting Impossibly Small Handbook does for neighborhood businesses.
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