Tag: about here

• What rules should we be breaking?

  Here is another great video from About Here talking about how breaking certain rules could make for better apartment buildings.

  The basis for the video is a design competition put on by Urbanarium, called Decoding Density, which asked participants to propose creative solutions for “six-story plus apartment forms in Metro Vancouver.”

  More specifically, the competition asked: How might Vancouver intensify its single-family neighborhoods with small-scale wood-frame apartments?

  The About Here video covers some of the common themes from the submissions and, not surprisingly, the first is single-stair buildings. Requiring only a single point of egress can really unlock small sites.

  Some of the other ideas are, perhaps, a bit more adventurous; but these are valuable exercises. Many rules are dumb. So it’s important that we continually question them and search for better ways.

  2024.07.30

• Why your city is still struggling to build missing middle housing

  About Here makes excellent videos about cities. Here’s their latest about missing middle housing:

  In my view, there are two key takeaways.

  The first is that cities need to spend way more time understanding the economics of missing middle housing. As Uytae Lee says in the video, our land use policies need to respond to real math and overall financial viability.

  The second is that there’s real potential here. Uytae gives the example of Auckland which, according to the video, managed to deliver 20,000 new missing middle homes in a 5-year time period.

  This is meaningful! And, it is suggested that this has reduced rents in the city by somewhere between 13-35% compared to where they might have gone had this new housing not been built.

  As I’ve said many times before on the blog, the devil is in the details. The headline may sound really great that some city is now allowing 4 or 6 homes on every single-family lot, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that any new homes will actually be built.

  It’s important we change that.

  P.S. Thanks to Michael Geller for sharing this video with me.

  2023.11.24