I wasn’t expecting to think about Baron Haussmann on a family vacation.

We were at Epic Universe, Universal Orlando’s new theme park, because the kids wanted to ride roller coasters and immerse themselves in the worlds of Harry Potter, Super Mario, and How to Train Your Dragon. But then, lo and behold, we turned a corner and found ourselves walking down a cobblestone boulevard of limestone façades and zinc mansard roofs, lined with cafés and awning-covered terraces. Above us were tall French windows, dormers, and balconies, wrought-iron balcony rails. A moment ago, we were with Yoshi in the Mushroom Kingdom, but we had clearly been transported to Haussmannian Paris.

“MOM, LOOK!” one of my children hollered. “THESE ARE THE BUILDINGS YOU LIKE!”

Friends, I had no idea that the urban development that I wrote about constantly online had been recreated, in astonishing detail, at Universal’s Epic theme park. The simulation is outstanding, and you can imagine how gobsmacked I was by it. And a little angry! Why is corporate American capable of building beautiful, walkable urbanism for entertainment and consumption, but we can’t as a society of public and private actors build the real thing?

People used the space as people naturally use a good city street. My husband, Pete, and I sat at a café table with drinks while our children wandered nearby, activating Harry Potter–themed wand features embedded in the shop windows. Because there were no cars, we could relax in a shared public space with our children without constantly calculating the danger posed by traffic. They explored while we sat and chatted, benefitting from the architecture that created both sociability for adults and independence for children.

And yet, for all its uncanny resemblance to a mixed-use neighborhood, this is, obviously, a 100% commercial neighborhood. The upper-story windows do not belong to households because they are just facades that don’t have habitable rooms behind them. There are no longtime residents looking down from the balconies, no children growing up above the shops, no elderly neighbors watching the street change over decades. The ground floors are activated by retail, but the “neighborhood” consists entirely of commercial and entertainment structures serving customers who leave at the end of the day. This is clear when you look at a satellite image of the place:

I find the simulation of mixed-use neighborhood fascinating. With extraordinary skill and playfulness, Universal has reproduced the outward form of mixed-use urbanism, where many buildings with shops on the bottom and residences on top rise up from the street. But Universal’s Parisian intersection is a purely commercial attraction; there is no residential real estate at all.

Like other writers before me, I wonder what the urban imitations tell us about Americans’ attitude towards dense, walkable, fine-grained urbanism. The vast majority of Americans live in low-density neighborhoods and depend on a car to do basic errands. Why are the built environments of their fantasies so very different from the built environments they actually live in? And it’s not just theme parks. Increasingly, large multifamily developers put fine-grained facades on large consolidated apartment buildings.

Some might argue that Americans appreciate the appearance of fine-grained urbanism but ultimately prefer the housing types our market already produces: detached houses and large, consolidated apartment complexes. But we cannot infer genuine preference from a market in which the alternatives are largely unavailable. Our zoning codes, building regulations, subdivision rules, and financing practices make true fine-grained, mixed-use apartment buildings extraordinarily difficult to produce. Developers rarely offer them, and households rarely have the opportunity to choose them. Until this form becomes legal, financeable, and repeatable, our housing choices reveal as much about institutional constraint as they do about consumer preference.

Universal’s remarkable Parisian neighborhood in Orlando elicits a powerful response, which we should take seriously. This essay begins by asking what those façades communicate and why we find them so compelling. I then trace the development of the Parisian buildings that inspired this environment. This is not a historical detour, but rather an effort to reconstruct the building, property, regulatory, and financial systems that produced the urban form we admire.

Finally, I argue that we should take our affinity for traditional urbanism seriously without mistaking its outward appearance for the system that created it. We do not merely want façades that look fine-grained. We want the underlying conditions that allow a genuinely fine-grained city (i.e., many buildings, owners, residents, and histories) to emerge. We want the system that gives rise to the beautiful city streets we love.

The essay ends with a surprise coda (and a preview of my next article) about what Disney, acting as a master developer, is building in France today. Another entertainment company that perfected the simulation of traditional urbanism is now helping produce real, inhabited French neighborhoods.

2. What Our Fantasies Reveal About the City We Still Desire

Why are Americans constantly building dense, fine-grained urbanism as facades, but never building them as actual buildings?

It’s not just Universal’s recreation of Haussmannian Paris. It’s the Main Street at Disney. It’s Diagon Alley at the other Universal park. It’s the Greco-Roman urban setting at Mt. Olympus in the Wisconsin Dells. It’s the ski villages at the resorts. It’s the developments like Park Kennedy, in Washington D.C., where a single large commercial building is made to look like a fine-grained street through an artful facade strategy.

Urbanists have commented on the irony of thematic urbanism, which allows Americans to experience in a commercial setting a way of life that their suburban lifestyle denies them. In Suburban Nation, Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck ask whether people really visit Disney World only for the rides. They suggests that Americans are also powerfully drawn to the “pleasant, pedestrian-friendly public space and the sociability it engenders” (63). For many Americans, the theme park one of the few public space where they can experience socializing, dining, and shopping as pedestrians.

Michael Sorkin approached theme-park urbanism more critically, arguing that theme parks turns urbanism into a consumable medium. It extracts recognizable images from real cities, detaches them from their histories and geographies, and repackages them as an entertainment product. Near the end of “See You in Disneyland,” he delivers his sharpest formulation: “Disney invokes an urbanism without producing a city … a city with billions of citizens (all who would consume) but no residents.” American theme parks are selling an anodyne urbanism to a suburban population.

Duany and Sorkin identify two sides of the same phenomenon. Duany reads the theme park’s popularity as evidence of our enduring attraction to walkable public space and the sociability it enables. Sorkin shows how private enterprise packages that public life as a controlled commercial experience. Yet both accounts center on the appeal of the public realm. We are drawn to the public street, yes, but we are also drawn to the private realm that is indicated by the homes above the shops, and, more generally, to the suggestion of an urban lifestyle and identity made up of dialects, cuisine, careers, romance, and accumulated history. Much of the allure is the life behind the facade.

The life behind the façade

Let’s do a close reading of the dense, fine-grained, mixed-use facade of the traditional urban street. What story is legible in the picture of multiple stories of residences above shops?

From a distance, the block might look like a single, consolidated building, but up close you can see the signs of different buildings. You can see that the roof line changes, the facade articulation shifts, there are masonry wall rising above the roof. In real Parisian construction, these walls correspond to party walls separating neighboring buildings, extending above the roof to serve as firebreaks. At Universal, an obsessive observer might notice that these apparent party walls occur too frequently to mark plausible building divisions.

Each apparent building also occupies a compelling middle scale. It is broad and physically imposing—not the narrow structure that fine-grained sometimes calls to mind—yet it stands wall to wall with its neighbors. Each is large enough to possess a strong identity, but small enough to remain part of a greater whole.

The upper windows suggest habitable rooms … bedrooms, kitchens, and living rooms where people sleep, cook, read, throw parties, paint, raise children, grow old, and pass on to the next world, leaving their ghostly memory to remain in the building and neighborhood as it also grows old. We imagine the back side of the apartment building, with balconies overlooking a courtyard where people can have plants and private outdoor space.

We also appreciate the extraordinary productivity of the land. A single parcel can support a storefront and perhaps a dozen or more households! It feels so affluent, but also democratic and efficient. The beauty and convenience are not reserved for a single family, but are shared by many people living side by side. Its grandeur is collective.

A shift in the window rhythm, masonry, or cornice marks the end of one building and the beginning of another. In a Haussmannian block, the boundary is often visible from above where the party wall rises through the roofline. These building divisions carry a social and economic promise because they can have different owners, histories, conditions, and price points. One may be renovated while its neighbor remains modest. They can change independently without ceasing to form a continuous street.

At some level, we understand that the public realm depends on the private residential world surrounding it, and that the features we love in the great historic cities are downstream of homes that can support ownership, long-term tenancy, and family life. A café or shop is a shared room for the neighborhood, a place where residents meet and local culture evolves. Over time, continuity among residents, businesses, and institutions produces cuisines, festivals, customs, dialects, and local knowledge. It is this interweaving of private residence and public commerce that creates an identity no branding strategy can manufacture.

This fine grain does not imply universal homeownership. Great cities have always contained owners and tenants, just as commercial streets have contained both proprietors and businesses leasing space. The deeper condition is pluralized stakeholding, where homes, commercial space, and institutions are controlled by many people, some of whom remain long enough to accumulate knowledge and transmit a way of life.

And this leads us to the wonderful irony in Universal’s Paris. The entire environment was produced by one proprietor as a comprehensively managed commercial property, yet much of its emotional power comes from simulating a city made by many owners and many hands. A centralized enterprise has beautifully reproduced the visual language of decentralization.

Large contemporary developments increasingly do the same. Designers divide a single building visually through changes in brick, cornice height, window rhythm, and storefront treatment. The façade tells a story of many buildings, owners, and eras even when the parcel, capital stack, circulation system, and ownership remain singular.

We have become adept at creating visual grain after eliminating much of the property grain that historically produced it. The large consolidated apartment buildings create neighborhoods without families or long-term occupants. The theme parks create cities without citizens.

The deeper question, then, is why we can reproduce the image of a fine-grained city so convincingly as entertainment, when we cannot build actually fine-grained neighborhoods. To answer it, we have to look behind the façades, and to the parcels, party walls, building types, ownership patterns, and regulatory framework that made the real Paris possible.

3. Haussmannian Paris was a system, not a style

The Haussmannian block, named for Baron Haussmann, the civil servant who directed the modernization of Paris, is made up of many physically and legally separate buildings, built wall to wall to create a coherent whole. There are three coordinated systems that make this possible. Pay attention, because we need to revive these systems if we want to have the dense, fine-grained urbanism of our theme park fantasies.

The building system

Parisian blocks (îlots, or “islands,” in French) were made up of many independent buildings that were joined by party walls. In a systematic survey of nineteenth-century Paris undertaken for the Atelier parisien d’urbanisme, the architectural historian François Loyer traced how the Parisian block was transformed in the 19th century, from narrower medieval homes to wider and larger apartment houses.

Older Paris was built on narrow medieval parcels, generally six to eight meters (roughly twenty to twenty-six feet) across. This frontage is comparable to the “narrow and deep” rowhouse scale that we still find in British and North American cities. As the Parisian apartment house developed, however, builders widened the parcel. Loyer describes a frontage of twelve meters (thirty-nine feet) for a building with one large street-facing apartment per floor, and twenty meters (about sixty-six feet) for two apartments arranged around a single stair.

On older streets with narrow parcels, developers assembled multiple parcels to create sites that were large enough for the new, modern apartment buildings. In new districts, they also subdivided large, vacant sites into the new, wider lots. Importantly, the parcel remained the fundamental unit of building and ownership. Even in cases when a single developer built an entire block, the block was subdivided into multiple adjoining buildings, each building with its own stair and party wall. In this way, the block could read as a single “island” even though it was made up of many discrete properties.

The party wall, or mur mitoyen, made this arrangement possible. By 1804, the French Civil Code (the body of private law governing property and relations among private owners) had codified the basic rules. A wall separating two buildings was presumed to be shared unless evidence showed otherwise. The owners divided the cost of maintaining it, and each could build against or into it under rules protecting the other’s rights. As we discussed in last week’s article, the party wall is one example of a boundary system that helps independent buildings to meet at the property line rather than shy away from it, as American buildings do.

In addition to the party wall, the small-parcel building benefited from point access circulation. Residents shared a stair that served one or two apartments per floor, giving each building its own entrance and space-efficient circulation.

The Property and Finance System

How were properties entitled and financed?

The Napoleonic cadastre (the property registration system) was created for taxation and not necessarily for creating a clear title. But it did the important work of maintaining an official record of property boundaries and ownership. Beginning in 1809, surveyors thoroughly documented Paris, ultimately producing roughly 26,200 ground-floor plans, generally one sheet per property, indexed by address and owner.

Separate mortgage registers recorded notarized transfers—including sales, exchanges, donations, divisions, and expropriations—and allowed built or unbuilt property to secure a debt. A parcel and its building could circulate without the whole block changing hands.

Financing was big and small. The grand new boulevards drew large development companies, the Crédit Foncier, and the financial networks of figures such as the Pereire brothers. In the northern and eastern peripheral neighborhoods, apartments were built, with modest savings and limited credit, by small-scale owners, including lawyers, merchants, shopkeepers, artisans, and even some workers. In Paris, Capital of Modernity, David Harvey describes these as two systems with different “geographical domain,” “clientele,” and “rhythms” (129-132).

While large financiers definitely participated in Haussmannian development, having access to enormous capital stack was not a prerequisite for producing a continuous neighborhood. Smaller and larger deals were made, allowing for very broad participation in the development of modern Paris.

The Regulatory System

In addition to systems for the buildings and for ownership and finance, there was a system for how the buildings interacted with the rest of the block and city.

The decree of 26 March 1852 required a builder to obtain the official street alignment and grade before beginning work. It also required new buildings on sewered streets to carry rainwater and wastewater to the sewer. The decree of 27 July 1859 tied maximum façade height to the legal width of the street and regulated roofs, chimneys, dormers, and the height of buildings in courts and interior spaces.

The famously exacting aesthetic requirements typically came from conditions that were attached to the sale of city land. There wasn’t a Parisian stylebook. A surviving 1860 sale for a lot on Boulevard de Sébastopol required neighboring buildings within the block to share principal façade lines and story heights. It also specified stone façades, balconies and moldings, water and sewer connections, and sidewalk work. Disagreements among owners were settled by the prefect, or police.

The regulatory system coordinated civil law, street plans, general regulations, administrative review, and project-specific covenants.

And so, the building system, the property/financial system, and the regulatory systems directionally all favored the decentralized apartment block. The building system supplied the basic building unit. The property and finance system allowed that unit to change hands and be financed. The regulatory system coordinated the building with the rest of the block and street. Neither laissez-faire nor a block-scale apartment, the system was a centralized framework with decentralized execution.

This is what is so deeply ironic about the thematic fine-grained urbanism for sale at theme parks and increasingly on the facades of our commercial buildings. The facades give us the image of the fine-grained city, and we appreciate the visual expression of coordinated architecture, entitlement, financing, and regulations. At some level, we probably intuit the complexity and great achievement that is represented by fine-grained urbanism. But we have not yet connected our longing for that kind of city with the steps needed to get us there.

4. We Deserve the Cities We Love, and We’re Capable of Building the Real Thing

It would be a mistake to dismiss Americans’ affection for places like Universal’s Paris or for traditional facades as nostalgia or an embarrassing affinity for pastiche. They are responding to a legitimate desire for a dense, fine-grained urban neighborhood that works for people across the life cycle and even generations. Something that they’ve read about in books, experienced while living abroad in Europe, seen in movies, but they rarely experience in the United States. A walkable urban neighborhood that is not just for college students and young professionals, but is actually for home owners and families, too.

But we should be careful not to confuse the facade with the thing itself. I see some praising traditional facades on commercial buildings as aesthetic progress. Their argument is that a warehouse or apartment complex with an attractive facade is better than an ugly one. Fair enough, but I worry that many Americans are confusing the two, and don’t understand the difference between the visual grain and the property grain, between the aesthetic and the development system that produces it.

Like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, we have become accustomed to studying the shadows of a richer urban order. Cornices, bay windows, party-wall rhythms, and varied storefronts evoke a world of homes, proprietors, neighbors, and accumulated history. But the projected image is not the real thing. The danger is not that traditional façades are “fake” or “pastiche,” but that we may accept their image as the closest we can come to building the places they represent. We will adorn our warehouses and podium apartment complexes with beautiful facades, and wonder why the urban revival feels so hollow.

We will not build the great cities we want through design guidelines and material requirements alone. First, we must learn to recognize what those cities actually are. A warehouse or podium apartment building with a beautifully articulated façade is not a fine-grained neighborhood.

Second, we must rebuild the development system that produces the small-parcel density we crave. Rather than merely imitating party walls, we should make party-wall construction legal and straightforward. Rather than using façade changes to make one block-long apartment complex resemble several independent buildings, we should divide large sites into buildable parcels. We should allow each building to meet the street and its side property lines, rise five or six stories, and possess its own entrance, stair, address, ownership, and financing.

Our financial institutions must participate as well. Community Reinvestment Act examinations should give banks credit for small-balance construction, acquisition, and rehabilitation loans that produce independently owned multifamily and mixed-use buildings on individual parcels, particularly in low- and moderate-income communities. Regulators should consider the number and distribution of these loans (not merely their aggregate dollar value) so that one block-scale deal does not count for more than a pipeline of neighborhood-scale investments.

Fine-grained density should be the path of least resistance. Today, our codes, financing practices, and approval processes make consolidated development easier than incremental development. If we want cities built from many hands, we must make small-parcel urbanism easy, and stop treating the block-sized project as the default.

At Universal’s Paris, my family sat together drinking Butterbeer and Wizarding World spirits at a cafe table, watching the kids running around in the streets, having a blast. We marveled at the artistry, creativity, the engineering, and the money — both the capital required to build such an amazing venue, and the money that the throngs of people paid to be there.

Americans already have the technical and financial capacity to build fine-grained cities. We build far more expensive and technologically complex projects every day. Our problem is that we lack a shared vision, and the resolve to reform the laws, regulations, and financing practices that currently favor consolidated development. However, with the right framework, we can build dense, walkable neighborhoods that support households at every stage of life and endure across generations.

The steps are always the same: The public or master developer creates the framework, and private actors fill it in. The framework produces the right form and attractive investment opportunity, and the separate parcels ensure pluralized ownership over time.

5. Preview—Disney is building real Haussmannian courtyard blocks in France today

The irony takes my breath away. At Val d’Europe, east of Paris, France is once again building fine-grained courtyard blocks, but this time through a public-private partnership in which Euro Disney serves as an urban developer. To be clear, an American company, known for simulating dense, walkable urbanism in theme parks, is today building dense, walkable neighborhoods … in France. The American imitation has become a partner in building the real thing in another country.

In a forthcoming essay, I’ll examine how this remarkable development was planned, financed, built, and owned. It is additional evidence that American companies are capable of building the fine-grained neighborhoods Americans want, when they have a willing public partner.

A century ago, the Queensboro Corporation built the Greystones in Jackson Heights (above, left) as a coordinated development of fourteen contiguous apartment buildings on fourteen separate lots. The block was planned as a whole, but it remained granular, with separate buildings, addresses, entrances, and ultimately separate assets joined into a continuous street wall.

Compare that with a contemporary project like Park Kennedy in Washington, D.C. (above, right), with 260 rental units above retail and private amenity space. It is one large apartment building, but its façade is intentionally broken into what appear to be many smaller buildings. The architecture changes materials, cornice lines, and facade treatment to reproduce the visual signals of an incrementally developed street, even though it’s a single building.

That imitation is revealing. Developers understand the extraordinary appeal of fine-grained neighborhoods. But what makes those neighborhoods valuable is not simply the appearance of many buildings. Their diversity is the expression of an underlying system of many parcels, many owners, many buildings, and many decisions accumulating over time.

Producing a dense, fine-grained city requires a system for managing boundaries.

Small parcels must be allowed to remain separate while buildings rise directly against their edges. Zoning must permit zero side setbacks. Fire codes must provide practical ways to separate adjoining buildings. Property law must establish predictable rules for support, access, maintenance, demolition, and rebuilding. Financing and title systems must allow the resulting buildings to remain distinct assets.

The party wall is one particularly elegant institution within this larger boundary system. It allows neighboring properties to cooperate at their shared edge without requiring the properties themselves to merge. But the larger principle is more important than the wall itself: Fine-grained urbanism depends on managing boundaries rather than eliminating them through consolidation.

In the absence of a good system for managing boundaries, consolidation is the path of least resistance. For roughly one hundreds years, cities have taken this path, allowing developers to merge multiple parcels and build one large project.

The new “five-over-ones” may imitate granularity at the façade, but the granularity of ownership is gone. If we want to build new urban neighborhoods that are dense yet demographically diverse, beautiful and valuable yet broadly affordable, and capable of serving households across the life cycle, we need to recover the institutional capacity to support small-scale ownership within large-scale urban development. Specifically, we need to rebuild the legal, regulatory, and financial systems that allow a block to remain divided into many buildings, owners, and bets rather than consolidating into one asset.

The practical question, then, is how to build this condition again. What would a best-practice system for granular apartment block development look like today—one that allows a large site to be planned and constructed coherently while subdividing it into small, attached point-access buildings that can remain separately owned, financed, adapted, and eventually replaced?

Party Walls and the Institutions of Urban Granularity

“Most multifamily builders [in Houston] have no conception of a party wall. They have no idea what the requirements are, have never heard of ‘party wall,’ have no idea even that they might want to build contiguous apartment buildings.”
— Houston-area developer, in a phone conversation with me

In much of the United States, contiguous apartment buildings have become so unusual that many builders no longer think of them as a normal development option. Side setbacks pull buildings away from property lines. Multifamily projects are typically designed as detached, freestanding structures. Even when several buildings occupy the same site, they are usually separated from one another rather than joined into a continuous urban fabric.

That makes the party wall feel almost exotic, even though for centuries it was one of the basic institutions that allowed cities to be built densely on small parcels.

So before going further, it is worth being precise about what a party wall is, and about the larger system of property, fire, and building rules that allows independent apartment buildings to meet at their boundaries.

A party wall is a wall shared by adjoining properties under a legally recognized arrangement. As the Cornell Legal Information Institute explains, ownership can take several forms. The wall may be held jointly, divided along the property line, or owned by one party subject to the other party’s right to use or receive support from it.

In American usage, “party wall” has meant both a specific property relationship and, more loosely, a wall designed to form part of contiguous construction. What this essay is really concerned with is the larger boundary system that makes adjoining, independently owned buildings normal.

This distinction also helps clarify international comparisons. Other countries organize the same boundary problem through different combinations of property law, building codes, easements, and doctrines governing shared walls, adjoining walls, or independent walls built directly to the property line. The physical assembly may vary—a genuinely shared wall, separate fire walls, or simply two zero-lot-line buildings—but the institutional objective is similar: to make it ordinary and predictable for independent buildings to touch without requiring their properties to merge.

Coordination Through Consolidation

America builds attached townhouses all the time. Developers routinely construct rows of separately owned homes with shared or abutting walls, individual lots, conventional mortgages, and independent resale. The legal and property machinery for granular attached development is not extinct.

The townhouse works inside a highly standardized low-rise building, subdivision, and mortgage system. Stack more households above one another and the project crosses into multifamily building codes, commercial underwriting, accessibility requirements, elevators at greater heights, and more complex life-safety systems.

America knows how to coordinate attached buildings when each building contains one household. The difficulty begins when we try to stack many households vertically while preserving the building as a small, independent unit.

Modern development largely solved that coordination problem through consolidation. Developers merge multiple parcels into one development site. Instead of distributing 200 homes among ten 20-unit buildings, it is easier to construct one 200-unit building organized around double-loaded corridors.

Many entrances become one lobby. Separate stairs and elevators become centralized circulation. Multiple financing decisions become one capital stack. A collection of small development acts becomes one large project.

There are powerful reasons for this. Architecture, engineering, permitting, legal work, insurance, construction mobilization, elevators, lender due diligence, and other fixed costs do not decline proportionately when a project becomes smaller. Urban Institute research identifies high predevelopment costs, limited liquidity, difficult approvals, restricted access to financing, and limited capacity to absorb delays as recurring barriers for small and emerging multifamily developers.

Building codes reinforce the advantage of scale. In most American jurisdictions, a four-, five-, or six-story apartment building requires two remote exit stairs connected by circulation. On a small site, fitting that arrangement can be difficult enough to force parcel assembly.

A 2025 analysis by the Center for Building in North America and the Pew Charitable Trusts found that dual-stair requirements push developers to assemble multiple small parcels simply to make a building footprint work. The authors estimate that small single-stair buildings can cost 6 to 13 percent less than comparable dual-stair designs. In the report’s Jersey City example, the second stair and the space needed to reach it occupy about 7 percent of the building’s floor area.

And so the megaproject is the creature of zoning and the fixed costs of development, each tilting the economics the same direction of consolidation. This is why we have so many buildings where hundreds of small, one-sided units are strung along double-loaded corridors, totally detached from neighborhood fabric. This is the modern American multifamily product.

The megaproject manages all that complexity by eliminating boundaries. There is no adjoining owner to negotiate with because one entity controls the site. There is no interface between buildings because there is only one building. Consolidation is an extremely effective coordination technology, but it carries a cost.

Unlike a consolidated megaproject, a fine-grained block is made of many buildings that can be owned, financed, adapted, or replaced independently. Differences accumulate through decisions made by different people, under different circumstances, at different moments in time. A megaproject can imitate those differences aesthetically. It cannot easily reproduce the underlying independence that created them.

And that independence matters for far more than appearance. Granularity gives a neighborhood more ways to change. One building can be renovated while another remains inexpensive. One can become condominiums, another rental housing, another a small commercial or institutional property. A new developer can enter without buying an entire block. Capital can enter in smaller increments. Buildings can age, fail, improve, change use, or be replaced on different schedules.

That makes granular neighborhoods more adaptable and resilient. They do not depend on a single owner, financing structure, building system, or redevelopment cycle. Change can happen incrementally rather than through the demolition and replacement of an entire megaproject.

Granularity also operates at a scale that can serve households across more stages of life. The large corridor building is efficient for many residents, but it is a poor fit for many families, particularly those who value a close relationship between the home and protected outdoor space. In a smaller point-access building around a courtyard, a parent can move from an apartment to a shared yard through a short stair or elevator rather than navigating a long interior corridor, lobby, and public sidewalk. Entrances, stairs, gardens, and play space can belong to a much smaller community of households.

The advantage, then, is not nostalgia for small buildings. It is that a neighborhood composed of many small buildings can contain more kinds of homes, more ownership structures, more price points, and more paths of adaptation over time. Its pieces can respond independently as households, markets, and institutions change.

A city that can only coordinate by consolidating will keep producing larger and larger objects. A city that can coordinate across boundaries can remain dense, diverse, adaptable.

Governing the Boundary

An economical wide-and-shallow building that makes efficient use of the perimeter of a lot is viable when the development system allows it to use the full width of its parcel and provides a predictable way to meet the building next door.

Courtyard Urbanist’s Sixty Ell prototype—an approximately 60-by-64-foot point-access building with a courtyard-facing notch—shows the geometric and economic logic of the wide-and-shallow, attached building.

By getting floor area from width rather than depth, the building can produce shallow, dual-aspect, front-to-back apartments around a compact core. When its side walls are designed to abut neighboring buildings, those surfaces no longer function as exterior façades, reducing cladding, waterproofing, weather exposure, and long-term maintenance. The more compact exterior envelope can also improve thermal performance and reduce heating and cooling loads.

Repeated around a block, these small buildings form a continuous street wall while concentrating open space into a central courtyard. The key is a predictable way for independent buildings to meet at their side boundaries.

Seattle shows the limits of point-access reform when it is not paired with a workable system for adjacency. As the Mercatus policy brief shows, compact apartment buildings can once again fit on small infill lots. But when those buildings must remain separated at their sides, each parcel still produces a freestanding object. The street wall is interrupted, and open space is fragmented into narrow side yards.

Allow the same buildings to meet at their side boundaries, then you can reconfigure the massing so that the street edge becomes continuous, while open space is consolidated into a larger courtyard at the center of the block.

A party wall is one way for independent buildings to meet, but not the only one. Separate abutting walls can serve the same urban purpose if fire separation, structure, access, maintenance, and property rights are predictable.

Other countries show how these relationships can be standardized rather than negotiated from scratch. French, Italian, and British law use different combinations of default rights, prescribed payments, notice, and dispute resolution, but the principle is similar: attached development becomes easier when the boundary is a routine, governed transaction rather than a bespoke negotiation. See Appendix: Comparative Systems for Governing Building Boundaries.

American building codes already provide a technical path. Under Section 706 of the 2024 International Building Code, party walls between separate buildings generally must meet fire-wall requirements, including fire separation and structural stability.

The larger challenge is making adjacency normal for multifamily buildings. This means zoning must permit zero side setbacks, code must provide practical fire separation, and property law must clarify access, maintenance, demolition, and rebuilding.

But the goal is not necessarily a traditional party wall. It is a reliable, performance-based system that lets independent buildings touch. The megaproject coordinates by eliminating boundaries; the granular block coordinates by governing them.

The Granular Block as a Development Model

Fine-grained urbanism does not require every parcel to be developed independently over fifty years. Granularity can be designed into a large development from the beginning.

A master developer could assemble an entire site, plan the block as a whole, use one construction schedule and general contractor, and still divide the project into a series of small, legally and technically independent buildings. Each could have its own address, point-access core, code identity, parcel or separately financeable property interest, while adjoining its neighbors to form a continuous street wall.

The target is something like this:

one coordinated development → many point-access buildings → many independently ownable and financeable assets → one coherent block

Jackson Heights offers an important American precedent. Beginning in 1916, the Queensboro Corporation developed the Greystones as fourteen contiguous apartment buildings on fourteen separate tax lots. The buildings were designed as a coordinated ensemble and even permitted in groups, yet the cadastral divisions survived underneath the continuous blockfront. Development occurred at the scale of the ensemble; the resulting city remained divided at the scale of the building.

That is different from merely subdividing a large building into condominium units. The objective is to preserve the building itself as a unit of ownership, finance, adaptation, and succession. One building could later be sold or refinanced without selling the block. Another could change tenure or use. A third could be renovated—or eventually replaced—without requiring every neighboring building to participate.

Some infrastructure may still make sense at the scale of the block. A courtyard, underground garage, stormwater system, or other shared facilities could be governed through easements or a limited common entity. The goal is not to duplicate everything ten times. It is to distinguish carefully between the systems that benefit from coordination and the things whose independence gives the neighborhood its adaptability.

This suggests a practical research question:

How should a large urban development be subdivided so that it captures the efficiencies of coordinated production while preserving genuine independence at the scale of the building?

That requires determining the appropriate parcel width, building size, point-access configuration, fire and property separation, shared infrastructure, financing structure, and succession rules.

In other words, a development can be coordinated but still incremental in outcome.

Point Access and the Unmeasured Ledger

Point-access housing organizes a relatively small number of apartments around a compact vertical core rather than along a corridor connecting remote stairs. In their HUD Cityscape policy brief, Stephen Smith and Eduardo Mendoza describe how this arrangement can support smaller buildings, dual-aspect homes, family-sized apartments, better daylight, and more efficient use of infill sites.

Point access gives us the building, but we need the managed boundary for the block.

The potential savings are straightforward. Point access can eliminate the second stair and much of the corridor area. Attached construction reduces weather-exposed side walls, exterior cladding, and land lost to side setbacks, while smaller parcels reduce the amount of land that must be assembled before development can begin. There may also be a revenue upside to the ledger: whether households pay a premium for dual-aspect units, smaller building communities, and protected outdoor space is an empirical question worth testing.

Against those savings, subdivision can multiply stairs, sprinkler risers, fire alarms, utility connections, meters, roofs, mechanical systems, management structures, and transaction costs. Elevators may determine where the ledger changes. Providing one in every small building multiplies both capital and maintenance costs, and the tradeoff will vary with building height, width, unit count, accessibility requirements, and local code.

The literature reviewed for this essay does not include a published apples-to-apples comparison of these savings and penalties. That is a research gap: determining where the fine-grained block becomes competitive across building height, width, construction type, unit count, elevator requirements, courtyard ownership, and shared-infrastructure assumptions.

Recovering the Capacity to Coordinate

This is not about reviving nineteenth-century party-wall construction for its own sake. The goal, to be clear, is recovering the capacity to build dense urban places out of many independent pieces.

Traditional perimeter blocks show that coherence does not require consolidation. Many buildings, parcels, owners, and investments can contribute to one street and one block while remaining capable of changing independently. A modern version of that system might be built incrementally, or a master developer might construct the entire block at once and subdivide it into point-access buildings. What matters is that coordination at the beginning does not eliminate granularity in the future.

Cities need operating systems for the granular block. They need predictable rules for boundaries and fire separation, subdivision and title, shared courtyards and infrastructure, financing, construction, demolition, rebuilding, and succession. Some things should be coordinated at the scale of the block; others should remain independent at the scale of the building.

The challenge is therefore partly one of transaction costs. Consolidation became attractive because it makes complexity easier to manage by eliminating boundaries. But better standards, model agreements, digital property records, automated code checking, and eventually AI-assisted coordination could make it cheaper to govern those boundaries instead—helping architects, developers, lawyers, lenders, and public agencies manage many interdependent buildings without turning them into one asset.

That is the larger research agenda: to define a best-practice system for granular development that captures the efficiencies of coordinated production while preserving small-scale ownership, adaptability, and succession.

The fine-grained city does not eliminate coordination. It achieves enough coordination for its pieces to remain independent, and enough independence for the city to keep changing.

Appendix: Comparative Systems for Governing Building Boundaries

European party-wall systems emerged as system to help coordinate the boundary of adjacent buildings. Many establish defaults and compulsory procedures that reduce the need for adjoining owners to negotiate every relationship from scratch, thus making apartment party wall construction easier and therefore more common.

Under Article 653 of the French Civil Code, a wall separating adjoining buildings, courtyards, or gardens is generally presumed to be held in common unless a title or physical evidence indicates otherwise. Article 661 allows an adjoining owner to acquire common rights in an existing wall by reimbursing the prescribed share of its value and the land beneath it.

Article 874 of the Italian Civil Code similarly permits an adjoining owner to obtain common ownership of a boundary wall upon payment. These systems price the transaction and limit the ability of one owner to hold out indefinitely.

This is not exclusively a civil-law institution. The United Kingdom’s Party Wall etc. Act 1996 provides a notice-and-surveyor process for specified work affecting party walls and adjoining properties.

The common-law lineage runs far deeper than the 1996 Act. London’s Assize of Buildings of 1189 opens by naming its purpose: “appeasing the contentions that arise among neighbours over boundaries.” It then supplies the terms. Two neighbors building a stone wall between them each contribute a foot and a half of land, so that a wall three feet thick and sixteen feet high straddles the line; costs are joint; drainage is settled; either may raise his own portion at his own cost if the other declines; and neither may thin the wall, breach it, or take down his part without the other’s assent. The assize does not stop at standard terms. It also provides a limited fallback where one neighbor will not participate, and adjudication before city officials when the matter is disputed. Those three functions — a default bargain, a way past refusal, and a forum — are the same ones later systems distribute among themselves, with the French and Italian codes leaning on compulsion and the 1996 Act on procedure. What is striking is that the earliest surviving example in the common-law line reached for all three at once.

American law also contains precedents. The catchline of D.C. Code § 1-1326 is “Wall extending over lot line,” but its operative text declares a qualifying wall to be a party wall and establishes rights for adjoining properties.

There is obviously a lot of historical variation and legal complexity here, but the important lesson is that fine-grained attached construction becomes easier when the law standardizes the transaction, defines the rights, and supplies a procedure when neighbors disagree.

The Chicago Plan Commission recently approved a 14-townhouse expansion of RiverWard, which would bring the riverfront development to 49 homes. The original 35-home phase is already under construction.

RiverWard is an attractive project on land that had remained vacant for years. Its three-story homes provide four or five bedrooms, private outdoor space, and two-car garages. They are currently marketed from approximately $1.25 million to $1.95 million.

But the expansion prompted me to ask what this same site could support if Chicago made fine-grained multifamily as easy to build as townhouses? Is this a case where courtyard urbanism could help create a walkable, affordable, and beautiful block?

The Development Plan that Current Law Supports

The amended planned development contains approximately 113,763 square feet of net site area, or about 2.61 acres. It permits a total of 49 townhouses and caps floor area ratio at 1.5.

The RiverWard development is a rational response to the rules governing the property. The developer has found a high-value form that can be built, financed, marketed, and sold under the existing regulatory framework.

But it is not the only physical form the land could support.

The Same Site Planned as a Fine-Grained Neighborhood

Using perimeter-block planning, my current conceptual model produces approximately 358,357 square feet of gross building area.

The building footprint is approximately 55,607 square feet, covering just under 49 percent of the net site. That leaves more than half the land open for courtyards, passages, the riverwalk, and other public and shared spaces.

The principal buildings contain six full stories.

The six floors account for approximately 333,642 square feet. The neighborhood would therefore read primarily as a six-story masonry street wall, with the seventh floor set well back behind terraces and landscaped roofs.

Importantly, the buildings would not form one enormous corridor-based apartment complex. The block could be divided into many attached party-wall buildings, each with its own entrance, core, façade, materials, and architectural identity.

Together, they would form a continuous street wall around a system of shared courtyards and an active riverfront piazza.

A Conservative Residential Program

For this capacity test, I have treated the entire ground floor as nonresidential. It could accommodate a combination of structured parking, building entrances, commercial space, restaurants, neighborhood services, bicycle storage, loading, and mechanical uses.

That leaves approximately 302,750 square feet of gross residential area on the floors above.

At an assumed 93 percent residential efficiency, the project provides approximately 281,558 square feet of net residential space.

A revised illustrative unit mix is:

• 52 four-bedroom homes with offices at approximately 2,100 square feet

• 91 two-bedroom homes at approximately 1,050 square feet

• 78 one-bedroom homes at approximately 720 square feet

• 39 studios at approximately 520 square feet

That produces 260 homes containing approximately 281,190 square feet of net unit area.

This is not a unit count inflated by hundreds of micro-studios. Twenty percent of the homes are exceptionally large four-bedroom family apartments. Another 35 percent are two-bedrooms. More than half of the entire development would therefore consist of two-bedroom or larger homes.

The comparison is:

49 townhouses under the approved plan

versus

260 homes in the perimeter-block model

That is 211 additional homes, or more than five times as many households, on the same land

.

Read more

The southwest corner of Western and Lawrence occupies one of the most Lincoln Square’s most valuable locations. A short walk to the Western Brown Line station, to the main commercial area, and to several excellent public and private schools. Yet for decades, it has been a dead zone of single-use commercial buildings for decades. Much of the nearly two-acre site is occupied by an underused bank complex, surface parking and drive-through infrastructure. There is no housing and no green area.

What would it look like if owners redeveloped it as a mixed-use courtyard block buildings?

A compact Fifth Third branch remains at the corner, integrated into the ground floor of a mixed-use building (we could save a drive-through by integrating it into a pedestrian plaza, but first let me present the vision without the drive-through). Six-story buildings line Western and Lawrence, replacing asphalt with storefronts, apartments, a plaza, and a large planted courtyard.

The outcome could yield:

• 200–240 homes (including a significant share of 3 and 4 BDs)

• 20,000–26,000 square feet of commercial space

• Six-story, mixed-use buildings

• A shared interior garden

• A civic plaza

• Much less pavement and parking

Instead of a bank surrounded by car infrastructure, the bank becomes an anchor within a rich piece of urban fabric.

The site represents an outstanding development opportunity

The Fifth Third offering contains approximately 85,926 square feet. Its broker advertises the possibility of as much as 343,704 square feet of buildable floor area under a transit-oriented development scenario. Fifth Third reportedly wants to return to the completed development with approximately 3,000 square feet of visible corner space. View the property listing.

The land will be redeveloped. The question is whether it becomes another controversial megaproject of 300 small, yardless units over a commercial space, or a beloved and enduring piece of Lincoln Square.

Entitlements, entitlements, entitlements

The physical rules required to create a courtyard block are simple:

• Buildings may meet the front property line.

• Buildings may meet side property lines with blank party walls.

• Buildings may rise six stories.

• Buildings may cover approximately 50–60% of the land.

• The remaining ground must be preserved as open space.
  

At that scale, the site could support approximately 258,000–309,000 square feet of development, or roughly 200–240 homes, depending on the unit mix and commercial program.

The coverage limit matters as much as the height allowance. It creates a straightforward bargain:

Build compactly and substantially around the perimeter—but preserve the center of the block as open ground.

That ground becomes an important amenity for residents, especially families. It also creates room for mature trees, reduces heat-island effects and allows more rainwater to reach soil instead of running off pavement.

Density and environmental quality are not opposites. Compact buildings can make room for nature precisely because they use land efficiently.

One project—or several?

The site could be developed all at once, but it should consist of multiple different buildings with different tenure and unit mixes.

The perimeter should be divided into distinct buildings with individual façades, entrances, circulation cores and rooflines. Point-access plans can support efficient, family-friendly apartments with more windows and less corridor.

The project could also be phased. Fifth Third might retain the corner, rebuild its branch beneath housing and sell or ground-lease several entitled development pads to other builders.

But subdivision is not automatically cheaper. Every additional building may require another elevator, stair, utility connection and construction mobilization. Dividing the site into too many tiny projects could undermine the efficiency of the concept.

A better structure may be:

• One master entitlement

• One infrastructure and landscape plan

• One recorded courtyard covenant

• Several substantial development pads

• Multiple buildings—and potentially multiple developers

This would allow incremental development without unnecessarily duplicating every expensive building system.

A courtyard held in common

The rear yards would be connected through a recorded covenant governing access, maintenance, insurance and shared costs. It would also prevent future owners from fencing the garden into isolated pieces.

The landscape should be generous but uncomplicated:

• Mature canopy trees

• Picnic tables and benches

• A sandbox or natural play area

• Community garden plots

• Lawn and durable planting

• Permeable paths

This should not feel like a luxury “amenity deck.” It should feel like a large shared backyard in the middle of the city.

Housing for families

The courtyard makes this site particularly suitable for families. The unit mix should therefore include a meaningful number of three- and four-bedroom homes alongside smaller apartments.

The precise mix needs testing. Making one-third of the development four-bedroom apartments could create lease-up risk. A more defensible program might emphasize two- and three-bedroom homes, include a smaller number of four-bedroom units and retain enough one-bedroom apartments to support a diverse population.

Chicago’s affordable-housing rules also matter. If the entitlement triggers the Affordable Requirements Ordinance, the project may need affordable units, fees or another permitted compliance option. The City’s framework includes a 20%-affordable option at an average of 60% of area median income. Review the ARO framework.

Family-sized affordable apartments should receive full—and ideally bedroom-sensitive—credit. Otherwise, the economics encourage developers to satisfy the requirement with the smallest possible units.

Zoning is necessary—but not sufficient

A courtyard overlay could make the desired form legal and predictable. It could establish the six-story envelope, eliminate unnecessary setbacks and parking, permit party walls and protect the shared open space.

That would reduce risk. It would not, by itself, make construction inexpensive.

An early screening model assumed approximately $250 per square foot in hard construction costs, no acquisition cost for the land, high point-access efficiency and strong new-construction rents. Even under those favorable assumptions, it did not comfortably produce a conventional developer return.

The model’s approximately $11.8 million gap was calculated with land entered at zero. It therefore is not simply a requested discount from Fifth Third’s asking price. Any actual land price would increase the gap.

Construction cost is the largest uncertainty. Published Chicago benchmarks for conventional apartments are substantially higher than the preliminary assumption. This concept may outperform those benchmarks through efficient plans, repetition, simple courtyard façades and minimal parking—but that must be demonstrated by a Chicago contractor.

What could make it work?

This may require something more creative than a conventional land sale:

• Fifth Third participates in the land. It could ground-lease the property, retain its corner commercial space and share in the development’s long-term value.

• The City provides entitlement certainty. The height, coverage, parking, party walls, development pads and courtyard covenant are established upfront.

• A contractor validates the building system. Conventional, panelized and prefabricated approaches should be priced before the program is fixed.

• Affordable housing receives appropriate financing. TIF, tax-exempt financing, tax credits or other subordinate capital may be necessary.

• The site is phased. A first phase containing the bank, limited commercial space and perhaps 80–120 homes could establish rents and demonstrate demand.

• Commercial space remains flexible. Permanent retail should be concentrated along Western, Lawrence and the plaza; other ground-floor space can adapt as demand grows.

A serious pilot

The purpose of this vision is not to claim that a beautiful rendering is automatically financeable.

It is to show what the land could become and what must change to get there.

Western and Lawrence could become a model for underused commercial corridors:

• Replace asphalt with homes.

• Retain businesses in compact urban spaces.

• Permit substantial but human-scaled density.

• Divide large sites into recognizable buildings.

• Preserve the center for trees, families and water.

• Allow development to happen in phases and by more than one hand.

The concept is spatially credible. The location is strong. The site has real development capacity.

Making it real will require more than zoning: disciplined design, minimal parking, verified construction costs, an affordable-housing strategy and creative participation by the landowner.

That is why Western and Lawrence should be treated as a serious pilot.

Contact us if you would like to help make this vision a reality: projects@courtyardurbanist.com

Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Courtyard Urbanism Enthusiast,

On July 11, a federal housing bill became law without a presidential signature. Ten days later, Michigan raised the statewide single-stair limit from three stories to four. Two weeks before that, North Carolina became the first state in the country to delete nearly all of its parking minimums.

Put those three together and you have much of the regulatory stack that removes key main barriers to courtyard housing in America: too much required parking, two staircases in small apartment buildings, and poor design guidelines.

This month’s Market Brief covers:

• CU Project Updates — Recap of Courtyard Urbanism in Bloomington-Normal, SPUR (Bay Area), and more.

• Project to Highlight — The Parkline at 1457 N. Main Street, Chinatown, Los Angeles

• New Laws and Laws Taking Effect — NC H162, CA AB 179, NH HB 1588, MI HB 5570/5571, CT HB 8002

• The Federal Story — courtyard buildings and pattern books enter federal housing law

• The Evidence — Urban Institute on whether upzoning actually produces homes

• Losses and Watch List — California Forever pairs jobs and housing, LA delays SB 79 to 2030

1. CU Project Updates

Keep Families in the City

This Sunday, August 16, Courtyard Urbanist will join the Chicago Growth Project for Keep Families in the City: Building Neighborhoods for Lifelong Chicagoans.

The panel will examine why Chicago families are so often forced to choose between the walkable neighborhoods they love and homes that meet their needs. I will discuss how courtyard buildings, missing-middle housing, and related reforms could create more family-sized homes and help Chicagoans remain in the city throughout their lives.

The event runs from 1:00 to 3:30 p.m. at Le Village Lakeview, 4021 N. Broadway. It is designed for families, with one ticket admitting the entire household and food, toys, activities, and a children’s play area provided. Register through Eventbrite.

Courtyard urbanism has entered San Francisco

On July 29 I joined SPUR’s Digital Discourse series for “From Family Zoning to Family Housing: Courtyard Urbanism for San Francisco,” alongside Annie Fryman, SPUR’s Director of Special Projects, and Michael Lane, SPUR’s State Policy Director.

The argument I made at SPUR is basically the one I make for every city: San Francisco can use courtyard urbanism to add sustainable, naturally affordable, family-friendly density. San Francisco’s Family Zoning Plan opens the door to more four- to eight-story housing and more family-sized homes, but the rules governing building form, parcelization, and development will determine whether that capacity produces larger megaprojects or great neighborhoods. Courtyard urbanism depends on the viability of small-lot buildings with wide, shallow floorplates; a mix of home sizes and uses; and protected shared courtyards assembled into fine-grained, walkable blocks. This is the time-tested system for giving families more light and space, parents more time, children more independence, and households a reason to remain in the city through every stage of life.

The recording is free and up on SPUR’s event page. If you work in a city with a newly upzoned map and no idea what to build on it, that hour is for you.

Earlier in July, I traveled to Bloomington-Normal to give the keynote opening for Strong Towns BLONO’s Downtown Bloomington Transitional District Charrette. Residents and practitioners walked the district, worked over parcel maps, and tested how city-owned lots and parking areas could become fine-grained courtyard blocks. The trip reinforced the implementation sequence I keep returning to: teach the form, test it on real sites, and turn the drawings into pre-reviewed plans, parcel passports, and a pilot district. I tell the full story and lay out that three-part playbook in “Setting the Table for Courtyard Urbanism.”

Also in July, we continued conversations with developers, municipalities, housing organizations, and capital partners across the country. A prospective Boston-area development is still furthest along, supported by a favorable regulatory environment and a local sponsor with a clear vision (I visited the site last week with sponsor, capital partner, and construction team — super exciting, history-making work being done there). Across the public and private sectors, individuals and groups are taking action to move courtyard urbanism from a compelling idea to a practical development program.

Want to get involved?

If you are a capital partner, contact us about investment opportunities in emerging courtyard-block projects.

If you are a private developer with site control and a viable entitlement path, contact us about feasibility, master planning, and design services.

If you represent a city, housing organization, or other institutional partner, contact us about creating an implementation roadmap: pre-reviewed plans and a pattern book, a courtyard-block zoning overlay, and a pilot project.

If you are a local housing advocate, civic organization, or resident, consider organizing a charrette to introduce courtyard urbanism, test the form on real sites, and build support for a local implementation program.

To begin a conversation, email projects@courtyardurbanist.com.

2. Project to Learn From

The Parkline at 1457 N. Main Street, Chinatown, Los Angeles

Just east of Los Angeles State Historic Park, a six-story apartment building has been completed around a series of open-air courtyards. The Parkline deserves attention for what it accomplishes and for what it reveals about conventional multifamily development. A multifamily building with courtyards is not necessarily courtyard urbanism.

I am not faulting developer Thrive Living or architect AO. They have delivered needed affordable housing through a design that is rational within the regulatory system in which they are operating.

But the published first-floor plan also illustrates why this development model does not create the dense, green, fine-grained neighborhoods that work for people across the life cycle. This is a development that is designed for small-households and short-term occupancy, not for families and long-term residency.

Project specifications

• 376 apartments, all studios, junior one-bedrooms, and one-bedrooms

• Six stories, with open-air courtyards and a rooftop deck

• 6,448 square feet of ground-floor commercial space

• 82 parking spaces for 376 homes

• 42 apartments reserved for extremely low-income households, with the remaining homes targeted to households earning up to 80 percent of area median income

• Prefabricated modular construction

The Parkline provides only 82 parking spaces for 376 homes, or one space per 4.6 apartments. Earlier Los Angeles requirements could have demanded 376 to 564 spaces, while even the reduced transit-oriented standard would require 188. The project shows what becomes possible when parking reflects expected demand rather than a blanket minimum. Los Angeles City Planning explains the current transit-area parking reforms.

The Parkline contains no family-sized homes, but unit mix is not the only issue. Even if every apartment had four bedrooms, it would remain one 376-unit, corridor-served megaproject with paved courtyards contained inside a podium-style structure.

Courtyard urbanism means many buildings, one block. Separate shallow buildings can be financed, built, and owned by different parties while enclosing a shared, ground-level garden with real soil, mature trees, and stormwater infiltration.

This distinction shapes who can build, how the neighborhood evolves, and how residents experience it. A large apartment alone is not family-friendly urbanism. Families also need privacy, daylight from multiple directions, useful thresholds, direct access to outdoor space, and a comfortable social scale.

The Parkline delivers affordable housing, density, limited parking, and modular construction on a constrained site. It also demonstrates the limitations of a system that channels multifamily housing into large, unified corridor buildings.

Moving beyond that system will require leadership from the city. Los Angeles should develop the following three tools.

1. A pattern book of pre-reviewed plans for wide, shallow, four- to six-story apartment buildings, particularly the 8–25-unit buildings capable of composing a fine-grained block.

2. A courtyard urbanism zoning overlay that allows multiple buildings and parcels to enclose a shared courtyard through a predictable administrative approval process.

3. A pilot district where the city, developers, architects, lenders, and residents can test the complete model on real sites.

The Parkline shows that Los Angeles can deliver density without a tower and housing without a parking space for every apartment. The next task is to deliver that density as a neighborhood.

3. New Laws and Laws Taking Effect

North Carolina kills parking minimums — first in the nation

House Bill 162 — Parking Lot Reform / Stormwater Control

On July 6, Governor Josh Stein signed House Bill 162 — “Parking Lot Reform/Stormwater Control” (chaptered as Session Law 2026-39 on July 7), barring most local governments from requiring a minimum number of off-street parking spaces for new residential and commercial development. It takes effect January 1, 2027. Read the law.

The details:

Coastal counties are exempt — a late concession over vacation-rental parking. The law still covers roughly 90% of the state’s population.

Localities also can no longer require a parking stall larger than 9 by 20 feet, except for handicap, parallel, or diagonal spaces.

The stormwater provisions matter for infill, too. When an already-developed property is redeveloped, existing impervious area generally gets credited rather than treated as brand-new impervious surface requiring full retrofitting to current standards. The law also allows localities to offer incentives for developers who voluntarily provide stormwater controls beyond state requirements.

It passed 44–1 in the Senate and 111–2 in the House. Stein called it “another tool in the tool box.”

This is the single most important state action of the month for courtyard development, and it is not close.

Parking minimums are one major reason small and mid-sized multifamily projects pencil out at the wrong scale. Required parking is extremely expensive. Its cost gets rolled into rent, and the land it consumes is land you cannot build homes on or turn into a courtyard. On many constrained infill parcels, a two-space-per-unit mandate does not merely shrink the project. It can kill it, or force it into a podium typology that no longer produces a fine-grained block.

And here is the hydrological bonus: courtyard urbanism can add density while reducing impervious surface. Replace an asphalt-heavy commercial site with compact, multi-story buildings around a planted courtyard and you can add substantially more homes while converting pavement into soil, trees, gardens and permeable ground. More people per acre can mean less runoff per acre.

Delete the parking mandate, preserve the redevelopment credit for existing impervious area, and the courtyard block becomes much easier to build at the scale it was always meant to be built at: incrementally, by many hands, on ordinary lots.

New Hampshire: housing in commercial zones, by right (but serious limitations in bill)

New Hampshire’s mandate requiring cities and towns to allow multifamily housing in commercial zones took effect July 1. On July 15, Governor Kelly Ayotte signed HB 1588, which rewrote the requirements two weeks after they landed. Read the law.

Under HB 1588, housing in commercial zones is allowed by right, and most of the density restrictions, landscaping requirements, and conditional use permits towns had adopted are off the table. The law also expressly permits converting existing nonconforming commercial buildings to multifamily or mixed-use, so long as the building envelope isn’t expanded. And it punishes cities that improperly deny a multifamily project with a fee-shifting provision letting an applicant recover attorney’s fees when a municipality imposes requirements beyond what state law authorizes, and the applicant prevails at the Housing Appeals Board or in court. Towns that don’t play by the new rules now face a bill.

Read this next part carefully, because it cuts the other way, hindering progress toward better urban form. Municipalities retain authority over three dimensional controls: frontage, setbacks, and building height. Those are precisely the levers that determine whether you get a perimeter block or a detached building sitting in a parking lot. Courtyard urbanism can still be thwarted in New Hampshire by setback requirements and a three-story height cap.

And HB 1588 did not travel alone. Ayotte also signed HB 1010, which gives towns explicit power to require studies proving a commercial-zone housing development won’t harm traffic or water and sewer capacity. That is a procedural brake that will slow down liberalization. One step forward, one step back in New Hampshire.

Net: New Hampshire is now one of the better states in the country in which to attempt an infill courtyard block in a downtown commercial district — the by-right pathway is clear enough to underwrite against. But the fight has moved from how many units to what shape, and that is a fight the courtyard block has to win on frontage and height.

Michigan expands single-stair construction

On July 21, Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed HB 5570 and HB 5571, which amend Michigan’s construction code to permit qualifying residential buildings of up to four stories to use a single interior exit stair. The previous limit was three stories. Read the governor’s summary.

This may be the housing reform with the broadest design implications in this month’s brief. The two-stair requirement, which forces developers to distribute the cost and space of two stairs across enough apartments, has pushed American construction toward long, double-loaded corridors and larger, deeper floorplates. Point-access buildings that place four or five homes around one stair make smaller floorplates more feasible, give each home more exterior wall, and allow building footprints that can wrap a courtyard rather than fill the lot.

Michigan’s reform, which applies through four stories and includes fire-safety and design conditions, is narrower than the six-story standards adopted or proposed elsewhere. Still, it brings the same principle into midwestern American building practice. Small apartment buildings in Michigan can now meet modern safety standards without organizing every floor around two stairs.

California: AB 179 restructures affordable-housing finance

Governor Newsom signed AB 179, the housing budget trailer bill for the 2026–27 budget. It is principally an affordable-housing finance and administration bill, not a general zoning or fee-repeal measure. Read the governor’s summary.

• State officials estimate that a package of affordable-housing finance and impact-fee reforms could reduce the cost of qualifying affordable housing by $60,000 to $70,000 per unit

• $200 million for the Multifamily Housing Program

• $500 million for enhanced state low-income housing tax credits

• $900 million for the HHAP homeless block grant

• Creates the California Housing and Homelessness Agency, consolidating several state housing departments

• Creates a $100 million Disaster Housing Rebuilding Fund for qualifying disaster recovery

That estimated per-unit reduction is significant, but it should not be read as a blanket waiver for every market-rate project. The savings apply to qualifying affordable housing through a package of finance and fee reforms. For courtyard urbanism, the implication is narrower: small, family-sized buildings may benefit when they are part of an affordable-housing strategy, but AB 179 does not itself eliminate local impact fees for ordinary private development.

The disaster fund could also support rebuilding in the Palisades and other qualifying burn areas. The urban question remains whether those resources reproduce isolated subdivisions or help rebuild complete neighborhoods.

AB 179 is a supporting player rather than the star. But supporting players decide whether the deal closes.

Connecticut’s middle housing mandate goes live

Also on July 1, the operative provisions of Connecticut’s HB 8002 kicked in. Towns must now allow “transit community middle housing” — residential buildings of 2 to 9 units — on land zoned for mixed-use or commercial use. And towns can no longer reject a proposed development of up to 16 units for lack of off-street parking absent a documented adverse public health impact. Read the state summary.

Two to nine units, in commercial zones, with parking objections defanged. That is an incremental developer’s charter. One building is not a courtyard block on its own, but several on adjoining parcels can assemble into a fine-grained perimeter block without requiring a single megaproject.

4. The Federal Story

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law without a signature

At midnight on July 11, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law. The President neither signed it nor vetoed it within the constitutional ten days, and Congress remained in session, so it took effect on its own. The Senate had passed it 85–5 on June 22; the House passed it 358–32 the next day. Its lead sponsors were Senators Tim Scott (R-SC) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). Read the enacted law.

It is the most substantial federal housing-supply package in decades, bringing several reforms that had been advancing separately into a single law.

The most direct provision is Section 209, the Accelerating Home Building program. For the first time, federal housing law expressly names the courtyard building. It defines a covered structure as a low- or mid-rise building with no more than 25 homes and authorizes HUD grants to help local governments select and adopt pre-reviewed designs — also identified as pattern books — for mixed-income housing. The grants fund the design and adoption system, not construction itself.

Here is what else is in it for people who build courtyard blocks:

1. HUD must publish model code and technical guidance for point-access (single-stair) buildings up to six stories — including consultation with developers, architects, fire marshals, researchers, economists, and officials in states that have already done it. HUD may also work with the International Code Council to get point-access standards into the IBC itself.

2. HUD is authorized to establish competitive grants for single-stair pilot projects testing safety, feasibility, and effectiveness. The program sunsets after seven years.

3. FHA multifamily loan limits rise for the first time since 2003, and get indexed to inflation. If you have ever tried to size a HUD 221(d)(4) against 2003 per-unit caps and current construction costs, you know why this matters.

4. The bank Public Welfare Investment cap goes from 15% to 20%, loosening a structural constraint on bank investment in LIHTC deals.

5. HUD must publish guidelines and best-practice frameworks for state and local zoning — reducing or eliminating parking minimums, raising allowed FAR, encouraging transit-oriented development.

6. Authorization for a $200 million annual competitive grant program for local governments and tribes that demonstrate measurable increases in housing supply.

Section 209 is the provision I would underline. The federal government has now recognized the 8-to-25-unit courtyard building and the pre-reviewed pattern book as a housing-supply strategy. That does not make the building legal everywhere, but it gives cities a federal framework — and potentially federal support — for adopting the exact implementation tools courtyard urbanism needs. The point-access work is the second half of the story, for model language can help states make those small buildings physically and financially workable.

The caveat is that almost everything above is a directive or authorization to HUD, not a self-executing change. Guidelines have to be written. Grants have to be funded and awarded. Pre-reviewed designs still have to be adopted locally, and model language still has to be adopted by states or jurisdictions under no obligation to do so. The law is an invitation, and the next eighteen months of implementation will see who comes to the party.

5. The Evidence

Does upzoning produce housing? Mostly yes. The exceptions explain when it does not.

Urban Institute researchers Yipeng Su, Will Curran-Groome, and Yonah Freemark recently published How Big Upzonings Affect Housing Supply, which examines seven neighborhood rezonings in New York City and Philadelphia’s 2012 zoning rewrite.

The findings

• Across seven New York City upzonings, the researchers estimated that more than 4,000 additional homes were produced within four years compared with similar parcels that were not upzoned.

• Gowanus produced the largest response. Its 2021 rezoning resulted in an estimated 5,400 additional completed homes by 2025.

• Philadelphia’s 2012 rewrite allowed more homes within each development. Combined with later zoning-map changes and an expiring tax abatement, it contributed to a permitting increase from 2019 through 2021. At its peak, the reform was associated with as many as 4,000 additional permitted units per year, although not every permit will result in construction.

• The 2018 Jerome Avenue rezoning in the Bronx produced no statistically significant increase in housing supply. Philadelphia neighborhoods with weak demand before the rewrite also attracted little new development afterward.

Gowanus combined three conditions that supported development. The rezoning added substantial capacity, the affected land consisted largely of well-configured industrial parcels with low-value existing buildings, and the surrounding housing market was strong. Public investment, transit access, and the cleanup of the Gowanus Canal also supported the area’s appeal. The researchers explain these conditions in a companion article.

Jerome Avenue had a weaker housing market and slower rent growth before its rezoning. Philadelphia showed the same pattern. Neighborhoods that had attracted little development before the zoning rewrite generally remained quiet afterward.

The evidence supports a qualified conclusion. Upzoning can produce housing, but new capacity is most likely to become homes when the reform adds enough capacity to change project economics, applies to parcels that can be redeveloped, and operates within a market that supports construction.

Upzoning is often necessary, but it is not sufficient. Cities should pair additional capacity with the measures that make ordinary parcels easier to build. Those measures include parking relief, single-stair reform, lower fees, predictable by-right approval, and pre-reviewed building plans. That combination describes much of what July delivered.

The study raises another question that it does not answer. How can cities strengthen demand in places where the housing market is weak?

I expect courtyard urbanism to matter here. It cannot create household purchasing power or overcome weak regional economics. It can improve the kind of neighborhood that new zoning capacity allows the market to build.

Courtyard urbanism can combine density, greenery, fine-grained street frontage, family-sized homes, and shared outdoor space. It can also divide large redevelopment sites into smaller projects that different builders can deliver over time. These are qualities found in sought-after neighborhoods in Copenhagen, Paris, and Stockholm but rarely reproduced in new American development.

A neighborhood built on this model could attract households that are not well served by either detached houses or large corridor apartment buildings. That is my prediction, not a finding of the Urban Institute report. Upzoning creates capacity. Courtyard urbanism may help turn that capacity into places where more people want to live.

6. Losses and Watch List

California Forever pairs jobs and housing after California loses Port Alpha

In July, Saronic chose Texas for its $3.2 billion Port Alpha complex after California failed to establish the predictable approval process the project required. California lost more than 10,000 prospective direct jobs, along with the suppliers, training programs, and investment that would have accompanied them. The Port of Brownsville provides the project details.

The decision does not materially damage California Forever. Saronic was one prospective tenant within its planned 7,500-acre, multi-tenant Solano Shipyard. California Forever continues to plan the shipyard and manufacturing district while pursuing other American and allied shipbuilders. Its current shipyard materials confirm that work continues.

California Forever is right to link industrial development with housing. Ten thousand jobs would create demand for thousands of homes. Without new housing nearby, that growth would produce higher prices, displacement, longer commutes, and outward sprawl. A compact, walkable community near the shipyard is workforce infrastructure.

KCRA reports that California Forever is seeking a more predictable state approval process that would become operative only after a major employer commits. The proposal would shorten review timelines without waiving environmental law or eliminating local control.

Port Alpha’s departure does not discredit California Forever. It demonstrates the cost of California’s failure to approve major employment and the housing needed to support it as one coordinated program.

Los Angeles delays SB 79 to 2030

SB 79, the Abundant and Affordable Homes Near Transit Act, took effect July 1. In Los Angeles it eventually zones for something on the order of 1.5 million new homes, with roughly 448,000 unlocked immediately. See Los Angeles’s implementation page.

The city moved first. On June 23, ahead of the effective date, City Council adopted ordinances taking the maximum-delay path available under the statute. SB 79 lets transit-adjacent areas that already permit at least half the housing the law requires hold off on rule changes until a year after the next state-mandated planning period. For Los Angeles, that is 2030. Lower-income neighborhoods, areas at wildfire or sea-level-rise risk, and designated historic districts can also delay.

In exchange, the Council adopted a Low Rise Ordinance allowing two- to four-story multifamily buildings in 57 station areas, including parcels that were previously limited to single-family housing.

This is a genuinely mixed result and I would resist reading it purely as a loss. Four years of delay on the citywide map is a real cost. But two to four stories in 57 station areas, including formerly single-family territory, creates a plausible envelope for courtyard housing: more than a duplex, less than a tower, and capable of forming a low-rise perimeter around shared open space.

The watch item for the next twelve months is whether anyone actually builds one — or whether the Low Rise Ordinance produces 57 station areas full of skinny double-loaded stick-frame boxes with a leasing office where the courtyard should be.

What July Means

Three things happened at once this month, and they are the three things courtyard urbanism has always needed:

1. The parking mandate broke (North Carolina, statewide, first in the nation).

2. The two-stair mandate began to break (Michigan at four stories; federal guidance and model language coming).

3. The commercial-zone wall broke (New Hampshire, Connecticut, both live July 1).

At least one of these reforms was passed with courtyard buildings explicitly in mind: federal law now names the type. The others operate indirectly by changing parking, stairs, permitted use, height, light, and party walls — the rules from which urban form emerges.

This is not inevitable. It was made by law, and it can be remade by law. July was a good month for the remaking.

What to do with this

If you are a developer: North Carolina after January 1, 2027, and New Hampshire commercial zones right now are the two most underpriced places in the country to try a courtyard block. Go look at frontage and height rules before you look at anything else.

If you are a planner or an elected official: HUD will now develop point-access guidance and model language, alongside grants for pre-reviewed designs. When your state or locality considers them, say yes early.

If you are in Los Angeles: the Low Rise Ordinance sites are open. Somebody is going to build the first real courtyard block at an LA station area. It should be somebody who reads this newsletter.

Divide the land, write good code, and let many hands build the city.

Cheers, Alicia

On July 23rd, I boarded a train at Chicago’s Union Station bound for Normal, Illinois.

Strong Towns BLONO had invited me to give the keynote address at the public kickoff of its 2026 Downtown Bloomington Transitional District Charrette. The evening began with an open public-engagement session, followed by my talk, “Courtyard Urbanism: Building Cities for Families,” in the courtroom at the McLean County Museum of History. The next day, a smaller group spent hours walking downtown, studying its parcels, drawing on maps, and imagining what a repaired downtown Bloomington could look like.

The event was organized around the important question of what should happen in the “transitional areas” surrounding downtown Bloomington?

Downtown Bloomington has an urban core that is mainly commercial and is surrounded by under-developed areas that, ideally, evolve into a denser, mixed-use transition neighborhood between the urban core and the lower-density residential neighborhoods. The vacant and underdeveloped areas already have streets and infrastructure. But they are visually dominated by surface parking lots and leftovers of the car-oriented development model that hollowed out so many American downtowns in the second half of the twentieth century.

A charrette exists to make a different future visible. It gets people out of the abstract language of “density” and “revitalization” and models buildings on familiar sites. Charrettes help people to imagine what a rebuilt downtown could look like. That makes a charrette one of the best tools for introducing courtyard urbanism to a place that hasn’t seen it before.

Bloomington-Normal needs live-work neighborhoods for a changing workforce and growing employment

Remember: cities exist to put people in close proximity to jobs and to their social and cultural networks. With ~135,000 residents and home to State Farm Insurance and Rivian, Bloomington-Normal has a large population and strong regional employment, but it largely fails to put its residents close to their jobs and social networks, forcing them into isolation and car dependency.

Unlike the fading small towns held up as romantic comeback stories, BLONO isn’t hunting for a reason to exist. Its employment base is growing and the demand for housing is strong. However, although the employment base is growing, the need for single-use office space, downtown, sitting on land far away from workers’ homes is declining rapidly.

This is the same national story I’ve written about before. U.S. office vacancy has plateaued at roughly double its pre-pandemic level. A quarter of the country’s paid workdays now happen at home. And the households doing that work look nothing like the ones this downtown was built around. Among married couples with children, both parents work in 66.3 percent of families today, up from about a quarter in 1960. When both adults hold jobs, flexibility stops being a perk and becomes the schedule.

State Farm doesn’t need fewer workers. It needs less downtown square footage per worker. Fewer of those 13,000 people are in that building at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday than at any point in the company’s history.

I heard the flip side of that shift firsthand during Friday’s charrette. A mother of two — a one-year-old and a four-year-old — who works at State Farm told me at length about her frustration with the car culture grind, where the most stressful part of her day is wrestling her kids into carseats to take them to daycare and other desinations. She wasn’t asking for a bigger house farther out. She wanted to walk her kids to school and get to work herself without the car seats.

Walkable, family-friendly density does not exist in Bloomington-Normal. There are houses for families in low-density subdivisions, and there are student apartments, downtown lofts, and some new yardless corridor buildings. Nowhere can you find fine-grained neighborhoods made of many small apartment houses, townhouses, small mixed-use buildings, courtyards, streets, parks, schools, and local businesses.

This housing stock reflects the automobile-oriented patterns of the mid-twentieth century in the Twin Cities. Older walkable neighborhoods were neglected while housing and commercial activity dispersed outward. Downtown Bloomington kept its civic and architectural assets, but the continuous urban fabric around them thinned out.

Uptown Normal shows the trajectory can be reversed. Its redevelopment — a 1999 masterplan by the Chicago firm Farr Associates, more than two decades of infrastructure investment, the Uptown Circle roundabout, a multimodal Amtrak and bus station — brought apartments, hotels, transit, public space, shops, and civic life back to its center. It’s an accomplishment that required that the local government spend enormous political and financial capital to see it through.

But Uptown’s next phase reminds us that density alone is not sufficient to make a great or even viable neighborhood.

The weakness of conventional megaprojects; the strength of the building-and-block model

Much recent American densification follows what you could call the superparcel model: assemble a large site, hand it to a single developer, and build one large building — or one connected podium complex — designed, financed, approved, and managed as a single project.

Remarkably, these projects can add hundreds of apartments without creating a neighborhood. The long blank walls, few entrances, internally oriented amenities, narrow demographic, limited usable yard space, limited ownership and development participation … all of these forces make such projects feel incomplete and sterile. They feel designed for throughput and cars rather than long-term occupancy and pedestrian activity.

Noah Tang, the president of Strong Towns BLONO, has made this case in detail writing about Uptown Normal’s Trail East and West sites. Two development proposals for those parcels collapsed in the past decade — a five-story, roughly $30 million building from an out-of-state firm that fell apart on financing in 2021, then a two-building, 150-unit, $50–60 million proposal from another out-of-town developer that went quiet by 2023. Tang's diagnosis is blunt: "Trying to assemble a capital stack of cards for a project of $30 million dollars is a tall order, and pretty much anything can knock this fragile metaphor of financing down." His alternative is to subdivide the same land into 20-to-40-foot parcels sold with design covenants — closer to the width of Uptown’s own successful blocks — so no single deal has to carry the whole neighborhood. His point isn’t that Uptown should stop growing. It’s that the physical and financial structure of its growth matters as much as the growth itself.

Courtyard urbanism is a version of the same idea, sized for a downtown transitional district instead of one boulevard. A perimeter block can reach real density at four, five, or six stories without being one building and one development deal. Divide it into many buildable parcels instead. Each building contributes a stretch of street wall and encloses part of a shared courtyard, and different architects, developers, contractors, nonprofits, cooperatives, and owners can all take part without breaking the coherence of the whole.

The block is the unit of urban design. The building is the unit of development. That distinction is what lets density grow incrementally and hold people across the life cycle, instead of resetting to zero every time one megaproject stalls.

A high-agency urban revival group brings courtyard urbanism to their city

Strong Towns BLONO started in 2022 as the Bloomington Revivalists and has grown into an independent nonprofit whose members include teachers, contractors, planners, professors, real-estate professionals, small-business owners, and elected officials. Members choose priority campaigns and build projects around them — a downtown tax-assessment map, a crash-data explorer, a sidewalk wayfinding mural pilot, zoning advocacy, and last summer’s charrette for the city-owned Front N Center site, where sixteen volunteers spent a day producing low-, medium-, and high-intensity redevelopment concepts for a since-demolished downtown block.

Noah Tang leads the group with a rare skill set, which includes an understanding of urban development and a knack for teaching and coordinating. Under his leadership, the local advocacy group has evolved beyond a reactive (“gives feedback on proposals after they’re already designed”) group. It is helping generate the designs.

That’s the context Noah invited me into.

Teaching a form, then going for drinks

That first evening began with maps. The public could examine the transitional district and talk through specific sites with the charrette team. Their input could then feed directly into the next day’s design work in a natural, sequential fashion.

Then I gave my keynote, a ~45 minute presentation on courtyard urbanism + 15 minute Q&A. I explained how mid-rise perimeter block creates neighborhoods that are dense enough to support walkability and amenities, and green enough for kids to have backyard experiences. I showed how mid-rise perimeter blocks can hold house-like apartments with multiple bedrooms, dual-aspect plans, frequent entrances, usable outdoor space, and a clear sequence from public street to private home to shared courtyard. I argued that the courtyard block is a development system that lets many buildings and many builders assemble one coherent neighborhood incrementally over time. I argued that courtyard urbanism is the solution to cities’ family urban exodus problem — and the means by which historically gutted cities like BLONO can create fantastic live-work neighborhoods that appeal to households of all ages, stages, and incomes. I showed them how to design the blocks. It was a great audience, and they had great questions and comments.

Then we went for drinks! Local development gets shaped by plans and ordinances, but also by relationships, and the people in that room were good-humored and willing to spend a weeknight talking about parcel dimensions, party walls, and urban history—my favorite things.

The next morning the charrette began in earnest. The study area was split into four quadrants, and we were divided into four teams and assigned to a quadrant. We walked the streets looking at the city-owned lots, parking lots, historic structures, and awkward cell towers. Back at the maps, we covered them in tracing paper and started drawing.

While others worked fluently with markers and physical materials, I shifted to my laptop and started testing building footprints on screen. I’m a hopelessly digital person in a beautiful, analog ritual. My contributions focused on the city-owned sites already positioned for redevelopment. I subdivided these sites into parcels roughly 60’ of street frontage, and then traced the shallow footprint (40’ deep), and chamfered any corner lots.

The activity is revealing the latent urban structure already present in a city block How to divide the street frontage into multiple parcels?

A charrette report should be a beginning, not an ending

Strong Towns BLONO is still finishing the output of the 2026 charrette, which is likely a draft proposal or packet assembling the site analysis, drawings, and recommendations from the three-day process (the charrette continued on to Saturday, although I returned to Chicago on Friday).

The recommendations will go into 2026 report that the Planning Commission will take guidance from as they make plans for the transitional district.

The next step is bringing the report into a sustained conversation with Bloomington’s planning staff, Planning Commission, mayor, City Council, land-disposition officials, and property owners. The city’s comprehensive plan already calls for downtown to function as a vibrant commercial, cultural, and residential neighborhood, and the city has recently amended its own Downtown Transitional District regulations.

What it the best possible outcome for the charrette? I think it should become the starting point for three linked pieces of development infrastructure: (1) A pattern book of pre-reviewed buildings; (2) a mission-aligned parcel passport system that specifies boundaries, building envelope, height, frontage, access, parking, open-space and environmental obligations—and often its intended housing type or tenure; (3) a pilot courtyard block district.

1. A pattern book of pre-reviewed buildings

A pattern book would define a family of middle housing building types suited to Bloomington. These shouldn’t be surface-level façade designs. They should set the spatial and architectural rules that create fine-grained neighborhood with adequate green space: building depth, frontage, party-wall conditions, entrances, stair and elevator configurations, unit orientation, ground-floor relationships, courtyard edges, corner conditions, roof forms, and adaptable mixed-use space.

Selected plans could then get advance review for compatibility with local zoning, building code, fire access, utilities, and design standards. Pre-reviewed means the city has resolved the recurring questions once, and this cuts design cost and approval uncertainty, which comes as a special relief for small developers.

2. Parcel passports

Pair those building types with parcel passports for priority redevelopment sites: a site-specific license that tells a prospective builder what can be built. That might include parcel dimensions, ownership and disposition process, allowable building envelope, utility connections, access and servicing conditions, environmental or historic constraints, parking and loading rules, applicable incentives, approval sequence, and which pre-reviewed building types fit the site.

At Amsterdam’s Centrumeiland, the city subdivides large blocks into smaller plots and issues each one a parcel passport, enabling households, cooperatives, housing associations, and developers to build individual pieces while the city coordinates the form, infrastructure, tenure, and affordability strategy across the block.

Cities routinely advertise land as “available” and leave the developer to discover months later that the site has an unresolved title issue, inaccessible utilities, or an approval process no one can explain. A parcel passport turns municipal land from a vague opportunity into a development-ready product.

3. A pilot courtyard district

Finally, Bloomington should designate a small pilot area to test the whole system at once: the charrette plan, a fine-grained parcel map, pre-reviewed building types, parcel passports, public-realm improvements, a predictable approval path, and a transparent process for disposing of city-owned land.

The objective is to replace fragmented and uncertain with one coherent set of standards built around the neighborhood the city wants. A handful of buildings would test the pattern book, one block would test the shared courtyard and parcel structure, and the district as a whole would test whether multiple developers can build side by side, with room to adjust before the city extends the model further.

That is how a charrette becomes an implementation program

A playbook for bringing courtyard urbanism to your town

The Bloomington-Normal experience offers a sequence other communities can copy.

Start with a capable local organization, such as a Strong Towns local conversation, a housing advocacy group, a neighborhood association, a preservation group interested in constructive infill, or a coalition of residents and small developers.

Pick a real place, such as a publicly owned parking lot, an underused commercial property, a dead mall, obsolete institutional land, or a redevelopment parcel too important to fill with another isolated apartment complex.

Invite a broad but working group — residents, architects, builders, developers, planners, elected officials, lenders, housing advocates, business owners, critics — and structure the event around building a vision with broad appeal.

Teach the building form before asking people to draw it. Most Americans have never had a vocabulary for telling a freestanding apartment complex apart from a perimeter block, or a unified megaproject from an incrementally built neighborhood. Once people know the parts, they can make better choices about them.

Walk the sites. Draw the blocks. Test dimensions. Identify the publicly controlled parcels. Publish the results. Then use the charrette to launch the three pillars: pre-reviewed plans, parcel passports, and a pilot district.

A charrette doesn’t resolve financing, rewrite the zoning code, remediate a site, or persuade a city to sell its land differently. A charrette sets the table. It turns a foreign, unknown kind of development into something people can talk about concretely, gives residents something more specific than the word “density” to react to, shows officials that a parking lot is a future neighborhood and not just a future project, and gives builders a sense of which pieces of a big site they could actually take on themselves. It also hands a local organization a positive agenda instead of a defensive one.

Bloomington-Normal already has the jobs, the institutions, and the infrastructure. The work now is building the neighborhoods that connect them.

If you would like to organize your own charrette and want to learn more about how to do it, you can reach out to Noah Tang at president@strongtownsblono.com.

If you want to find out more about engaging me for presentations and workshops, you can send an email to projects@courtyardurbanist.com

The population of young children in big cities is falling fast, with the under-five population declining by double digits in New York City, Cook County, and Los Angeles County in the years following the pandemic. Yes, part of the decline is explained by falling fertility. But birth rates are falling twice as rapidly in large urban counties as in rural counties.1

Families wishing to raise children in cities have few attainable housing options because the market offers little between a million-dollar single-family house and a small, yardless apartment in a large building. In desirable urban neighborhoods, single-family homes often start at $1 million. Yet most new multifamily housing consists of small units in large buildings. Of the 484,000 multifamily homes completed nationwide in 2025, 42 percent had one bedroom, while only 10 percent had three or more. Larger apartments also command a steep premium. In the Chicago metropolitan area, newly completed three-bedroom apartments rented for an average of $3,172 per month in early 2025, compared with $1,743 for a studio. Even these relatively rare larger apartments often lack direct access to a yard, the intimacy of a small building, or proximity to desirable schools. And so we have a profound housing gap, where families must either pay a substantial premium for a suitable home or move outward to find one.2

This is a problem for families, who lose access to the conveniences and opportunities concentrated in cities. It is also a problem for cities, which lose students for schools, tax payers necessary for fiscal health, and workers for workforce growth. More fundamentally, cities lose their connection to the next generation of citizens. A city without children is a city with no future.

Small apartment buildings can help cities retain families while providing the density and variety of homes that urban life requires. Yet affordability requirements designed for large developments can impair the feasibility of small apartment buildings. Cities must recalibrate those policies so they do not prevent the family-sized housing they need.

Helpfully, the federal government now recognizes this missing small apartment production scale and suggests a pathway for reform. Section 209 of the newly enacted 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act defines low- and mid-rise buildings containing no more than 25 homes as a distinct category and expressly includes infill and courtyard buildings. Section 102 directs HUD to develop guidance for point-access buildings of up to six stories, considering construction costs, affordability, family sizes, unit configurations, accessibility, and fire safety.

The ROAD Act does not change local inclusionary policy. However, it does establish the important principle that buildings with 25 homes or fewer warrant specialized rules and streamlined approval.

Cities should apply the same principle to affordability requirements. For buildings containing 25 homes or fewer, cities should allow family-sized units to replace otherwise required affordable units.

Reform is necessary because unrestricted family-sized and legally affordable homes serve different needs. One expands a scarce housing supply, and the other serves households the market cannot reach. Larger developments should continue to provide income-restricted housing, while smaller multifamily projects should become our path to deliver more family-sized homes.

Small Buildings Work at the Right Scale for Residents and Developers

Small apartment buildings have historically been the workhorses of dense, mixed-income urban neighborhoods. They are simple enough for average developers to build without costly, complex systems, yet large enough for many households to share the costs of land, roof, and foundation. Their shallow plans can produce dual-aspect, house-like homes, with a front facing the street and a quieter back facing the yard. Their street frontage can also accommodate a shop, small garage, or accessible ground-floor home. The small apartment building creates urban family housing at a lower cost per bedroom and at a scale that works for residents and developers alike.

Family-sized apartments can provide housing more efficiently on a per-bedroom basis. A three-bedroom apartment costs more than a studio, but it does not require three kitchens, three entrances, or three circulation systems. Larger homes spread these fixed costs across more bedrooms and residents.

Buildings with 10 to 25 homes can preserve that efficiency through relatively simple construction. They more easily avoid the the podiums, structured parking, deep floor plates, and extensive corridors of larger buildings. The Terner Center’s development model shows substantially lower construction costs for low-rise wood buildings than for podium and high-rise construction.

The smaller scale multifamily can work really well for families. In small apartment buildings, homes are often directly connected to the street and to a protected yard, and smaller scale means more intimacy and familiarity with neighbors.

For developers, the lower total capital requirement makes an individual project accessible to smaller builders. These buildings can fit on infill parcels, without needing to assemble an entire block or financing a megaproject.

Essentially, small multifamily is large enough to achieve economies of scale, yet simple enough for smaller developers to build and families to comfortably inhabit.

Stop Penalizing Family-Sized Homes

Apartment economics already favor smaller units, and the inclusionary policies exacerbate the bias toward smaller units.

Three- and four-bedroom homes require more floor area, windows, storage, and sometimes additional bathrooms, while studios and one-bedroom apartments generally earn more rent per square foot. So it is no surprise that we see more new studios and one-bedrooms apartments than new three or more bedrooms.3

Inclusionary policy makes this imbalance worse by weighting apartment doors rather than bedrooms or floor area. A studio and a three-bedroom home may each satisfy one unit of an obligation, even though the larger home accommodates more people, costs more to build, and uses substantially more of the project’s available space.

Thus we have a double penalty on family units. The market rewards smaller units, and public policy discourages developers from building larger ones. If cities want family housing, their affordability rules must value bedrooms and not just doors.

Adjust Inclusionary Housing for Buildings with 25 homes or fewer

To expand family housing and improve affordability, cities should retain conventional inclusionary requirements for large developments while allowing buildings with 25 homes or fewer to satisfy those requirements by providing family-sized units. This targeted pathway would treat the production of a scarce and essential housing type as an affordability strategy that expands supply and gives more families attainable urban options.

The evidence on inclusionary zoning’s overall effect is mixed, and feasibility modeling shows why reform is needed. While higher affordability requirements can produce more affordable homes in projects that go forward, they leave fewer projects financially viable.4

Cities are already responding by adjusting their policies. Albany reduced its affordable-housing set-aside from as much as 13 percent to 5 percent. Ottawa adopted an initial set-aside rate of zero percent, retaining the option to increase it if future market conditions make inclusionary zoning financially feasible. San Francisco temporarily reduced its inclusionary-housing requirements in 2023 and continues to reassess them through a triennial economic-feasibility review. In Pittsburgh, the City Council amended pending legislation to replace a proposed citywide inclusionary-zoning mandate with a voluntary affordability bonus, while preserving the city’s existing inclusionary-zoning overlays.

Increasingly, cities are recognizing that their inflexible affordable housing requirements undermine housing production and, ironically, their affordability goals. Removing barriers to building large units in small buildings is the next step needed to boost production in this important category.

The ROAD Act supplies a useful boundary

The newly enacted 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act gives cities a useful federal definition. Section 209 defines a “covered structure” as a low- or mid-rise structure containing no more than 25 homes and expressly includes infill development, courtyard buildings, cottage courts, townhouses, multiplexes, and other multifamily forms. The law authorizes support for locally prereviewed plans for these buildings. Another provision directs HUD to develop model code language and technical guidance for point-access residential buildings of up to six stories, considering construction cost, affordability, family sizes, unit configurations, accessibility, and fire safety.5

The law does not govern local inclusionary zoning. However, it does establish the important principle that a low- or mid-rise building with no more than 25 homes is a distinct housing-production category deserving specialized rules, streamlined approval, and public support.

Local affordability policy should recognize the same distinction.

Why Chicago’s existing family-unit swap is not enough

Chicago’s ARO already acknowledges that larger affordable homes should count for more. With the housing commissioner’s approval, one restricted three-bedroom home may substitute for two restricted studios or 1.5 restricted one-bedroom homes. [Chicago Municipal Code § 2-44-085(V)]

That is useful, but it does not solve the small-building problem. The replacement home remains income restricted and subject to the same long-term compliance system. It also consumes more floor area and costs more to construct. In a 2025 planned-development amendment involving 35 for-sale townhomes, providing all family-sized affordable homes reduced a seven-home obligation to six. The project still had to deliver six off-site affordable homes in two separate three-unit buildings. [Chicago PD 1127]

Chicago’s current rule treats a larger *affordable* home as a substitute for smaller affordable homes. Under our proposal, a reformed rule for a building with 25 homes or fewer, a qualifying *unrestricted* family-sized home could replace a required affordable home. That stronger relief is justified by the fragility of small-building economics and the severe shortage of urban family housing.

Pair the pathway with actionable development capacity

Even a better affordability rule will accomplish little if zoning does not permit the density, setbacks, and height needed for the building type.

Inclusionary zoning is often described as a way to share the economic value (“a windfall”) created by development rights. That logic makes sense when additional capacity creates enough value to support the public obligation. But in many cities, a rezoning merely allows an ordinary five- or six-story apartment building where outdated zoning permits townhouses or low-density commercial development. This is not necessarily a windfall. It often corrects an artificial constraint.

A qualifying small-building project should receive automatic permission for:

• five or six stories, depending on context;

• sufficient floor-area ratio;

• zero side setbacks for party-wall construction;

• no residential parking minimum;

• flexible ground-floor uses; and

• administrative approval under objective standards.

If a city wants family-sized housing, it should also ensure that unit-size requirements do not reduce the permitted number of homes or force the building to sacrifice usable area elsewhere. Capacity must be predictable, and financeable, and not a nominal bonus that cannot fit within height, setback, parking, or design rules.

Calculate affordability across a multi-building block

When you have a larger development involving multiple buildings and potentially hundreds of homes, then you need a rule that calculates affordability across the larger development.

If a 100-home courtyard block is under common control, it should not receive five separate small-building exemptions. Its total affordability obligation should be calculated across all 100 homes. But the obligation need not be reproduced within every stairway or building.

Amsterdam’s Centrumeiland offers a useful land-development analogy (not a literal American inclusionary program). The island is planned for approximately 1,700 homes, with roughly 60 to 70 percent delivered via self-build models that include individuals, small building groups, and collectives. The remaining parcels are developed with public financing and provide subsidized units.

Cities should create a formal **Block Affordability Agreement** with the following rules:

• The obligation is calculated across the entire development.

• Subdivision into several buildings does not reduce it.

• Affordable homes may be concentrated in designated buildings or parcels.

• A nonprofit, housing authority, community land trust, cooperative, or mission-driven developer may deliver an affordable building.

• Other parcels may be sold to independent small builders.

Block-level compliance must not become a pretext for “secondary door” affordable housing. Affordable buildings should occupy good locations, use equally durable construction, have dignified entrances, share courtyards and common facilities, and be completed alongside market-rate buildings.

Economic integration should be judged at the scale of lived experience. Do residents share the same courtyard, sidewalks, schools, parks, transit, and neighborhood institutions? Are affordable homes equally durable? Are affordable phases delivered on time? Those questions matter more than whether every stairway contains precisely the same financing structure.

Calculate affordability at the scale of the development while preserving the building as the unit of delivery.

A Chicago pilot

Chicago (or any city) could test this approach through a pilot for buildings containing 10 to 25 homes. The pilot should provide:

• full substitution of qualifying unrestricted family-sized homes for the ARO obligation;

• objective bedroom, floor-area, and usability standards;

• automatic mid-rise zoning capacity;

• parking and setback relief;

• prereviewed plans consistent with the ROAD Act framework;

• administrative approval; and

• Block Affordability Agreements for larger, genuine multi-building developments.

Evaluation should count more than income-restricted apartment doors. It should measure:

• total homes and bedrooms completed;

• two-, three-, and four-bedroom homes completed;

• cost and rent per bedroom;

• income-restricted homes produced or forgone;

• projects approved, financed, started, and completed;

• approval time and project attrition;

• small and emerging developers able to participate;

• use of infill sites.

  

Make Room for the Next Generation

Cities have no future if they attract young adults only to lose them when they have children. Sustaining urban neighborhoods, schools, and civic institutions requires enough two-, three-, and four-bedroom homes for families to remain and grow.

Small apartment buildings can provide those homes on infill sites, through simpler construction and a broader range of builders. But they will not return if cities apply rules designed for 300-home developments to fragile 15- or 20-home projects.

For privately developed buildings with 25 homes or fewer, cities should allow family-sized homes to replace required affordable homes and provide the zoning capacity needed to build them. Larger developments should retain their full affordability obligation, calculated across the block and allocated among genuine buildings and housing providers.

And we should judge this policy by the completed housing that it produces, and not intentions. A city that wants children, strong schools, and neighborhoods that endure across generations must make room for families. Its future depends on it

The newly enacted 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act contains several provisions with direct implications for courtyard urbanism, small multifamily housing, and family-oriented apartment design.

The Act does not itself legalize courtyard blocks or override local zoning and building codes. It does, however, create a set of federal tools that states, cities, developers, housing agencies, and research institutions can use to make these building types easier to deliver.

The most important provisions are:

1. Federal guidance and pilot funding for point-access residential buildings of up to six stories

2. Preapproved housing templates that explicitly include courtyard buildings and structures of up to 25 units

3. Planning and implementation grants for zoning, permitting, and regulatory reform

4. Federal frameworks for state and local housing-supply policy

5. New tools for publicly owned land, infill development, environmental review, and affordable-housing construction

6. Performance incentives for jurisdictions that increase housing production

Individually, these provisions address different parts of the housing-delivery process. Together, they establish a coherent pathway:

A state or locality legalizes point-access courtyard buildings, adopts a family of preapproved plans, reforms the zoning and permitting rules necessary to use them, identifies suitable infill or publicly owned land, and allows multiple builders to deliver complete blocks incrementally.

That is the implementation opportunity created by the Act.

The law does not deliver this system automatically. HUD must issue guidance and design programs. Congress must appropriate funds. States and cities must adopt reforms. Developers, architects, lenders, fire officials, and housing agencies must translate the statutory opening into actual projects.

The task for implementation partners is to connect its provisions around real development opportunities. Which is Courtyard Urbanist is here: to connect implementation partners around real projects (projects@courtyardurbanist.com).

Let’s review the relevant provisions in detail:

1. Point-access buildings receive federal recognition

Section 102 directs the Department of Housing and Urban Development to develop model code language, technical guidance, and best practices for point-access block residential buildings

The Act defines a point-access block as a Group R-2 residential building in which one internal stair provides access and egress for all dwelling units, up to six stories.

This is a major development for multifamily housing reform.

Point-access buildings are often discussed under the narrower label of “single-stair reform.” But their importance is not merely that they eliminate a second staircase. The compact core changes the geometry of the building.

Without a long corridor connecting two remote stairs, a small apartment building can have:

• a shallower floorplate;

• more exterior wall per home;

• more corner apartments;

• more homes with windows on two or three sides;

• better opportunities for cross-ventilation;

• larger and more flexible family units;

• a clearer relationship between the building entrance, street, and courtyard.
  

These features influence whether multifamily housing can support families and long-term residents rather than primarily producing small, one-sided rental units.

Congress appears to recognize this broader value. HUD’s required analysis includes construction costs, affordability, family sizes, diverse unit configurations, accessibility, international standards, state and local precedents, and alternative fire-safety measures.

HUD may also establish competitive pilot grants to evaluate or demonstrate the safety, feasibility, and cost-effectiveness of point-access buildings. Eligible participants can include governments, developers, construction firms, architecture and engineering firms, nonprofits, universities, and research institutions.

This creates a direct opening for implementation consortia.

A serious point-access pilot should include:

• a state or local code authority;

• fire and life-safety experts;

• a developer;

• architects and engineers;

• a builder or construction manager;

• a university or research institution;

• a jurisdiction prepared to permit a real project.

The demonstration should measure more than code compliance. It should evaluate construction cost, net-to-gross efficiency, permitting time, family-unit yield, daylight, ventilation, accessibility, evacuation performance, and resident experience.

For courtyard urbanism, the building-level definition is especially useful. A complete courtyard block can consist of several independently permitted point-access buildings organized around shared open space.

The block is the unit of urban design. The individual building remains the unit of code compliance, construction, finance, and development.

2. Preapproved templates explicitly include courtyard buildings

Section 209 authorizes grants for preapproved housing designs, sometimes called pattern books.

These are not simply collections of attractive architectural examples. The Act defines them as construction plans that have been assessed and approved for compliance with local building and permitting standards so that approvals can be streamlined and expedited.

The list of eligible building types includes:

• duplexes;

• triplexes;

• fourplexes;

• cottage courts;

• townhouses;

• multiplexes;

• infill housing;

• courtyard buildings;

other low- and mid-rise residential structures of up to 25 units.

Courtyard housing is recognized as a distinct category suitable for standardized, preapproved design.

The 25-unit limit also fits a fine-grained development model better than it may initially appear.

A complete courtyard block might contain:

• four 18-unit buildings;

• three 24-unit buildings;

• six 12-unit buildings;

• a mixture of apartments, townhouses, corner buildings, and live-work units.

Each building can remain within the federal template threshold while the block as a whole contains a substantial number of homes.

This creates a transformative alternative to the conventional American model in which an entire block is delivered as one enormous apartment building over a shared parking podium.

A courtyard block can instead be divided into smaller parcels and constructed by several developers or builders over time. That can reduce concentration of risk, allow phasing, create opportunities for smaller firms, and produce architectural diversity within a coherent urban framework.

A useful courtyard-template program should therefore not consist of one standardized building. It should create a configurable family of building types.

That family might include:

• 50-, 60-, and 75-foot-wide buildings;

• midblock and corner conditions;

• party-wall and freestanding variants;

• buildings containing approximately 8 to 25 homes;

• three-, four-, five-, and six-story versions;

• residential and mixed-use ground floors;

• rental, condominium, cooperative, and affordable-housing variants;

• family-oriented unit mixes;

• alternative structural systems;

• rules for assembling buildings around a common courtyard.

The template system should standardize what benefits from repetition while preserving room for architectural expression, local materials, climate adaptation, and neighborhood character.

Section 209 grants will generally flow through local governments, tribes, and municipal organizations. This makes partnership essential.

Cities need design and technical capacity. Designers need jurisdictions willing to adopt and use the plans. Developers need plans that are not only legal but financeable and constructible.

3. Templates require zoning and permitting reform

A preapproved building plan is useful only where the building is legal.

Many American zoning ordinances nominally permit multifamily housing while prohibiting the physical characteristics needed to construct a viable courtyard building.

Typical barriers include:

• side setbacks that prevent party-wall construction;

• low lot-coverage limits;

• excessive parking requirements;

• low floor-area ratios;

• restrictions on multiple buildings on one site;

• maximum building-length rules;

• minimum lot dimensions;

• inflexible open-space formulas;

• discretionary review;

• use segregation;

• subdivision rules that prevent small-parcel development;

• building codes that require two stairs regardless of building size or configuration.

This is why the Act’s planning and zoning provisions are significant.

Section 107 directs HUD to develop federal best practices for state and local zoning and housing-supply frameworks.

Section 207 authorizes support for planning and implementation, including zoning-code updates, regulatory reform, permitting improvements, increased review capacity, transit access, and removal of barriers to housing production.

These provisions can be used to create the regulatory environment in which point-access courtyard templates can work. Can become normal, even.

A local implementation program might include:

• a courtyard-block or perimeter-block zoning district;

• point-access code provisions;

• zero-side-setback and party-wall standards;

• reduced or eliminated parking minimums;

• objective approval procedures;

• shared-courtyard ownership and maintenance rules;

• small-parcel subdivision standards;

• mixed-use ground-floor permissions;

• coordinated fire access and utility plans;

• standards for phased construction around a common block.

The objective should be to establish a normal, repeatable development pathway.

4. The Act creates a broader pathway for missing-middle housing

The Act does not rely heavily on the term “missing middle” (this is a healthy shift), but it supports nearly the entire spectrum:

• duplexes;

• triplexes;

• fourplexes;

• cottage courts;

• townhouses;

• multiplexes;

• small apartment buildings;

• courtyard buildings.

Importantly, the Act expands the significance of “middle housing” to buildings of up to 25 units, which is closer to the traditional European multifamily standard.

America would benefit enormously from developing the upper end of the missing middle: the small apartment buildings containing roughly 8, 12, 18, or 24 homes, including family-sized units and compact point-access buildings. This is, in fact, a category of building that the United States never built at anything like the scale found in European cities, and it is one of the reasons our cities have failed to retain population and value over the long 20th century. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European neighborhoods were filled out by thousands of small and mid-sized apartment buildings, while American urban development remained far more polarized between detached houses and large apartment structures.

These buildings occupy the large gap between the detached house and the 200-unit institutional apartment project.

They can make efficient use of valuable, transit-served land while remaining accessible to a wider range of:

• local developers;

• small builders;

• nonprofit organizations;

• community development corporations;

• resident groups;

• architects;

• lenders;

• contractors.

Section 209’s 25-unit threshold creates an opportunity to recognize small multifamily as a distinct production sector, rather than treating it as a scaled-down version of conventional large apartment development. That distinction could be especially valuable for lending by supporting more standardized underwriting, appraisal, and financing products tailored to buildings of roughly 8 to 25 homes.

But templates and zoning reforms will not be enough!

Implementation partners must also address:

• acquisition and predevelopment capital;

• construction and permanent financing;

• standardized underwriting;

• appraisal methods;

• shared infrastructure;

• courtyard governance;

• condominium and cooperative law;

• affordable-housing compliance across multiple buildings;

• procurement and disposition of public land.

While the federal Act creates a platform for this work, it does not solve every institutional barrier. This is a longer quest.

5. Public land and infill provisions can create a project pipeline

The Act also contains provisions related to publicly owned land, infill development, environmental review, and affordable-housing construction.

Certain jurisdictions receiving Community Development Block Grant funds must create searchable inventories of undeveloped publicly owned land.

Other provisions expand the use of CDBG funds for new affordable-housing construction and streamline aspects of federal environmental review for qualifying housing and infill activity.

These measures could help jurisdictions connect land, templates, builders, and funding.

Cities and public agencies often control:

• vacant parcels;

• obsolete municipal facilities;

• parking lots;

• former institutional sites;

• underused commercial properties;

• larger redevelopment areas.

Yet these sites are frequently inventoried poorly, released irregularly, or awarded only through large master-development processes.

A courtyard implementation strategy could use public land differently.

A public entity could establish:

• the block plan;

• streets and infrastructure;

• the shared open-space system;

• building envelopes;

• template options;

• affordability expectations;

• parcel-disposition rules.

Individual building parcels could then be released to several builders, nonprofit organizations, community land trusts, cooperatives, or mission-aligned developers.

This would allow the public sector to coordinate the neighborhood without requiring one developer to construct the entire district as a single project.

6. Housing-production incentives strengthen the case for repeatable systems

The Act also creates or modifies incentives for jurisdictions that increase housing production.

This is good because federal housing policy has historically rewarded planning, process, or program compliance more consistently than construction.

Courtyard templates and point-access reform can help cities move from policy adoption to production because they reduce the number of decisions that must be reinvented for each project.

A jurisdiction that combines:

• legal building forms;

• preapproved plans;

• objective permits;

• identified land;

• qualified builders;

• standardized financing;

has a better chance of producing housing repeatedly than one that relies on individually negotiated megaprojects.

But production metrics should be designed carefully.

A raw unit count may reward large conventional apartment projects while overlooking family suitability, development diversity, neighborhood quality, affordability, or the geographic distribution of new housing.

Implementation partners should argue for evaluation methods that measure not merely how many units are permitted, but what kinds of neighborhoods and housing markets are being created.

How the provisions fit together

The most important feature of the ROAD to Housing Act is the potential to connect several sections into one implementation strategy.

Point-access guidance

Creates the technical and code pathway for compact, family-oriented small apartment buildings.

Preapproved courtyard templates

Turns the building type into a repeatable, permit-ready product.

Zoning and implementation grants

Make the plans legal and usable.

Public-land and infill tools

Create a pipeline of suitable sites.

Construction and financing provisions

Help projects move from plans to completed homes.

Production incentives

Reward jurisdictions that successfully deliver housing.

Together, these provisions support a model in which a city or state can move from abstract housing reform to a functioning delivery system.

What an implementation consortium should build

The strongest practical response would be a coordinated Point-Access Courtyard Housing Demonstration.

The consortium could include:

• a city or state;

• a housing agency;

• a university or research institution;

• architects and engineers;

• fire and life-safety experts;

• one or more developers;

• builders and construction managers;

• lenders;

• affordable-housing organizations;

• community or resident representatives.

The work should have four connected components.

1. Establish the code pathway

Develop and validate point-access provisions for residential buildings of up to six stories, including fire protection, travel distance, smoke control, accessibility, emergency response, and building-size limits.

2. Create the template family

Produce a preapproved set of small courtyard buildings containing approximately 8 to 25 homes, with multiple widths, heights, unit mixes, structural systems, and ground-floor conditions.

3. Reform the local rules

Adopt the zoning, subdivision, parking, party-wall, courtyard-governance, mixed-use, and permitting provisions needed to assemble the buildings into complete blocks.

4. Deliver and evaluate real projects

Construct pilot buildings on publicly controlled or infill land and measure:

• cost;

• permitting time;

• construction speed;

• housing yield;

• family-unit production;

• safety performance;

• energy use;

• daylight and ventilation;

• resident experience;

• neighborhood outcomes.

With pilots, the goal is creating a demonstration building as the gateway to a replicable development system.

The opportunity for implementation partners

For much of the last century, American housing policy has treated the building, parcel, block, and neighborhood as separate questions.

Zoning regulates use and density. Building codes regulate structures. Housing programs finance units. Transportation agencies plan movement. Public works departments build infrastructure. Developers assemble projects. Architects design buildings.

Courtyard urbanism requires these systems to work together.

A courtyard block is both an urban form and a delivery framework. It organizes several buildings around protected shared open space. It creates substantial density without requiring one enormous structure. It accommodates homes of different sizes and tenures along with commercial, institutional, and civic uses. It allows buildings to change over time while preserving the enduring structure of the street and block.

The ROAD to Housing Act contains several of the components needed to revive the coordinated framework:

• point-access buildings;

• preapproved courtyard templates;

• small multifamily housing;

• regulatory reform;

• public land;

• infill development;

• implementation funding;

• housing-production incentives.

The next step is to assemble those components around a willing jurisdiction, a viable set of building plans, and a great development site.

Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Courtyard Urbanism Enthusiast,

In June, the policy landscape continued to shift directionally toward courtyard urbanism enablement. Single-stair reform is entering the mainstream. States and cities are beginning to reduce barriers to mid-rise, infill, and smaller-scale housing. Even Congress is starting to recognize point-access blocks, CDBG-funded housing construction, environmental-review reform, and manufactured housing as part of the national housing agenda.

These changes matter because courtyard urbanism will need legal reform to scale.

But June also showed how fragile reform can be. Modest proposals can stall. Broad housing packages can fail.

The encouraging news is that we do not have to wait for every statute, zoning code, or building code to change. In many places, courtyard blocks are already legal, nearly legal, or possible through existing entitlement paths. What is missing, in many cases, is simply leadership.

So, the opportunity right now is to find the places where land, rules, capital, and local will already align enough to begin.

Our next phase is not only policy reform, but proving through early projects that courtyard blocks are a buildable American housing model hiding in plain sight.

This month’s Market Brief covers:

CU Project Updates — Courtyard Urbanist is advancing a Boston-area courtyard block project, partnering with Bloomington-Normal on a downtown repair charrette, working with Chicago Growth Project to remove barriers to family-friendly housing, and fielding implementation conversations with developers, landowners, municipalities, capital partners, and civic groups across the country and beyond.

Our work with tech partner, Bucky Build, had yielded a courtyard feasibility tool (link below).

Single-stair reform — One less stairway can make a major difference for point-access buildings, family-sized apartments, shallow floorplates, and courtyard-block development.

Enacted state reforms — California’s SB 79 takes effect July 1, and New York passed major SEQRA reforms intended to make infill housing easier to build.

Local finance watch — Providence, Rhode Island’s BUILD Act shows how tax timing can make or break smaller housing projects.

Federal watch — The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support and includes provisions relevant to point-access blocks, CDBG funding, environmental review, and manufactured housing.

Losses and watch list — Connecticut’s “Golden Girls” room-rental bill stalled in the House, and Illinois’ BUILD Act failed to advance before adjournment, though some housing funding survived in the budget.

1. CU Project Updates

A lot is moving quickly behind the scenes.

First: a potentially history-making Boston-area project is advancing. I can’t share the project details publicly yet, but the pieces now coming together in an implementation pathway that Courtyard Urbanist was created to facilitate. We have land assembly, entitlements, public and private collaboration, CU design work, and now active conversations with potential GP partners.

If this continues to move forward, it could become one of the first major demonstrations of courtyard urbanism as a real development model for the American market. Hopefully, we will soon reach the point where I can share more specific details.

Second: Courtyard Urbanist is coming to Bloomington-Normal, Illinois. We are working with Strong Towns BLONO on the 2026 Downtown Charrette, beginning with public engagement and a keynote on courtyard urbanism, downtown repair, and building cities for families. Bloomington-Normal is one of the most interesting small-metro opportunities in the Midwest. It is a college town, a civic center, a major employment hub, home to Rivian manufacturing, and a place with real potential for fine-grained courtyard block growth.

Watch Bloomington-Normal for great courtyard block opportunities. Event details are here: Courtyard Urbanism: Building Cities for Families Charrette + Keynote.

Third: we are working with Chicago Growth Project on organizing a Chicago effort to remove the regulatory barriers to family-friendly housing. This includes the rules that make courtyard buildings, missing-middle housing, larger family-sized apartments, and fine-grained infill unnecessarily difficult or impossible to build: setbacks, height and density limits, and the structure of the ARO.

The first public event for this effort is Keep Families in the City: Building Neighborhoods for Lifelong Chicagoans, hosted by Chicago Growth Project on Saturday, August 16, 2026, from 1:00 to 3:30 PM at Le Village Lakeview. We’ll be talking about what reforms like courtyard buildings and missing middle housing can unlock for Chicago families, and how the city can make it easier for families to stay for the long haul. (Courtyard Urbanist⁠)

Fourth: CU’s partnership with Bucky Build, a pre-construction technology platform for developers and AEC teams, has been productive in specific conversations, and more generally in developing tools that are broadly applicable to courtyard development.

Bucky turns the pre-construction planning maze into one guided workflow. For anyone taking a project from land to a real plan, construction isn’t the slow part but everything before it is: zoning feasibility, land constraints, design options, builder selection, permits, and financing, usually stitched together across five different consultants who don’t talk to each other. Bucky runs feasibility against local zoning, shows what’s actually buildable on a given parcel, and produces permit-ready planning outputs from day one.

One example close to home: on a recent Massachusetts courtyard project, Bucky cut through the as-of-right vs. conditional-use zoning question in a fraction of the usual research time. The kind of check that normally eats a week of back-and-forth before anyone can commit to a design direction. If you’re developing, or you advise people who are, reach out here

You can also check out the Courtyard Housing Feasibility Calculator they built for us. Will a courtyard housing project pencil? Test units, all-in cost, required rent, and developer margin in real time. Free feasibility calculator.

Finally, we are in multiple other conversations with developers, landowners, municipalities, capital partners, and civic groups across the country — and beyond. The implementation network is growing.

If you want to be an implementation partner, contact us at projects@courtyardurbanist.com.

Read more

Overview

Chicago families shouldn’t have to choose between the neighborhoods they love and the space they need. Let’s talk about how we can fix that.

Do you love your neighborhood, but wonder if Chicago has room for your family to grow?

You’re not the only one asking. Thousands of families in Chicago feel the same pull: stay in the walkable neighborhoods they love, or move to the suburbs for the space their family needs.

We believe that you shouldn’t have to choose!

Keep Families in the City is a panel discussion on removing the barriers that make family-friendly housing hard to build in Chicago, allowing families to stay in the city for the long haul.

We’ll hear from Alicia Pederson of Courtyard Urbanist on what reforms like courtyard buildings and missing middle housing can unlock for families, then bring in legislators and housing experts for a broader conversation on what the city can do to make it happen.

This event is for anyone who wants to see Chicago build neighborhoods where families can put down roots, not just survive until the first school district question comes up. No housing policy background needed. Just bring your stake in the city’s future.

Each ticket includes entry for the whole family! We will have food provided, with the exact food to be announced at a later date. Our venue has toys, activities, and a play area for kids to play during the entire event.

Speakers and sponsors to be announced.

When: Saturday, August 16, 2026, 1:00 to 3:30 PM
Where: Le Village Lakeview, 4021 N Broadway, Chicago, IL 60613

Space is limited, so grab your spot today!

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/keep-families-in-the-city-building-neighborhoods-for-lifelong-chicagoans-tickets-1992152874876?discount=Alicia

Cities have always struggled to order the intensity they create.

Writers have been aware the problem of urban intensity going back hundreds of years. It’s a theme that appears in Renaissance pastoral literature, a genre 16th- and 17th-century writers often used to explore the tension between the country and the city. (Remember my background is in Renaissance literature, not urban planning, so hang with me for a moment here.)

Renaissance pastoral often begins with escape. A young gentleman or lady grows tired of the crowds, unrest, and plagues of the city, and flees to the countryside in search of simplicity and nature. But they never remain in the country. Among the shepherds, the urban exile becomes bored and restless. The pastoral idyll cannot replace the social, intellectual, and civic world of the city.

For example, in Sannazaro’s Arcadia (published in Naples in 1504), the young Neapolitan gentleman Sincero withdraws from Naples into the pastoral world of Arcadia, but he ultimately turns back toward the city. Near the end, he remembers Naples not as a corrupt place to be escaped forever, but as his “noble and most generous patria,” a city of ports, towers, temples, palaces, streets, beauty, learning, and public life. The pastoral retreat clarifies that the city, for all its blemishes, remains the environment that formed him and gave scope to his life.

Renaissance writers spoke of crowds and thongs the city. Today, we usually call this density.

Density is both the source of the city’s power and the source of its vulnerability.

Density is necessary to create the proximity and convenience that define city living. Cities exist to bring people into close proximity to one another, to jobs, commerce, culture, institutions, and opportunity. Historically, this proximity has been one of the basic thresholds of civilization. It has broadened people’s ability to trade, worship, marry beyond the clan, build professional relationships, and transmit knowledge through teaching and apprenticeship.

When researchers study human accomplishment across different kinds of places, they consistently find that achievement in science, art, commerce, and culture is disproportionately concentrated in cities. The higher rates of achievement flow from the higher concentration of people with different skills, ambitions, and experiences. Cities, moreover, concentrate capital, institutions, specialized labor, patrons, customers, collaborators, and audiences in the same place. All of this concentration creates the social and economic conditions for achievement across many fields.

In that sense, cities can be spaces of extraordinary freedom of action. Cities are environments where you can “just do things,” because the collaborators, capital, talent, customers, teachers, patrons, and institutions needed to make things happen are close by.

But density also concentrates harm. It can intensify noise, congestion, disease, pollution, crime, and disorder. It intensifies land value and, with it, the cost of housing. When many people want access to the same urban opportunities, the price of land rises, and the large house with a yard becomes unattainable for many middle-class households. Urban life has always contained this tension between renaissance and plague, convenience and cost, the benefits of density and its negative externalities.

Density is both the city’s power and its danger.

We often respond to the harms of density through law and public administration. Crime is addressed through policing. Disease through sanitation, vaccination, and public health. Pollution through regulation. These interventions obviously have merit, but they do not answer the more fundamental spatial question:

How should we shape the built environment so that it captures the benefits of density while containing its harms?

We want high density. The challenge is to structure high density so that cities can maintain both high proximity and a high standard of living for residents across the full life cycle.

The question is how to recover the city’s great light without getting burned.

Our Tall ‘n’ Sprawl Non-Solution to Urban Intensity

American development generally offers two responses to urban intensity.

The first is to spread it out.

The second is to concentrate it inside very large buildings.

Each approach solves part of the problem. Neither fully resolves it.

Sprawl offers legitimate advantages of privacy, quiet, personal space, and a yard of one’s own. But that privacy and space is purchased at the expense of convenience, community, and civic life. Daily destinations become a logistical burden. Children depend on adults to go almost anywhere, encouraging helicopter parenting in the absence of an environment where children can independently play with friends, walk to school, or get to activities. Older people can become isolated when they stop driving. And the private landscape itself becomes a constant obligation: mowing, raking, shoveling, trimming, watering, repairing, and maintaining outdoor space that is used by one household alone rather than shared as part of a larger civic realm. Local businesses struggle when too few customers live nearby. Public transportation struggles with ridership. Public schools struggle with enrollment, especially as household size decreases. Public life disappears because there is no common ground where people can meet.

Sprawl protects the household from urban intensity by destroying civilization itself.

The contemporary apartment megaproject solves one problem while creating another. It gathers hundreds of households into a single enormous structure, often near transit, employment, and commerce, and it delivers true density and convenience. But it does so for a narrow segment of the population willing to live in large, anonymous buildings, often for a relatively short period of life. These buildings can work for young adults, small households, and short-term renters. They are much less successful at creating homes that people want to inhabit across the life cycle. Families, owners, neighbors, parents, children, and older residents need both urban convenience and a more fine-grained, domestic form of city living.

Large apartment complexes often organize domestic life like a hotel. Residents pass through a common lobby, take an elevator, and walk down long double-loaded corridors to reach small, one-sided apartments. These units lack the spatial logic of houses, which usually have fronts and backs, public and private sides, direct thresholds, and a legible relationship to outdoor space. And while hundreds of people may live under one roof, sheer numbers do not create community. Past a certain scale, the probability of knowing any particular neighbor declines. The megabuilding delivers density and convenience, but often at the cost of familiarity and domestic life.

This arrangement is especially difficult for families with young children. Many parents want a house with a yard because they want outdoor space that functions as a place where a child can play while a parent cooks dinner, folds laundry, or answers an email nearby. A courtyard on the other side of a large building does not serve that purpose. If your apartment is on the fifth floor facing the street, you cannot send a four-year-old downstairs and around the building to play where you cannot see them, hear them, or call them back inside. For family life, outdoor space must be visible, accessible, and close enough to feel like a shared room under the open sky.

Sprawl destroys the city. Megaproject urbanism concentrates it without ordering it into a form that supports domestic life across generations.

The urbanist’s challenge is preserving the freedom, opportunity, and convenience created by proximity while maintaining a high standard of living for households at every stage of life.

Courtyard urbanism, the ordering technology for density

The courtyard block is a time-tested urban planning technology, refined over centuries to create density while maintaining private outdoor space in the form of the courtyard.

Its fundamental achievement is creating great homes with yards while maintaining the density and form needed for intense public life.

The courtyard block creates the density and form needed for intense public life by stacking homes of different sizes on top of commercial space, allowing many owners and residents to share expensive urban land.

The courtyard block creates great public streets and spaces by framing the mixed-use streets and piazzas that belong to everyone. They are the rooms and corridors of the city. They accommodate crowds, commerce, entertainment, protest, and celebration. It is the realm of opportunity. It is the place where people encounter businesses, institutions, amenities, and one another.

Rather than eliminating crowds and commerce and the full Shakespearean cast of society, it puts them in their right place, framing them in the streets and plazas.

The courtyard block creates great homes with yards by CHUNKING density into many small, multifamily buildings that are built around the perimeter of a block to enclose an interior, private courtyard.

Because these are small multifamily buildings, units are accessed off of a central stair rather than long corridors. Large units can be front to back, with a window wall facing the public street and a window wall facing the the courtyard. Like a house, not a hotel room, a street side and a quiet courtyard side, and their stair provides direct access to a private courtyard.

The courtyard is shared, but private to the residents. Green, protected, and bounded, it belongs to a recognizable residential community. It can accommodate gardens, meals, children’s games, casual conversations, and small acts of mutual assistance. It exemplifies the “comedy of the commons,” where a thing becomes more valuable when more people own it. Kids have kids to play with on their block. Residents can share tools and equipment for gardening, biking, grilling, home maintenance.

Children have a place to play outside the apartment that does not require them to go near or cross a high-traffic street and go out of view of their parents. Parents can observe them without directing every moment. Neighbors can speak without arranging a formal gathering. The courtyard creates valuable private residential space through a specific scale and geometry that creates the possibility of large homes with yards, in small buildings, with access to private but shared courtyards.

Durable technology for creating valuable urban real estate that lasts forever

We know courtyard urbanism works because many of the most valuable and beloved urban neighborhoods on earth are courtyard-block neighborhoods. They were built when societies were poorer and construction technology was far less advanced than it is today. Yet these buildings and blocks have been renovated, adapted, and maintained across generations, sometimes for hundreds of years. I first encountered this form directly in Florence, living in a building organized around a courtyard that dated to the sixteenth century. Edinburgh’s courtyard blocks date largely to the eighteenth century. Across Europe, these places have endured because they solve the basic problem of urban life: how to combine density with light, privacy, shared outdoor space, street life, and long-term adaptability.

The façades and materials vary, but the underlying urban form is remarkably consistent. The buildings are typically wide and shallow, sometimes with wings extending back into the courtyard to add floor area. They are built wall-to-wall along the street, forming a continuous perimeter that defines the public realm outside and encloses a protected green interior within the block.

The durability comes from the economical and valuable design.

• Efficient land use: Continuous street walls and zero side setbacks place more usable floor area on a given site while preserving a substantial shared courtyard.

• Lower land cost per home: Land is distributed across many apartments rather than a small number of single family homes.

• Shared building components: Residents share roofs, foundations, exterior walls, elevators, mechanical systems, utility connections, and outdoor space.

• Less exterior envelope per unit: Party walls and compact building forms reduce façade area, heat loss, waterproofing, and long-term maintenance.

• Shallow, efficient floorplates: Point-access plans reduce corridors and other non-rentable circulation, increasing the ratio of usable or saleable space to gross building area.

• Mid-rise construction economics: Four- to six-story buildings can often use simpler structural systems and construction methods than towers.

• Repeatable building types: Standardized widths, structural bays, cores, façades, and unit plans reduce design, engineering, permitting, and procurement costs.

• Smaller contractor packages: Local and midsized builders can compete for work without the overhead associated with megaproject construction.

• Distributed development risk: A delay or failure on one parcel does not necessarily stop construction across the entire block.

• Shared infrastructure: Parking access, utilities, stormwater systems, energy systems, waste facilities, and courtyard improvements can be coordinated at block scale.

• Lower parking burden: Walkable mixed-use locations, shared parking, and fewer internal driveways reduce the amount of expensive structured parking required.

• Simpler façades and structures: Regular bays, stacked wet walls, repeated openings, and limited cantilevers make construction easier and reduce material waste.

• Lower lifecycle costs: Durable party-wall construction, compact envelopes, accessible shared systems, and clearly allocated building responsibilities can reduce operating and replacement costs over time.
  

Balancing Density & Green Space

By making efficient use of the long perimeter of a city block, courtyard-block neighborhoods can produce substantial density without towers. Inner districts in Vienna and Copenhagen regularly reach roughly 40,000 to 60,000 residents per square mile, with some Viennese districts exceeding that. These are densities far above the average American urban area (2,553 people/sq mi in 2020) and even higher than many of our densest urban areas. Yet Vienna and Copenhagen are also among the world’s most livable cities, trading the top position in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Liveability Index. The point is not that courtyard blocks alone cause livability, but that very high residential density can coexist with generous private yard space, parks, shops, transit, and fantastic public streets and plazas.

Medium parcels for optimizing density and livability

Urban form is downstream of parcel size. Start too small, and the development options narrow quickly. You may get a single-family house, a row house, a two-flat, or a very narrow apartment building with deep floor plans and limited light. Start too large, and development tends to consolidate into a megaproject: one big building, one ownership structure, one garage, one risk profile, and often one long corridor serving many small units.

For courtyard urbanism, the sweet spot is the medium parcel.

A parcel around 60 feet wide and 100 feet deep is large enough to support a mid-sized multifamily building, but still small enough to preserve fine-grained development. With no side setbacks, a 60-foot-wide parcel can hold a 40-foot-deep building with a 2,400-square-foot floor plate. On a 100-foot-deep lot, that leaves roughly 3,600 square feet of open space behind the building.

Go up six stories, and the same parcel can produce 14,400 gross square feet of building area, or an FAR of 2.4. If the ground floor contains a storefront, lobby, services, and parking or storage behind, the five upper residential floors provide about 12,000 gross square feet. At roughly 91 percent efficiency, that yields about 10,900 net square feet of usable residential area.

That is enough room for a serious family-oriented building: for example, one 5-bedroom home, four 3-bedroom homes, and eight 1-bedroom apartments. In that scenario, thirteen households share a 6,000-square-foot parcel, a generous rear garden, and the structural efficiencies of one roof, one foundation, one envelope, and one building system.

Not every building should follow this mix, but the point here is that a medium parcel gives you enough floor plate to create front-to-back homes (not just small, one-sided units) while keeping the building shallow enough for daylight, cross-ventilation, and good room proportions.

And when many of these medium parcels line the perimeter of a block, their rear yards can combine into something much more valuable to families with little kids, community gardeners, and neighbors who prefer a larger, shared courtyard to a smaller, private yard. In this way, we achieve density without towers, family housing without detached houses, and shared, private outdoor space in the dense, city center.

Three paths to courtyard urbanism

The physical form is proven. The question is how to deliver it within a development system that now favors large, consolidated projects.

There is no single implementation model. Courtyard urbanism can be initiated by a city, delivered by a master developer, or built incrementally by local builders and resident groups. What these paths share is a common spatial framework: medium-sized parcels, buildings constructed to the front and side property lines, shallow floorplates, modest parking, sufficient height, and rear open space coordinated to form a shared courtyard.

1. City-led development

The greatest barrier to courtyard urbanism is zoning.

Cities can legalize the form directly. The basic rules are relatively simple: allow buildings to meet the front and side property lines; permit construction up to approximately six stories; reduce or eliminate parking requirements; and reserve roughly half of each parcel for rear gardens that combine with neighboring parcels to form a shared courtyard. Depending on the building code and local market, these buildings can use single stairs or multiple stairs, with or without elevators.

On greenfield, brownfield, or publicly controlled land, the city can go further and create the development platform itself. It can prepare the street network and utilities, establish medium-sized parcels, define the shared courtyard, resolve access and maintenance rights, and entitle the district through a form-based code. The city can then sell or lease individual parcels to local builders, cooperatives, affordable-housing providers, or groups of future residents. Each participant develops a manageable building while contributing to a coherent block and neighborhood.

This is the model Amsterdam is testing at Centrumeiland in IJburg: the city establishes the land framework, parcel rules, infrastructure, and public realm, while many different owners, builders, cooperatives, and architects deliver individual buildings. Similar principles shaped Bo01 / Västra Hamnen in Malmö and Französisches Viertel / Loretto in Tübingen, where public planning created the platform and many smaller actors produced the neighborhood.

Cities can also support courtyard urbanism through a specialized middle housing infill program. Preapproved building templates, standardized construction details, and expedited permitting could make it easier to redevelop suitable urban lots with wide, shallow apartment buildings. Cities such as South Bend, Indiana, have established “Sears Catalogue” for infill housing. The catalogue currently lacks a middle housing courtyard building exemplar, but perhaps South Bend will contact us so we can work with them on one soon.

In this model, the city’s role is using public authority to create the rules, parcels, infrastructure, and legal framework within which many different “missing middle” builders can participate.

2. Master-developer or new-town delivery

A master developer, institutional landowner, or new-town builder that controls both the land and the entitlements can implement this model today.

The landowner can divide the site into medium-sized parcels organized around shared courtyards. The master developer establishes the streets, utilities, parking strategy, parcel dimensions, architectural rules, and courtyard governance. Individual buildings can then be constructed directly, sold to other builders, or delivered through joint ventures.

This approach also has practical financial advantages. Instead of committing all the capital up front to one enormous structure, smaller buildings can be financed and constructed in phases, allowing the neighborhood to grow in response to demand. The first buildings may sell or lease at prices comparable to the surrounding area, but as streets, shops, courtyards, public spaces, and neighboring buildings come online, later buildings benefit from the value created by the earlier phases. The neighborhood itself becomes an appreciating asset. Early buildings prove the market, while later buildings sell into a more complete, desirable place and may achieve substantially higher returns. Capital is deployed incrementally, risk is staged, and different parcels can serve different markets (family condos, rentals, affordable housing, senior housing, cooperatives, offices, shops, or live-work units) without disrupting the coherence of the whole, because the street grid, parcel framework, courtyard structure, and design rules hold the neighborhood together.

The resulting homes should also compete more effectively than conventional corridor apartments. Wide, shallow buildings can provide better daylight, larger window walls, quieter courtyard-facing rooms, frequent entrances, and a clearer relationship between the home, street, and garden. These qualities can produce stronger sales and rental comparisons than deep, double-loaded corridor buildings on otherwise similar sites.

The landowner can divide the site into medium-sized parcels organized around shared courtyards and a coherent street network. The master developer establishes the common framework: streets, utilities, parking strategy, parcel dimensions, architectural rules, courtyard governance, and shared maintenance. Individual buildings can then be constructed directly, sold to other builders, or delivered through joint ventures.

This is not theoretical. It is close to how many of the best contemporary Nordic districts are being built.

In Nordhavn, Copenhagen, By & Havn acts as master developer: setting the plan, infrastructure, parcel structure, design expectations, and ground-floor strategy, while individual buildings are delivered by many different actors. The result is not one megaproject, but a coordinated district composed of many distinct buildings.

In Malmö, Bo01 in Västra Hamnen used a Quality Programme to coordinate many developers and architects within one shared urban framework. The city allocated individual building sites, set sustainability and design requirements, and required developers to work within common rules while still allowing architectural variation. More recently, Varvsstaden shows a similar logic at the district scale: a former industrial site is being transformed over decades into a mixed urban quarter with housing, workplaces, schools, public space, and reused industrial fabric.

In Gothenburg, Masthuggskajen is another useful precedent. The city and Älvstranden Utveckling coordinate streets, parks, quays, infrastructure, and district goals, while a consortium of builders delivers different parcels: rental housing, condominiums, offices, hotels, cultural space, preschools, restaurants, and ground-floor commercial uses. The neighborhood is coordinated, but the buildings are not all produced by one actor.

Stockholm Royal Seaport offers an especially relevant block-level example. In the Stora Sjöfallet block, multiple developers received land allocations within the same block and were required to meet shared sustainability, stormwater, and green-courtyard standards. The block contains several buildings, different ownership structures, a preschool, green roofs, solar panels, and a carefully designed shared courtyard.

These examples show that coordination does not require consolidation. A city or master developer can establish the rules of the game, build the infrastructure, and protect the public realm, while many smaller actors build within that framework.

The platform provides streets, utilities, access, parcelization, courtyard rules, shared parking, and design standards. The individual buildings provide variety, ownership opportunities, architectural difference, and phased delivery.

This lets a large site become a neighborhood incrementally. One building can be rental, another condominium, another cooperative, another affordable housing, another a resident-led project, another a corner building with shops below. The district can be coherent without becoming monolithic.

The master plan provides continuity. The parcels provide diversity. The courtyard and street network hold it all together.

Most importantly, the master developer is not merely producing a collection of new units. The developer is creating a durable neighborhood. When the underlying urban structure is good, buildings can be maintained and adapted over generations. A development that is valuable enough to justify investment over the years.

3. Incremental infill by local builders and building groups

Courtyard urbanism does not always require an entire block to be redeveloped at once. It can also emerge parcel by parcel within existing cities. A local builder might redevelop a 60-foot-wide lot with a 12- or 20-unit apartment building. A cooperative might commission the neighboring parcel. A group of households could develop a small condominium building designed around their needs. An affordable-housing provider might build another portion of the block, while a larger developer completes the corner with shops below.

This does not automatically produce one large, shared courtyard. That usually requires coordination across multiple parcels and owners. But even on a single medium parcel, the rear open space can be dramatically better than the small “postage-stamp” yards that many city homes offer, if they offer outdoor space at all. A 2,600- or 3,600-square-foot rear garden shared by 10 to 20 households is not the same as a full block courtyard, but it is still a meaningful piece of green, semi-private outdoor space: large enough for trees, tables, children’s play, and gardens.

Each project can have its own architect, financing, ownership structure, and construction schedule. The buildings do not need to look identical (although “cookie cutter” is fine if the pattern is good!). They need to follow a shared set of urban rules: build to the street, meet the neighboring party walls, maintain a shallow floorplate, and preserve the rear portion of the site as part of the block’s green interior.

This path lowers the threshold for participation. A builder does not need to acquire an entire block or raise capital for hundreds of homes. Residents can become active commissioners rather than merely choosing among standardized units. Local architects and contractors can participate. One delayed or failed parcel does not stop the rest of the neighborhood from moving forward.

Over time, separate projects can begin to form a unified courtyard block. The block becomes a platform that coordinates many buildings, owners, and development models without requiring a single institution to control everything from the beginning.

Civilizing intensity

Cities will always be intense.

That intensity is not a flaw to be engineered away. It is the source of much of the proximity, specialization, culture, exchange, discovery, and freedom that all make urban life valuable in the first place.

We get to choose what form the built environment takes, and we have to understand that there are consequences both of solving the problem of intensity with sprawl and of only using megaprojects to deliver density.

Sprawl creates logistical burdens on households and denies them access to all the amenities and opportunities and freedoms of the city. Megaproject urbanism preserves proximity but fails to create cities capable attracting lifelong residents.

Courtyard urbanism is a way of arranging or composing the city so that public streets remain active spaces of serendipity and opportunity, so that private homes remain quiet and secure, and shared green courtyards created a bounded social world between them, where young children can play safely with friends.

The courtyard block is not a retreat from urban intensity. It is how we civilize it.

From Framework to Implementation

This framework is now being tested on an active opportunity in the Greater Boston area.

The site is in an inner-suburban community with existing mixed-use and multifamily zoning, fragmented parcels, underused commercial land, and a strong local interest in walkable village-center development. The opportunity is to convert a conventional auto-oriented district into a compact, mixed-use courtyard development organized around shared open space, smaller buildings, active ground-floor uses, and a more coherent public realm.

The work is still preliminary. It involves entitlement analysis, feasibility testing, land-assembly strategy, parking scenarios, public-benefit modeling, and conversations with local stakeholders.

But the early findings are extraordinarily promising.

Here are anonymized comments from an initial presentation to the local planning board:

Planning Board Chair

“I like this. I like this a lot… this is very exciting… I don’t think [an opportunity like this] is that frequent. So this is really good.”

Planning Board Member

“I love everything you have said about the vision. It all makes sense to me.”

Planning Board Member

“Considering it’s allowed, it’s in our bylaws, to me, this is part of the point of having these flexibilities.”

“For me, the height makes sense, especially if it’s further back… maybe not all the way to the street, depending on the design.”

Planning Board Member

“It does speak to some of the elements we’ve been discussing in the comprehensive plan… village centers… missing middle housing… creation of open spaces and… third spaces… for gathering.”

“I think it turns an underused, not particularly attractive area of town into… a benefit in terms of open space, in terms of housing… bringing a little bit more vitality… I think this has the potential to do that.”

The zoning appears unusually compatible with courtyard urbanism. The land-assembly logic is plausible. Preliminary financial scenarios suggest that development will be very successful across multiple scenarios. The public-benefit proposition is legible: new housing, better use of underperforming land, more walkable local commerce, and the possibility of financing meaningful public open space through future incremental value rather than existing municipal funds.

In many American suburbs, courtyard development is not impossible because the form is unknown or because residents categorically reject it. It is absent because no one has done the work of assembling land, reading the code closely, testing the economics, designing the block, solving parking, and translating the project into a public proposition that local officials and residents can understand.

The form is centuries old. The contemporary work is making it legible, financeable, buildable, and approvable under North American conditions.

We are currently looking for local partners, implementation partners, and investors interested in this Greater Boston-area opportunity.

This may include:

• local developers or builders;

• landowners with adjacent or related property interests;

• architects, engineers, or entitlement professionals familiar with Greater Boston suburbs;

• civic or municipal partners interested in compact, walkable, family-friendly development;

• capital partners, co-GPs, or project investors;

• mission-aligned organizations interested in applying the courtyard framework to other sites.

If you would like to learn more, discuss the Boston-area project privately, or explore how this framework could apply to another site, please get in touch:

projects@courtyardurbanist.com

At Centrumeiland, a new district in Amsterdam’s IJburg expansion, the city is avoiding one of the great failures of contemporary urban development, the large-parcel megaproject. Rather than handing the 37 acres over to a few large developers to build massive, hotel-like buildings, Centrumeiland is subdividing the site into perimeter-block parcels, assigning each parcel a buildable role through a plot “passport,” and enabling many smaller actors to build within one coherent urban framework.

Begun in 2013 as part of Amsterdam’s IJburg land-reclamation project, Centrumeiland modernizes the old perimeter-block model for contemporary goals. It will be dense, but green; urban, but family-oriented; highly planned, but open to many builders. Amsterdam plans roughly 1,500 to 1,700 homes on the 37-acre island, or about 40 to 46 homes per acre. By American standards, that is serious density. But it is not being delivered as a monoculture of towers or double-loaded apartment blocks. Centrumeiland includes a mix of housing types and tenures: large family-sized homes, smaller rentals, social housing, mid-market housing, market-rate condos, individual self-build houses, collective self-build projects, housing-association buildings, and developer-led apartments.

The ambition is a dense urban neighborhood that can serve households across the lifecycle: singles, couples, families with children, older residents, renters, owners, and collective building groups. It also adapts the perimeter-block tradition to contemporary priorities: low-car living, accessibility, climate resilience, mixed tenure, family housing, and broader participation in development and ownership.

All of this depends on the subdivision and passport system. Amsterdam breaks the large site into many buildable pieces, assigns each parcel a role through a plot passport, and holds the pieces together through streets, blocks, party-wall conditions, courtyards, public-space rules, and environmental obligations. In this way, they have brilliantly resurrected the old urban formula that allows many builders to participate in the development of a large site, making a real neighborhood.

For American cities, the moral of the story is clear. On large brownfield and greenfield sites, cities should stop treating whole districts as single development packages to be handed to master developers. They should do the more civic work first of laying streets, subdividing land into buildable parcels, and issuing clear “parcel passports” that specify what each site can become. In existing neighborhoods, the same logic should operate at a smaller scale. Cities should create transit-oriented overlays that give ordinary private lots clear building rights that make great multifamily housing easier to finance, permit, and build.

Centrumeiland goes far beyond “build more housing.” It is more radical and more urbane. Divide the land, write good code, and let many hands build the city.

The Megadevelopment Trap

For the last half-century, large urban sites have met a sadly familiar fate. A railroad, port authority, public agency, hospital, university, or industrial landowner controls a vast tract of developable land. The master-planning process then carves it into a few enormous parcels and awards them to one or several major developers. After years of negotiation, public fights, redesigns, entitlement battles, and financing risk, the developer may finally build the megaproject, which is widely reviled by the public.

Megaprojects may be economically productive. They can deliver housing, offices, parks, retail, transit, and tax revenue. But the development model itself is thin. Too few actors control too much land. The parcels are too large, the buildings are too big, and the building code and underwriting norms push toward deep floorplates and double-loaded corridors. The buildings are dominated by small, expensive, hotel-like units that are poorly suited to middle-income families who need light, storage, bedrooms, outdoor access, and a sense of domestic permanence. These districts may be a success on paper (for now), but they make failed neighborhoods, lacking the social depths and street life that is the reward of fine-grained courtyard urbanism.

Hudson Yards, the obvious American example, is a district built with immense capital and immense floorplates, yet devoid of the personality, grain, and street-level complexity that make places like the West Village or Brooklyn’s older neighborhoods feel like true city. Mission Bay is the softer San Francisco version: economically successful, institutionally important, but still more master-planned innovation district than cherished neighborhood. Nordhavn in Copenhagen is the more sophisticated European case. It has transit, climate goals, waterfront space, and serious planning capacity, but still shows how large-parcel urbanism fails to create neighborhoods that appeal to diverse households across the lifecycle.

The problem is the development system. A megaproject cannot make a great neighborhood. Neighborhoods require many actors, many front doors, many ownership structures, many building types, many ground-floor conditions, and many small adaptations over time. They need private yards. They need a public framework strong enough to coordinate many actors.

That is the old art of division and perimeter block planning Centrumeiland begins to recover.

Making Land Into City

Centrumeiland is part of Amsterdam’s IJburg expansion, a chain of artificial islands built in the IJmeer on the city’s eastern edge. IJburg extends Amsterdam outward into the water between the historic city and the open landscape of the Markermeer, turning what was once lakebed into new urban land. Centrumeiland sits within this larger archipelago, connected back to Amsterdam by bridges, cycling routes, bus service, and the IJtram to Amsterdam Centraal. It is therefore both peripheral and deeply urban, a new island neighborhood made from water, but tied into the metropolitan fabric of Amsterdam.

While the land reclamation is impressive, even more remarkable is the public framework that governs the development. The city divided the land into kavels, and created parcel-specific rules through kavelpaspoorten, or plot passports.

A passport can define the parcel boundary, buildable envelope, maximum height, frontage condition, access requirements, open-space obligations, water-management rules, parking expectations, program, tenure, sustainability requirements, and sometimes ground-floor use. It tells a builder not merely that “residential” or “commercial” is allowed, but what kind of urban contribution this specific piece of land is supposed to make: a row of townhouses, a small apartment building, a collective self-build project, a social-housing block, a mid-market rental building, a mixed-use corner building, or a larger perimeter-block parcel with shared courtyard space.

The subdivision and passport framework enables much broader participation in the development. Of the planned 1,500 to 1,700 homes, roughly 60 to 70 percent are intended to be self-build. But “self-build” here does not only mean one household designing one eccentric house. It includes individual self-builders, small groups, collective private commissioning, building groups, housing cooperatives, and other resident-led or small-group development structures.

This should not be confused with an affordable-housing utopia. Centrumeiland includes social and mid-market rental housing, but much of the ownership and free-sector rental housing serves affluent or upper-middle-income households. Its lesson moral here is that parcelization broadens participation and creates more development pathways than the master-developer model.

Subdivision changes risk. Instead of one enormous project that must be financed, leased, absorbed, and managed as a single undertaking, the district can grow through many smaller acts of building. At this scale, these buildings will be easier to adapt over time to the changing needs of the community.

And subdivision changes the urban outcome. More parcels mean more doors, more owners, more builders, more design opportunities, more frontages, more ground-floor possibilities, and more opportunities for the neighborhood to mature over time.

How the Passport Works

The passport system turns a master plan into a set of buildable opportunities. And the user experience is relatively simple: browse the city’s parcel portal, identify a suitable kavel, download the rules, assemble the household group or development team, register during the application window, and then build under the parcel’s passport and leasehold conditions.

For a household, building group, cooperative, housing association, or developer, the process begins with a specific parcel. Amsterdam posts available kavels through its municipal self-build and land-disposition pages. Prospective builders can review the parcel online, see what category of project it is intended for, download the relevant documents, and register during the official application window.

Each parcel comes with its own package of rules: a selection brochure, parcel rules, maps, technical appendices, leasehold terms, drainage requirements, common-terrain rules, and sometimes tender documents. Together, these documents function as the kavelpaspoort, or the plot passport.

The passport tells a prospective builder: this is the piece of land; this is the role it plays in the block; this is the volume it may hold; this is the height limit; this is where the building must sit; this is how it must meet the street; this is where access and parking occur; this is how much open space must remain; this is how rainwater must be handled; and this is the kind of project the parcel is meant to receive.

Importantly, a parcel is not simply marked residential or commercial or mixed use. It may be intended for an individual self-build house, a small group of homes, a collective private commissioning project, a social-housing building, a mid-market rental block, a mixed-use corner building, or a larger apartment building organized around a courtyard condition.

The genius of the system is legibility. Ordinary households cannot negotiate a megaproject. Small builders cannot absorb a twenty-acre redevelopment district. A cooperative cannot finance and design a whole waterfront master plan. But they can evaluate one parcel if the city has already defined its size, rules, obligations, access, tenure, and development capacity.

This is what makes broad participation possible. The city breaks the district into pieces that different kinds of builders can understand, finance, and build.

The result is visible in the buildings already delivered: terrace-like self-build rows, small apartment houses, CPO projects, social and mid-market rental buildings, and larger courtyard-oriented blocks. Impressively, the district contains multiple building types and multiple tenure forms within one block structure.

Where the Model Needs to Be Stronger

Centrumeiland is not yet a full-throated revival of the great perimeter block neighborhoods of the late 19th century — not Stockholm’s Östermalm, Berlin’s Charlottenburg, Prague’s Vinohrady, or Barcelona’s Eixample reborn in the IJmeer. It lacks much of the form discipline of those older courtyard-block districts: the confident street walls, chamfered corners, piazzas, pervasive ground-floor commerce, masonry depth, ornament, and mature architectural culture that make the best European neighborhoods feel charming and sublime all at once.

A stronger passport would not need to mandate historical pastiche, but it COULD require vertical window proportions, façade depth, visible entrances, extra high ceilings on ground floors, corner treatments, roofline articulation, and enough ornament or detail to keep the street from becoming a corridor of boxes.

It should also push the default parcel size toward more disciplined mid-rise apartment urbanism.

Some individual self-build parcels at Centrumeiland are closer to house lots. That can produce charm and variety, but it is not the same as the medium-grain apartment-house fabric of the great courtyard-block districts. A stronger version of the model would include more parcels in the range of 60 to 70 feet wide, deep enough for a shallow apartment building and courtyard relationship, but not so large that the parcel becomes a megablock.

A stronger version of the Centrumeiland model would push more of the default parcel system toward medium-parcel, dual-aspect apartment buildings. A five- or six-story building on a 60- or 70-foot parcel could hold family-sized flats, smaller apartments, a point-access stair or small elevator, common storage, bike rooms, accessible ground-floor units, and flexible ground-floor commercial space where appropriate.

This is the missing scale between the self-build house and the megablock. The building is large enough for multiple households to share land, structure, stair, elevator, storage, and energy costs, but still small enough to remain fine-grained and buildable by many actors. The shallow plan allows apartments to have light and air from more than one side, making larger family units much easier to design than in a deep double-loaded corridor building. And because the homes are flats rather than stacked townhouses, they avoid the daily burden of internal stairs, which is a real benefit for parents carrying babies, toddlers, groceries, and strollers, and for older residents or anyone with mobility limitations (including senior dogs)

The ground floor also becomes more useful. A 60- or 70-foot frontage can accommodate a small shop, clinic, studio, or café where the street calls for commerce, while still leaving room for storage, bikes, trash, building services, an accessible unit, or a modest garage condition where needed. It would still be fine-grained. It would still allow many builders. But it would have enough urban weight to support street life, shared costs, family housing, and a more durable neighborhood fabric.

Centrumeiland recovers the development system. The next step is to recover the urban grammar.

The American Application

For American cities, the lesson is to create a modern urban passport system.

There are two obvious applications: large-site development and existing-neighborhood overlays.

On brownfield and greenfield sites — former industrial land, rail yards, malls, hospital campuses, public land, waterfronts, and other large redevelopment areas — cities should stop defaulting to the megaproject model. They should lay out streets first, shape interesting blocks, design public spaces, subdivide land into buildable parcels, and assign parcel passports. Those parcels could then be allocated to many actors: small developers, cooperatives, housing associations, community development corporations, nonprofit builders, resident-led groups, and larger developers where appropriate.

Large developers may still participate. But they should not control the whole district. The city should not ask one actor to simulate the complexity of a neighborhood.

The quality of the neighborhood is determined upstream: street geometry, block structure, parcel dimensions, public-space hierarchy, and rules of participation. If the streets are dull, the blocks oversized, the parcels too large, the ground floors dead, and the whole site controlled by one capital stack, no amount of façade variation will create a great neighborhood.

The second application is existing neighborhoods, especially transit-oriented districts. Here, cities do not need to make new land or assemble huge sites. They need zoning overlays that make good urban buildings legal, predictable, and easy to permit.

A parcel-passport overlay could define permitted building types by lot width and depth; replace suburban setbacks with build-to lines; allow party-wall construction; set courtyard or rear-yard requirements; establish height ranges, ground-floor rules, corner standards, parking maximums, façade standards, stormwater rules, and pre-approved building types.

On private land, the American version would differ from Amsterdam’s leasehold-based system. Cities would more often use zoning overlays, subdivision rules, Planned Development reform, parking reform, pre-approved plans, and entitlement incentives. But the logic can travel.

For ordinary private lots, the passport could be an opt-in fast track: follow the rules and receive predictable approval, more units, less parking, and fewer discretionary fights. For large sites seeking upzoning, public subsidy, infrastructure support, or Planned Development approval, the passport system should be mandatory. If a landowner wants the public value of a major entitlement, the city should require a public urban framework in return.

Modernizing the Perimeter-Block Code

The goal is not to recreate the 19th century. It is to recover what the 19th century understood about city-making and update it for contemporary needs.

The 19th century gave us the street plan, the parcel, the perimeter block, the party wall, the courtyard, the street wall, and the mixed-use ground floor. It gave us a system in which many builders could produce coherent urban fabric because the public rules were strong enough to coordinate private action.

The 21st century should keep that logic, but give it new obligations: climate adaptation, stormwater management, tree canopy, heat mitigation, universal accessibility, low-carbon construction, energy performance, affordable housing, family-sized flats, bike storage, car-light living, childcare, prefabrication compatibility, fire safety, and mixed-income ownership models.

It should also make collective self-development easier. Self-build does not have to mean one household designing one house. At urban scale, it can mean ten or fifteen households forming a building group, cooperative, or resident-led development entity to commission one mid-rise apartment building within a city-defined parcel and code.

But that cannot happen without the right sites and the right development framework. Households cannot collectively build a neighborhood from scratch. Small builders cannot absorb a megaproject. Cooperatives cannot invent the parcel, the code, the financing pathway, the fire-access strategy, the courtyard rules, and the entitlement process every time they want to build.

Amsterdam’s subdivision and passport system gives the city a way to create many buildable pieces, assign each one a role, and invite many actors into the work of development without surrendering urban coherence.

For American cities, the moral of the story is that we do not need to choose between the megaproject and the detached house, between master-developer monoculture and atomized individualism. In the better model, the city lays out the streets, shapes the blocks, divides the land, writes the passports, and lets many hands build.

Courtyard Urbanist helps cities, developers, institutions, and public agencies create subdivision and passport systems for courtyard-block neighborhoods: street and block plans, parcelization strategies, form-based rules, building-type standards, courtyard requirements, and implementation frameworks that make fine-grained urban development easier to finance, permit, and build.

If your city, agency, institution, or development team is working on a large site — or wants to create a zoning overlay for better multifamily neighborhoods — we would be happy to talk.

Email us at projects@courtyardurbanist.com.

Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Courtyard Urbanism Enthusiast,

In May, the courtyard urbanism movement continued its shift from architectural idea into statutory language, code reform, and development strategy.

The most important housing-policy story this month is the steady accumulation of many smaller technical changes: stair geometry, permit shot clocks, by-right review, accessory dwelling units, lot-size reform, and federal support for point-access block buildings. Together, these rules influence whether American cities can once again build small and mid-sized apartment buildings with generous apartments, shallow floorplates, family-sized units, private courtyards, active ground floors, and walkable blocks. Or whether the industry remains trapped between the single-family house and the large double-loaded-corridor building indefinitely.

This month’s brief covers:

CU Updates — building prototypes, consulting work, speaking events, Horizon Lines 2050, the Tribune op-ed, and the Diversey/Seminary substation fight.

Scissor Stairs in Washington — how a small change in stair regulation can unlock a missing mid-rise building type.

Enacted Laws — Georgia, Virginia, Kansas, and Austin move on permitting, ADUs, by-right housing, lot-size reform, and density bonuses.

Federal Housing Reform — the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act and the growing legitimacy of point-access-block and single-stair reform.

Losses and Watch List — setbacks in Minnesota and Colorado, and local resistance to California’s SB 79.

1. CU Updates

May was a major month for Courtyard Urbanist’s transition from public advocacy into a practical design, development, and project-delivery platform.

The biggest development is our emerging partnership with Bucky, the development feasibility technology platform founded by Mark Savic and Mason McIntosh for architects, engineers, builders, and developers working in the built world. Bucky is building the planning and feasibility infrastructure needed to make housing (and courtyards!) projects easier to design, evaluate, finance, and deliver.

Together, Courtyard Urbanist and Bucky are building the platform needed to move courtyard urbanism from concept to implementation through three integrated layers: design and development, capital formation, and demand aggregation. The design and development layer translates courtyard urbanism into a repeatable building model, with a catalogue of courtyard-block patterns, mid-rise building types, unit layouts, ground-floor configurations, parking solutions, and tools for evaluating sites, zoning constraints, unit mixes, phasing, and development feasibility. The capital layer helps organize funding around specific sites and projects, creating a pathway for accredited investors and, where appropriate, community financing structures to support buildable courtyard-block developments. The demand aggregation layer captures where people want to live, what kinds of units and neighborhoods they want, and which locations have the strongest household demand. Together, these layers connect better urban form, viable development, aligned capital, and real market demand, turning courtyard urbanism from an admired idea into an implementable development system. (development deck)

At the same time, we are continuing to refine the architectural design work for our buildings and blocks with our architecture partners, led by David Getzin. This work is focused on making the courtyard-block model not only beautiful and code-adaptable, but deeply livable for American households.

As we work through designs for 3 and 4BD units, for ground floor parking solutions, and for strategic retail/office integration, our goal is complete lifecycle housing that can support children, teenagers, parents working from home, multigenerational households, and people who want to remain in walkable neighborhoods through different stages of life.

We are already collaborating on active project conversations and applying this platform logic to development opportunities. It is clear that cities, landowners, developers, institutions, investors, and families are looking for a housing model between the detached house and the large apartment building. Courtyard Urbanist’s contribution is the form and strategy to make middle housing function as complete urbanism.

We are actively looking to onboard with:

• Landowners and developers interested in evaluating sites for courtyard-block development.

• Governments and agencies preparing their municipalities and policies for policy reform, development and invesment

• Accredited investors and capital partners interested in future project opportunities.

If you are interested in learning more about these opportunities, please contact us at projects@courtyardurbanist.com.

We also have new opportunities to onboard volunteers onto our CU Slack channel. If you’re interested in starting a CU group in your area, email projects@courtyardurbanist.com, and we will send you a Slack invite.

May also brought major advisory work and conversations with several institutions, municipalities, and civic partners. Some of this work is still private, but one project we can discuss publicly is our upcoming collaboration with Strong Towns Bloomington-Normal. In July, Courtyard Urbanist will participate in charrette work and deliver a keynote speech and presentation in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, which is considering building code changes and zoning overlays to encourage courtyard block development.

Bloomington-Normal is a particularly important place for this conversation. It is a major university community, home to Illinois State University and Illinois Wesleyan University, and it is also a major advanced-manufacturing center because of Rivian, the electric-vehicle company producing vehicles at scale in Normal. In other words, Bloomington-Normal is a community where housing demand, institutional growth, industrial investment, and quality-of-life expectations are converging. This is a perfect environment for courtyard urbanism.

In his State of Illinois last month, Governor Pritzker specifically highlighted Bloomington-Normal and Rivian in the context of Illinois growth and the need for more housing outside Chicago. We agree completely. But Courtyard Urbanist’s contribution is to make the middle-housing conversation more specific. It is not enough to say that Illinois needs more housing, or even more middle housing. We need to know what form that housing should take, how it fits into existing neighborhoods, how it supports families, how it creates complete lifecycle housing, how it relates to streets and parks, and how it can be delivered by real developers on real sites.

Courtyard urbanism is dispositive here because it is a neighborhood-making system: many buildings, many owners, many unit types, many price points, shared green space, pedestrian-oriented streets, and a development pattern that can support families, students, workers, empty nesters, and seniors within the same walkable district.

Our speaking and project pipeline is also expanding. In addition to the Bloomington-Normal charrette and keynote, Courtyard Urbanist is preparing for Edge Esmeralda (week of June 22-27) and The Progress Conference in Berkeley (October 8-11). These events reflect the growing interest in courtyard urbanism as part of a broader conversation about abundance, governance, construction technology, family-friendly cities, and the next generation of American urban development.

Cumulatively, May was another great month of progress for Courtyard Urbanist, as we move from visual advocacy and design research into platform-building, project delivery, institutional advisory work, and investable development opportunities.

2. Scissor Stairs in Washington

One of the most technically important reforms of the month came from Washington State.

Washington passed the nation’s first statewide scissor-stair reform, creating a pathway to allow scissor stairs in apartment buildings through changes to the state building code. The bill, House Bill 2228, was sponsored by Representative Janice Zahn and passed unanimously in both chambers.

Scissor stairs are a type of stair configuration where two separate staircases are placed next to each other in a compact, interlocking arrangement, somewhat like a double helix. The stairways remain separate and provide distinct means of egress. They have different exits on each floor, and the stairwells do not cross or intermingle, so if one stairway is compromised by smoke or fire, residents can still safely use the other.

This matters because stair geometry shapes building geometry. In many states, scissor stairs are effectively banned because building codes require stairway doors to be separated by a distance of one-half the diagonal dimension of the building. That separation rule makes the compact interlocking stair arrangement impossible to use.

The separation rule is one of the many rules that make small multifamily harder to do, since floor area is consumed by the secondary stair, and often floorplans are comprised. Scissor stairs help because they preserve two means of egress while reducing the amount of floor area consumed by circulation. That creates more room for leasable space and apartments, makes smaller buildings more financially viable, supports smaller footprints with better floor plans, allows development on smaller lots, facilitates infill housing, and reduces land costs.

For courtyard urbanism, this is a major reform category. Courtyard blocks depend on the ability to build multiple smaller buildings around the perimeter of a block. These buildings need efficient vertical circulation, shallow floorplates, and enough usable area to support family-sized apartments. Scissor-stair reform is a small technical change that will contribute to better urban housing.

Washington’s bill also reflects a broader national shift. For decades, American housing regulation has treated small apartment buildings as suspect and large corridor buildings as normal. Stair reform begins to reverse that bias.

New York City and Dallas already allow scissor-stair configurations in residential buildings. Chicago may soon join them through a proposed building-code amendment that would allow scissor stairs in buildings up to 150 feet (pgs. 314-316). If more jurisdictions follow, the country could regain a flexible mid-rise building type that sits between the tiny walk-up and the large corridor building.

3. Enacted Laws: Permitting, ADUs, By-Right Housing, and Lot Reform

Several states enacted housing reforms in May that are relevant to the courtyard-block development model, even when they do not mention courtyard blocks directly. The common theme is the reduction of discretionary friction (ie, makes it harder for authorities to use red tape to slow or stop a project).

Georgia: permit shot clocks and transparency

Georgia enacted SB 447, which creates tighter timelines for land-disturbance permit applications. The bill requires local authorities to identify deficiencies within defined review windows and to tie those deficiencies to relevant federal, state, or local regulations. It also adds requirements for public-facing permit tracking.

This matters because long and uncertain permitting timelines disproportionately hurt small and mid-sized developers, who have less capacity to absorb months of carrying costs and regulatory uncertainty. Large institutional developers can survive delay; small builders often cannot.

For courtyard blocks, permitting speed is central to feasibility. The model depends on repeatable, fine-grained development: many buildings, smaller parcels, phased construction, and local builders. If every small project must endure an open-ended review process, only the largest and most capitalized actors can participate. Shot-clock-style reform helps make smaller-scale urbanism investable.

Virginia: ADUs by right

Virginia passed SB 531, legalizing accessory dwelling units more broadly in single-family residential zones. The law limits localities’ ability to impose stricter requirements on ADUs than on primary dwellings for setbacks, height, and frontage. It also prevents municipalities from requiring a familial relationship between the occupants of the ADU and the primary dwelling.

ADUs are not courtyard blocks, but they are part of the same regulatory turn away from rigid single-family exclusivity and toward more flexible use of urban land. They allow neighborhoods to absorb smaller households, aging relatives, renters, caregivers, and young adults without requiring a full-scale redevelopment process.

For courtyard urbanism, the deeper lesson is that household composition has changed faster than zoning. Cities need housing forms that accommodate extended families, singles, children, elderly relatives, and mixed-income households within walkable neighborhoods. ADUs solve a small version of that problem. Courtyard blocks solve it at the scale of the city block.

Kansas: by-right housing and small-lot reform

Kansas passed SB 418, the By-Right Housing Development Act, one of the more comprehensive state-level efforts to reduce barriers to housing production. The act streamlines approval for housing projects that comply with existing land-use regulations and do not require extensive environmental review. It also reduces certain lot-size requirements, allows third-party inspections when local authorities take too long, and expands opportunities for by-right residential development.

The most important principle here is by-right approval. A city cannot have a functioning small-developer ecosystem if every compliant project is still subject to discretionary delay, political negotiation, or unpredictable review. The more a project complies with the rules, the more automatic the approval should be.

For courtyard urbanism, this matters because the development model is intended to be repeatable. A courtyard-block pattern book only works if a city’s codes and processes allow the pattern to be executed predictably. By-right rules, smaller lots, and third-party review all reduce the friction that currently pushes housing production toward large, expensive, one-off projects.

Austin: recalibrating the density bonus

Austin continued to lead on local housing reform by revising its citywide density bonus program. The new bonus program allows developers to seek additional height in increments — 15, 30, 45, or 60 feet — depending on zoning rules and neighborhood context. This replaced the more ambitious D90 program, which allowed up to 90 feet of additional height in exchange for affordable units.

The policy shift reflects a familiar tension in housing reform: maximum theoretical capacity versus practical project feasibility. A bonus that is too large for political comfort can become unstable; a bonus that is too small may not produce enough housing. Austin’s new approach attempts to create a more flexible middle path.

For courtyard urbanism, the key question is whether the rules support good mid-rise urban form: active ground floors, shallow floorplates, small parcels, shared courtyards, flexible ownership, and buildings that can be built by more than one kind of developer. Height matters, but height alone does not produce urbanism.

4. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act

At the federal level, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act continued to advance. On May 19, the House released an amended version of the bill, and it passed the following day by a wide bipartisan margin. With that vote, both chambers have now passed major housing legislation, although the final bill still requires reconciliation before becoming law.

The act includes provisions to expand housing construction loans, encourage local governments to loosen permitting rules, support manufactured housing, improve access to housing finance, and advance reforms related to point-access blocks and single-stair multifamily buildings.

For Courtyard Urbanist, the point-access-block provisions are especially significant. Point-access blocks — compact apartment buildings organized around a stair and elevator core rather than long double-loaded corridors — are one of the key building types needed for family-friendly mid-rise urbanism. They are often associated with single-stair reform, but the two are not identical: “point-access block” describes the building form, while “single stair” describes one possible egress strategy within that form.

The federal government does not need to design courtyard blocks. But it can help legitimate the building types, financing tools, and code pathways that make them possible.

The act’s environmental-review provisions are also relevant. Small infill housing projects can be killed by review burdens that were designed for much larger or more environmentally disruptive projects. If federal policy can distinguish between greenfield sprawl and infill housing, it can help reduce the procedural burden on precisely the kinds of projects cities need most.

The broader signal is important: housing reform is no longer limited to local zoning debates. Stair rules, financing, manufactured housing, community banking, environmental review, and local permitting are now part of the national housing conversation.

5. Losses and Watch List

Not every May development was positive. Several states and cities showed how housing reform can stall, narrow, or be locally resisted.

Minnesota: the Starter Homes Act stalls

Minnesota’s Starter Homes Act would have required municipalities to allow mixed housing — including duplexes, triplexes, and townhouses — on a portion of land currently dedicated to single-family homes, with special emphasis on areas near transit and parks. It also would have limited certain restrictive design standards, such as minimum garage sizes, for small residential buildings.

The bill failed to advance this session. Its House version failed in committee, and its Senate companion was removed from consideration after missing policy committee deadlines.

The failure is a reminder that even modest missing-middle reforms continue to face political resistance. The old zoning paradigm remains powerful: detached houses by right, small multifamily by exception, large multifamily by negotiation.

For courtyard urbanism, Minnesota’s setback is instructive. It is not enough to advocate for “more housing.” Reformers need to explain what kind of housing, at what scale, on what parcels, under what design rules, and for what households. Courtyard blocks can help make the missing-middle argument more concrete because they offer a physical model that balances density, green space, privacy, family life, and neighborhood form.

Colorado: lot-size reform stalls

In Colorado, HB26-1114 passed the House but was later postponed indefinitely in the Senate Local Government & Housing Committee. The bill would have barred many jurisdictions from requiring lots larger than 2,000 square feet for single-family homes. A companion lot-splitting bill, HB26-1308, would have required administrative approval for certain residential lot splits, but it was also postponed indefinitely. The Colorado Sun reported that lawmakers abandoned both smaller-lot housing bills near the end of session.

Lot-size reform is often treated as a technical issue, but it is foundational. Minimum lot sizes regulate who can build, what can be financed, how much land cost is embedded in each home, and whether neighborhoods can evolve incrementally.

For courtyard urbanism, lot-size flexibility is essential. Fine-grained urbanism requires parcels that are neither tiny slivers nor massive megaproject sites. The ideal American courtyard-block district will likely depend on medium-sized parcels, party walls, shared courtyards, phased development, and a financing structure that allows many actors to participate.

Los Angeles: local resistance to SB 79

In Los Angeles, the City Council adopted a measure that temporarily blunts the implementation of SB 79, California’s transit-oriented housing law. Rather than allowing the full state upzoning around transit stops to take immediate effect, the city advanced a more limited plan for selected low-density areas, allowing residential buildings between four and sixteen units and up to four stories.

This is part of a larger pattern where city responds to state preemption by adopting minimum-compliance alternatives that preserve as much local control as possible.

For courtyard urbanism, Los Angeles presents both a warning and an opportunity. The warning is that state-level zoning reform will always encounter local counter-moves. The opportunity is that cities may be more willing to accept reform when it comes with a credible urban-design model. If the alternative to single-family zoning is perceived as towers or generic apartment blocks, resistance will remain high. If the alternative is beautiful mid-rise courtyard blocks, with trees, private courtyards, family-sized units, and active streets, the politics may change.

6. What This Means for Courtyard Urbanism

May’s housing-policy developments clearly indicate that reform is moving from slogans to building mechanics.

The world is waking up to reality that housing scarcity is caused by rules that make certain good building types difficult or impossible to produce.

Courtyard blocks need a specific regulatory bundle:

• permission for mid-rise multifamily buildings;

• small and medium parcelization;

• party-wall construction;

• shallow floorplates;

• efficient stairs and cores;

• reduced or eliminated parking mandates;

• by-right approval;

• flexible ground-floor uses;

• predictable permitting;

• and codes that allow more than one building type between the detached house and the large corridor building.

This month’s reforms touch many parts of that bundle. Washington’s scissor-stair bill addresses circulation and building efficiency. Georgia’s permit reform addresses delay. Kansas addresses by-right development and lot-size constraints. Virginia addresses gentle infill and household flexibility. Austin addresses height and bonus calibration. The federal ROAD to Housing Act gives point-access blocks and single-stair reform national legitimacy.

The work now is translation. Policy reform does not automatically produce good urban form. If cities legalize more housing but developers respond only with generic corridors, podiums, and isolated megaprojects, the country will have missed the deeper opportunity.

Courtyard urbanism is the bridge between housing reform and urban design. It offers a way to turn new legal capacity into neighborhoods people actually want: fine-grained, green, walkable, family-friendly, socially mixed, and beautiful.

The month’s lesson is simple: the code is starting to move. Now the building model must be ready!

See you next time,

Alicia

One Friday morning last month, I boarded the Brown Line downtown to hear Governor J.B. Pritzker deliver his State of the State address at the City Club of Chicago. When the Governor’s office invited me to attend, I rescheduled my prior commitments immediately. I had been a strong supporter of the BUILD Plan since its announcement in January, and I wanted to hear Pritzker make the case for it live before a room of policymakers, developers, housing advocates, and civic leaders.

As the train rose above the street and began its creaking north-to-south cut through Chicago, I looked out at the city from one of its best vantage points. The Brown Line is one of Chicago’s great urban tours because it stays above ground almost the entire way. From its tracks, you can see the city as an achieved civilization of middle housing: two-flats, three-flats, six-flats, courtyard buildings, small apartment houses, commercial corridors, schools, parks, alleys, back porches, garages, churches, and tree-lined streets. As the train approaches downtown, this fine-grained fabric gradually gives way to taller buildings, until you are rumbling around the Loop through a forest of skyscrapers.

Dazzling as the downtown towers are, they would not exist without the surrounding neighborhoods that housed the people who built and sustained them. Chicago’s economic power has always depended on residential neighborhoods where people could live close to jobs, schools, transit, churches, parks, and daily necessities. They could rent. They could own. And many could do both: living in one unit while leasing another to tenants. In my neighborhood, this is still known as the “Polish pension plan,” because so many Polish immigrant families used rental income from an extra unit to sustain themselves in retirement. A city of middle housing is a city of homeowners, renters, small landlords, extended families, and neighborhood-scale financial independence.

This is what makes neighborhoods durable. It allows more kinds of people to live near one another. It supports local businesses because there are enough customers within walking distance. It supports neighborhood public schools because there are enough families within attendance boundaries. It supports transit because there are enough riders to make frequent service useful.

All of this was made possible by Chicago’s rich tradition of middle housing. And all of it is much harder to build today than it should be.

And this brings us back to the City Clubs event, and Pritzker’s BUILD Plan, which matters precisely because it is an attempt to reopen the path to the kind of neighborhood fabric that made Chicago work in the first place.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves”

At the City Club event, Pritzker energetically defended the BUILD Plan. His main theme is well known: the housing shortage is one of the most urgent problems facing both Illinois and the United States, and it is a problem almost entirely of our own making.

Bad policy and excessive regulation prevent developers from delivering the homes Illinois needs. Housing costs rise because supply is constrained. Parking mandates, discretionary approvals, local veto points, and outdated building codes slow construction and limit the number and kind of buildings that can exist at all.

In a wonderful moment that took my breath away (as a Renaissance Lit PhD), Pritzker framed the BUILD Plan as an assertion of agency over fatalism, quoting Julius Caesar to make the point:

“To quote William Shakespeare,” Pritzker said, “the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

In Julius Caesar, Cassius says the line to Brutus as an argument against fatalism. We should not blame fate—the stars—for misfortunes that are, in fact, the result of human action or inaction. It is a line about agency, responsibility, and the obligations of people with power.

Agency over fatalism means admitting that high housing costs are the predictable result of zoning laws, parking mandates, procedural delay, and building-code requirements that make small-scale multifamily housing unnecessarily difficult or impossible to build.

Agency over fatalism means taking action by reforming zoning laws, building codes, and legalizing traditional neighborhood forms again. We have the power to make it easier to build the middle housing that makes up the affordable, walkable neighborhoods people want now more than ever.

And the BUILD legislation does just that. As introduced, HB 5626 would require municipalities to allow up to four units on lots larger than 2,500 square feet, up to six units on lots larger than 5,000 square feet; and up to eight units on lots larger than 7,500 square feet. It would also legalize accessory dwelling units in districts that permit single-family homes, limit certain parking mandates, standardize some impact fees, create plan-review and inspection timelines, and prevent building codes from prohibiting single-stair residential buildings that meet specified requirements. (Illinois General Assembly)

Critics have already tried to recast the proposal as a plot to force “Section 8 housing” into suburbs. That is simply not what the legislation says. The bill is about zoning capacity, ADUs, parking mandates, permitting, impact fees, and building-code reform.

Others raise parking. But developers do not build homes without parking where buyers or renters demand parking. And in transit-served urban neighborhoods, forcing every small unit to carry a parking space can be the difference between a feasible building and no building at all.

But what is really going on here? Why is there resistance to middle housing? And why don’t property owners already have the right to build two flats and three flats in places where it is legal to build a single-family home? This is important to understand.

Historical context: zoning as nuisance prevention

To understand why property owners do not already have the right to build multifamily housing in places where it is already legal to build a single-family home, we need to review the history of American zoning law. Since Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. in 1926, local governments have had broad power to decide what may be built where.

The original justification was nuisance prevention. The Supreme Court ruling intended to keep genuinely harmful or incompatible uses—factories, smoke, noise, heavy industry, dangerous operations—away from homes. This logic seems fair enough. A thing may be reasonable in one place and unreasonable in another. As the Supreme Court put it, “a nuisance may be merely a right thing in the wrong place—like a pig in the parlor instead of the barnyard.”

There are clearly land uses most people do not want in the middle of a quiet residential block. Few wish to live near a slaughterhouse, a heavy industrial facility, a large farm operation, or a data center. These raise real questions of noise, traffic, sanitation, safety, and public order.

However, Euclid also understood the exclusion of apartments as central to modern zoning. Cities could create residential districts where not only industry and commerce, but also hotels and apartment buildings, were banned in order to preserve detached-house neighborhoods. And here the Court accepted a striking theory of harm. Apartment houses, it reasoned, might be “entirely unobjectionable” and even “highly desirable” in one setting, but nearly nuisance-like in another, because they could bring height, bulk, traffic, parked cars, noise, and the loss of light, air, and open space for children. “[T]he coming of one apartment house is followed by others,” reasons Euclid, “interfering by their height and bulk with the free circulation of air and monopolizing the rays of the sun which otherwise would fall upon the smaller homes, and bringing … the disturbing noises incident to increased traffic and business, and the occupation, by means of moving and parked automobiles, of larger portions of the streets, thus detracting from their safety and depriving children of the privilege of quiet and open spaces for play” (272).

That argument did not come out of nowhere. Euclid was responding to a serious early twentieth-century American problem. A large share of apartment housing in the United States had, sadly, become associated with overcrowding, poor ventilation, dark rooms, fire risk, dangerous vehicle traffic, and generally bad living conditions. Unlike many European jurisdictions, which used height limits, lot-coverage controls, courtyard requirements, and building-depth rules to ensure sunlight, ventilation, and shared outdoor space, many American cities allowed developers to cover too much of the lot and build too high without providing enough light, air, or protected space for children.

So the apartment house entered the American legal imagination as a nuisance. It became associated not with the sunny courtyard block, the Parisian apartment house, the Berlin perimeter block, or the Edinburgh tenement, but with overbuilt lots and high-traffic streets. This is important context for understanding the rise of the suburbs and the twentieth-century stigma against apartment living.

But Euclid misjudged apartments. Apartment housing can be fully compatible with light, ventilation, nature, and family life when it is designed well. In fact, it may be especially compatible with family life because it allows multiple households to share land and building costs, support one another socially, and benefit from the greater convenience and amenity that apartment neighborhoods make possible.

The right decision was never to ban apartments from residential neighborhoods, but to regulate the form. Prevent nuisance by limiting lot coverage, controlling height, and preserving the center of the block as a protected area for light, air, gardens, and children’s play.

This is exactly what many European cities learned to do. No front setbacks. No side setbacks. Buildings aligned along the street to create a continuous urban edge. But only partial lot coverage—often around half the parcel or block—so that the interior could remain open, green, sunny, and shared. Under these conditions, apartments delivered some of the best residential urbanism ever built! Apartments with cross-ventilation, sunlight, courtyards, gardens, shops nearby, schools nearby, and children playing in protected interior spaces.

As for the BUILD Act, eight units on a residential lot will not create a nuisance. But if suburban municipalities are worried about light, air, traffic, and open space, they have tools far better than exclusion. They can limit lot coverage. They can regulate building depth. They can require usable rear yards or shared courtyards. They can protect the center of the lot or block for trees, gardens, stormwater, and children’s play.

In other words, they can legalize middle housing while also requiring good middle housing.

The deeper point is that nuisance prevention is a legitimate goal for residential neighborhoods, but it should never have been used to exclude small multifamily buildings. Whether in rental apartments, condominium buildings, multigenerational houses, courtyard buildings, tenements, flats, or houses divided among several families, middle housing has been normal throughout urban history. It has a long lineage stretching from antiquity through the early modern and modern city. Fine-grained, small-format multifamily buildings allowed households to share land, share infrastructure, reduce housing costs, and benefit from proximity, mutual support, and community. They are not a threat to residential life. They are one of civilization’s basic tools for making residential life more affordable, convenient, and socially durable.

So the question the BUILD Act implicitly reopens: should a municipality have the same basic authority to exclude a four-flat as it has to exclude a factory? Should a town be able to treat small multifamily housing as though it were a nuisance?

Or should the State of Illinois recognize that middle housing is not a threat to residential life, but one of its basic and historic forms?

Because if it is already legal to build one home on a large parcel, what exactly is the public harm in allowing a property owner to build four, six, or eight homes instead?

I think the answer is yes.

Not an unlimited right to build anything, anywhere. Not a right to impose genuine nuisances on neighbors. Not a right to ignore life-safety codes, stormwater, fire access, structural integrity, or basic standards of habitability.

But a right to build small multifamily housing—up to eight units—on large residential lots where detached single-family homes are already allowed.

That right should be protected by the State of Illinois because the benefits are too large, and the alleged harms are too small. More homes mean more affordability. More households sharing expensive land means higher land productivity. More residents mean more customers for local businesses, more riders for transit, more children for neighborhood schools, and more property-tax revenue for municipalities facing long-term fiscal pressure.

Meanwhile, the dominant objection is parking.

At some point, a civilization has to decide whether the theoretical inconvenience of storing cars is more important than the real and escalating crisis of housing families, sustaining schools, and maintaining the social life of neighborhoods.

A bipartisan convergence

What is striking is that Pritzker’s plan is not some isolated blue-state experiment. Across the country, Democrats and Republicans alike are converging on the same basic conclusion: overly restrictive local zoning has helped create the housing crisis, and states have a legitimate role in restoring the right to build.

Montana, for example, passed major housing reforms in 2023 with broad bipartisan support, including duplex legalization and ADU reforms; the Montana Supreme Court upheld key parts of that package in March 2026. Pew has described 2025 as a year of “unprecedented reforms” in state legislatures, with states such as Texas, Washington, and Montana targeting barriers ranging from parking requirements to building codes. And states across the political spectrum—including Oregon, Montana, California, Utah, Washington, Arizona, Vermont, Colorado, Florida, New Hampshire, Maryland, and Minnesota—have adopted statewide zoning reforms of one kind or another.

This is because housing is not really a left-right problem. It is a build-or-don’t-build problem.

Republicans can understand it as property rights, family formation, and fiscal prudence. Democrats can understand it as affordability, inclusion, and climate-smart growth. Urbanists can understand it as neighborhood repair. Environmentalists can understand it as anti-sprawl land conservation. Parents can understand it as the ability to stay near schools and friends. Builders can understand it as removing rules that make good projects impossible.

The coalition is obvious because the need is obvious.

Thanks for reading! If you liked this, you should read Governor Pritzker’s article (linked below) about the BUILD plan’s role in bringing back starter homes (middle housing means more starter homes).

Cheers,

Alicia

JB Pritzker

We Can Bring Back Starter Homes

At the risk of stating the obvious, there are a lot of great reasons to own a home…

Read more

4 months ago · 496 likes · 46 comments · JB Pritzker

On the left, we have a dense, walkable, mixed-use courtyard neighborhood. Five- and six-story buildings. Shops at the ground floor, housing above. Trees, narrow, active streets, many different buildings, balconies, active rooftops, internal courtyards, many front doors. It looks urban and urbane and, at the same time, comfortable and livable.

On the right, we have the version now, to everyone’s horror, moving through the city: an updated retail plaza with abundant parking. An architectural rendering mocking us with the monstrosity of our drive-everywhere lifestyle.

The caption is short and obvious:

the policy we need / the policy we have

It went viral because it made the point that these two development outcomes, one fantastically appealing and the other depressing, are downstream of policy, not market demand.

The post was responding to an Urbanize Chicago story about the first demolition permit for the redevelopment of Clybourn Place, the aging retail complex at 1800 N. Clybourn. The current plan would replace the existing buildings with five new retail structures totaling about 43,900 square feet, surrounded by roughly 200 surface parking spaces. It will be newer, cleaner, and presumably easier to lease than what is there now.

But it is also a heart-breaking underuse of land in a neighborhood with extreme demand for family homes. It sits in the middle of the North Side, near Lincoln Park, Old Town, Bucktown, Wicker Park, DePaul, Armitage, Halsted, the Red Line, the river, and downtown. It is close to jobs, transit, schools, parks, restaurants, and some of the most expensive housing in the city. Four-bedroom housing is generally a $1.5M–$2.5M product if it is a condo/townhome, and often $2.5M–$5M+ if it is a single-family house (only housing type currently that offers yard access). In any rational land-use system, this would be an obvious place for housing over shops.

The appalling reason this is happening is that Clybourn is old industrial land that never became a neighborhood—and is now frozen in commercial under-development by laws that forbid residential construction, require excessive parking, and preserve parcels at a scale too large for ordinary neighborhood building. The problem is not only that Chicago makes mixed-use housing hard. It is that even when housing is allowed, our rules keep land in giant parcels, which means the market delivers giant projects: towers, podiums, lifestyle centers, or retail boxes with parking. To turn obsolete commercial corridors into real neighborhoods, Chicago needs two reforms at once: mixed-use zoning, so people can live above shops and services, and small-parcel zoning, so large sites can be broken into many buildings, many front doors, many owners, many unit types, and many yards. This article explains how Clybourn got stuck in this condition, why courtyard block development is the right strategy for sites like this, and what city governments, aldermen, developers, and ordinary citizens can do to make it possible.

Clybourn is old industrial land that never became a neighborhood

Like many commercial zones, Clybourn is the remnant of an older industrial site. Unlike the dense, fine-grained neighborhoods of Lincoln Park, Old Town, Wicker Park, Bucktown, or Lakeview, it was not built block by block, lot by lot, building by building, with many owners and many small parcels gradually forming a neighborhood. It was built around larger, coarse-grained parcels: factories, warehouses, rail-adjacent uses, and commercial buildings that never joined the fine-grained residential fabric around them.

As industry receded from the North Side, these parcels did not evolve into a normal neighborhood. According to car-oriented land use norms of the late 20th century, the parcels were redeveloped as big-box stores, entertainment uses, shopping-center formats, and acres of surface parking.

This pattern is common across American cities. Large obsolete industrial parcels get repurposed as new drive-to retail formats that did not fit comfortably into older neighborhood streets. Their land was close enough to wealthy neighborhoods to be commercially valuable, but not protected by the same pedestrian-friendly, fine-grained urban fabric. This is why we have so much urban land used in a car-oriented, suburban way.

The large parcels are anathema to great neighborhoods. The neighborhoods that work—the ones people love, defend, and pay extraordinary sums to live in—are fine-grained. They are built on grids, where blocks of land are divided into many smaller parcels. They are made by many owners, many builders, many architects, and many decisions over time. They contain many buildings, many front doors, many unit types, many price points, many architectural expressions, and many ways of living.

That fine-grained pattern also makes yards possible. You cannot have a real neighborhood without some form of outdoor domestic life: rear yards, courtyards, gardens, stoops, balconies, roof terraces, shared greens. Even dense neighborhoods need yards. Especially dense neighborhoods need yards.

City blocks work best when they balance public street life with private and semi-private outdoor space. Buildings maintain the street edge, but behind them are domestic spaces where children play, gardens grow, residents grill, host outdoor dinners, and maintain bikes. The block is, yes, building mass, but it is also the outdoor spaces and the social relationships they nurture.

Coarse-grained development, the only kind we seem to know how to build now, struggles to do this. A giant parcel becomes a giant building, or a giant retail box, or a giant parking lot, or a giant podium. It may contain amenities in expensive amenity decks that drive up per-unit construction costs and keep residents from patronizing gyms or cafes in their neighborhood. It does not create the same relationship between street, building, home, and yard. It does not create many owners or many buildings. It does not create the layered social and architectural texture that makes old urban neighborhoods work.

How do we get from coarse-grained development back to fine-grained development?

No fine-grained neighborhoods without policy that supports subdivision into smaller, mixed-use parcels

The most important fact about 1800 N. Clybourn is the entitlement. The site is governed by Planned Development No. 399, a commercial planned development from another era. The PD permits commercial uses and excludes residential uses. It also requires a large amount of off-street parking and treating part of the property as land for cars.

A retail redevelopment can move forward under the existing rules. A real mixed-use neighborhood cannot. Housing would require reopening the planned development, entering the rezoning process, and exposing the project to delay, negotiation, aldermanic discretion, neighborhood opposition, and all the uncertainty that comes with discretionary approval.

However, the larger problem here is that, even when housing is finally allowed on sites like this, the regulatory and financial system tends to produce one enormous project on one enormous parcel. So, mixed-use zoning is necessary but not sufficient.

Mixed-use zoning answers the use question: can housing, shops, childcare, groceries, clinics, offices, and restaurants coexist on the same site? The answer should obviously be yes. But small-parcel zoning answers the urbanism question: will the site become a neighborhood, or will it become a megaproject?

A single large parcel, even when rezoned for housing, usually invites a single large building: a tower, a podium, a lifestyle center, or some hybrid of all three. The parcel is the hidden unit of urban form. If the parcel is enormous, the project will tend to be enormous. If the parcel is broken into many buildable pieces, many buildings become possible. And with many buildings come many doors, many storefronts, many owners, many architects, many unit types, many price points, and many ways for the place to evolve over time.

There was, at one point, a more ambitious version of the Clybourn project. Earlier reporting described a possible second phase: a 500-unit residential tower rising roughly 520 feet, with ground-floor retail and structured parking. The developer may return to this proposal in the coming years, reviving the residential component when they are ready to fight for the right to build housing.

However, even if the tower is eventually built, it will not create the fine-grained, complete life-cycle neighborhood that everyone wants and no one delivers anymore. A 500-foot tower will add more units. But towers are an expensive way to produce urban housing. They require large capital stacks, long entitlement periods, complex engineering, structured parking, costly vertical circulation, and high rents. They also tend to produce a predictable unit mix: many studios and one-bedrooms, some two-bedrooms, and relatively few family-sized units.

Part of the problem is economic. When each unit has to absorb the cost of elevators, structure, mechanical systems, amenity packages, structured parking, financing risk, and years of entitlement uncertainty, the pressure is toward smaller, higher-rent apartments.

But part of the problem is architectural. Towers are usually built around deep floorplates: a compact central core of elevators, stairs, shafts, and corridors, surrounded by apartments arranged along the exterior wall. This works well for small units, because a studio or one-bedroom only needs a limited amount of window frontage. It works much less well for large family apartments, which need more bedrooms, more interior doors, more storage, more circulation, and more access to daylight

The deeper the floorplate, the harder it becomes to give every bedroom a window without making the unit very wide along the facade. A three- or four-bedroom apartment needs a lot of perimeter frontage, and in a tower that frontage is expensive and scarce. Consequently, large tower units are costly and awkward. The building’s geometry itself selects for smaller apartments.

By contrast, courtyard blocks use shallower buildings arranged around open space, creating more exterior wall per unit, more opportunities for cross-ventilation, and more workable layouts for two-, three-, and four-bedroom homes. Instead of concentrating hundreds of apartments around a vertical core, they distribute housing across many smaller buildings with more light, more frontage, and more direct access to yards, courtyards, balconies, and streets.

The policy we need would make courtyard blocks legal on sites like this. As the normal form of urban redevelopment.

This is what captured the public imagination with the viral tweet. The vision of the retail plaza redeveloped not as a tower surrounded by parking lots and commercial buildings. But as five- and six-story buildings lining streets and built to the sidewalk. Ground floors active with small shops, cafes, childcare, groceries, clinics, workshops, co-working spaces, and neighborhood services. Upper floors would hold apartments. Some would be small. Many would be family-sized. Buildings would be shallow enough to allow dual-aspect units: common areas and secondary bedrooms facing street, kitchens and primary bedroom facing inward toward shared courtyards at the heart of every block.

This is the urban form that American cities have to legalize if they want a future. It is dense without being a tower. It is green without being suburban. It is mixed-use without being a megaproject. It creates a strong public realm on the street and a protected common realm inside the block.

It also distributes ownership, architecture, and risk. Instead of one huge building consuming the entire site, a courtyard-block strategy could be made of many smaller buildings, many facades, many entries, and potentially many builders. And they would all be building at much lower construction costs, both because smaller buildings are less costly to build and because they come with less red tape.

A neighborhood made of many buildings can change over time. It can hold different tenures, different rent levels, different household sizes, different businesses, different architectural expressions. It can absorb shocks better than a single megastructure. It can become more valuable and more loved as it ages.

Next steps for reviving Clybourn and similar commercial zones

It’s fun to complain about bad things, but how do we fix them? What is the policy pathway for the kind of neighborhood Chicago actually needs?

City Council could act citywide. It could direct DPD to create a new commercial-corridor neighborhood overlay for obsolete industrial and auto-oriented retail land: places like Clybourn, Elston, parts of Western, Ashland, North, and other corridors where large parcels, surface parking, and weak pedestrian environments suppress the possibility of real neighborhood life. The overlay should legalize mid-rise mixed-use courtyard blocks by right, remove or sharply reduce parking requirements, permit zero setbacks and party-wall construction, require active ground floors on major streets, and make subdivision into 40- to 70-foot parcels the default rather than the exception. It should also create a pattern-book or pre-approved design catalogue: small apartment buildings, corner buildings, courtyard buildings, live-work buildings, family-sized flats, and mixed-use buildings that can be assembled block by block.

Alderman Hopkins could act immediately on Clybourn. He could convene a public working group on the future of the 1800 N. Clybourn corridor, ask DPD to study a fine-grained mixed-use alternative, and make clear that the ward’s long-term goal should not be another drive-to retail format followed later by an isolated tower. He could ask the developer to show a courtyard-block scenario alongside the currently permitted retail scheme and any future tower plan. He could also introduce, co-sponsor, or publicly request an overlay for Clybourn that allows parcelization, mid-rise housing, active ground floors, and reduced parking. His office lists office@aldermanhopkins.com as the public email contact, with a service office phone of (312) 643-2299. Send him this article!

Car-dependency, housing scarcity, and visual blight are not inevitable. The current condition was made by law, and it can be remade by law. We do not have to accept obsolete industrial corridors, retail boxes, and parking lots as if they were natural facts. We can decide what kind of city we want, write rules that serve those goals, and make the law work for our own interests: more housing, more beauty, more walkability, more local businesses, more family life, and more complete neighborhoods

.

I wanted to flag it here because the final week - Environments of Tomorrow (June 22-27) - is about the things this community thinks about. It’s hosted by Kevin Fishner and Devon Zuegel, and it covers three threads: architecture and urbanism (what gets built after the suburb, what actually makes a walkable neighborhood work), town-building (charter frameworks, land assembly, governance - the Próspera and California Forever crowd), and a parallel Future of Education thread led by Andrea Gallagher on schools, learning pods, and what a new town needs to hold families.

I am deeply excited about the talk I will be giving, and will be exploring some of the “post-suburban” themes in the newsletter in the weeks leading up to the event.

25+ sessions confirmed. The new-town conversation has moved past theory, and the people doing that work are going to be in one room.

If any of this is relevant to your work, applications are open at edgeesmeralda.com. You can come for just the final week or the full month.

And for readers of my newsletter, use the code EOT-ALICIA-10 for 10% off! Let me know if you plan on coming — I hope to see you there!

Alicia

Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Courtyard Urbanism Enthusiast,

In April, courtyard urbanism continued to make great progress in its path from architectural idea into statutory language, code reform, and development strategy.

Idaho enacted laws limiting setback, lot-size, and ADU restrictions. Indiana passed a housing bill that preserved important by-right and mixed-use provisions, even after being narrowed by local-government opposition. And Illinois’s BUILD package is now the serious state-level fight to watch because it goes directly to the rules that determine whether small multifamily buildings can be built: attached courtyard housing, single-stair reform, and parking reduction.

The setback rules, egress rules, and parking rules matter enormously. A city can say it wants more housing. It can legalize duplexes, fourplexes, and ADUs. But if the law does not recognize courtyard housing as a legitimate form, if the building code still forces small apartment buildings into large-building circulation patterns, and if the zoning code still requires too much parking, then small multifamily will not be built because it will be too expensive.

None of this means courtyard blocks are suddenly easy to build. But it does mean the assumptions that have made them difficult in much of the United States (mandatory setbacks, minimum lot dimensions, excessive parking requirements, two-stair mandates, discretionary approvals, and the absence of small-building finance) are now politically contestable.

Courtyard blocks are simple: buildings meet front and side property lines and create family-capable urban homes around protected green space. But they depend on a legal, financial, and development environment that allows those things to happen.

This month’s Market Brief covers the laws, projects, financing tools, and Courtyard Urbanist updates that matter for turning courtyard housing from a beloved historic type into a repeatable contemporary development model.

This month’s Market Brief covers:

• CU Project Updates — building prototypes, consulting work, speaking events, Horizon Lines 2050, the Tribune op-ed, and the Diversey/Seminary substation fight.

• Funding and Financing Landscape — why Courtyard Urbanist needs a capital stack built around Reg D, project SPVs, demand aggregation, public land, and smaller-building finance.

• The Big Picture — why April 2026 matters for the geometry, code, and financing of courtyard-scale development.

• Enacted Laws — Idaho and Indiana’s state-level reforms, and what they actually change.

• Pending Fight in Illinois — why HB 5626’s attached courtyard housing, single-stair, and parking provisions matter so much.

• Losses and Watch List — Virginia’s missing-middle bill, LIHTC expansion, and the limits of state reform.

• Projects in the Pipeline — Chicago’s $1 land + gap-financing pilot and Le Village’s coworking/childcare model.

  

1. CU Project Updates

Building the Typology, the Pipeline, and the Local Case

April was a busy month for Courtyard Urbanist.

The work is moving on several fronts at once: building prototypes, consulting inquiries, speaking engagements, local policy work, and early project-specific opportunities.

Building prototypes: family-sized units for the American market

The Courtyard Urbanist team has continued developing building prototypes, with a particular focus this month on floor plans for 3-bedroom and 4-bedroom units.

This has involved a lot of back and forth between the architects and me because the details matter a lot and, as you can imagine, I have a lot of input on the floor plans. The goal is not simply to produce “large apartments.” The goal is to modernize and Americanize the courtyard typology for contemporary U.S. markets. To be clear, these are apartments designed to compete with suburban 4BD homes. These are city homes that can urbanize a larger share of middle America by giving families the convenience and community of urban life without giving up the functionality of a real home.

There are several patterns I believe should pervade the family-sized units:

• the kitchen should have a window wall to the courtyard;

• the primary bedroom should have a window wall to the courtyard;

• bedrooms should not open directly into common areas;

• bathrooms should have windows wherever possible;

• and the main entrance should open into a real foyer, not directly into the living room or kitchen.

These may sound like small design choices, but they are not. They are the difference between an apartment that merely has three or four bedrooms and a home that actually works for family life.

The floor plans are getting very exciting.

I think they have the potential to meet a need in the American housing market in a way almost nothing else does: family-sized urban homes with light, privacy, practical circulation, generous kitchens, and a direct relationship to shared outdoor space.

That is the promise of the courtyard block. Not just more units. Better homes.

Consulting work: translating large parcels into courtyard blocks

April was also busy on the consulting side.

Courtyard Urbanist continues to hear from clients and potential partners who want technical guidance on how larger parcels could be developed as courtyard blocks. There are practical questions about site geometry, parcelization, building depth, unit mix, access, parking, courtyard dimensions, ground-floor programming, and how to make a block-scale concept legible to stakeholders.

The team is increasingly able to field this work because the models are becoming more precise.

That is important. Courtyard urbanism cannot remain only a visual or rhetorical idea. It has to become a repeatable development framework: something that can be tested on actual parcels, explained to landowners, reviewed by architects, understood by public officials, and financed.

Read more

Just as one slows to stare at a car wreck on the highway, so am I captivated by the stream of “distressed asset” headlines cross-cutting my newsfeed. It is a slow-motion REIT pile-up: iconic office towers, once the blue-chip anchors of the American skyline, are being offloaded at “high-vacancy” fire sale prices.

It is both shocking and exhilarating to witness the decline and fall of the office tower and the signs of a resurgence in neighborhood office space. For over a century, we funneled trillions in capital, land, and civic planning into the “hub-and-spoke” model, where workers connected to a central business district hub via many spokes. We built deep-floor plate office towers, assuming that workers would dutifully migrate from the periphery into a centralized office core forever. Unlike the versatile masonry lofts of the 19th century, today’s glass giants are often “functionally obsolete” for the one thing the world acutely needs right now: housing. Their massive, deep floor plates create “dark cores” that make residential conversion a financial and architectural nightmare.

In the ashes of the office tower we are seeing glimpses of new “work-near-home” movement blooming in our own backyards. In my neighborhood, the traditional office has evolved into various co-working programs. My next-door neighbor, navigating the chaos of a baby and a toddler, doesn’t commute to a cubicle downtown. She walks a few blocks to a hybrid “coworking + childcare + café” ecosystem. By keeping parents on-site, these models bypass the regulatory hurdles and costs of traditional daycare.

Then there is the West Loop, Chicago’s current “it girl” of urban development. Here, the “office” has survived by integrating into a fun, amenity-rich neighborhood. In the West Loop, the line between the office, the social club, and the street has blurred. Work happens in high-design, highly-amenitized environments surrounded by Michelin-starred dining and boutique residential blocks. It succeeds because it mimics the complexity of a real neighborhood (albeit primarily for young professionals and not families—more on this later).

All of this suggests that the decline of the high-rise office is headed to structural extinction rather than a cycle. The era of the monolithic office tower may have been a historical blip, a 20th-century anomaly with long-term viability in only a handful of global hyper-hubs like Manhattan or London.

As work decentralizes and daily life recenters around a walkable, mixed-use neighborhood, the market is demanding built environments that combine housing, flexible workspace, and social infrastructure. One urban typology poised to play an outsized role is the courtyard block: a form uniquely capable of producing flexible, adaptable space that accommodates a wide spectrum of uses—commercial, residential, and hybrid—and supports diverse households at every stage of the life cycle.

Let’s discuss in more detail.

The Office Tower’s Product Problem Is Not Going Away

The numbers are hard to ignore. U.S. office vacancy, which hit a record 20.6 percent in mid-2025, has settled into a historic plateau of 20.2 percent as of the first quarter of 2026, according to Cushman & Wakefield. While the streak of record-breaking quarterly highs has finally paused, stabilization at nearly double pre-pandemic levels confirms this is a permanent structural shift rather than a temporary dip.

In many downtown markets, the bleed has continued: Denver has reached a staggering 38.9 percent vacancy, while Atlanta has crossed the critical 30.4 percent mark. Even cities that appear to be “recovering,” such as Philadelphia (20.4 percent) or Chicago (27.0 percent), are largely doing so by aggressively removing obsolete stock from the count through demolition or conversion rather than a resurgence in leasing. These certainly look like the early stages of a total market realignment.

The industry’s response has been revealing. Firms are leasing less space and consolidating into better space. Real estate brokers call this “flight to quality,” but in 2026, it has intensified into a “flight to trophy”: Class A+ buildings in prime locations (mixed-use neighborhoods) are holding occupancy relatively well, while Class B and Class C towers (the bread-and-butter of twentieth-century downtown office stock) are bleeding tenants to the point of total vacancy. The high-rise office tower product is failing spectacularly.

The high-rise office tower was designed for a specific model of work: large organizations needing their employees in one place for eight to ten hours a day, moving between identical floors of the same building. Deep floorplates, often 25,000 to 40,000 square feet per floor, made sense for that model. The centralized cores, the single-use tenancy, the absence of housing: all of it was optimized for concentration and scale. Hybrid work and the increasing demand for “lifestyle office” has wounded that model, perhaps mortally.

The City Built for a Family and Lifestyle That No Longer Exists

For most of the twentieth century, work was spatially separated from the rest of life by the long commute. Workers left the neighborhood in the morning, spent the day in the office district, and came back. The city was organized to support this: downtown for work, residential areas for housing, and suburbs for families.

Crucially, this layout was a physical manifestation of a specific social contract: the stay-at-home mother and the breadwinner father. The 20th-century city was built on the assumption that while the father worked in an office tower, the mother remained in the neighborhood to manage the logistics of domestic life: the groceries, the school runs, and the household maintenance.

That separation has broken down, and the data suggests the old model is now fundamentally out of touch with how Americans live. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the “traditional” single-earner household has moved from the standard to the exception:

• 1960: Only about 25% of married-couple households were dual-income.

• Today: In 66.3% of married-couple families with children, both parents are employed.

The city is literally built for a family structure that no longer exists.

When two-thirds of families have both parents in the workforce, the long commute becomes extraordinarily inconvenient. Nicholas Bloom at Stanford, who has tracked work-from-home patterns more rigorously than anyone, notes that 25 percent of all paid workdays in the U.S. are now worked from home. He puts it plainly: “Work from home has stabilized, and it’s not going anywhere.”

By “re-attaching” work to the home and neighborhood, the spatial environment is finally aligning with the reality of the dual-income household. For women, who still perform a disproportionate amount of unpaid labor, the death of “spatial separation” removes a grueling logistical penalty. You no longer have to choose between being a “present” parent and a “productive” employee based on which side of a 45-minute highway stretch (or even train ride) you are standing on.

What this means, spatially, is that daily life has reknit itself around the neighborhood rather than the office district. The café that used to empty out at nine in the morning is full all day. Coworking spaces have appeared on residential commercial strips where they didn’t exist a decade ago. The places that support children’s independence after school also support adult flexibility during the workday. And, above all, families are looking for larger homes with more rooms to serve as home offices.

Proximity, time efficiency, and convenience are increasingly what workers optimize for. The commute was always a tax on the family unit. In a world where both parents are working, people are refusing to pay it.

The next generation of urban development must move beyond the single-use building. We need to build durable buildings with shallow floorplates that can evolve alongside the ever-changing needs of households and businesses for decades to come.

Courtyard Urbanism & the Complete Neighborhood

Courtyard urbanism is so important because it creates housing in the context of complete neighborhoods. Unlike the detached tower, which is expensive and architecturally limited, the courtyard block buildings are inherently wide and shallow. This architectural “thinness” allows the courtyard block to deliver spaces that enjoy dual-aspect lighting and natural ventilation at relatively low cost.

This form creates a spectrum of work environments that the modern market is starving for, serving everyone from middle-income families to the elite boutique firm and the industrial artisan.

1. The Professional Home: WFH Without Compromise

Because courtyard buildings feature shallow floorplates and central stair cores, they can easily accommodate large, family-sized units (3BD+) that are nearly impossible to find in 20th-century apartment towers.

The extra rooms create the literal “room to breathe” that working families need, allowing parents to manage busy careers without working from a kitchen island or sacrificing a child’s bedroom

2. The Integrated “Commerces”: The New Ground-Floor Standard

With a Floor Area Ratio (FAR) between 2 and 4, the courtyard block achieves the density required to support world-class amenities without the sterility of an office park. The ground floor is activated by street-facing retail and courtyard-facing studios, creating the “15-minute neighborhood” many young adults increasingly crave. Here, professional offices (clinics, creative studios, law firms) sit alongside third-wave cafés and grocery stores. This is the “neighborhood machine” in action: a localized economic ecosystem where work, social life, and domesticity occupy the same block.

3. The Connected Office: Steps from neighborhood amenities and home

Businesses will be able to attract employees by locating their offices in neighborhoods with the amenities that families need (school, critical mass of other families, retail, parks, etc.). A company can occupy a premier wing of a courtyard building, commanding a high-design entrance that feels welcoming and integrated. They can carve out a space within the interior courtyard for workplace outdoor functions. Such a workplace options will succeed succeeds because it offers an "amenity stack" based on quality of life that no downtown high-rise can replicate. When your office is just steps from your kids’ school, the neighborhood watering hole, and your own front door, the 50th-floor view begins to look like a gilded cage.

4. The Maker’s Atelier: Bringing Production Home

Crucially, the courtyard block allows for the return of “light” production to the urban fabric. Because the ground floors are designed for flexibility and often feature higher ceilings and “back-of-house” courtyard access, they can accommodate robotics labs, ateliers, workshops, and galleries. In the 20th century, these “maker” spaces were exiled to windowless industrial zones. In a courtyard block, a robotics startup or a high-end furniture atelier can thrive in the heart of the neighborhood. The dual-aspect light from the street and the courtyard is perfect for precision work, while the street-facing side functions as a gallery or showroom. This creates a “Live-Work-Make” synergy where the neighborhood can also support creative production.

At the scale of a single block, this adds up to dozens of overlapping work lives that cross-pollinate. A graphic designer in unit 5A runs her studio on the second floor; a family in unit 3B handles a corporate call from their fourth bedroom; a boutique robotics firm runs a sprint in a ground-floor suite facing the garden.

This is the “Parisian Model” adapted for the American 21st century. In Paris, office vacancy remains low in the CBD because the office supply is woven into the neighborhoods where people actually want to be (while La Defense, the tower office district, is struggling).

The block becomes a platform for hundreds of overlapping work lives, creating a resilient, integrated neighborhood that functions as a high-performance ecosystem for modern families, businesses, and creators alike.

VI. Why This Becomes Feasible Now

Until now, the courtyard block was unknown AND illegal throughout North America.

Setback requirements kept buildings away from property lines. Parking minimums buried ground floors in garages. Single-use zoning prevented housing and offices from occupying the same building. And building codes requiring two separate exit stairways in any residential building above three stories (a rule few other developed countries impose) made the compact perimeter block financially impossible on smaller lots. The second stairwell among other fixed costs pushed developers toward larger buildings with smaller units off of double-loaded corridors.

That code environment is now changing.

Governor Pritzker’s BUILD Plan in Illinois, introduced this spring, proposes exactly the reforms that make courtyard housing viable at scale. The single-stair provision would allow residential buildings up to six stories (with a single exit stairway, sprinkler systems, and emergency rescue openings) reclaiming up to 25 percent of floor area currently lost to redundant circulation. (A February 2025 Pew Charitable Trusts report found single-stair buildings of this height are at least as safe as two-stair equivalents.) Oregon, California, and Montana have already moved in this direction. Idaho signed setback reform and ADU legalization in April 2026.

For decades, this form was illegal. Now it is merely unfamiliar. And that is why we are here!

VII. Economic Reallocation

The capital story is becoming hard to ignore.

The office CMBS delinquency rate (the share of commercial mortgage-backed securities on office buildings that are past due) hit 12.3 percent in January 2026, its highest level on record. For context: it peaked at roughly 10.5 percent during the 2008 financial crisis. More than 50 percent of the $100 billion in office CMBS loans maturing in 2026 are projected to miss their maturity payments, according to Morningstar DBRS. (CMBS, or commercial mortgage-backed securities, are bonds backed by pools of commercial real estate loans, the dominant financing vehicle for large office buildings.) Brookfield Properties defaulted on an $835 million loan tied to One New York Plaza. SL Green and RXR defaulted on $940 million tied to One Worldwide Plaza. These are not obscure suburban buildings! These are Midtown Manhattan.

So where will real estate investment trusts go?

The courtyard block is, structurally, a more attractive vehicle for this reallocation than most of the development industry currently recognizes. Its smaller deal sizes expand access to regional developers and community lenders. More diversified tenants reduce reliance on any single anchor or use. Demand comes from multiple markets: housing, small office, and neighborhood retail. And because the form is repeatable and can be standardized across lots and cities, construction costs decline over time as the industry learns and refines the model.

VIII. Why Conversion Isn’t the Answer

The obvious response to the office distress data is to convert. Turn the towers into apartments. Fill the housing shortage by emptying the office surplus.

There is a reason this is not happening at scale.

Deep floorplates (the same feature that made towers efficient for large firms) make them structurally awkward for residential conversion. A 30,000-square-foot office floor is shaped for open-plan work, not for apartments, which require windows for every unit. Converting that floor to residential typically means leaving a large, dark core with no daylight access at the center of the building. Solutions exist (cutting light wells, wrapping the perimeter with smaller units) but they are expensive, structurally complex, and site-specific.

Industry estimates suggest that, at most, 5 to 7 percent of U.S. office stock is suitable for residential conversion at reasonable cost. The 71,000 units in the conversion pipeline in 2025 (a record high) represent 1.7 percent of total U.S. office inventory.

The future is not retrofitting the tower. It is investing in live-work neighborhoods where diverse households can live and work and where businesses can do business.

Conclusion

The twentieth century made a bet on segregation and consolidation. Work would be centralized in towers in the cores of major cities. Housing would be separated from it. Families would live in suburbs. The commute would be the daily ritual that connected these worlds.

The twenty-first century is renegotiating those terms. Work is decentralizing. Life is recentralizing in neighborhoods. The coworking space two blocks from school. The apartment with a proper third bedroom. Will the neighborhood office come next?

The courtyard block was the dominant urban building form for two thousand years before the twentieth century interrupted it. The interruption is ending. The conversation has moved. The capital is in distress. The policy is shifting.

The question now is who builds first.

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:

Copenhagen’s New 5-Minute Neighborhood: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

APR 19

Courtyard Urbanist is the leading newsletter for architects, planners, developers, and enthusiasts bringing family-friendly courtyard blocks to American cities.

Read full story

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

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:

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: