Nordhavn is one of Europe’s most ambitious urban redevelopment projects: a transformation of an industrial harbor into a new city neighborhood.

Across roughly 890 acres of former port land, planned for 40,000 residents, 40,000 jobs, and about 43 million square feet of development, it has been designed as a complete neighborhood organized around daily life: how people move, what they encounter, and how easily they can reach what they need.

Led by By & Havn, a public development entity created by the City of Copenhagen and the Danish state, the project has been on going since the early 2000s through a model of centralized land control, major upfront infrastructure investment—including the extension of the Copenhagen Metro—and phased parcel sales to private developers.

The result is a rare contemporary test case: a district that demonstrates how to build walkable, mixed-use urbanism at scale, while also revealing why high-cost, coarse-grained development struggle to produce housing and neighborhoods that work for diverse households across the life cycle.

1. The Good — a new walkable neighborhood by design

Nordhavn begins with the noble premise, which most modern development gets wrong, that planning should start with people rather than cars.

Lars Riemann, the Ramboll planner who led the project, described the inversion that defined Nordhavn’s approach:

“If you go back in time, when you did city planning, you would say: ‘Where do the roads go? How do the cars get from A to B?’

That was your main priority.

Then we’d put bike lanes next to the roads, pedestrian areas next to that and so on.

Here, we did the opposite. We said: ‘What does a walkable city look like? What do the streets look like? What do people like to experience as they are walking?’

At the end, it was like: ‘OK, so now that we have all this infrastructure for walking, biking and public transit, is there still some room for cars?’”

The result is visible in the street itself: cycle lanes as wide as car lanes, streets that are quiet not because they are empty but because there is little traffic noise, and cars that appear occasionally rather than constantly.

This approach differs fundamentally from the American pattern, where cities attempt to retrofit walkability onto road networks that were designed around cars from the outset.

“Easy reach” was defined as the five-minute neighborhood. Around each metro station, planners drew a quarter-mile radius and treated that circle as the basic unit of urban life. Within that distance are housing, shops, schools, childcare, and public space, arranged so that everyday needs are consistently within reach.

A quarter mile is not an arbitrary threshold. It is the point at which walking becomes habitual—folded into daily routines rather than treated as a separate activity. When destinations are this close, walking is often easier than driving. At this scale, proximity begins to shape behavior, and the neighborhood becomes something people experience continuously rather than occasionally.

The results are visible in Århusgadekvarteret, the first fully realized neighborhood within Nordhavn, where daily life has already taken hold. People live there and use the neighborhood naturally.

That outcome reflects a series of deliberate decisions. By & Havn, the public master developer, retained control of ground-floor spaces and curated tenants to establish a coherent street life early on. Buildings combine multiple uses, allowing different activities to share the same footprint and extend activity across the day. Substantial early investment—on the order of DKK 20 billion (~$2.9 billion)—in infrastructure, including the Copenhagen Metro M4 line, ensured that the district was integrated into the broader city from the outset.

By & Havn sold development parcels to private builders but retained ownership of the ground-floor commercial spaces. Managing director Anne Skovbro explained the strategy directly:

“When we sold the plots, we bought all the ground floors back, so we could design and decide what kind of shops we would like to have there in order to create this vibrant urban environment.”

From there, tenants were actively curated. The urban strategy firm BRIQ identified operators for specific spaces and invited them into the district.

One example: for the bike shop on the main street, they approached Pas Normal Studios, a premium cycling brand that had not yet opened a retail location. The result is not just a shop, but a social hub—combining retail, café, and cycling club in a single space.

Peter Bur Andersen’s diagnosis of why new districts often fail is blunt: governments provide transport, parks, and cultural amenities, then “just leave the rest to market forces … and therefore, we often see that these new city districts are born without a soul.”

There is something right in this diagnosis, but it is not the whole story. In many cases, what is described as “market failure” is actually the result of how development has been structured: large parcels, high rents, uniform retail bays, and timelines that favor national chains over small, local operators. Under those conditions, the outcome is almost guaranteed to feel generic.

At the same time, there is a valid point about essentials. A functioning neighborhood requires a baseline set of uses—grocery stores, pharmacies, childcare, and basic services—that behave more like public goods than pure market commodities. It is reasonable to treat them that way, whether through subsidy, land control, or deliberate placement, because the entire neighborhood depends on their presence.

Beyond that baseline, however, the market remains a valuable signal. It reveals what businesses can survive, what residents value, and how a district evolves over time. An overly-curated neighborhood is doomed to die of banality. The goal is to structure the environment so that a wider range of smaller, local actors can participate. When that happens, the neighborhood feels real because it has been tested and “worn in” over time.

Overall, Nordhavn succeeds as a model of pedestrian-first planning, of large-scale land reclamation, and of a public development entity using its control over land and leasing to create the conditions for urban life.

2. The Bad: Nordhavn works through a model that is expensive, coarse-grained, and difficult to replicate.

Converting a former industrial harbor into a neighborhood is inherently costly. Before any building could begin, the site required deep piling, soil stabilization, and extensive waterfront engineering. Plus, there was the front-loaded infrastructure strategy—on the order of DKK 20 billion (~$2.9 billion)—including early delivery of the metro. The district is exceptionally well integrated into the city, but it starts with very high fixed costs.

Those costs shape the structure of development itself. Because so much capital must be deployed upfront and recovered, the land is released in large parcels to well-capitalized buyers. Development consolidates into fewer hands: large institutional developers are needed to absorb risk, deploy capital at scale, and generate the proceeds required to repay those investments. Buildings are correspondingly large, high-spec, and delivered as single coordinated projects, with blocks assembled all at once rather than incrementally. The combined weight of land, infrastructure, and construction costs pushes rents and sale prices upward, making the neighborhood financially coherent only at elevated price points. Today, Nordhavn ranks among the most expensive addresses in Copenhagen, with property values roughly 20% above the city average. The result is a district built in large pieces. It is not fine-grained. It is coarse.

Dominated by large-format, expensive buildings, it is no surprise that Nordhavn skews toward affluent, highly educated professionals, with a notable presence of expatriate families. A fee-paying international school opened in 2017, reinforcing that orientation, while secondary school students still commute out of the neighborhood.

Affordable housing in Nordhavn is almost entirely dependent on the public social housing program. The development itself produces little naturally low-cost housing. Copenhagen’s citywide target is 30% social housing, but Nordhavn is currently at less than 20%. Anne Skovbro acknowledged the risk directly: “There is a danger of that [becoming a gated community]. But that’s why social housing is an important part of it.”

The absence of naturally low-cost housing also makes it difficult to accommodate middle-income families and elderly residents. Families typically need larger units and face higher overall living costs, increasing their housing burden. Older residents, often living on fixed or reduced incomes, face similar constraints. Both groups are essential to a complete neighborhood. Without a base of naturally lower-cost housing, it will be difficult for Nordhavn to fully support these life stages over time.

Historically, Copenhagen achieved that kind of social diversity through dense, low-cost buildings that worked for people across the life cycle. Neighborhoods like Nørrebro and Vesterbro were built as fine-grained fabrics of small courtyard apartment buildings: simple, repeatable structures that were inexpensive to construct and maintain. Because costs were low and buildings were small, many actors could build at once. Development was not only incremental; it was parallel and rapid.

Over time, that structure produced a durable mix. Some buildings were renovated and moved upmarket, while others remained modest. Prices diverged within the same block. Ownership was distributed. Local equity accumulated. And a wide range of households (across incomes and life stages) could live side by side.

In those neighborhoods, diversity was not programmed. It emerged from the underlying structure of the building stock and the passage of time.

Nordhavn, by contrast, delivers quality and coordination at the cost of that structural flexibility. Its coarse grain and high entry costs limit who can participate, both as residents and as builders. It is a successful neighborhood, but one whose social mix is managed rather than generated, and whose form may make long-term, organic diversity harder to achieve.

3. The Ugly: “no greenery” and “soulless architecture”

For all its planning rigor, the district can feel bleak and impersonal. Two criticisms come up again and again: there isn’t enough everyday greenery, and the architecture, while competent, can feel bland or “soulless.” Neither is accidental. Both follow from the same underlying structure: large parcels, institutional delivery, and buildings optimized for coordination and finance rather than affordability and livability.

Start with the lack of green space. The outdoor space is mainly linear public space rather than embedded, usable green at the level of daily life. Residents can walk along the water, but there are fewer places to simply sit on grass, let children play informally, or occupy a sheltered, planted space close to home, away from the high winds. Public reactions consistently point to this gap. In one discussion, a visitor noted there were “no notable green spaces” , while another prospective resident worried about “the absence of the green zones / parks” . Others describe the district as “pretty much only… concrete with no green spaces” . The recurring complaint is the absence of ordinary green woven into the neighborhood itself. Many complain of the high winds and lack of shelter.

To its credit, the city recognizes this gap. A major new park—Nordør – New Park—is planned as a large coastal landscape intervention. That will help. But, as I often point out, a public park is not a replacement for a backyard. Parks are wonderful, but they are not conveniently accessed from the home, they are not sheltered from the wind. They do not satisfy the need for a small, private outdoor space where children can play, where one can garden, keep a bike shed, etc.

This is where the contrast with courtyard urbanism becomes sharp. A courtyard block distributes green space continuously, at the scale of daily life. Instead of concentrating it in a few large parks, it places it inside the block—semi-private, sheltered, and directly accessible to residents. Green space is not something you travel to; it is something you live with.

The building form in Nordhavn helps explain the gap. Large, institutionally financed buildings tend toward larger footprints and deeper floor plates. That can be efficient from a development standpoint, but it works against the geometry that produces good interior open space. Where perimeter blocks exist in Nordhavn, the courtyards are often compromised—too shallow, too fragmented, or too residual to function as true shared gardens. Whatever efficiencies come from larger buildings are often purchased at the cost of usable, integrated green space.

The same structural logic shows up in the architecture. The “soulless” critique is subjective, but it is not random. What people are reacting to is a district built in large increments by a small number of actors, within a controlled design framework. The result is coherent, but also relatively uniform. Materials are consistent, details are precise, and façades are well-composed—but the overall effect can feel flat. There are fewer irregularities, fewer surprises, and fewer signs of incremental change. Public reactions often converge on this point. In one discussion, a commenter described Nordhavn as “utterly soulless,” while another called it “drab, dreary and devoid of charm” (reddit.com). In another thread, a visitor remarked that it “feels like a place designed all at once, rather than something that grew over time” (reddit.com). These reactions are subjective, but they point to a consistent perception: a neighborhood that is well executed, but lacking the layered irregularity and incremental texture that give older urban districts their sense of character.

Charm is easier to produce in fine-grained environments. When buildings are small and ownership is distributed, variation emerges naturally. Different builders, different timelines, and different constraints produce a layered streetscape almost by default. In coarse-grained development, that variation has to be simulated, and it rarely feels as convincing. Larger parcels mean fewer authors. Fewer authors mean fewer deviations. And fewer deviations mean less texture over time.

This is not a failure of design talent. It is a consequence of the development model. Large parcels, high costs, and institutional capital produce buildings that are optimized for delivery and performance, not for incremental richness. The same system that made Nordhavn coordinated and efficient also made it harder for the neighborhood to develop the small-scale complexity that people associate with warmth and character.

So the “ugly” side of Nordhavn is not that it lacks quality. It is that, even at a high level of execution, the combination of large buildings, limited embedded greenery, and controlled authorship can produce an environment that feels thinner than expected—visually, socially, and ecologically. Large parks may soften that over time. But a different urban structure—one that embeds green space within the block and distributes authorship across many smaller buildings—would make those qualities easier to achieve from the start.

Conclusion

Nordhavn is a real achievement: a walkable, transit-oriented district built at scale, planned around daily life rather than cars, reclaimed from an industrial harbor. Impressive. But the model that made it possible—high upfront costs, centralized control, and large-scale development—also limits its design and ability to be a socially complete neighborhood.

It produces a neighborhood that is expensive, coarse-grained, and socially narrow, where income diversity must be programmed rather than emerging naturally, and where greenery and character are harder to embed into the fabric itself.

By contrast, Copenhagen’s older neighborhoods show that fine-grained, low-cost building—delivered by many actors in parallel—can produce faster, more durable, and more socially diverse urbanism over time. The lesson is not to reject Nordhavn, but to recognize that great neighborhoods depend on low-cost building and dense, fine-grain design AND aligned policy systems that make them possible. How can combine Nordhavn’s strengths with a more flexible, inclusive, and fine-grained model of development?

Interesting Resources

• The Guardian: “The Five-Minute City: Inside Denmark’s Revolutionary Neighbourhood” (Dec 2024) — the source article for this case study; worth reading in full for the resident voices

• Cobe Architects — Nordhavn projects — the architecture and urban design firm that has led much of the built work in Nordhavn

• By & Havn — Copenhagen’s city and port authority that owns and develops Nordhavn; publishes planning documents and progress reports

• Nordhus — the non-profit communal space covered in this issue

To family-friendly courtyards in America,

See you then,

Alicia Pederson
Courtyard Urbanist

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Two states just signed the zoning changes that make courtyard housing legally possible.

Today, we’re covering Idaho’s landmark setback and ADU reform package, signed just nine days ago. We’re also looking at Indiana’s by-right housing law, which took effect in March. And we’re examining two near-misses (Virginia and Florida) where bills had the votes and still didn’t survive.

Together, these four stories tell you exactly where zoning reform stands heading into spring 2026.

Idaho Signs 2 Key Bills: Setbacks Gone, ADUs Freed

Bills: SB 1352 (Starter Home Subdivisions) and SB 1354 (ADU Rights)

Sponsor: Sen. Ben Toews, Coeur d’Alene

Jurisdiction: All cities with a population over 10,000

Status: Signed into law by Governor Brad Little on April 1, 2026

On April 1, Idaho’s governor signed two housing bills that, taken together, remove the two biggest physical barriers to building courtyard housing in the state:

1. SB 1352—Targets lot and setback restrictions. In any city with over 10,000 people, local governments can no longer require front or rear setback minimums in qualifying starter home subdivisions: parcels of four acres or more. Minimum lot sizes, lot depth requirements, and width restrictions are all removed. And cities must now permit at least 12 units per acre in these subdivisions, unless genuine infrastructure constraints make it infeasible.
   

2. SB 1354, goes after ADU restrictions. It strips both local governments and homeowners associations of the power to block ADU construction. Property owners can now build at least one ADU per lot, full stop, with no maximum square footage limits allowed.

There are sensible carve-outs: historic districts, environmental hazard zones, and public safety regulations are all preserved. But the core rules that have made courtyard-form housing mathematically impossible on most Idaho parcels are now gone for qualifying developments.

Why this matters for courtyard blocks specifically

A true perimeter courtyard block wraps all four sides of a block and requires the building to sit close to the front and side property lines (but not the rear!). Standard American setback rules (typically 5 - 20 feet on each side) make this impossible, and also waste a lot of buildable area around the perimeter of the block where the area is greatest (in addition to destroying the enclosure effect of a good street wall).

SB 1352 removes front and rear setback requirements in qualifying subdivisions, eliminating two of the most significant barriers to courtyard housing, though side setback rules may still apply depending on local implementation.

The 12-units-per-acre floor matters, too:

Below that density, a shared courtyard doesn’t have enough surrounding units to feel activated and alive. Idaho has now cleared both hurdles in a single bill.

Sources: BoiseDev (April 1, 2026) · Coeur d’Alene Press (April 4, 2026) · Newsweek

Indiana HB 1001: Duplexes and ADUs By-Right, Parking Caps in Effect

Bill: HB 1001 (Housing Matters)

Jurisdiction: Indiana — statewide, with targeted application in transit corridors, riverfront districts, and designated redevelopment zones

Status: Signed into law by Governor Mike Braun on March 4, 2026

Indiana’s HB 1001 reforms the approval process.

Rather than targeting specific lot rules, it goes after the approval process.

Single-family homes, duplexes, townhomes, and ADUs are now permitted uses by right in residential zones, meaning they can be approved without a public hearing.

Mixed-use and multifamily housing must be allowed in commercial zones unless a local government passes an explicit opt-out ordinance.

The bill also caps parking requirements.

Local governments can no longer require more parking spaces than a state-set ceiling for multifamily buildings, and it restricts local enforcement of setback rules, minimum lot sizes, density caps, and building bulk standards.

The caveat: the final version of HB 1001 was narrowed significantly in conference.

The original proposal was broader statewide preemption. What passed applies primarily in designated zones:

• Transit corridors

• Redevelopment areas

• And riverfront development districts

Local governments retain more control in standard residential neighborhoods. It passed the Senate by a single vote.

What this means for courtyard development

The parking cap may be the most important provision here…

When courtyard apartments are permitted, but parking minimums remain, developers are forced to provide parking underneath the building, which can mean structured parking, which means dramatically higher costs, which often means eliminating the ground-level courtyard entirely and replacing it with a parking deck.

These developments often are marketed as having “courtyards,” but they do not actually provide broadly usable outdoor space.

Indiana’s parking cap will allow developers to provide only as much parking as they estimate the market demands. In transit-served cities, a small garage for 5-8 parking stalls can be discretely tucked into the ground floor next to shops.

Sources: HousingWire · Indiana Capital Chronicle (Feb 19, 2026)

Two Near-Misses: Virginia and Florida

Virginia SB 454

Florida SB 48 / Live Local 4.0

Status: Both failed, in different ways, for different reasons

Not every bill gets signed. Two important stories from this spring show how quickly momentum can falter.

In Virginia, SB 454, described by advocates as the “most impactful” zoning reform bill on the table in the state, would have allowed denser housing near jobs statewide.

It passed the Senate 21 to 19 on February 5, 2026.

Then it died in a House committee in March.

The opposition argument was the familiar one: Local control.

The votes were there in the Senate; they weren’t in the House.

In Florida, the story is stranger.

The Florida Senate unanimously passed SB 48 in February 2026, requiring every local government to allow ADUs in single-family zones by December 1, 2026, a sweeping, no-exceptions mandate with unanimous support.

Then it went to conference with the House.

The two chambers couldn’t agree on one question:

Should cities be allowed to ban short-term ADU rentals?

They couldn’t resolve it.

The ADU language was dropped entirely from the final Live Local 4.0 bill that passed in March 2026. A bill with unanimous Senate support didn’t survive a single-issue procedural disagreement.

The lesson

These bills fail at the end, not the beginning.

The political will exists… Virginia’s bill cleared the Senate, and Florida’s ADU provision passed unanimously.

The kill shots come from committee structure, conference negotiations, and single-issue blocking.

Anyone pushing similar legislation in their own state should study both of these cases carefully before counting votes.

Sources: WMRA (March 13, 2026) · Planetizen (Feb 2026) · Discover South Florida — Live Local 4.0 summary

Why It’s Relevant

Front and side setback removal is the physical prerequisite for courtyard blocks.

A courtyard building sits at the front and sides of the lot. This is what perimeter planning means: concentrating building mass around the edge of lots and blocks, where the area is greater, and where the building itself can form a boundary between the public street and the private block interior.

Standard American setback rules, typically 5 - 20 feet per side, make this mathematically impossible on most urban parcels.

Idaho’s SB 1352 removes the front setback barrier for qualifying developments.

Indiana’s HB 1001 restricts it in designated zones.

So this legislation is helpful, but incomplete. Without explicit treatment of side setbacks and party wall construction, the perimeter block form remains only partially feasible.

The parking cap matters as much as the density allowance.

When a developer must provide two parking spaces per unit, and they’re building in a dense urban context, those spaces go underground or in a podium, which raises costs, reduces ground-level permeability, and eliminates the usable outdoor space that makes courtyard housing worth building.

Indiana’s parking cap addresses this problem directly:

A genuine courtyard at grade, with mature trees and room for children and neighbors, works best when parking is modest. We want modest parking, not parking abundance.

State preemption is the strategy that’s working.

Local zoning reform is slow and vulnerable to neighborhood opposition. Individual variances can take years. The bills that are actually passing in 2026 (Idaho, Indiana, and the Illinois BUILD package we covered last issue) all work by setting a state-level floor that removes the most restrictive local rules.

This model has momentum. The question now is which states are next.

The states to watch next are the ones combining state-level preemption with targeted reforms to setbacks, parking, and lot rules: Illinois, California, and Arizona in the near term, with Virginia and Florida likely to return quickly after near-misses this session.

How You Can Participate

If you’re in Idaho or Indiana:

Your local government now has a window, typically 60 to 180 days, to update its zoning code in compliance with these new laws.

That window is when the actual design standards get written:

• Show up at planning commission meetings

• Push for courtyard-forward language within the new framework before the defaults get locked in

Track & Support the Illinois BUILD package:

SB 4060, which would permit cottage clusters statewide as of right, is still moving through the Illinois legislature this spring. Its fate is one of the most important signals for the Midwest this session.

People who want this to become law can show their support by sending a letter to their state rep and senator

https://actionnetwork.org/letters/pass-the-build-plan

There is also a lobby day on April 15. If you’re in Chicago, ride the Amtrak to Springfield with 50 other YIMBYs and talk to state electeds about the BUILD plan:

https://airtable.com/appzwumHROgxp506v/pagvEqb4wIqV88wYM/form

To family-friendly courtyards in America,

See you then,

Alicia Pederson
Courtyard Urbanist

This newsletter is free — and Courtyard Urbanist’s best core content will always be free.

But if you want to go deeper into the regulatory, financial, and design questions that make courtyard urbanism work in practice, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

You will receive:

• ✅ Wildcard Essays — High-impact essays responding to the most compelling idea or debate. Stay on the cutting edge of this movement.

• ✅ The Courtyard Urbanist Market Brief — An in-depth monthly report on who’s building what, which policies are moving, where the funding is, and what to watch. If you’re a developer, planner, or investor, this is the one you can’t afford to miss.

• ✅ Quarterly Insider Roundtable Video Calls — Behind-the-scenes project work, design feedback, and direct access to the people building this movement. These calls are where strategy actually gets made.

The weekly free issues will give you a strong foundation.

But if you’re serious about courtyard urbanism—whether you’re building it, funding it, designing it, or advocating for it—the paid tier is where the real work lives.

Consider upgrading to the paid tier to join the practitioner network.

Upgrade To Paid

If you enjoyed this post, here’s what to read next:

Courtyard Urbanist is a weekly newsletter sharing research, case studies, and courtyard urbanism designs for North American cities, drawing on Europe’s best neighborhoods to upgrade U.S. cities with family-friendly courtyard blocks.
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Attached courtyard housing is becoming legal in Illinois law

Illinois is moving to legalize attached and detached courtyard housing in every residential zone across the state, as part of a middle housing reform package backed by the Governor. Meanwhile, on Chicago’s South and West Sides, the first courtyard-style buildings from the city’s Missing Middle Infill Housing program are already breaking ground.

Today we’re covering:

• The BUILD Plan legislation that would legalize courtyard housing statewide in Illinois

• Chicago’s Missing Middle program putting courtyard buildings in the ground right now

• What this moment means for the future of courtyard urbanism across America

What’s New

A. Illinois SB 4060 names courtyard housing as a legal right

Governor JB Pritzker introduced the Building Up Illinois Development (BUILD) Plan in early 2026 — a package of housing reform bills designed to address Illinois’s shortage of 142,000 homes (per a University of Illinois report).

The centerpiece bill, SB 4060, would amend the Illinois Municipal Code to require cities to allow “middle housing” — defined explicitly to include attached courtyard housing and detached courtyard housing — as-of-right in all residential zones statewide.

Under SB 4060, the number of units permitted on a given lot scales with lot size, ranging from 2 to 8 units.

The bill also legalizes:

• Cottage clusters

• Duplexes

• Triplexes

• Fourplexes

• Townhomes

• And stacked flat-plexes.

Lots with a minimum of 2,500 sq ft would qualify for middle housing by right. Senator Sara Feigenholtz joined as co-sponsor on March 5, 2026. As of April 2026, the bill has cleared early committee stages and is in active negotiation in the General Assembly.

Companion bills include:

• SB 4061 — single stair reform, allowing small multifamily buildings with one means of egress (as safe or safer per research)

• SB 4063 — third-party permit review when municipalities cannot process applications fast enough

An April 1, 2026 analysis by the Evanston RoundTable noted the bills could significantly affect local zoning in suburban communities across the state.

Sources: Illinois General Assembly — SB 4060 Bill Status | BUILD Plan roundtable — Illinois Business Journal, Mar 26 | Evanston RoundTable, Apr 1, 2026 | Capitol News Illinois — Pritzker abundance agenda

B. Chicago’s Missing Middle program is building courtyard housing today

While SB 4060 moves through the legislature, Chicago’s Missing Middle Infill Housing program — led by the Department of Planning and Development — has already advanced more than 300 residential units across 106 buildings on vacant city lots across North Lawndale, East and West Garfield Park, Chatham, South Chicago, and Morgan Park (as of February 2026).

Among the designs chosen through the city’s Come Home design competition is “The Courtyard Shift” by ParkFowler Plus — the first competition entry to move into active development — which uses an efficient courtyard layout to lower construction costs while creating shared outdoor space for residents.

Lots are sold to qualified developers for $1, with up to $150,000 per unit in construction subsidies available through Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Housing and Economic Development bond. Homes target buyers earning up to 140% of area median income, with resale limits to maintain long-term affordability.

In January 2026, Chicago City Council approved 27 Missing Middle projects in Morgan Park, South Chicago, and Chatham — representing $31 million in total investment from five minority-led development teams. A Chicago Sun-Times story published April 3, 2026 framed the program’s mission: bringing more families to the South and West Sides, one vacant lot at a time.

Sources: Chicago Missing Middle Program | Chicago Sun-Times, Apr 3, 2026 | Block Club Chicago — Groundbreaking, Jan 7, 2026 | City of Chicago — City Council approves 27 projects, Jan 2026

C. National data: 2025 was the best year for missing middle construction since 2007

The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) reported in March 2026 that 2025 saw 19,000 construction starts for 2- to 4-unit housing — the highest volume since 2007, up 6% from 18,000 starts in 2024. Yet this segment still represents only 5% of total multifamily production, and NAHB explicitly names zoning restrictions as the primary barrier to growth.

This is precisely why SB 4060 matters: the demand for smaller-scale, neighborhood-embedded housing is proven. The obstacle is not the market — it is the law.

Sources: NAHB — Best Year for Missing Middle Since 2007, March 2026 | CRE Daily — Missing Middle Hits 18-Year High | LBM Journal — Missing Middle Starts

WHY IT’S RELEVANT

This is the first time state law has explicitly named courtyard housing as a protected type

Most housing reform bills focus on ADUs, duplexes, or density in general terms. SB 4060 goes further and specifically names “attached courtyard housing” and “detached courtyard housing” as types that must be permitted statewide. This is a significant moment for courtyard urbanism as a recognized housing category.

Our movement partners are at the center of this

Abundant Housing Illinois (a grassroots community of 6,000+ activists and a Courtyard Urbanist partner organization) has been central to the BUILD Plan’s development. The group advocates specifically for housing types like four-flats and courtyard buildings as part of Chicago’s architectural heritage and as a replicable model for family-friendly density. You can learn more about them here https://abundanthousingillinois.org

Chicago’s program proves courtyard buildings are viable right now, at scale

The Missing Middle program is not a pilot. It has 106 buildings in active development across six Chicago neighborhoods, with groundbreakings happening in January 2026. Courtyard-style designs like “The Courtyard Shift” are winning city competitions and moving into construction. This is proof of concept that courtyard housing works, it’s fundable, and it’s getting built.

ADDRESSING MISCONCEPTIONS

Misconception 1: “This is just about apartments; it doesn’t apply to families.”

The Missing Middle program and BUILD Plan are both explicitly designed for working and middle-income families. Chicago’s program targets buyers at up to 140% of area median income, with resale restrictions to maintain affordability over time. Courtyard housing creates the kind of family-appropriate spaces (shared outdoor courtyards, ground-floor entries, neighborhood-scale density) that high-rise apartment towers cannot replicate.

Misconception 2: “State preemption of zoning removes local control”

SB 4060 does not tell cities what to build; it removes local prohibitions on certain housing types. Cities retain control over design standards, historic preservation, and permitting processes. What changes is that a city can no longer make courtyard housing illegal by default. This is a floor for housing choice, not a ceiling on community input.

Misconception 3: “Missing middle construction is in decline”

2025 marked the highest 2- to 4-unit construction volume since 2007 — not a decline. The trend is moving upward, and legislation like SB 4060 is designed to remove the zoning barriers NAHB identifies as the primary obstacle to further growth.

What I’m Thinking Of And Reading

I’ve been deeply immersed in the Horizon Lines 2050 vision (draft here), a plan to scale mid-rise courtyard blocks across Chicago to deliver upwards of 400,000 family-friendly homes by 2050. I’ve also been on many, many calls about potential development on the South and West sides of Chicago, about development modeling tools, about modular prefabrication and panelized prefabrication, about fire code reform, and about demand aggregation. I have been thinking about all of these subjects a lot. I feel like I’ve been writing and talking a lot, but not reading as much as I would like! I have been reading, to my children, Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, which is something I look forward to every evening.

To family-friendly courtyard urbanism in American cities,

See you then,

Alicia Pederson

Courtyard Urbanist

P.S.

This newsletter is free — and Courtyard Urbanist’s best core content will always be free.

But if you want to go deeper into the regulatory, financial, and design questions that make courtyard urbanism work in practice, as a paying subscriber, you will receive:

• ✅ Wildcard Essays — High-impact essays responding to the most compelling idea or debate. Stay on the cutting edge of this movement.
  

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• ✅ Quarterly Insider Roundtable Video Calls — Behind-the-scenes project work, design feedback, and direct access to the people building this movement. These calls are where strategy actually gets made.

The weekly free issues will give you a strong foundation.

But if you’re serious about courtyard urbanism—whether you’re building it, funding it, designing it, or advocating for it—the paid tier is where the real work lives.

Consider upgrading to the paid tier to join the practitioner network.

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Section 1 — The Big Picture

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For Horizon Lines: Chicago 2050, we’re advancing a plan to make Chicago the new world capital of courtyard urbanism.

And the plan includes a system—involving city, industry, and developers—that will build a city that is dense enough for urban life and livable enough for families to stay.

The Opportunity

Today, Chicago primarily produces two types of housing:

• large, expensive high-rises

• low-density homes that limit supply

Predictably, people leave when they need space, or stay and compromise.

This is not a demand problem. It is a production problem that is solved through flexible zoning, building designs that are standardized for prefabrication “kit of parts” construction, and a scalable development system that includes the participations of thousands of small developers and local builders.

A Pattern We Already Know

Chicago’s best neighborhoods emerged through a shared pattern:

• mid-rise density

• buildings aligned to the street

• mixed-use corridors

• incremental growth

This proposal revives the old pattern, but points it to a network of mid-rise courtyard blocks—organized around shared green space and built across the city over time.

A Call for Collaborators

We’re building a coalition of:

• residents

• practitioners

• elected officials

If this resonates, we want to hear from you. Email me at projects@courtyardurbanist.com, and we’ll send you the proposal.

The Vision

A Chicago that grows not through megaprojects, but through a flexible building code, industrialized construction technology, and a coalition of small developers and builders—green, walkable, family-capable neighborhoods across the city.

This is a monthly wildcard essay for paid subscribers, where I explore ideas that go beyond the usual case studies, chronicles, and regulatory analysis.

Courtyard Urbanist is a weekly newsletter sharing research, case studies, and courtyard urbanism designs for North American cities, drawing on Europe’s best neighborhoods to upgrade U.S. cities with family-friendly courtyard blocks.
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We don’t often get 47 blank acres in the middle of a major American city.

Last week, news broke that Justin Ishbia — the Shore Capital founder poised to become the next White Sox chairman — is under contract to acquire the old Amtrak rail yard in Chicago’s South Loop.

The site sits just south of Roosevelt Road, across the river from The 78, the mega-development where the White Sox had hoped to build a stadium before Chicago Fire claimed the land for a soccer facility.

This is the second act of that story (and might be the better one).

Ishbia’s team has begun early planning for a mixed-use development on the 47 acres. A healthcare innovation campus in partnership with Northwestern Medicine is reportedly part of the vision. And yes, a new White Sox stadium is being floated, too.

Cortyard Urbansist is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Stadium districts fail because they are event-driven, single-product environments, while successful urban districts are continuous, life-cycle neighborhoods built on diverse housing and coherent block form.

My suggestion? Organize the 47-acre site as a fine-grained, courtyard-based neighborhood, with the stadium embedded inside it.

Stadium districts should be built for everyday life rather than events

Most American stadium “mixed-use” districts follow the same pattern:

• They build a stadium in a lagoon of parking lots

• They add a hotel nearby and a few restaurants for fans

On game nights, the model performs exactly as intended. Lots of people stay at the hotels, the bars are crowded, and the entire area rises, like a zombie from the grave, for the event. But for the vast majority of the year—weekday mornings, off-season stretches, road trips—the buildings and infrastructure are dead. For the district is not a living neighborhood, but an undead real estate product that comes to life on occasion.

Great neighborhoods require a full range of housing: The Battery, Atlanta versus Wrigleyville, Chicago

What about The Battery Atlanta? The residential component at The Battery Atlanta is often cited as evidence that the project has moved beyond the traditional stadium model. And in a narrow sense, that’s true. There are apartments on site. People do live there.

But the small rental housing at The Battery Atlanta targets a narrow slice of the population. The residential structures follow the conventional American podium model: large, single-developer structures composed primarily of smaller rental units—studios, one-bedrooms, and a limited number of two-bedrooms—organized along double-loaded internal corridors and wrapped around shared amenity decks. This is the dominant multifamily product in the United States, and it mostly attracts smaller, more mobile households with shorter expected tenures.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Rental housing is indispensable to a healthy neighborhood, providing flexibility and entry points into urban living. It’s a problem when rental housing is the only offering. A neighborhood built on a single housing type is structurally incapable of supporting the complete life cycle, because it cannot accommodate residents as their lives evolve.

A great neighborhood, by contrast, is defined by the range of housing it offers across the full arc of the life cycle. To borrow from Shakespeare’s “Seven Ages of Man” speech, people move through distinct “ages”—childhood, adolescence and peer relations, family and career formation, retirement—and each stage carries different spatial and social needs. Smaller rental units are well-suited to individuals and couples in these more transitional phases, but without larger homes and ownership and yard options, the neighborhood cannot hold them as they move from one age to the next.

That is precisely what The Battery Atlanta does not provide. Its residential component attracts only a narrow slice of renters at a particular life stage, but cannot accommodate the full arc of household change over time. It can draw people in, especially in its early years, but it lacks the unit diversity, ownership pathways, and yard access required to retain them as their needs evolve—from single professionals to couples, from couples to families, from families to empty nesters. As a result, residency becomes transient by design. The district is optimized for throughput, rather than for long-term attachment, social rootedness, or intergenerational continuity.

Now compare that to the neighborhood around Wrigley Field, or “Wrigleyville,” in the Lake View neighborhood of Chicago

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In 2018, Ryan Johnson, a co-founder of real estate startup OpenDoor, sold his stake in the company and set out to build a car-free neighborhood from scratch in Tempe, Arizona.

At the time, conventional real estate wisdom said this was somewhere between naive and impossible. Phoenix, after all, is the most car-dependent major metro in the United States. More than 92% of households in the region own a car (compared with 45% in New York City). The city is ringed by highways, and its street grid is built almost entirely around the assumption that every trip begins and ends in a parking lot.

Nevertheless, John founded a company, Culdesac, and proceeded to build the car-free neighborhood in Tempe.

This week, Culdesac posted a two-sentence update on X: “7 years ago, we got laughed out of the room. Now, leaders from all over the country are visiting Culdesac Tempe asking, ‘How can I bring this to my city?’”

This is a case study in what it takes to build something genuinely new in American real estate and what it means for the future of walkable, car-free neighborhoods in the United States.

What Culdesac Tempe Is

Designed by Opticos Design, Culdesac Tempe sits on 17 acres along Apache Boulevard in Tempe, a suburb roughly 15 miles east of downtown Phoenix. It is built next to a Valley Metro light rail stop.

When all phases are complete (projected for 2028), it will contain:

• 760 apartments

• Pedestrian paseos

• A central plaza

• And around 21 local businesses housed in clusters of two- and three-story white stucco buildings arranged around shared courtyards

There is no residential parking. None. Cars are not banned outright, but residents agree not to park near the development as a condition of their lease.

The land that would otherwise be given over to parking lots and driveways is instead shared green space:

• Courtyards with fire pits and hammocks

• A pool

• A bike path

• And a community garden

Residents get a free Valley Metro pass, discounts on rideshare and autonomous vehicle services like Waymo, on-site carsharing, Bird scooters, and over 1,000 bike parking spots throughout the neighborhood. The first 200 residents received a free Lectric e-bike.

Construction began in 2019, and the first residents moved in during mid-2023. .

As of March 2025, almost 90% of the completed 288 units were leased.

Studios start at around $1,300 a month — below the median studio rent in the broader Tempe market at the time. The total project cost for all phases is approximately $170 million.

Why people said it couldn’t work

The skepticism was not unreasonable, because American development norms have been oriented around the car for nearly a century. Zoning codes separate homes from shops and workplaces, forcing longer trips and making quotidian life dependent on driving. Parking minimums exacerbate this problem, requiring developers to supply a fixed number of spaces per unit regardless of actual demand. Each of those spaces carries a real construction cost—often $30,000 to $60,000—that is embedded directly into rents and sale prices, while also consuming land that could otherwise support housing or shared space. The result is a development system that hardwires car dependency into both the physical form of cities and the economics of housing, even as transit remains sparse or underutilized in most metropolitan areas outside a few dense cores.

To build car-free housing in Phoenix, of all places, struck many observers as a category error. The region has become a cultural shorthand for the spatial logic of postwar America—endless arterials, strip malls, parking lots, and cul-de-sacs stretching to the horizon. Breaking Bad, along with Better Call Saul and Pluribus, uses that landscape deliberately, situating its stories of moral decay within a built environment defined by separation, scale, and dependence on the car. Vince Gilligan could have chosen a more glamorous or idyllic setting, but instead returned again and again to this distinctly American environment, where isolation is not incidental, but embedded in the physical form itself.

Building a car-free neighborhood anywhere in the U.S. would have raised eyebrows, but building it in Phoenix—one of the most fully realized expressions of car-dependent urbanism—made the idea seem fundamentally at odds with the place itself.

What Happened

The neighborhood works, and more importantly, it shows that Americans fall into natural patterns of urban living when the physical environment and underlying economics support it. Much of the skepticism surrounding Culdesac assumed behavior would not change: that residents would default back to cars, that retail would struggle, that the social life of the place would fall flat. None of that materialized. Instead, people adapted quickly to a setting designed around proximity, shared space, and viable alternatives to driving. So far, Culdesac looks like a historically normal neighborhood with patterns of daily life that look meaningfully different from car-oriented neighborhoods.

Residents use the light rail. They ride the e-bikes. The retail shops, which developers expected would take years to fill, grew from a handful to 22 businesses. One of them—Cocina Chiwas, by Armando Hernandez and Nadia Holguin—was nominated for a James Beard Award and named to the 2024 USA Today Restaurants of the Year list. Residents report knowing their neighbors, letting children play unsupervised in the plaza, and spending less money overall because they no longer own a car.

When Charles Montgomery, author of Happy City, visited, he described the development as “ideally configured to nurture a sense of belonging and neighborliness” in contrast to the alienation typical of car-dependent environments. The demographics are also broader than expected. What many assumed would be a narrow market of young ASU students has instead attracted families, older adults, and households across a range of incomes—the kind of diversity that often requires extensive policy intervention, but here emerges from the design of the place itself and the structure of the product.

What is less discussed, but equally important, is that Culdesac breaks from the dominant building model that has come to define multifamily housing in the United States. Over the past two decades, most new rental housing has been delivered as large podium buildings: a single structure, organized around double-loaded corridors, sitting atop a concrete parking base. That model is not inevitable. It is the product of financing conventions, parking requirements and building regulations, and construction standardization. Culdesac takes a different approach. Instead of one large building, it is composed of many smaller buildings, each with its own circulation, scale, and relationship to the ground. The result is a finer-grained environment that feels closer to a traditional neighborhood than to a single real estate product. This matters because it suggests that density does not require megastructures. It can be achieved through aggregation—many buildings, closely arranged—rather than consolidation into one.

Where It Leaves Room to Grow

Culdesac Tempe is an important first step. It proves that car-free living can work in an American context and that there is real demand for a neighborhood organized around people rather than parking. As a first built example, it also clarifies where the model can evolve, and many of those next steps have already been anticipated by the team behind it.

Some of that evolution has to do with structure. This is a single, large development delivered by one team, with a consistent architectural language and unified ownership. That approach made it possible to bring a new idea to market, but over time, the strongest neighborhoods tend to incorporate more variety: more buildings, more authors, more variation within a shared framework. Similarly, all of the units at Culdesac are rentals within a single ownership structure. That simplifies delivery, but future iterations may incorporate a broader mix of tenure, including for-sale units and smaller-scale ownership, allowing more households to put down roots and participate in the long-term life of the neighborhood.

There is also the question of context. Culdesac’s success in Tempe is closely tied to its proximity to light rail and a supportive local policy environment. Within the neighborhood, daily life works without a car. Beyond it, the surrounding region still operates on a different set of assumptions. That gap is not unique to Culdesac; it reflects the broader condition of most American metros, where transit and land use are still catching up to one another.

As the model begins to expand, it is already adapting. A planned project along the Atlanta Beltline did not move forward, underscoring the complexity of delivering this kind of development in different regulatory and financial contexts. A subsequent project in Mesa takes a different approach, introducing a car-light model with some parking included. That shift reflects local conditions rather than a retreat from the core idea. In many cities, reducing dependence on cars will be a more immediate and scalable step than eliminating it entirely.

This points toward a broader range of future applications. Some sites, especially those with strong transit, can support fully car-free living. Others may evolve toward car-light configurations that significantly reduce parking while still accommodating a mix of household needs. In my own courtyard block work, that translates into small buildings with limited on-site parking: enough to support families and longer-term residents, while still prioritizing shared space and walkability.

Culdesac demonstrates that it is possible to build walkable neighborhoods. The next phase is about expanding that possibility across more sites and more ownership structures so that it can support a full range of households and become a durable part of the American development landscape.

Why the Tweet Matters

The tweet matters because it captures a reversal that is a feature of so many great stories. What began as something dismissed, even ridiculed, returns as something sought after. The arc moves from dismissal to validation, from impossibility to demand. That shift is not just rhetorical. It marks a change in how an idea is perceived, and more importantly, in how it is acted upon.

When Culdesac started in 2018, asking an American city to waive its parking minimums for a residential development was a radical ask. Tempe agreed under a specific set of conditions: a transit-oriented zoning overlay along Apache Boulevard, a corridor in need of activation, and a developer willing to spend years building relationships with city officials and transportation partners before breaking ground. None of that was easy or inevitable.

Seven years later, city leaders are flying in from across the country to walk the paseos and ask how to replicate it. That is what proof of concept looks like when it works. The idea no longer needs to be argued for in the abstract. It has been built, occupied, and tested in the real world.

This does not mean every city will immediately eliminate parking requirements. The Mesa project shows how slowly those shifts occur and how models adapt to local conditions. But the terms of the conversation have changed. The question is no longer whether this kind of neighborhood can exist. It is how, and where, it can be built next.

The building exists. People live there. They know their neighbors. They structure their daily lives differently.

For the courtyard urbanism I advocate for, Culdesac is not a direct model. Courtyards and car-free neighborhoods operate on different logics and draw from different precedents. But they begin from the same premise: that American cities have been organized around the wrong priorities, and that demonstrating a better alternative in physical form carries more weight than any policy argument.

To family-friendly courtyards in America.

See you then,

Alicia Pederson

Courtyard Urbanist

Welcome to Courtyard Urbanist, the online space where the courtyard urbanism conversation lives.

It is a conversation between people who are trying to bring back family-friendly cities and neighborhoods for diverse households to North America using courtyard blocks.

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This Newsletter Is For Three Kinds Of People:

Courtyard Urbanist is specifically for:

• The Builder. You’re an architect, developer, planner, or policy person actively working on (or trying to work on) courtyard-scale housing in North American cities. You need to know which policy windows are open, which projects are moving, and where the funding is. The Monthly Market Brief is written for you.

• The Advocate. You write, research, teach, or organize around urban form, housing policy, and the future of American neighborhoods. You follow the courtyard urbanism conversation closely and want to be ahead of it. The weekly newsletter and research archive are your territory.

• The Enthusiast. You love cities. You’ve walked the streets of Rome or Copenhagen and wondered why American cities don’t feel like that. You’re not necessarily an architect or developer, but you’re curious, you’re paying attention, and you believe the built environment matters. You belong here, too.

  

The Biggest Problems Keeping Courtyard Urbanism Out Of American Cities

If you’ve landed here, chances are you’re running into one ,or several, of these walls.

• Problem #1: Nobody has mapped the policy landscape. Setback rules, lot coverage rules, side-yard requirements, parking minimums: the regulations blocking courtyard blocks vary city by city, and almost no one has done the work of tracking what’s changing and where. Most builders find out what’s possible only after they’ve already committed to a site.

• Problem #2: American developers don’t have a repeatable courtyard block model. European cities built this form for centuries. American developers are starting from scratch, without the typological knowledge, the financing templates, or the precedent library that would make courtyard blocks a routine product instead of a bespoke experiment.

• Problem #3: The funding landscape is opaque. Which Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) programs, state housing funds, and federal initiatives actually support mid-rise perimeter block construction? Most practitioners don’t know, not because the money isn’t there, but because no one is synthesizing it specifically for this building type.

• Problem #4: Courtyard projects keep getting killed in permitting. Wide, shallow buildings with no side setbacks and commercial ground floors run into zoning codes that weren’t written for them. Knowing where the exceptions, variances, and reform pathways exist is the difference between a project that moves and one that dies on the desk.

• Problem #5: There’s no trusted source tracking what’s actually being built. Which courtyard projects are in the pipeline in North America right now? Which cities are actively reforming codes to enable this typology? Without a synthesized, regularly updated source, practitioners are flying blind.

• Problem #6: The European precedents are hard to translate. Prague, Copenhagen, Berlin, Edinburgh: these cities have centuries of courtyard block fabric. But what actually transfers to American land economics, zoning structures, and construction costs? The analysis is mostly missing.

• Problem #7: Families are still leaving cities at scale. The family flight problem has not been solved. Millennial parents who want to stay in cities are still being priced out of single-family homes and underserved by small apartments. The housing form that would keep them (spacious, dual-aspect, courtyard-facing units) is virtually unknown in the United States.

• Problem #8: The advocacy is scattered. Strong Towns, missing middle advocates, new urbanists, YIMBY coalitions: many groups are adjacent to courtyard urbanism, but no single publication is making the specific, sustained case for the perimeter block as a distinct, deployable housing solution.

• Problem #9: Zoning reform moves faster than most practitioners can track. States are passing setback reform bills, cities are updating ADU rules, density bonuses are proliferating, but parsing what each change actually means for courtyard-scale development requires time most practitioners don’t have.

• Problem #10: There’s no community of practice around this typology. Architects, developers, planners, and researchers working on courtyard blocks are largely isolated from each other. The knowledge isn’t accumulating. Every project reinvents the wheel.

This is not a newsletter about urbanism in general. Every issue delivers something specific and usable.

And here’s what I’m doing to help builders, advocates, and designers upgrade U.S. cities with family-friendly courtyard blocks…

Courtyard Urbanist “Chronicles” — Movement Intelligence

• What is Courtyard Urbanist working on?

• Which developers, cities, and coalitions are moving?

• Where is momentum building, and where is it stalling?

The Chronicles keep you inside the conversation as Courtyard Urbanist develops.

Regulatory and Zoning Study — Policy Intelligence You Can Act On

I go deep on a specific regulatory question:

• A state setback reform bill

• A city’s lot coverage rules

• A zoning variance pathway that opens the door for courtyard-scale buildings

These aren’t summaries of summaries.

I read the legislation.

I track the votes.

I tell you what the change actually means for someone trying to build a perimeter block in that jurisdiction, and where the next opening is likely to emerge.

In-Depth Case Study — Design Precedents That Transfer

European courtyard blocks are the proof of concept. But the analysis has to go deeper than “look how beautiful Prague is.”

Each case study covers topics like:

• Block structure

• Building width

• Unit layout

• Courtyard geometry

• Specific conditions — regulatory, economic, cultural — that made it possible.

The goal is always the same: what can actually be adapted for North American cities, and how?

Wildcard Essay — The Analysis That Can’t Wait

• A policy announcement

• A provocative idea

• Or a live debate demands a response that doesn’t fit neatly into a scheduled format

The Wildcard Essay is where I write the piece that needs to be written — the most complex, controversial, and timely analysis I produce.

Courtyard Urbanist’s Monthly Market Brief

This is the synthesized intelligence layer for practitioners.

Every month:

• Policy wins and losses

• Projects in the pipeline

• The funding landscape for courtyard-scale development

• Opportunity alerts for advocates and developers

• And updates from Courtyard Urbanist’s own active work.

When I flag a project, it exists.

When I say a policy window is open, I’ve read the legislation.

This is what serious builders and advocates use to stay ahead.

Who Am I?

I’m Alicia Pederson, PhD, Founder and Director of Courtyard Urbanist, and a developer and researcher focused on courtyard block housing for North American cities.

My path to urbanism is unconventional.

I hold a doctorate in English from Northwestern University, with a specialization in Renaissance English and Italian literature and research on urban writers and the city-rural nexus.

I spent time living in a 16th-century Florentine palazzo, where I experienced firsthand what courtyard housing actually does to daily life.

I’m a mother of three living in Chicago’s Lincoln Square. Around 2022, I started watching families leave our neighborhood because the housing simply stopped working for them. A 2BD condo worked for two people. It didn’t work for a family of five. And a $1M+ single-family home wasn’t an option.

The courtyard block is the solution I kept looking for and couldn’t find in any American city.

I started writing publicly in 2024, first on X (growing from 0 to 20,000+ followers), the Chicago Tribune and Crain’s Chicago Business, and now here.

Courtyard Urbanist has grown from a research project into the field’s primary publication, tracking policy, projects, and precedents across North America and Europe.

I work directly with my city through local urbanist groups, my neighborhood organization board, and ongoing collaboration with elected officials, architects, and developers. That on-the-ground work shapes everything I write here.

Best Issues

New to Courtyard Urbanist? Here are some of my readers’ favorite newsletters:

1. Courtyard Urbanism One Pager - Family-friendly density through courtyard blocks

2. Towards a New Aesthetics of Abundance - Courtyard Urbanism, Buildings Without Worth, and a New Ecology of Building

3. Chronicle #1: The New American Urbanism Is Already Underway - Reflections on the Festival of Progressive Abundance in Los Angeles (Jan. 29-Feb. 1)

4. Monthly Market Brief — February 2026: Policy wins from the Illinois BUILD plan, LIHTC expansion, active projects in Utah and Minnesota, and a full funding landscape breakdown.

Work With Courtyard Urbanist

Courtyard Urbanist is a research and development brand, not just a publication.

If you’re a developer, municipality, architect, or investor working on a courtyard block project — or trying to determine whether one is viable in your market — I offer consulting engagements focused on site feasibility, regulatory strategy, typological design, and courtyard block precedent research:

• Type Kits: Typological pattern book for the Courtyard Urbanist ideal, with variations for context and program. Preview the Type Kit concept here.

• Action Kits: Supporting real-world implementation, helping local actors navigate planning, political, and financial systems

• Talks, Seminars, and Discussions

• Exploratory Introductory Calls

• Development Strategy Call

• Live, Virtual, and Recorded Programs

• Video Seminar — Client-Specific Themes

• Advisory & Consulting

• And more!

Learn more about working with Courtyard Urbanist →

Get In Touch

• If you have a project, a partnership idea, or an invitation to speak or collaborate
  → projects@courtyardurbanist.com

• If you’re bringing research, sources, or spirit of inquiry—especially if you’re a student or educator interested in contributing
  → research@courtyardurbanist.com

• If you’re looking to participate, volunteer, advocate, or help grow the community
  → community@courtyardurbanist.com

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Why American Buildings Don’t Touch or Meet the Street

If you look at almost any building in the United States, you’ll notice that it sits back in the lot, shying away from the front and side property lines.

By contrast, buildings in many European cities meet the street directly and often touch the building next door.

The typical American building is detached and free-standing—a small island in the middle of its lot. It sits apart from both the street and its neighbors, buffered by a sequence of spaces that have become so familiar we rarely notice them: a strip of grass, a sidewalk, a small front lawn, a side lawn or “gangway,” perhaps a driveway. These gaps create a landscape of separation in which buildings hover within their parcels rather than shaping the public space around them.

As the urban theorist Leon Krier has illustrated, this arrangement is quintessentially suburban: buildings float within open space. The traditional city operates on the opposite principle. There, buildings align with the property line and meet the street, forming a continuous edge that establishes a clear boundary between public space and private life.

This pattern feels so normal that most Americans assume it is the natural way buildings are built, or that it reflects a deep cultural preference for front and side lawns. But there is nothing organic about wasting the perimeter of a lot—where the usable area of land is actually the greatest. The pattern is the consequence of a rule buried in almost every American zoning code: the setback.

A setback is the minimum distance a building must sit away from a property line. Zoning codes usually require a front setback from the street, side setbacks from neighboring lots, and sometimes a rear setback as well. Typical numbers look something like this: front setbacks of ten to thirty feet and side setbacks of five to fifteen feet.

Most people have never heard the term, yet everyone lives with the consequences. The empty strip of grass between the sidewalk and the building. The awkward gaps between neighboring buildings that fill with trash cans, mechanical equipment, or nothing at all. The apartment building that faces a parking lot rather than the street.

These spaces are not accidents, nor are they the organic expression of Americans’ preferences. They are the visible traces of a historically unusual rule that limits the right of property owners to build along the edges of their land.

So deeply ingrained has this rule become that we have largely forgotten the design tool that once made traditional urban blocks possible: the party wall—a shared structural wall that allows two buildings to meet directly at the property line.

Once buildings are allowed to touch, the geometry of the block changes dramatically. The edges of the block become architecture, defining the street, while the interior of the block can be organized into shared space: courtyards, gardens, or service areas.

Because party walls contain no windows, buildings constructed this way tend to remain relatively shallow rather than extending narrow and deep into the lot. When party walls disappear and buildings must stand apart, the opposite tendency emerges: buildings stretch deeper into the parcel in order to achieve the same floor area, consuming yard space while leaving fragmented gaps along the sides.

Push buildings away from the property line, and the entire geometry of the block begins to change, reshaping both the usefulness of the land and the experience of the street.

The geometry advantage of the perimeter block

There is another reason courtyard blocks are such a high-impact urban form, and it has to do with geometry. And if I, as an English PhD who does not particularly enjoy math, can understand this, so can you.

Cities function best when buildings meet the street. The edge where private buildings and public space touch is where most of urban life unfolds: front doors, shop entrances, stoops, windows, balconies. Urban life tends to concentrate along edges.

The perimeter block works so well because it maximizes those edges. Instead of scattering buildings across a parcel, the building mass is drawn to the outer boundary of the block, forming a continuous ring around a shared interior courtyard. The result is both simple and remarkably elegant: almost the entire perimeter of the block becomes building frontage, streets are defined by coherent walls of architecture, and the interior of the block becomes a protected courtyard.

To understand just how powerful this geometry can be, it helps to compare two places with almost identical block sizes.

A typical Chicago block measures roughly 330 by 660 feet. A typical block in Prague’s Vinohrady district is nearly the same width—about 330 to 380 feet—though somewhat shorter in length.

The difference between these two places is not the size of the block. It is how the buildings are allowed to sit upon it.

In Vinohrady, buildings are typically constructed directly on the front and side property lines, using party walls to connect neighboring structures. Five- and six-story buildings form a continuous perimeter around the block, enclosing large shared courtyards within.

In Chicago, by contrast, zoning rules usually require front and side setbacks that push buildings away from the edges of their lots. Instead of forming a continuous edge, buildings migrate toward the middle of parcels, leaving strips of leftover space around them.

At first glance the difference may seem minor—just a few feet here or there—but its consequences are substantial.

On a typical Chicago block, setback rules often reduce lot coverage to roughly one-third of the parcel. On perimeter blocks like those in Vinohrady, buildings occupy closer to 40–45 percent of the block, concentrated along its edges. That difference alone can amount to more than 10,000 additional square feet of building area per floor on the same block.

Yet the more important difference is spatial rather than numerical.

In Vinohrady, the entire edge of the block becomes architecture. Streets feel enclosed and legible, while the interior courtyard becomes a large shared space for residents. Under setback zoning, by contrast, much of that edge dissolves into leftover land—lawns, side yards, access lanes—that rarely contribute meaningfully to street life.

The building ceases to shape the city and instead becomes an object sitting in the middle of a parcel. One geometry produces streets and usable green space. The other produces gaps and leftover land.

Setbacks may appear to be minor spacing rules. A few feet here or there at the front or side of a lot may seem harmless. But repeated across an entire block, those small separations accumulate into tens of thousands of square feet of wasted land, while simultaneously degrading both sides of the urban environment: the public street outside and the shared courtyard that might otherwise exist within.

Why do we even have setbacks?

What’s striking about setbacks is that they were not originally designed with apartment buildings—or even with a coherent theory of urban form—in mind. A recent academic study tracing the evolution of setback regulations shows that they emerged gradually during the nineteenth century as cities confronted the public health crises produced by rapid industrial urbanization. Concerns about fire, overcrowding, light, and ventilation led planners and reformers to experiment with ways of introducing more air and daylight into dense neighborhoods. In the United States, one of the tools that emerged from this period was the setback: front, side, and rear spacing requirements intended to create small pockets of open space around buildings so that light and air could reach interior rooms. The idea was straightforward and seemingly sensible: if buildings stood farther apart, ventilation would improve and disease would spread less easily. These rules often appeared first in fire codes, subdivision regulations, and street-widening provisions long before they were absorbed into the zoning systems that now govern most American cities.

European planners confronted the same nineteenth-century public health concerns, but they often pursued a very different strategy. Rather than pushing buildings away from the street and from one another, many European cities insisted on strict build-to lines along the front and sides of lots so that buildings would continue to define the street edge. At the same time, they imposed strong requirements for light and ventilation inside the block itself, often requiring that every habitable room have a window and limiting buildings to roughly half the area of the lot. The result was a distinctive architectural response: buildings rose directly along the street but wrapped around interior courtyards that supplied light and air. In Paris, regulations that followed Haussmann’s nineteenth-century reconstruction and were formalized in the 1902 building code controlled height, lot coverage, and courtyard dimensions while allowing buildings to align with the street. In Vienna’s Gründerzeit districts, similar rules produced tall perimeter buildings that sometimes extended narrow wings into the courtyard to bring daylight deeper into the structure.

Both American and European planners were therefore trying to solve the same problem: how to bring light and air into dense cities. But the regulatory tools they chose pushed urban development in very different directions. American rules increasingly created space around buildings, separating structures from the street and from one another. European rules created space inside blocks, concentrating buildings along the perimeter while reserving the interior for courtyards. Over time these two approaches produced dramatically different urban geometries. One gradually weakened the street wall and dispersed buildings across the lot, while the other preserved the street edge and organized urban life around shared interior courtyards.

Housing Reform Is Moving, But the Form Debate Isn’t

In recent years, housing reform debates in the United States have focused on a single central question: how many homes are allowed on a parcel of land. Across the country, states and cities are beginning to loosen long-standing restrictions on unit counts, allowing duplexes, fourplexes, and small multifamily buildings in places where they were once prohibited. These reforms represent an important shift away from the rigid single-family zoning regimes that dominated the late twentieth century. Yet even as the rules governing unit counts begin to change, the spatial constraint often remains in place. The form of the building itself may still make those units difficult—or even impossible—to construct.

Courtyard blocks illustrate this problem clearly. This form depends on relatively wide and shallow buildings that sit along the edges of lots and blocks, often sharing side party walls so that the street remains defined while the interior of the block becomes a courtyard. When zoning codes require significant front and side setbacks, however, this geometry cannot emerge. Buildings are pushed inward, away from property lines, and the shallow perimeter structure that courtyard housing requires becomes impossible to achieve. In other words, it is entirely possible to legalize a fourplex while still making a courtyard building impossible to build.

This is why setback reform may be one of the next critical steps in housing policy. Several states have already begun to move in this direction, as legislators recognize that rigid setback rules can limit housing supply just as effectively as density caps. Virginia, Michigan, and Idaho all have active legislation aimed at limiting or reforming setback requirements for small multifamily housing. The momentum is real, even if the conversation remains focused primarily on density rather than building form.
Virginia HB 1212 →
https://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/knowledge-hub/news/on-zoning-and-housing-states-continue-to-take-charge/

Indiana’s HB1001 similarly restricts certain setback, density, and bulk standards on qualifying parcels:
https://www.housingaffordabilityinstitute.org/housing-reform-february-202/

These efforts represent an important shift. For decades, setbacks have been treated as neutral technical rules rather than as powerful determinants of urban form. That assumption is beginning to change. Yet even here an important conversation remains largely absent: relaxing setback rules is only the first step. Cities must also rebuild a design culture capable of using the spatial possibilities that those reforms create.

For most of the twentieth century, American architecture and development practice has been organized around detached buildings separated by open space. As a result, much of the practical knowledge required to design buildings that share party walls, sit directly on property lines, and organize light and air through courtyards rather than side yards has gradually faded from everyday practice. I talked to a developer in Houston last month who shared with me that builders in the area have concept of a party wall; they literally have no knowledge of how to build buildings to the property lines. So, reforming the rules alone will not automatically restore the building traditions that once produced courtyard blocks. Developers, architects, and builders will need to rediscover the techniques that made these forms work: party walls, zero-lot-line construction, shallow building wings, and courtyard-based strategies for light and ventilation.

Courtyard Urbanist is actively working with architects, builders, and other building professionals to help rebuild this knowledge. Together we are developing new building plans, design templates, and construction guidelines that translate the geometry of courtyard blocks into practical tools that owners and small developers can use on real lots. The goal is not simply to change zoning rules, but to make it easier for people who want to build courtyard housing to do so—providing clear design strategies for working with zero-lot-line buildings, party walls, and courtyard-based layouts that bring light, air, and shared space back into the center of the block. Email us at projects@courtyardurbanist.com if you would like to learn more about this!

The next frontier

Over the past several years, much of the housing reform conversation in the United States has focused on a straightforward question: how can we legalize more homes? That work has been important, and in many places it is beginning to change long-standing zoning rules that restricted neighborhoods to a narrow set of housing types. Cities and states are slowly reopening the door to duplexes, fourplexes, and small multifamily buildings in places where they had effectively been banned for decades. But the next frontier in housing reform may turn out to be a matter of legalizing the building forms that make urban neighborhoods function well in the first place.

The courtyard block is one of those forms. For centuries it has provided a simple and durable way of organizing dense urban housing, placing buildings along the edges of blocks so that the street remains clearly defined while shared courtyards occupy the interior. This arrangement concentrates urban life where it belongs—along the street edge—while giving residents access to quiet and protected green space inside the block. Yet in much of the United States today, the courtyard block is still technically illegal. Not because anyone ever banned courtyards as such, but because a seemingly minor rule makes the geometry required for them almost impossible to achieve. That rule is the setback.

If setback rules are affecting a project you’re working on — or if you’ve run into them in your own city — leave a reply.

The regulatory map for courtyard urbanism is still being drawn.

To family-friendly courtyards in America,

Alicia Pederson
Courtyard Urbanist

Further Resources

“Shaping suburbia: the one-and-a-half-century evolution of setback regulations in American neighbourhood development” — peer-reviewed, published February 2026 → https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13574809.2026.2619113 (paywalled — note that in the newsletter)

Smart Growth America — 2026 state zoning reform roundup → https://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/knowledge-hub/news/on-zoning-and-housing-states-continue-to-take-charge/

Housing Affordability Institute — State Legislatures and Housing Reform, February 2026 → https://www.housingaffordabilityinstitute.org/housing-reform-february-202/

Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Courtyard Urbanism Enthusiast

A lot happened in February.

• 390–9 — House vote on the federal Housing for the 21st Century Act

• $250M — Capital in the Illinois BUILD Plan, if it passes.

• 1.22M — Additional homes enabled by LIHTC expansion.

• 0.4% — The share of Edmonton RS-zoned lots that drove a record housing output.

On February 18, Governor Pritzker delivered something I did not expect to hear from an Illinois politician: a direct, substantive attack on single-family zoning. His Building Up Illinois Developments (BUILD) plan is the most significant state-level housing reform the Midwest has seen in a long time. Beyond Illinois, the federal Housing for the 21st Century Act passed the House 390–9. And the One Big Beautiful Bill, signed into law last summer, permanently expanded the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit.

The regulatory and financial environment for missing middle housing is better today than it has been in decades.

This month’s Market Brief covers:

• The Big Picture — What February’s headline developments mean for courtyard-scale projects specifically

• Policy Wins & Losses — Illinois BUILD, the federal housing bill, LIHTC expansion, Edmonton’s record results, and two things on the watch list

• Projects in the Pipeline — California Forever’s labor deal, Chicago’s Missing Middle Initiative, and Broadway Cottage Courtyard

• Funding & Financing Landscape — The $100M infrastructure provision I keep coming back to, where construction lending actually stands, and what it means for courtyard projects right now (Chronicle #2 subscribers: this is the section I teased in the PS)

• CU Project Updates — Bennet Development in Ogden, our design partnership with Living Process, Carlton County, MN, and Brooklyn Center, MN

• Opportunity Alerts — Four specific windows open right now

• What I’m Reading & Thinking About

Here’s the in-depth report:

Read more

Courtyard Urbanism Is Moving From Theory to Projects

A few weeks ago, a developer in the Mountain West reached out about courtyard blocks.

They are overseeing a massive 1,000-acre master-planned community—a project expected to deliver roughly 3,000 homes adjacent to a major new advanced manufacturing and aerospace hub.

They had been following the conversation about courtyard urbanism online and wanted to talk about what courtyard blocks could look like in this context.

We spent an hour talking through the vision and implementation. We discussed how courtyard-oriented buildings could organize the residential “fabric” of the development, providing a sense of enclosure and community that standard suburban pods lack.

We looked at how these streets and courtyards could structure the neighborhood’s identity and—most importantly—what the development math looks like.

Courtyard housing is “missing middle” par excellence. At four to six stories, these buildings deliver meaningful density while avoiding the “high-rise tax”—structured parking, massive concrete systems, and complex elevator cores. In a rapidly growing tech and manufacturing corridor, they offer a family-friendly, financially feasible alternative to both sprawling subdivisions and anonymous podium apartments.

It was a great exploratory conversation that signals a shift: Developers are moving from “Why?” to “How?”

Minnesota, Twice

A few weeks later, two separate conversations opened up in Minnesota.

The first was with Carlton County, a rural community facing a challenge familiar to many Midwestern towns:

• Population decline
• Falling school enrollment
• Young families moving away

The county is exploring a federal planning grant and asked whether Courtyard Urbanist could serve as a technical partner—helping model housing scenarios that could attract and retain families.

One idea under discussion is testing redevelopment options around the Carlton Schools site using the Courtyard Urbanist platform.

What would it take to transform underutilized land into housing that actually works for families with kids?

The broader question is simple:

What if small Midwestern towns could build courtyard housing that fits their scale and character?

Around the same time, a second conversation began with Brooklyn Center, a suburb of Minneapolis.

The city is planning a major redevelopment initiative called Civic Square, and local officials are exploring whether courtyard block planning could help shape a walkable, family-friendly district as part of the larger master plan.

In early March, I met with Brooklyn Center’s Economic Development Manager and the architectural team working on the project.

The city has begun sharing technical materials—site maps, infrastructure considerations, early phase layouts—and we’ve shared our advisory framework for how courtyard planning could fit into the process.

Both conversations are still early! But they signal strong interest in courtyard urbanism, which is emerging across very different contexts—from rural counties to suburban redevelopment districts.

Regenerative Urbanism in the Pacific Northwest

Most recently, the conversation has moved west.

I am currently in talks with a developer in Salem, Oregon, regarding a vision for a new Innovation District.

This project isn’t just about adding housing. It’s about what the planners describe as “Neighborhoods as Living Systems”—walkable, nature-connected districts that transform underutilized industrial land.

The site is a strong candidate for a courtyard block pilot.

Because the district goals emphasize human-scale interaction and the power of proximity, courtyard prototypes offer a way to achieve urban density while preserving the private green sanctuaries that families crave.

We are currently exploring how the Courtyard Urbanist design catalogue could provide the residential DNA for this regenerative master plan.

The Pacific Northwest already has a long tradition of innovative wood-frame construction and missing-middle experimentation, which makes Salem a particularly promising place to test whether courtyard urbanism can be both ecologically restorative and financially viable.

The Design Work

Meanwhile, architect David Getzin and I have been building something I’ve wanted to create for a long time.

David is an architect in Pasadena and a longtime collaborator. Thanks to early support from our Founding Investors, we’ve begun translating my archive of courtyard buildings, floor plans, and block structures into something more systematic:

A flexible catalogue of adaptable building and block prototypes.

In many ways, the inspiration comes from Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language.

Alexander argued that great places are rarely invented from scratch. Instead, they emerge from recurring spatial patterns—relationships between buildings, streets, courtyards, and rooms that people have refined over centuries.

Courtyard urbanism is full of these patterns.

Across many European cities and historic neighborhoods, courtyard blocks consistently share spatial structures such as:

• Corners that anchor blocks
• Buildings arranged around shared gardens
• Entrances that transition between public streets and private homes
• Wings that extend into courtyards to increase density while preserving light

These patterns appear again and again because they work. They allow parents to do things like say, “Go play outside!” to young children.

What David and I are doing is translating those patterns into a contemporary design system.

Instead of designing one-off buildings for individual sites, we are developing a family of courtyard building types that can be configured for many different contexts.

The designs are being built in parametric form, allowing them to be adjusted quickly—testing densities, site layouts, and housing programs without starting from scratch.

In a sense, the project is a technological continuation of Alexander’s insight:

A pattern language for courtyard housing that can be applied to real development sites.

The goal is simple:

A working catalogue of courtyard buildings and blocks—based on proven urban patterns—that can be adapted to sites across many different cities.

The Tools and the Team

Alongside the design catalogue, the Courtyard Urbanist platform continues to evolve.

It allows us to drop courtyard buildings onto real parcels and instantly see how they affect density, layout, and site organization.

But good housing is not just about software.

It’s about people who have actually built cities.

To that end, I’ve begun formalizing a Courtyard Urbanist Advisory Council.

Rather than a static list of names, this will function as an active working group, helping peer-review our first three Block Templates to ensure they meet rigorous aesthetic, financial, and code-compliance standards.

Our collaborators include:

• Virginia Postrel — Author & Columnist
• Chuck Marohn — Strong Towns
• Nicholas Boys-Smith — Create Streets
• Shajay Bhooshan — Zaha Hadid Architects
• Lindsay Sturman — Livable Cities Initiative
• Kasey Klimes — Rhizome R&D
• Gabe Metcalf — California Forever
• Stephen Smith — Center for Building in North America
• Matt Hutchins — CAST Architecture
• Michael Lane — SPUR
• Laura Fingal-Surma — Urbanist Ventures

Out in the world

The conversation around courtyard urbanism continues to spread.

Last month, I joined the Hogtown podcast with Toronto developers Matt and Chris Spoke. We talked about missing-middle housing, block structure, and the challenge of delivering beautiful, family-friendly density in North American cities.

You can watch it here:

Courtyard urbanism is also popping up in unexpected places.

A recent Edinburgh Substack column argued for reviving fully enclosed courtyard blocks as a way to deliver beautiful density while maintaining strong street structure. The piece analyzes Marchmont’s historic courtyard blocks and makes the case that Edinburgh should be building more of them today.

Read it here:

BuildEdinburgh

Saturday column: In praise of 'fully-enclosed courtyard' housing

BY any standard, it has to be viewed as something of a social media phenomenon, especially when you consider her X (formerly Twitter) account is about the relatively esoteric subject of architecture…

Read more

2 months ago · 9 likes · Editor

What this means

For the past year, Courtyard Urbanist has mostly been advocacy—writing, speaking, and explaining.

But the pieces are clicking into place:

• The platform (Rapid site testing)

• The advisory council (Expert peer review)

• The design catalogue (Buildable architecture)

• The pilot leads (Real-world implementation)

We are building the infrastructure to move from essays to projects.

Pilot projects

One of the goals of Courtyard Urbanist this year is to collaborate on a small number of pilot courtyard block projects.

We’re especially interested in working with:

• Developers exploring courtyard housing on sites between 1 and 5 acres.

• Cities looking for family-friendly urban housing prototypes.

• Builders or modular manufacturers interested in repeatable courtyard systems.

If you’re working on a site where courtyard housing might make sense, I’d love to hear about it.

Please contact us here: projects@courtyardurbanist.com

To family-friendly American cities.

See you then,

Alicia Pederson

Courtyard Urbanist

PS - For our paying subscribers and founding members, we’ve just released our first Marketing Brief!

In it, I share a deep dive into:

• Key Policy Wins & Losses

• Projects in the Pipeline

• Funding & Financing Landscape

• Opportunity Alerts

• What I’m Reading & Thinking About

• And more!

Here’s a sneak peek:

Want access to February’s Marketing Brief (and more in-depth briefs every month?)

Upgrade to paid

In 2015, a Chinese developer hired a Dutch architect to build something almost unheard of in the United States: a true European-style courtyard block.

The result was The Oosten, a 216-unit condominium building occupying an entire city block in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

It is among the most serious attempt to build a courtyard block in modern America.

It’s also a luxury development, with studios starting around $1.2M and three-bedroom units selling for over $2M.

The Oosten shows that courtyard blocks can be built in the United States—but without smaller parcels they tend to become luxury megaprojects rather than diverse neighborhoods.

Today I want to break down the Oosten project:

• What the Oosten is

• What the Oosten gets right

• What it gets wrong

• What it means for American courtyard development

1. What the Oosten Is

The Oosten sits at 429 Kent Avenue in South Williamsburg, a few blocks from the East River waterfront.

Designed by Dutch architect Piet Boon and developed by XIN Development Group International (the U.S. arm of Chinese developer Xinyuan Real Estate), it was completed in 2015 on a site of roughly 94,700 square feet—just over two acres.

The building is eight stories tall and contains 216 residential condominium units. In total, it comprises approximately 500,000 gross square feet of construction area, including 343,228 square feet of sellable residential space, according to engineering firm Langan’s project records.

The building also includes roughly 10,000 square feet of ground-floor community facility space, currently occupied by Brooklyn Global Prep, a private school. This small institutional tenant demonstrates how ground-floor commercial or community facility space in courtyard block developments can accommodate neighborhood-serving institutional uses, even within predominantly residential projects.

Boon organized the building as a true perimeter block:

• The structure wraps the full perimeter of the lot

• It encloses a central courtyard shared by residents

The courtyard sits on a structural slab above parking, but it is designed and accessed almost like a ground-level yard.

This is meaningfully different from the typical American “Texas Donut” configuration, where apartments wrap around interior parking garages.

The financials suggest the project was highly profitable

XIN acquired the site for $54.2 million in 2012, while the condominium offering plan projected roughly $400 million in total sales.

With roughly 500,000 gross square feet of construction, and mid-rise New York building costs in the mid-2010s typically estimated at $350–$500 per square foot, total development costs likely fell somewhere between $175–$250 million.

Current listings show:

• One-bedrooms selling around $1,300 per square foot

• Three-bedrooms around $1,070 per square foot

These prices reflect both the building’s quality and the dramatic appreciation of Williamsburg real estate over the past decade.

By any estimate, the Oosten was a financially successful luxury development.

2. What the Oosten Gets Right

Let me be clear: The Oosten is a real accomplishment in urban form that demonstrates the tremendous value of perimeter block buildings.

The building creates a clear distinction between:

• the public realm — Kent Avenue, the street, the city

• the private realm — the shared courtyard interior

This is the fundamental spatial move that makes European courtyard blocks so livable, and it is rare in American multifamily construction.

Most American apartment buildings are either:

• Towers in open space (no enclosure, no protected interior), or

• Corridor buildings with single-loaded or double-loaded layouts facing one direction.

The Oosten gives residents something American apartments rarely offer:

• A front door on the street

• A private outdoor world behind them

A diverse unit mix

The building also accommodates households of very different sizes.

Piet Boon designed a wide range of apartments—from compact one-bedrooms to large five-bedroom duplexes suitable for families.

Many units have dual-aspect layouts, with windows facing both the public street and the private courtyard.

These are what I call “lives-like-a-house” units:

• dual orientation

• excellent natural light

• rooms that feel properly proportioned rather than compressed along a corridor

The five-bedroom duplex plans circulating online are frankly extraordinary—large front-to-back homes that look nothing like typical American apartment units.

Serious urban density without towers

The building’s floor area ratio (FAR) of 3.62 on a two-acre site is also notable.

That’s impressive urban density, comparable to the mid-rise courtyard blocks found in cities like Copenhagen—achieved without towers and without eliminating private outdoor space.

3. What the Oosten Gets Wrong

Despite its strengths, the Oosten also demonstrates the drawbacks of monolithic megadevelopment.

The project was:

• developed by one developer

• designed by one architect

• built all at once across an entire block

The result is architectural monotony, where the facades are competent but relentlessly uniform.

That is not how the courtyard blocks that inspire projects like this were historically produced.

In cities like Berlin, Prague, or Stockholm, a perimeter block was rarely conceived as a single project.

Instead, blocks emerged incrementally:

• different developers

• different architects

• different buildings

• often built across decades

Each building has its own façade, stair configuration, floor plate, and ownership structure.

The coherence of the block comes from shared urban rules:

• build to the lot line

• maintain the street wall

• roughly match cornice heights

Variety naturally emerges within these constraints.

This decentralized process produces the visual richness that makes historic European streets so compelling.

The Oosten gives you one architectural vision executed at block scale.

It’s a good vision—but it’s still just one.

A single luxury price bracket

Because the Oosten is a single condominium development, everything is bundled into one financial structure.

The pool, gym, concierge, and other amenities are baked directly into the cost of every unit.

At roughly $1,000–$1,300 per square foot, the building functions as a single luxury housing product.

Historic courtyard blocks were rarely structured this way.

In cities like Berlin or Copenhagen, the same block often contains:

• condominiums

• rentals

• large family apartments

• smaller walk-up units

This diversity emerges because the block is composed of many buildings rather than one.

Fragmentation allows for:

• different price points

• different ownership models

• different household types

The Oosten has a wide range of unit sizes, but they all sit inside the same luxury pricing structure.

A courtyard built like an amenity deck

The courtyard itself is attractive, but its programming reflects a luxury development model and the reality that it sits above structured parking.

Traditional courtyard interiors are usually at ground level (deep, permeable surface) and function more like neighborhood backyards.

You typically see:

• playgrounds

• sandboxes

• bike sheds

• garden plots

• mature trees

• open space where children can play while adults watch from nearby windows

Play infrastructure, garden plots, and bike sheds are all signs that the courtyard is intended to be used by residents across the life cycle. Kids, bike commuters, gardeners.

Mature trees signal that there is not a $5M parking garage underneath the courtyard.

So, while the Oosten proves American developers can build courtyard blocks again, it does not yet demonstrate how to build them in the way that historically made them so socially and economically successful.

4. What This Means for American Courtyard Development

The Oosten is not a failure. In many ways, it is the most important modern American courtyard precedent we have.

But it also illustrates how contemporary development conditions can transform a flexible housing form into a monolithic luxury product.

Several structural factors push projects in that direction:

• large development parcels

• single-developer delivery

• bundled luxury amenities

• and, at the time the project was approved, significant parking requirements

When the Oosten was approved, Williamsburg zoning required parking for roughly 40% of units.

For a project of this scale, that effectively meant building an underground garage—one of the most expensive elements of New York construction.

Those costs flow directly into apartment prices.

Historic European courtyard blocks rarely carried that burden.
Most were built before widespread car ownership and had no structured parking at all.

Parking rules in New York have since changed, but the Oosten reflects the regulatory environment of its time.

The deeper issue, however, is development structure.

In cities like Prague, Copenhagen, and Berlin, courtyard blocks emerged incrementally:

• multiple parcels

• multiple developers

• multiple buildings

That process naturally produced:

• architectural variety

• ownership diversity

• a range of housing types

In modern American development, a single developer often builds the entire block at once.

When one entity carries all the risk on expensive urban land, the result is usually luxury housing.

How cities could make courtyard blocks work again

Cities that want real courtyard urbanism—not just luxury courtyard buildings—need to adjust the rules.

That includes:

• subdividing large blocks into smaller parcels

• reducing structural costs through tools like parking reform

• permitting zero lot line buildings up to 6-8 stories

Courtyard blocks can work in the American regulatory environment.

The next step is recovering the incremental development model that historically made them architecturally diverse and widely attainable.

Final Grade: B+

If I had to give the Oosten a grade, it would be B+.

It proves that courtyard blocks are physically and financially viable in the American development environment.

Piet Boon’s design is serious, and the dual-aspect units are genuinely excellent.

What keeps it out of the A range is:

• limited economic and architectural diversity

• the absence of incremental development structure

• the lack of family-compatible courtyard programming

For those of us trying to revive courtyard urbanism in the United States, the Oosten is an important precedent.

But it is still a luxury product serving one narrow slice of the market on one block in one very expensive city.

For courtyard urbanism to fulfill its potential—to keep families in cities and produce neighborhoods where people of different incomes and life stages can live together—we need a different development model.

We need:

• many builders

• many buildings

• many price points

• and many small acts of construction adding up to something coherent

The challenge now is figuring out how to build courtyard blocks the way they were historically built:

incrementally, by many builders, across many parcels.

To family-friendly courtyards in America,

Alicia Pederson
Courtyard Urbanist

On Wednesday, Governor Pritzker stood before the Illinois General Assembly and proposed a sweeping overhaul of local zoning power to make it easier to build housing. Hurray!

The plan is called BUILD—Building Up Illinois Developments. It targets the local rules that have made it nearly impossible to build anything other than single-family homes in most Illinois neighborhoods. It would ban parking minimums on middle housing, legalize granny flats and backyard cottages statewide, modernize building codes, and put $250 million toward getting new housing off the ground.

Within hours of the speech, Representative Kam Buckner filed House Bill 5626—the actual bill that would turn BUILD into law. It’s over 40 pages long, and according to Elrod Friedman, a municipal law firm that tracks this kind of legislation closely, “...it’s the biggest challenge to local zoning authority in Illinois since the state established home rule power in 1970.”

For those of us working to bring courtyard blocks to American cities, this is real progress. But it’s still only one brick in a larger barrier wall. Let us discuss what the bill accomplishes and where it falls short.

“Attached courtyard housing” is actually named in the bill, so that’s great!

HB 5626 creates a new legal category called “Middle Housing”—everything between a single-family home and a large apartment complex. Duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, townhouses, cottage clusters, and “attached courtyard housing.”

That’s courtyard urbanism, written into Illinois state legislation by name!

Under the bill, local governments would have to allow Middle Housing anywhere single-family homes are currently allowed. No special permits. No review boards. No hearings where a handful of neighbors can kill a project. The bill uses a sliding scale—smaller lots can hold a few units, larger lots up to eight—but the main theme of the bill is very simple: if you can build a house on a lot, you should be able to build a small apartment building too.

This matters because courtyard blocks are made up of exactly these kinds of buildings—small, multi-unit structures lining a block perimeter. HB 5626 wouldn’t legalize a full 20-unit courtyard building on its own, but it would make the individual building blocks of courtyard neighborhoods much easier to get started.

Parking reform is in the bill, mercifully

If you’ve ever wondered why new apartment buildings look the way they do (wrapped around a parking garage, set back from the street, no ground-floor shops) parking mandates are a big part of the answer.

When cities require one or two parking spaces per apartment, it eats up the land and money that could go toward housing, shops, or green space. A single structured parking space can add $30,000 to $60,000 to a unit’s cost. That’s not a typo. Parking requirements make our built environment ugly and expensive, and may be the main villain in the sad story of American urbanism.

HB 5626 would impose strict limits on how much parking local governments can require, and it would eliminate parking minimums entirely for small developments and buildings near transit. Chicago already took this step in 2025. This bill would extend it statewide.

$250 million for the invisible costs that sink small projects.

Before anyone builds anything, a site needs sewers, stormwater systems, utility hookups, and road access. Big developers absorb these costs across hundreds of units. A small developer building eight apartments on one lot (the kind of builder courtyard blocks need) often can’t afford it.

BUILD dedicates $250 million to site preparation grants, middle housing construction, and first-time homebuyer assistance. The site prep funding is modeled after an existing state program for industrial land. Applying the same idea to housing could unlock neighborhoods where courtyard development is currently too expensive to even start.

Three provisions in the bill that haven’t gotten enough attention.

Single-stair construction. This is the one that surprised me. HB 5626 would let developers build multi-family buildings with a single stairway instead of the two staircases most U.S. codes require. Why does this matter? The two-staircase rule forces buildings to be wide and deep—exactly the opposite of the narrow, shallow buildings that create courtyard blocks. Nineteen states are already moving on single-stair reform. If this bill passes, Illinois joins them.

Hard deadlines on plan review. The bill gives local governments strict timelines for reviewing plans and inspecting buildings. Miss the deadline? The applicant can hire a private inspector, and the municipality has to accept the results. This targets one of the quietest ways local governments kill projects: by simply not processing them.

Standardized fees. Right now, the fees local governments charge developers vary wildly from town to town. HB 5626 would require uniform formulas statewide, so the cost of building the same project doesn’t double just because you crossed a municipal border.

And one overarching rule worth knowing: every provision in the bill says local governments can be more permissive than the state standards, but not more restrictive.

The opposition has difficult position of defending deceleration and decline

The Illinois Municipal League warned against state involvement in zoning, and House Republicans called it overreach. That was predictable. It’s the same response seen in Colorado, Washington, and California.

But this is ultimately an argument for deceleration and decline. It asks Illinois to accept fewer homes, fewer families, and less growth. This is an approach unlikely to find support in a state where there is broad demand for policies that expand housing and opportunity.

Illinois is short roughly 142,000 homes. That shortage is already driving up costs and pushing families out. If HB 5626 passes, it takes effect January 1, 2027, with eight months for local governments to comply before state standards apply.

What’s still missing: elevator codes!

The single-stair provision was a welcome surprise. But there’s one major barrier left that HB 5626 doesn’t touch: elevator rules.

Federal law currently requires elevators in multifamily buildings to be large enough to fit a stretcher—which makes them so expensive that many small builders skip the elevator entirely. The result: upper floors in small buildings are inaccessible. That’s a problem for families with strollers, older residents, and anyone with a disability.

Washington State is leading the way with a bill that would allow smaller, wheelchair-accessible elevators in buildings of six stories or fewer. And a bipartisan group in Congress is pushing to reform the federal standards so states can adopt this kind of common-sense fix without violating the Fair Housing Act.

Without elevator reform, HB 5626 gets us further than I expected—zoning, parking, single-stair, inspection timelines—but we still can’t build the fully accessible courtyard buildings we need at a price point small developers can handle.

What comes next

BUILD is the proposal. HB 5626 is the bill. The spring legislative session will determine whether it survives, gets watered down, or stalls. I’ll be tracking it closely and writing about what it means for courtyard development as the details take shape.

Between HB 5626, single-stair reform spreading across the country, and the federal elevator push, this is one of the more promising stretches for courtyard urbanism that I’ve seen since I started this work. The policy conversation is finally catching up to the design conversation—and that’s worth paying attention to.

→ Want to go deeper with me? I’ll be releasing the Courtyard Urbanist Monthly Market Brief soon, covering who’s actually moving on courtyard projects, where policy windows like BUILD are opening, and what our Advisory Council and investor partners are working on behind the scenes. Paid subscribers get this exclusive report every month.

You’ll also get access to Quarterly Insider Roundtables—live video calls where you get behind-the-scenes looks at active courtyard projects, workshop design questions in real time, and connect directly with the developers, planners, and architects building this movement. Think of it as your seat at the table.

If BUILD or this bill raises questions for you—about your city, your project, or what courtyard development could look like where you live—leave a reply. I’d love to hear from you.

To family-friendly courtyards in America!

See you then,

Alicia Pederson

Courtyard Urbanist

****Sign the letter to congressional leaders here****

If you’ve traveled much in Europe, you know that their small multifamily buildings have practical, wheelchair-accessible elevators that are unknown in the US. Many of these are VERY old buildings that have been retrofitted with elevators.

Why do small apartment buildings in the United States not have elevators?

If you walk through almost any prewar neighborhood in Chicago, you’ll notice the pattern immediately. Three-story buildings. Four-story buildings. Beautiful, compact urban housing that doesn’t have elevators.

For the disabled, for parents with small children, for seniors, negotiating multiple flights of stairs without an elevator is a serious life constraint.

It means someone who uses a wheelchair cannot live there. It means seniors are eventually forced to move out of homes they love. It means parents carry strollers up flights of stairs.

And it seemed strange, because in other countries, buildings like these often do have elevators.

So I dug deeper, got to read Stephen Smith’s fantastic work on the subject, and learned that the issue wasn’t about technology or the market but policy.

How good intentions produced the wrong outcome

In the United States, the Fair Housing Amendments Act quite rightly requires multifamily housing to be accessible.

But over time, the law has been interpreted in a way that effectively requires very large elevators—much larger than what is commonly used in Europe and other developed countries.

These elevators are excellent. They accommodate wheelchairs comfortably.

But they are also expensive and spatially demanding. They require larger shafts, larger overruns, and more building area devoted to circulation instead of housing.

And that this creates a situation where developers of small and mid-rise buildings often decide not to include an elevator at all. Not because tenants or buyers don’t want elevators! But because the specific type of elevator the regulatory environment expects makes the building financially or physically infeasible.

So, perversely, the Fair Housing Amendment Act has been interpreted in a way that has decreased building accessibility.

What Europe gets right

In much of Europe, smaller elevators are standard. They are fully usable by wheelchair users. They are safe and dignified.

And because they are smaller and less expensive, they get built everywhere.

Five-story buildings have elevators. Six-story buildings have elevators. Ordinary apartment buildings include them as a matter of course.

Accessibility is not reserved for luxury buildings.

This is one of the reasons European cities are easier places to have families and age in place. People don’t have to leave their neighborhoods just because they have a baby and stroller or because their mobility changes.

The small multifamily buildings work for all ages and abilities.

The reform that could enable millions of accessible homes

Recently, I’ve been talking to Stephen Smith of the Center for Building in North America about possible congressional fix (read his work—he is the “undisputed king of elevator reform” in North America).

Stephen explains that Congress can clarify that small and mid-rise apartment buildings are allowed to use smaller—but still fully wheelchair-accessible—elevators.

This would expand accessibility tremendously.

It would mean that thousands of buildings that currently omit elevators would include them.

It would also lower housing costs, improve housing quality, and make it easier to build the kinds of urban housing that America desperately needs.

Sometimes, the most powerful reforms are not massive new programs, but small corrections that allow good things to happen again.

This is a rare moment when Congress can act

Congress is currently working on major housing legislation, and this presents a WONDERFUL opportunity to address this problem now.

We’ve drafted a letter urging congressional leadership to include this clarification.

You can read it here:
https://action.courtyardurbanist.com/elevator

If you care about housing affordability, accessibility, or the future of walkable urban neighborhoods, I encourage you to sign.

This is personal for many people—including future versions of ourselves

Elevator access isn’t just about disability in the abstract.

It’s about aging and injury.

It’s about pregnancy and parents with strollers.

It’s about whether the home you live in today can still work for you tomorrow.

Today, Courtyard Urbanist is announcing the formation of its Advisory Council — along with the first group of Founding Investors backing the Courtyard Urbanism initiative.

We will introduce individual Council members in the coming weeks, so watch this space.

This marks the next step in a coordinated effort to bring dense, multi-generational, family-supportive urban housing to the United States — and to improve the physical form of American cities for the next century.

The Council brings together developers, policymakers, architects, authors, and technologists who recognize both the scale of the opportunity and the urgency of the moment.

Together, we are working to make courtyard urbanism legal, financeable, and buildable in the United States.

Our goal is to Americanize and advance a time-tested model that has shaped some of the most celebrated neighborhoods in cities such as Copenhagen, Paris, Prague, and Rome.

We are creating the conditions for multifamily housing (the apartment or condo building, the co-op, the palazzo, a baugruppen, etc.) that surpasses the expectations of modern American families while reviving the walkable, mixed-use, amenity-rich neighborhoods that make cities fantastic.

Alongside the Council, an initial group of Founding Investors has accepted an invitation to support this work at its earliest stage.

They share the conviction that courtyard housing represents one of the most important and overlooked opportunities in American real estate — and that now is the moment to lay the groundwork.

We are expanding this group carefully to create the runway needed to develop the design, legal, and financial frameworks that will allow this housing to scale.

The Advisory Council and the Founding Investors are steps toward consolidating both dimensions of Courtyard Urbanist (the public conversation and real-world implementation) and progress on both tracks will be shared over time.

Courtyard urbanism is ultimately a project to make American cities work better for households of all ages, stages, and incomes by increasing the supply of small multifamily buildings with shared outdoor space.

The component building is simple and repeatable:

• 4–6 stories
• Single central stair and compact elevator
• A range of unit sizes, including substantial family housing
• Active ground floors with discreetly integrated parking
• A shared interior courtyard — secure, green, and communal

This is the fundamental building block of walkable, multigenerational, durably prosperous urban neighborhoods.

We are at the beginning of assembling the coalition that will make this possible in American cities.

If you are a builder, policymaker, or investor who wants to be part of this effort, reach out.

Chronicle #1

Earlier this month, I spent a weekend in Los Angeles at The Festival of Progressive Abundance, surrounded by people who are, unbelievably, interested in building cities and not just debating them.

The Festival of Progressive Abundance, hosted by the indefatigable Steve Boyle, brought together an unusual crowd: urbanists, housing advocates, and members of Congress alongside the founder of California Forever, The American Housing Corporation, Monumental Labs, and Urbanist Ventures.

City builders with capital, ambition, and many shared goals with the abundance and progressive crowd.

Refreshingly, these people were mostly agnostic about ideology, being much more motivated by life-changing visions and extreme competence. These were cheerful, forward-looking, and technically serious characters. And the mood was pragmatic optimism: we can build again, and what we build will be better than what came before us (such as site of the festival, Hollywood Park, a massive 300-acre, $5 billion+ development and sports/entertainment complex with abundant parking but insufficient residential).

The Urbanism Vibe Shift

In the past year, technology and capital have begun aligning around large-scale urbanist projects in a way that signals tremendous new things on the horizon:

• Jan Sramek is building California Forever—the first major new walkable city in America since the mid-20th century—planned for up to 400,000 people on 60,000 acres between San Francisco and Sacramento, integrating manufacturing, housing, and public realm from the start. Crucially, it proposes to embed courtyard urbanism into its fabric, reintroducing a typology—perimeter blocks with shared interior green space—that North American urbanism has historically lacked at scale, making the project potentially significant not just as a new city, but as a structural shift in American urban form. (I made this case during the panel discussion on California Forever on Saturday.)
  

• Bobby Fijan just launched The American Housing Corporation. Factory-made rowhouses designed for families, targeting around $750,000 in Austin. His thesis is straightforward: build housing in places where young people already live, so they can stay, have kids, and put down roots. The exact housing type that largely disappeared from American cities.

• Micah Springut’s Monumental Labs is bringing back stone construction using robots and AI to cut costs up to 90%. The material that made European cities beautiful and durable for centuries, now economically competitive with modern materials.
  

• Laura Fingal-Surma funds urbanist startups (such as American Housing Corporation and Swyft Cities, the urban gondola company) through Urbanist Ventures.

  

So what is really remarkable is that these actors are going beyond policy work (which is also necessary and good), and building alternatives to the current development paradigm.

Why this matters for Courtyard Urbanism

Jason Crawford gave a compelling talk placing the progressive movement in historical context—especially its evolving situationship with technology and science. He argued that American progressivism was once defined by its ability to build at civilizational scale: dams under FDR, the moon landing under JFK, the Panama Canal under Teddy Roosevelt. But beginning in the mid-20th century, growth slowed and we lost our public ambitions. became a country that struggles to build housing, transit, or major infrastructure. Progressives, he suggested, retained their commitment to science but grew wary of technology and economic growth. His case was that progressive values actually require all three—and that we must consciously reunite them.

His talk reminded me that technology is not an end in itself, but requires moral direction. Progressive values—human flourishing, shared prosperity, long-term stewardship—provide that orientation. Technology is not inherently good; it becomes good when it is deployed toward outcomes that genuinely improve society. That is where our work on courtyard urbanism fits. The conversation is shifting from “why” to “how,” from advocacy to execution. The real question is whether we will use our knowledge, capital, and technical capacity to build environments where families thrive, communities endure, and cities grow with purpose.

What I learned

Saturday evening, I was on a panel about California Forever. I argued that Jan’s project matters because it shows solutions to American cities’ failure to accommodate families. It’s also an opportunity to debut courtyard urbanism in North America at scale. Not as retrofit infill, but as intentional city design from the start.

On Sunday’s panel, Lindsay Sturman with Livable Communities Initiative (LCI) and I presented LCI’s vision for Los Angeles: 3-5 story buildings with retail below and housing above, built along commercial corridors. Creating 15-minute neighborhoods where families can walk to daily needs. Developers and architects weighed in on financing, regulatory feasibility, and market demand for walkable neighborhoods.

The school enrollment signal

Throughout the festival, people kept mentioning declining school enrollment. City leaders, developers, urbanist organizers are all worried about this sobering trend.

Elementary schools are closing because families keep leaving for the suburbs. The tax base is eroding. Neighborhoods are aging out.

This is why courtyard urbanism is such an important and beautiful solution, and cannot be dismissed as a niche aesthetic preference. Courtyard urbanism provides infrastructure for keeping cities economically viable.

Cities need families. Not just for schools, but for stable neighborhoods, for street life, for the kind of multi-generational community that makes cities function. When families concentrate in suburban counties, cities lose the population base needed to sustain services, maintain stable school enrollment, and keep public spaces safe.

Courtyard blocks offer exactly what families need—spacious apartments, private outdoor space, walkability, and urban convenience. The functional equivalent of a big house with a yard, but in the dense city center with all its fantastic energy and amenities.

The misconceptions holding us back

The same doubts kept surfacing and are always worth addressing directly.

“Courtyard blocks require mega-developments.”

No.

True courtyard blocks are formed by 10-20 individual small-lot buildings, not one massive structure. A 20,000 square foot building might cost $4-6 million—achievable for local developers, community groups, even homeowner-developers. Not just national firms with hundred-million-dollar war chests.

“Dense housing can’t accommodate families.”

Look at Copenhagen, Prague, Berlin. Courtyard apartments with dual-aspect units offer better natural light and ventilation than American row houses or corridor buildings. The wide, shallow building form creates generous room layouts. The private courtyard gives kids safe outdoor space. It works. It’s worked for hundreds (thousands—going back to Ancient Rome!) of years.

“Mixed-use doesn’t pencil in America.”

Yet in Europe’s most valuable districts and America’s most successful urban neighborhoods, mixed-use is the norm. Yes, the challenge is real. We lack Europe’s tradition of small business support. But the economic benefits are demonstrable. Higher tax revenues, lower infrastructure costs, and walkable convenience that commands premium prices.

“American codes make courtyard blocks illegal.”

Most European courtyard buildings have dual egress. They’re code-compliant. The real barriers are zoning—setbacks, height limits, use restrictions—and financing. Lenders hesitate over unfamiliar typologies. The solution exists: Planned Unit Developments and master planning that allow flexibility. Portland and Arlington have already done this successfully.

“Courtyard urbanism only works for wealthy professionals.”

Traditional courtyard blocks naturally create mixed-income communities. Larger units on lower floors command premium prices. Upper-level walk-ups remain affordable. Because they share land and infrastructure costs, small units stay naturally low-cost without formal subsidy. This is how European cities achieved income diversity for centuries.

What I am taking from Los Angeles

The vanguard is building.

Hurray, capital is no longer allergic to urbanism! Technology is reducing construction constraints. Developers are asking execution-level questions.

The conversation has moved A LOT.

Courtyard blocks belong inside this shift, and not as boutique infill, but as foundational city-building fabric.

Next week’s newsletter will address regulatory mechanics. How zoning, underwriting, and building codes actually interact with courtyard development — using real examples.

We are entering a build decade and can see glimpses of New American Urbanism that is rich in courtyard blocks.

Ciao! A presto!

Alicia Pederson
Courtyard Urbanist
Lincoln Square, Chicago

A Missing Middle Model for Family-Friendly Cities

Courtyard Urbanism revives a time-tested urban form—perimeter blocks organized around shared interior courtyards—and adapts it to contemporary American cities. The result is neighborhoods that are dense but humane, urban but quiet, and capable of supporting families at scale.

Rather than isolated buildings or mega-blocks, courtyard urbanism produces complete blocks: fine-grained, walkable, and socially legible

How It Works

Each city block is built as a perimeter of small, shallow buildings—apartments, rowhouses, and mixed-use structures—enclosing a shared interior courtyard.

• Buildings face the street, reinforcing active, safe public realms

• Courtyards provide protected, green, semi-private outdoor space

• Central stair cores maintain human scale

• Ownership and construction can be distributed across many actors

This form supports density without high-rises. It balances urban amenities and green space.

Why Courtyards Matter

Courtyards offer families the suburban backyard in the walkable, amenity-rich city center:

They provide:

• Safe outdoor play space for children

• Daily social contact across generations

• Light, air, and greenery in compact neighborhoods

• Quiet refuge from traffic and noise

• Eyes-on-the-space safety

They allow families to live urban lives without sacrificing the benefits traditionally associated with suburbs.

Density Without Displacement

Courtyard Urbanism delivers “missing middle” density—typically 3–6 stories—capable of supporting transit, schools, and local retail, while remaining compatible with existing neighborhoods.

Because buildings are:

• Small and repeatable

• Built incrementally

• Suitable for local builders and unions

growth can occur faster, cheaper, and with broader participation, avoiding the boom-and-bust dynamics of megaprojects.

A Proven Global Model, Re-Americanized

Courtyard blocks have shaped some of the world’s most loved cities—Barcelona, Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen—producing neighborhoods that remain desirable, adaptable, and socially mixed over centuries.

Courtyard Urbanism translates this pattern into:

• American construction systems

• American family needs

• American political and regulatory realities

It is not nostalgia—it is applied urban intelligence.

The Outcome

Courtyard Urbanism creates neighborhoods that are:

• Family-friendly without being car-dependent

• Dense without being alienating

• Social without being exclusive

• Urban without being anti-family

It is a blueprint for the next generation of American neighborhoods—built faster, lived better, and designed to last.

.

Hi friends,

We’re thrilled to share that Courtyard Urbanism—and the ideas you’ve helped champion—were recently featured in Vox! Read the article here

Your engagement over the past weeks has helped raise visibility for the movement and sparked a real conversation about housing, design, and the aesthetics of urban form. Thank you for reading, commenting, sharing, and making this a community effort!

As a next step, we’re inviting you to be beta testers of Courtyard Composer, developed collaboratively by Courtyard Urbanist and Treasury. This early release will shape how the tool evolves, and your input is critical. We are particularly interested in feedback from architects, planners, and design technologists, so please do be in touch if that’s you.

Log in:

• User: the email you signed up with

• Pass: [firstname]-courtyard

  • Example: lucyj@gmail.com → pass: lucy-courtyard

What’s available now:

• Imagine mode: generate images using the Courtyard Urbanist type kit

• Gallery mode: explore and share images from the community

Access note: Design and Map modes are currently blocked; professionals can request early access.

Additional info & community links:

• Feedback tool: in-app for comments, feature requests, screenshots

• Discord: interactive discussion

• Partnering/support: courtyardurbanist.com/p/work

• Treasury Spatial Composer / broader discussion: treasury.space

Thanks again for your support. Your engagement is what makes Courtyard Urbanism a living conversation—and now you can help shape the tools that make it actionable.

—Alicia & John

The Courtyard Urbanist project aims to modernize the role of urban courtyards in addressing a growing set of challenges: housing availability, quality of family life, urban infrastructure, built value and aesthetics, and more.

What began as a provocation is increasingly becoming a real contribution. The number of people and institutions engaging with the courtyard urbanism grows weekly.

Progress in this space requires bridging complex and often sensitive divides between professions, technologies, and political constituencies. In a moment shaped by dazzling novelty and passionate disagreement, advancing housing abundance through courtyard urbanism means orchestrating people, systems, and ideas across multiple axes.

Orchestration in the New Design Era

Architectural design and design technology represent only some of these axes, but they reveal the need for orchestration in three critical ways.

1. Visualization, AI, and the role of architects

AI-driven visualization is rapidly improving the public and developer’s ability to imagine alternative urban futures. Tools such as the Courtyard Composer make this tangible.

We believe that this AI acceleration must not bypass architects and creators. On the contrary, it should validate their worth and even expand their reach to new forms of creative work.

This happens in a couple of initial ways:

• Ensuring attribution, licensing, and compensation for named designers and contributors.

• Ensure that design and stylistic content from professional designers is used under licensed terms rather than treated as free, and that this use directly generates engagement and new commissions.
  

2. A wide range of spatial and design technologies maturing are emerging and maturing simultaneously

Under such conditions, no single piece of software or closed, sinecured workflow can plausibly produce high-quality built design. Quality now depends on nimble orchestration across technical and creative domains, moving at great speeds, and based on high levels of knowledge and experience.

3. Design must become public and participatory earlier and faster

Finally, professionals, experts, enthusiasts and novices can come together simultaneously around design, visualization, and planning tools. It makes no sense to include the public in consultation when the design is essentially done, nor does it make sense for design iteration among developers, planners, architects, owners, and the general public to take months and years, when it can and should take seconds and days.

So: The new era of built design and design technology isn’t and cannot be one of incumbent tools being forced on yet another generation of reluctant professionals. Instead, it is an arena that invites orchestration of many, sometimes historically opposed themes into a new whole.

Standing Projects, 2026-2027

Courtyard Urbanist aims to facilitate this evolution with three standing projects, alongside ad-hoc collaborations and invited projects: (1) Type Kits, (2) Action Kits, (3) Courtyard Composer

Type Kits

Courtyard Urbanist is developing, with partners, a Type Kit for modern urban courtyards: a kind of typological pattern book for the Courtyard Urbanist ideal, with variations for context and program.

This isn’t just, or even primarily, an aesthetic exercise. Type Kits are intended to:

• Reframe architectural contributions to everyday living, focused on courtyard urbanism;

• Provide guidance on materials, circularity, and wellness;

• Accelerate new fabrication and construction techniques;

• Clarify the value proposition of courtyard-led urban morphology

• Integrate directly with contemporary visualization, design and construction systems.

Additional Type Kits from independent partners and designers are invited, forming a family of related but distinct courtyard identities.

Action Kits

The Courtyard Urbanist Action Kit supports real-world implementation, helping local actors navigate planning, political, and financial systems. It provides concrete guidance on researching codes, engaging planners and representatives, interfacing with developers, and rallying local interest for current and potential urban courtyard initiatives.

Courtyard Composer

The Courtyard Composer is an early implementation of the Treasury Spatial Composer tool, specialized for development of urban courtyard typologies. It allows:

• Architects to share modular and parametric designs with clients in real time;

• Designers and enthusiasts to upload mesh models for exploration and imagine;

• Developers and the public to select real sites, test courtyard typologies, and explore how it would look, and what it would cost, to developer any given type of courtyard there.

The Courtyard Composer draws directly on the Courtyard Urbanist Type Kit and invites other Type Kits to drive engagement.

To explore the Courtyard Composer, sign up at composer.courtyardurbanist.com

To discuss the broader architectural design and design technology opportunities behind Courtyard Composer, and to use the Treasury Spatial Composer for non-courtyard uses, contact Treasury.

To colloborate on any projects in general, please contact Courtyard Urbanist here.

I want to personally invite the Courtyard Urbanist community to join me in Los Angeles for the Festival of Progressive Abundance, happening January 30–February 1

You can use a special 30% promo code: courtyard when registering (registration link).

I’m excited about this event because I’ll be talking about something I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about lately: a new aesthetics of abundance—and how urban form, housing typologies, and family-friendly design fit squarely within the broader abundance movement (as I lay out in my most recent essay).

Also, I’m looking forward to spending time with so many people shaping this moment—Jan, Micah, Laura, Jeral, and many others—and I’d genuinely love to see a strong showing from courtyard enthusiasts.

Also: I would very much enjoy hanging out, grabbing drinks, and—if we can get enough people—maybe even playing a little euchre. :)

I’d love to see you there. Let me know if you’re coming and I’ll send you hotel info etc.

—Alicia