Jan Gehl has a method. The Danish architect who has spent sixty years studying how people actually use streets didn’t start with plans or zoning maps or density calculations. Instead, started with a folding chair.

He puts the chair on the sidewalk. He sits down. And he counts.

He counts…How many people walk past in an hour? How many of them stop? How many look in a window? How many talk to each other, or how many sit down somewhere. How many are children. How many are old. How many are alone. He does this on street after street, city after city, and he writes the numbers in a notebook, and from those numbers — not from theory, not from ideology, not from a consultant’s rendering — he builds his understanding of what makes a street work.

One of the most numbers Gehl ever produced was this: on streets where the ground-floor frontage changes every five to seven meters (approximately 17 to 22 feet) — a new door, a new window display, a new awning, a new texture — pedestrian activity is seven times higher than on streets where the frontage is monotonous. Seven times. Not ten percent more. Not twice as much. Seven times.

Gehl called it the five-second rhythm. At walking speed (about 3 miles per hour, or roughly 4.4 feet per second) you cover approximately 22 feet every five seconds. If something new happens in the streetscape every 22 feet, your brain keeps clicking. You keep walking. You want to look. You maybe linger. Perhaps you even stop or come back. If nothing changes for fifteen or twenty seconds, if you are walking past the same wall, the same material, the same blank surface, your brain checks out. You grab for your phone. Any new messages? Your feet speed up. You are no longer in a place. You are passing through.

This is neuroscience. Our human brains are wired to seek novelty, a survival mechanism that once kept us scanning the savanna for predators and now keeps us doomscrolling through feeds. Cognitive scientists call it the orienting response: when something new enters your visual field, your attention snaps to it. Maybe it’s a painted yellow door. A funky window display with plants. A person wearing a wild and strange outfit. Each one resets your brain’s attention stopwatch. And each one gives you a reason to stay present in the physical world rather than retreat into the one in your pants pocket. When the smartphone offers infinite novelty at zero physical effort, the streetscape has to compete, not with content, but with cadence. A streetscape that delivers richness at walking speed gives you something Instagram filters cannot: the feeling of being somewhere.

Remember, something new every five seconds. Five.

I think about that number every time I walk past most development, similar to the point made by Matthew Yglesias in the tweet below:

Why Does New Development Feel Like That?

You may be asking why new development feels like this but you already know the kind of building I’m talking about. You may not know the name, but you know the building. A few stories of wood-frame apartments over one story of concrete — the concrete level is either parking or retail, usually parking with a thin veil of retail stretched across the street-facing side. The exterior is a patchwork of fiber cement panels in two or three colors, arranged in a pattern that a computer generated and no human would have chosen. The building is long. It occupies an entire block face, sometimes two. It has a lobby entrance and maybe, if the city required it, a retail bay or two at the corner. The residential floors above are accessed through interior corridors. The windows are uniform. The balconies, if present, are unused, too small for a chair, and too exposed for comfort, decorative appendages that exist to break up the facade on the architectural rendering and serve no function in the lives of the people behind them.

The five-over-one is the defining multifamily building type of 21st-century American development, not because it is the most frequently built, but because it is the most visible, the most replicated across markets, and the most responsible for the increasing homogeneity of the American streetscape. It dominates new construction in growing cities like Austin, Nashville, Denver, Indianapolis, Raleigh, Columbus. It is the product of a specific intersection of building code (the 2009 International Building Code allowed five stories of Type V wood-frame construction over one story of Type I concrete), lending practice (banks love the predictable returns of a 200-unit building with standardized floor plans), and zoning reform (cities that relaxed height limits and use restrictions got more of these, fast). The five-over-one and development like it is what the development industry builds when you remove the most restrictive barriers but leave the underlying incentive structure (build big, build fast, build standardized) intact.

And by every metric that planners currently use to evaluate urban development, the five-over-one is a success.

It is dense. A five-over-one on a half-acre lot easily delivers sixty to eighty dwelling units per acre, well above the threshold for what is deemed transit-supportive density. It is mixed-use, at least nominally. There is typically some retail on the ground floor, even if the retail is a leasing office or amenity space and a package room. It meets the form-based code’s requirements for build-to line (the building is pulled up to the sidewalk), ground-floor transparency (the code says sixty percent, the architect delivers sixty percent), and street wall continuity (the facade is unbroken for three hundred feet). On the DPZ transect, the five-over-one lands comfortably in T5, Urban Center. On the SmartCode’s standards, it passes.

So why does it feel dead?

What is an Active Edge?

Before we get to how some places feel dead and others don’t, we should discuss what we mean by active edge. An active edge is composed of things that catch your attention. It’s a qualitative feeling but can certainly be qualified in numbers. Walk along a block and ask yourself, “how many cool or neat things can I count within every 100 feet?” If that number is less than, say, something like 5, it’s probably not an engaging block. If it’s more than 20, then the block sounds way more engaging and is probably far more interesting to be on. We call these neat or cool items Active Edge Elements.

It’s also important to remember where our eyes go. Typically for pedestrians, we only really acknowledge things between the first couple stories and typically not above five stories. Those first two are the most important. Because we can still see and probably yell to that second story, it can be as just as much an edge as the oft-cited first floor. This is partially why the roads of New Orleans’s French Quarter or Condesa or Roma in Mexico City feel so intimate - their multistory porches let life and music bleed into the public outside. They are porous.

When Jan Gehl counted storefronts in Copenhagen and established the five-second rhythm (fifteen to twenty active frontage elements per roughly 330 feet, one scene change every 17 to 22 feet at walking speed) he was counting on commercial streets. Mostly doors that customers use. Windows with merchandise. Outdoor seating where people eat food they just bought. The method works and is a widely cited metric for street-level vitality in the urban design literature. But it has a big blind spot.

Gehl’s counting method has a problem the moment you try to apply it outside a retail corridor. It assumes that activity at the ground plane is commercial activity. That the door matters because a customer walks through it. That the window matters because a product is behind it. That the surface matters because it is selling something.

But this assumption excludes most of the world’s neighborhoods from the conversation.

When I walk down my neighborhood streets, I can’t relate with the Bund in Shanghai or the West End of London; neighborhood corridors like mine typically don’t show up in urbanist photoshoots. We have a regular street. Bungalows and shotgun houses. Not much retail. No restaurants. By Gehl’s commercial metric, the ground-plane openings score is near zero. Two or three doors per hundred feet, none of them serving customers. Blank residential facades. No active edges and a dead street, right?

This couldn’t be more wrong!

Let’s look at what is actually there.

The house on the corner has a porch with fourteen plants in mismatched pots — terra cotta, plastic, a coffee can, something that used to be a colander (I think). The plants spill over the railing and onto the steps. They are not landscaping. They are not designed at all. They are an accumulation of one person’s decisions over multiple growing seasons, and they are visually dense enough to stop your eye for three full seconds as you walk past. Even if you’re mostly questioning where some of the pots came from - or what they were - it’s enough to get your attention. That’s an active edge.

Next door, someone has hung a string of Christmas lights across the porch ceiling. They’ve been up since two Christmases ago. Half of the lights are still on at night, the other half with blown bulbs from overuse. Below them, two lawn chairs face the street. A pair of heavily worn shoes sits by the door. The porch is not occupied right now, but the signs of occupation are everywhere — a crusty coffee mug on the railing, an overfilled ashtray, a phone charger snaking through the window next to an AC unit. This porch is a room with no walls, and it is furnishing the street with evidence that someone is there. Remember, intrigue and novelty are the spice.

Next door, a man we call Chicken Paul has a front yard littered with wire fencing and, you guessed it, chickens. A ridiculous number of chickens. If you’re unlucky, you may also catch his very large and very loud Rottweiler vociferously protecting the domain of Chicken Paul. This is CP’s world, we’re just living in it. This is an active edge we avoid (at times).

Three houses down, the garage door is covered with a mural. It is not a commissioned piece. This is not Banksy. It looks like a child, maybe a teenager, painted it — a sun, some flowers, a word in script that might say “blessed” (or possibly “breathe” it is hard to tell when I walked past). But that doesn’t matter. The mural is a signal that someone cared enough about something to write it down in paint. That signal is an active edge.

Across the street, a chain-link fence is threaded with plastic flowers. Next to it, a yard with a hand-painted sign that says “Slow Down Children Playing” in letters that are not quite straight. The sign has seen better days - perhaps it was a victim of someone not heeding its advice. Next to that, a house with a neon sign in the rounded second floor window, one of those Milwaukee’s Best signs probably stolen from a bar, glowing careless blue hues in the middle of a Spring afternoon. It is not advertising really much of anything. It might make a cold beer sound good, but really it is just someone’s idea of what a window should be.

Every single one of these builds an active edge.

Redefining the Frontage Event

We’ve established that an active edge is the mosaic of interest of the ground-plane interface between a building (or lot) and the street that captures the attention of a person moving at walking speed. An active edge is one that builds novelty. That is the definition. Not “any commercial frontage element.” Not “any door that serves customers.” Any element that engages the eye. Not necessarily the 60% (or other arbitrary number) of transparency required, as many of our zoning codes would prefer.

This matters because the neuroscience behind Gehl’s five-second rhythm isn’t focused on commercial activity. It is about novelty processing. The human brain’s dopamine system, the reward circuitry that motivates exploration and learning, is activated by unexpected stimuli. A predictable environment produces habituation: the brain stops paying attention. A varied environment produces engagement: the brain stays alert because the next stimulus might be rewarding. The five-second rhythm works not because there is a store every five seconds but because there is something different every five seconds. The rhythm is perceptual, not commercial.

A porch with fourteen plants in mismatched pots is a novelty event. Now, if every house had fourteen plants, would it be? We crave the unexpected, so what is deemed novel truly depends on the context in which you're at. Truly vibrant places are built by and for a myriad of different people with different experiences and stories - these places reflect the ethos of “it takes a village” necessary for dynamic urban life.

When I say a street has high active edge elements, I do not necessarily mean it has to have a lot of shops. I mean it has a lot of moments or a lot of places where the boundary between the private world of the lot and the public world of the street becomes permeable to attention and creates novelty. The attention can flow inward (you notice the plants) and outward (the person on the porch notices you noticing). That bidirectional flow of attention is osmosis. It is what makes a street feel watched, inhabited, alive. And it happens on residential streets as readily as on commercial ones. But only if the residential fabric is fine-grained enough, porous enough, and human enough to produce it. The term “Active Edge Element” = a slice of novelty. Remember that for later.

What Kills the Active Edge

The difference between an active edge and what I term a ‘lame edge’ is the active edge intrigues while the lame edge bores. The active edge dies when the interface between building and street is sealed. A house set back forty feet behind a lawn with no porch, no fence, no planting bed, no yard art, no evidence of habitation visible from the sidewalk — that is a dead edge. The building exists, but it is not participating in the street. It is not offering anything to the pedestrian’s visual field. It could be occupied or vacant and you would not know the difference from the sidewalk.

Remember, we’re expanding the definition of what an active edge is. You could have the coolest, most active window display or architecture, but it does not matter if it’s set far across the street where no one can see it. This reminds me a bit of the adage if a tree falls in the woods — if the architecture is great but surrounded by parking lots, was it actually able to be experienced? The relational aspect of buildings is far more important than buildings themselves. Architecture takes second fiddle to relationships between buildings.

A parking lot is a lame edge. A blank wall is a lame edge. A privacy fence taller than eye level is a lame edge. A garage door facing the street (the dominant frontage type in post-1960 American residential construction) is a lame edge. These surfaces do not just fail to attract attention. They actively repel it. They tell the pedestrian’s brain: there is nothing here for you. Speed up. Look at your phone. Get to where you are going.

The five-over-one’s ground-floor parking podium is a lame edge. The strip mall’s setback behind a parking lot is a lame edge. The suburban office building’s reflective glass curtain wall is a lame edge. But so is the ranch house with the two-car garage presenting its blank face to the street while the front door hides around the side. Dead edges are not exclusively a commercial-district problem. They are a residential-district problem, and they are the default product of every American subdivision built after the garage became the primary interface between the house and the street.

But it is not just the long blank wall that kills the active edge. Even if a ground floor is actively being used with businesses it could still be a lame edge. This may because it still bores! Perhaps the street wall is too continuous, perhaps the building is monolithic and repeated. The windows are too predictable, too consistent. This breaks the novelty hunter inside the zona incerta of our subthalamus. This is what Strong Towns contributor Alexander Price has termed “coarse-grained urbanism”.

Remember, we want novelty every five seconds or so, so 20-30 feet should have a little something new that activates, brings intrigue. Of course, this naturally occurs in neighborhoods with 25-30’ foot lots and buildings pushed near or up to the sidewalk. A neighborhood built and tended by many hands tends to better reflect the minutiae of daily life and the intricacies of the human experience that the best places often showcase.

Let’s not mistake ourselves: it is not just the five-over-one that is to blame. Our lending and construction practices treat multifamily construction like building a hotel. Our central business districts are filled with large parking garages and convention centers. Our blocks are long, monotonous and boring. It’s our convenient monoculture of development patterns in the 21st century that make lame edges. Some have called this the architecture of neoliberalism. It’s the economies of scale used to build architecture, but not places.

Counting Intrigue

Okay, so what does this all mean? How can we get back to building places that encourage novelty that “make places go”? If the problem is clear — monolithic development patterns have systematically eliminated the fine-grained variety that traditional neighborhoods produced by default — then the response has to be equally clear. We need a way to measure what we're losing. Not in architectural style points or code compliance metrics but in the thing your brain actually registers at walking speed: how many moments of interest does this street give me before I check my phone?

That's a countable thing. And counting it is the first step toward building it back.

Take a walk along your favorite street or block. Keep a count in your head or on a piece of paper. We’re looking to create an average of how many Active Edge Elements happen every 100 or so feet to create a baseline figure.

When you use my upcoming scoresheet to count Active Edge Elements (this is a teaser), count everything that engages your eye. Not just doors and windows. Count:

1. Entries and thresholds. Are there are any interesting doors, gates, stoops, porches, steps, ramps or any point where a person could transition from the public realm to the private realm or where evidence of that transition is visible (shoes by a door, a welcome mat, a screen door propped open)? Extra points for nice porches and patios!

2. Transparent surfaces. Windows with visible activity behind them — a lit room, a person, a cat, merchandise, art, plants on a sill. Not windows with drawn blinds or reflective film. The test is: can the pedestrian see through the surface into a world that is different from the one they are standing in?

3. Display and expression. Murals, signs (commercial or personal), art, flags, banners, seasonal decorations, neon, string lights, painted surfaces, chalkboard menus, sandwich boards, posters, bumper stickers on a fence. Any surface that carries a message or an image placed there by a human being with intent.

Vegetation and material variety. Planting beds, window boxes, hanging baskets, potted plants, trellises, front gardens, vegetable patches, trees whose canopy creates a visual event at the pedestrian scale. Also material transitions — a brick wall meeting a wood fence meeting a chain-link section threaded with vines. Each material change is a micro-event.

Objects and accumulations. Yard art, sculptures, fountains, birdbaths, garden gnomes, religious statuary, found-object installations, collections visible from the sidewalk can all be active edge elements that bring novelty. But this demands that the objects are done in a way that piques interest or wonder or joy and not disgust. Weird can be good! Is it cool or is it …just sortof weird in a bad way?

Movement and people. Wind chimes, flags, spinning pinwheels, water features, a dog in a yard, a person on a porch, a sprinkler, a bird feeder with birds on it. Movement captures the eye more powerfully than any static element. A street with wind chimes and flags and a dog behind a fence is perceptually richer than a street with none of these, even if the architecture is identical.

But if movement is the appetizer then people are the meal. (I don’t mean this cannibalistically!)

We are social animals wired to scan for other humans: we really are reading faces, gauging body language, assessing whether a place is safe, friendly, worth entering even if unconsciously. There is no architectural detail, no facade treatment, no materiality choice that competes with the sight of another person sitting outside with a coffee.

This is the thing designers don’t want to hear: the presence of people is a stronger predictor of whether a place feels alive than the style of what houses them. A mediocre building with a great porch and someone on it outperforms a great building with a blank wall and no one around. Outdoor seating, visible porches, front yards They say “other people have decided it’s worth being here, so that means it’s safe to stay”. The best architecture in the world cannot replicate what an occupied cafe patio on a sidewalk communicates in a quarter of a second.

Yes, more people will bring more chances for novelty but that does not mean simply that density = novelty. It’s a built environment that allows those extra people to put their imprint on the space around them that builds novelty. Places that encourage informality in good reason tend to have higher novelty, and thus, feel more like places.

Anyways, the point is not to count every blade of grass in this exercise. The point is to count the decisions — the evidence that individual human beings have made choices about what the interface between their private world and the public street looks like. Each decision is a frontage event. Each event is a beat in the rhythm. And the more beats per hundred feet, the more alive the street feels, whether those beats are storefronts or porches or murals or fourteen plants in mismatched pots. How much cool stuff did you see? Was it an exciting walk? On average, how many neat things did you see every hundred feet?

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So, now, me do the exercise. Not in Copenhagen but rather here in Indianapolis. On a block where a five-over-one was recently built.

*Author’s note: I have changed some of these following descriptions slightly to not hurt an architect’s or developer’s personal feelings. It’s not necessarily their fault we build like this, but rather a cosmic gumbo of financing, regulation, and design codes that make it most feasible for economic gain. We can and should code and build better!

I’m standing on the sidewalk on a weekday afternoon. The building is to my left. It runs the entire length of the block, let’s call it 200 or so feet. I start walking. I’m going to see how many cool or neat things I spot each 100 feet.

For the first thirty feet or so, I pass the parking garage. The ground floor here is a concrete wall with horizontal ventilation slits. There is no door. There is no window. There is nothing for my eyes to engage with. The wall is the color of wet cement. My feet speed up without my deciding to speed up. I am in the retail corridor now. Gehl would clock me at zero engagement events in six seconds. I look above, the small Juliet balconies on the slab wall above the retail barely register a depth away from the street wall. There are no active patios from what I can see - no plants, or life. I would clock zero active frontage elements. My brain has checked out a bit already. At least there are street trees?

At the thirty-foot mark, the retail begins. A large glass storefront — a leasing office, I think? Or a lobby? The glass is floor-to-ceiling, which satisfies the transparency requirement, but the interior is a reception desk, a potted plant, and a hallway leading somewhere I cannot see. There is no activity or people inside from what I can discern. The glass functions as a mirror, not a membrane. I can see my own reflection more clearly than I can see what’s inside. Maybe I check myself out. Alright, I’ll call that one active frontage element — me seeing myself — in six seconds.

At the fifty-foot mark, the second retail bay. This one is empty. It has been empty since the building opened years ago. The required rent, which the developer set based on the construction cost of the concrete podium, is something like forty-two dollars per square foot. It seems likely they’ve never intentionally tried to fill it, as they could write it off. A national chain used to operate next door, but that space is now also vacant. The glass is covered with brown paper from the inside. Zero engagement events.

At the hundred-foot mark, another lobby entrance. A glass door with a key fob reader. A hallway leading to an elevator. A sign that says RESIDENTS ONLY LEAVE PACKAGES AT LOBBY. I suppose I could count this as one engagement event, and it’s exclusionary as the door is telling me that the life of this building happens somewhere I am not invited.

The remainder of the space repeats more empty retail, probably written off in the development’s pro forma.

At the two-hundred-foot mark, I reach the end of the block. I have walked the entire frontage of a building that contains two hundred apartments and six thousand square feet of retail space. I have encountered four engagement events. This building is producing engagement at roughly one-quarter of the minimum threshold for pedestrian life.

Now let me do the same exercise on the block that the five-over-one replaced. Except I can’t, because the block is gone. But I can do it on the next block over, which hasn’t been redeveloped. Similar vintage. Similar density. Six buildings instead of one. It’s scruffy.

A couple houses at first, nothing too fancy. A fourplex, it looks like. Not much on the porch. Fifty feet in is a barbershop with its door propped open, radio playing, a man in the chair visible from the sidewalk. Next door is a recently renovated office with a porch where someone has left a pair of boots and a bag of potting soil from the local Digs nursery. A vacant lot, yes, that happens. It’s not great, but at least it’s a gap in the wall, a moment of sky, a place where the street can breathe and I can see garages and alley behind with some strange graffiti. A small, one-story building with a tattoo parlor downstairs and an apartment in the rear, neon sign buzzing in the window. A house converted to an insurance office, hand-lettered sign, American flag. A corner building with a restaurant whose tables spill onto the sidewalk, two people eating, a waitress leaning in the doorway smoking a cigarette.

I count eighteen engagement events in 100 feet. One every five feet. Gehl’s rhythm, almost exactly. And this is not a fancy block. This is not Fifth Avenue. This is a scruffy, unplanned, economically marginal block where the buildings are old, and the businesses are small and nothing has been designed recently by anyone with a modern degree in architecture.

It works anyway. It works because it is porous.s

Here is what I mean by porous, and here is where the concept starts to get precise.

That scruffy block has six separate buildings on six separate lots. Each building has its own front door, its own ground-floor relationship to the sidewalk, its own owner making independent decisions about what to do with the space. The lots are narrow (twenty to thirty feet) which means the facade changes every twenty to thirty feet, which means a pedestrian encounters a new building, a new door, a new texture, a new identity every four to six seconds. That is the five-second rhythm, produced not by design but by the grain of the lot pattern.

The new development has one building on one lot. The facade changes when the overlay zoning decides it changes (every 50 feet) which is whenever the fiber cement panel shifts from gray to taupe. The building has one owner making one set of decisions about the entire block face. The ground floor serves the building’s internal needs (parking, lobby, leasing) and not the street’s needs. The boundary between inside and outside is sealed. The building presents a surface to the street. The scruffy block presents a membrane. The edge is lame.

In my last article, I used the word porosity to describe this difference. Now I want to make it more specific.

The scruffy block has moderate place porosity: the buildings cover maybe forty to fifty percent of their lots, leaving room for yards, gangways, parking pads, gardens, the spaces between things where informal life happens. The five-over-one has almost no place porosity — the building covers eighty-five to ninety percent of its lot. There is no space between things. There is only the thing.

The scruffy block has high space porosity: lots of active edges and openings in the building fabric at the ground plane. Doors, windows, display surfaces, porches, that gap where the vacant lot lets the sky in. Random flowerpots that grab attention. Active edges are the novelty. The five-over-one has low novelty and thus space porosity — a few large openings widely spaced, most of them functionally sealed (the lobby) or economically failed (the empty retail bays).

The scruffy block has high relational porosity: the alley behind the buildings connects to the next street, the gaps between buildings let you see through to the interior of the block, the lot pattern creates multiple possible routes and multiple possible encounters. The five-over-one has zero relational porosity: the building is a wall, continuous and impermeable, from one end of the block to the other. There is no way through. There is no way around or through. There is only past and forward.

Dense but imporous. That is the diagnosis. Dense, but the novelty is missing.

I’ll ask: which feels more like a place?

I want to be careful here because I don’t want this to read as nostalgia. I am not arguing that we should preserve every scruffy block and build nothing new. We need new housing. We need a lot of it. The five-over-one exists because cities need density and the market delivers density in the form that maximizes return on investment. Good! I understand the economics. I have worked with developers and will continue to do so. I am not anti-development. New development fits a need we desperately have for new housing.

What I am is anti-imporous development. I am against building types that add people to a place without adding life to a place. I am against codes that measure density and ignore porosity, that count the units and miss the opportunity to place plants on a porch. I am against a planning profession that evaluates a building by its compliance with setback dimensions and transparency percentages while ignoring what happens on the sidewalk after the building opens. I am against code that doesn’t let great places happen. I think we can make places feel more alive by understanding and upholding a decent relationship between buildings.

Gehl didn’t count doors because he liked doors. He counted doors because doors are where the inside of a building meets the outside of a street. Every threshold is a transaction between private life and public life. Every porch is a potential encounter. Every patio is an eye on the street, a person coming or going, a reason for someone else to be there. When you replace six buildings with six doors each or thirty-six doors on a block with one building with two entrances, you have not just changed the architecture. You have removed thirty-four opportunities for the street to be alive.

That is what the five-over-one does. It replaces a porous block with an imporous one. It replaces thirty-six transactions with two. It replaces the five-second rhythm with a twenty-two-second silence. And the code, the form-based code, the SmartCode, the transect, looks at the result and says: this is good urbanism. Is it though?

The code is wrong. Not because it is badly written. Because it is measuring the wrong thing.

Next time I’m going to tell you about a country that measures the right thing, a country with twelve zones instead of fifty, where a restaurant can go on a residential street because a small restaurant is not a nuisance, and where the most expensive city in the developed world is also the most affordable of its size.

But before that, I have a homework assignment for you.

This week, walk down a block that feels good to you, but you’re not sure why. It could be a block you like to walk your dog more than other blocks. Take your phone, of course. Count the doors. Count the windows. Count the places where the inside of a building touches the outside of the street. Count the weird things you see that make you linger. Count the alleys, the passages, the gaps, the places where you could turn and go a different direction. Count anything that sticks out as being ‘cool’ or neat to you.

Then walk down a block that feels dead. Do the same count.

You don’t need a planning degree to see the difference. You just need your feet and five minutes. The numbers will tell you everything the zoning map can’t.

This is the second in a series about urban novelty, a new way of measuring what makes neighborhoods work. Last time I introduced the concept. This time I applied it to the building type that is replacing our neighborhoods. Next time: what Japan figured out about zoning that we still haven’t.

Subscribe to follow along. Share this with someone who lives near a five-over-one and knows exactly what I’m talking about.

Next: “What Japan Knows That We Don’t”

We’re sitting at the corner of Avenida Michoacán and Avenida México in the Condesa neighborhood of Ciudad de México aka Mexico City.

It’s a Tuesday. Three in the afternoon. Buenas tardes. Nothing special is happening.

And yet something is happening everywhere.

One too many spritzers later, an elderly man sits pecking at chilaquiles that have been out too long, unbothered. A ragtag troop of accordion-heaving musicians waltzes table to table, harmonizing for exactly 45 seconds before moving on, a tacit understanding with los propinas. Two young men in tattered, paint-spattered jeans roll a tire into the fenced construction site next door. What could they possibly be doing with that? A small girl on an Ecobici weaves between the tables nearest the tree-lined avenue and the café crowd at Toscano. And yes, someone’s dog is yipping, tied to a parking meter, watching all of this with the calm authority of a building inspector.

The infrastructure hums above, a superfluous powerline cascades to the ground, perhaps shook by a micro earth tremor.

There’s an elderly man selling tamales from a cart at the corner, and the line — four people, maybe five — is blocking the sidewalk just enough that you have to step into the street. You almost collide with a woman on a bicycle who rings her bell at you. Not in anger. Just a warning. You step back onto the sidewalk grinning, because somehow that entire sequence from the close-call to the bell, to the chilaquiles and the yipping dog — it all felt like a conversation you were part of, even though nobody spoke to you.

In that, the scene here at Parque México purrs.

You wake up. You’re in Indianapolis now. Meeting a friend for coffee on Monument Circle.

Grab your latte. Walk south along the Circle to the southern steps. Past some panhandlers under an ornate theatre marquee. There are flyers for upcoming shows but no one outside. Keep going.

The buildings are still here. Most are even taller, but many are the same vintage, the same brick. Many of them are genuinely beautiful, in a way that Condesa’s low-slung stucco never attempted. One is classic Art Deco, its crown stepping back in a nod to the nascent setback laws of 1920s New York. Large, lumbering buildings, some rising sixty stories, pierce the sky. Facades drip with the warm grays of hometown Indiana limestone quarried just dozens of miles away. The architecture is more accomplished than most of what you saw in Condesa. The density, if you measured it by floor area per lot, is comparable to what you just left.

But something has …shifted.

The buildings are pulled back from the sidewalk. The doors are fewer and farther between. No upper floor balconies. Not many plants. Not so many windows or porches, you think. Ground floors are parking garages, blank walls, windows with nothing behind. Lots of glass! The lots are wider, and the blocks are long. There is no dog tied to a meter. There is no tamale cart. There is no woman on a bicycle with a bell yelling to get out of the way. However, there is the beautiful, towering Soldiers and Sailors Monument that pierces three hundred feet into the pale Midwest sky, casting a lingering shadow over a man selling “glizzys” from a cart. A street person yells at a passerby. Neither of them looks up.

The infrastructure is fine, great even. No falling powerlines here.

But for now, there is only you, on your phone now, looking past buildings that are not talking to you, or to each other. The architecture is gorgeous, you think. But does mere beauty not make great places?

At least today, Monument Circle does not hum.
It idles.

It does not go.

There’s Gotta be a Word for It

I have been thinking about cities for awhile now, and for most of that time I have been trying to figure out what makes that difference. Not in the abstract — I’ve read Jacobs, I’ve read Gehl, I’ve read the canon of the New Urbanists and I know the theories. Eyes on the street. The ballet of the sidewalk. The five-second rhythm. I can recite those. What I couldn’t do, for years, was measure the difference. I could feel it. I could describe it. I could walk a client down a street and say “this is alive” and then walk them down another street and say “this is dead” and they would nod because they could feel it too. But I couldn’t tell them why in terms precise enough to write into a code. We both know Monument Circle doesn’t feel like Condesa, but why? It’s not just because of population density. And it’s not because one has tamales and the other hot dogs.

The planning profession’s best attempt at measuring this has been density. We measure dwelling units per acre. We measure floor area ratios. We measure lot coverage. We plot neighborhoods on a spectrum from rural to urban and we call the spectrum a transect, and we write codes that assign each block a position on that transect and regulate what can be built there based on where it falls.

Density is real and it matters. You cannot have urbanity without some threshold of people and buildings in proximity. But density is not the thing I feel in Condesa that I don’t feel on Meridian. Those two corridors have comparable built form. What they don’t have — what is radically, viscerally, unmistakably different — is something else.

I think there’s a word for it.

Take a Walk on the Older Side

Okay, now walk with me for a minute. Not on Monument Circle or in Mexico this time. We’re not going too far away from Indy, though.

We’re in the Oregon District of Dayton, Ohio, ninety minutes down I-70, a city one-fifth the size of Indianapolis, a place that most us Midwesterners drive past on the way to somewhere else. Oregon is Dayton’s oldest neighborhood. The first plat was laid out in 1829, the year the Miami Canal opened and the first boats arrived from Cincinnati, and within a few years German immigrants were arriving by the waterway and building modest brick houses on narrow lots along Tecumseh Street — some of these are still standing. For the next century, the neighborhood grew the way neighborhoods grew before zoning intervened: houses beside shops beside workshops beside taverns, Federal next to Italianate next to Queen Anne, all threaded together on a twelve-square-block grid of brick streets and sometimes gravel alleys. By the 1960s, the city wanted to bulldoze it for urban renewal. A group of residents who understood what they had fought the demolition plan, got the neighborhood listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974, Dayton’s first, and began the slow, painfully slow work of restoration. In 2015, the American Planning Association named Fifth Street, the neighborhood’s commercial spine, a Great Place in America.

Stand now at the corner of Fifth and Brown Streets. Look around.

The lots are narrow. Twenty-five feet, thirty feet. Each lot has its own building, and each building has its own front door within arm’s reach of the sidewalk. Some of the buildings are two stories, some are one. Some are brick, some are frame. Most are modest.

Walk one block off Fifth and some of the buildings are both: a barber in what used to be a living room, a tattoo artist in a converted garage, a bar in a building that was almost certainly something else in a former life. The alleys are open and walkable, and you can often cut through the middle of the block to get to the next street over. There are at least six different routes you could take to walk five hundred feet in any direction. On Friday afternoons, the city closes Fifth Street to cars and people spill into the road with drinks in hand: Ohio’s DORA laws let you carry a beer through the district like a civilized adult. Beer in tow, the whole neighborhood becomes, for a few hours, what it was always built to be, an outdoor room.

Now think again about Monument Circle.

This is the big commercial and architectural heart of a much larger city in Indianapolis. Measured by the metrics we use in planning (things like floor area, employment density, commercial activity per square foot) Monument Circle is way more urban than the Oregon District. It has taller buildings. More people working. More money changing hands per acre. By every number in our toolkit, Monument Circle should feel more alive.

But it just doesn’t.

It feels like less like a public space and more like a corporate lobby. You maybe drive there. You park. You go sit outside on the steps. You come out when there’s intentional programming, maybe for the summer farmer’s market. You walk back to the office or drive away. You never quite fully like you are part of a true neighborhood. You never once feel like the place is talking to you. The buildings are not talking to each other. Or to you. The spaces between the buildings are parking garages and five lane stroads, infrastructure for cars, not for encounter.

The Oregon District is modest. Monument Circle is monolithic. Dayton hums in brick and ice cream. The Circle idles in limestone and concrete.

Why?

I’m sure you’ll say density. There’s just not enough people. Condesa and even Dayton’s Oregon District have more people. Okay, sure. But just because a place has a lot or very little people residing in it does not have everything to do with whether it is active. Los Angeles neighborhoods have some of the highest rates of density in the United States while being some of the least walkable.

The answer is not density here. Downtown Indy and Monument Circle have more density than Dayton. The answer is not design. Dayton’s buildings are scruffy, uncoordinated, some of them are arguably ugly, while Monument Circle’s are frankly beautiful. The answer is not mixed use, both places have a mix of commercial and residential activity.

The answer, I believe, is novelty.

Your brain is a prediction machine. It is an algorithm of output-generation based on biological and experiential inputs. It is constantly scanning the environment, comparing what it sees to what it expects, and allocating attention based on the gap between the two. When the environment delivers something your brain did not predict like a fresh face, a new door, a new smell, a different texture, or a weird noise coming out of somewhere, your brain rewards you with a small pulse of electricity. You light up. You slow down. You look. You linger. Neuroscientists call this the orienting response.

Jan Gehl, the Danish architect who spent sixty years counting pedestrians, measured its urban expression: on streets where something new happens every five to seven meters (a different shop, a different door, a different awning), pedestrian activity is seven times higher than on streets where the frontage is monotonous. Seven times over. Not because the architecture is better. Because the novelty is higher. The brain stays engaged because the environment keeps delivering things the brain did not predict. It wouldn’t matter if they were all Hadid or Gehry-designed buildings. It would not matter if they were zoned with a mixed-use overlay. It would not matter if there were neoclassical historic sites.

Urban novelty is the rate at which a place delivers new information to a person moving through it. A place with high urban novelty changes constantly at the scale of the human step which means every five seconds, something new. A place with low urban novelty repeats the same wall, the same material, the same sealed surface, for fifteen or twenty or thirty seconds at a time, until the brain gives up, checks out, and reaches for the phone. And we are wont to grab the phone.

Our first scene in Condesa had a high urban novelty; its narrow lots mean that every fifteen to twenty-five feet there is a different building with a different owner, a different door, a different relationship to the sidewalk. Its alleys and paseos and gateways mean you can move through the block in multiple directions, encountering different things on each route. Its ground and upper floors are permeable — doors, windows, display surfaces, outdoor seating, vendor stalls, porches, plantings, music — and the activity inside the buildings spills out onto the sidewalk and the activity on the sidewalk filters into the buildings. The boundary between inside and outside, between private and public, between what’s “yours” and what’s “mine”, is soft. Negotiable. Alive. Every threshold is a fresh encounter. And that’s not just because it may be your first time here. The built environment lends itself to being intriguing. It’s built by incremental hands of thousands. Every block is a sequence of small surprises of humanity’s daily minutiae. The buzz of the place itself is intriguing. It’s novel.

Even with the absolutely breathtaking monument at its center, Monument Circle lacks such novelty. For two of its quadrants, the block is dominated by one owner, with one entrance and one relationship to the street, which is really creates none because the building is monolithic to passerbys. Its orbital road means there is exactly one route for pedestrians. Its ground floors are sealed by lobby entrances, parking structure walls, blank facades punctuated by curtain glass. The boundary between inside and outside is hard. Impermeable. Non-negotiable. Cold. Your brain predicts what it will see in the next five seconds and it is right. It is right again five seconds later. And again. And again. The brain stops predicting because there is nothing left to predict. You are on your phone now.

Opposite novelty. Opposite experience.

So, what produces urban novelty? What is the structural property of the built environment that generates the stream of new information your brain craves?

The answer comes from materials science. In physics, a porous material (like a sponge, a coral reef, a loaf of good bread) is one that is full of openings, passages, channels, and voids that allow energy and matter to flow through it. It allows communication between the outside and in. An imperious material, a block of concrete, a sealed container, a parking garage, is one that resists flow. The energy hits the surface and stops. Porous places have a flow of place (write that term down, we’ll come back to it eventually).

Buildings do this. Neighborhoods do this. Cities do this. The porosity of the built fabric, the frequency of openings in the boundary between building and street, the number of passages through the block, the permeability of the ground plane — is what produces novelty. Each opening is a source of new information: a glimpse into an interior, a sound escaping through a door, a person emerging from a threshold, a smell drifting from a kitchen. The more porous the fabric, the more novelty it generates. The less porous, the less novelty, until you reach the condition of Monument Circle, where the fabric is so sealed that the only new information is the occasional parking garage ventilation slit.

Porosity is the structure. Novelty is the experience.

You feel the novelty. You can measure the porosity. And I believe that measuring the porosity by counting the openings, mapping the passages, quantifying the permeability of the ground plane, gives us a way to predict, with precision, which places will produce the urban novelty that makes a street hum and which will produce the urban monotony that makes a street idle. This is how we can actually measure which places go and which ones don’t.

This is the variable that neither the density calculation nor the architectural review can see. And this is the variable I want to put at the center of how we zone our cities.

That’s a big claim. I’m going to spend the next several posts making the case for it. I’m going to show you what novelty looks like — from Chicago’s Logan Square to Tokyo to even here in humble Indianapolis. I’m going to show you what happens when you measure porosity instead of density and how it reveals things about our neighborhoods that the current zoning map cannot see by default. I’m going to show you what a zoning code built around porosity would look like, and why I think it would produce better outcomes than the codes we have now.

And I’m going to tell you about building types and codes that are being done all over America right now and why they might score well on every metric we currently use and terribly on the one metric that actually matters: novelty.

But I’ll leave that for next time.

Just for now, I want to leave you with this. Next time you’re walking down a street that feels alive (a street that, shall we say, hums) slow down and notice what your body is noticing. Are there many entrances? Are the buildings unique? Are there lots of them? What are the people doing? What does the street look like? How long is the block? How soft is the boundary between inside and outside? Do you wonder where you’ll walk next? Is the hazy rhythm of windows a staccato, or is it a consistent lull? Are the street walls colorful? Are there patios? Do you smile?

Is it a place to be consumed — or is it a place to live?

That’s novelty. And your body has been measuring it your whole life.

Your zoning code has never measured it once.

This is the first in a series of posts about a concept I’ve been developing — a new way of thinking about what makes neighborhoods work, grounded in years of planning practice and observation of cities. If you’re a planner, an urbanist, or someone who just feels the difference between a street that hums and one that doesn’t, I think you’ll find something here. Subscribe to follow along.

Next: “Why the Five-Over-One Feels Dead”

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For decades, the dominant narrative of housing development has been one of outward expansion or large-scale, capital-intensive redevelopment. While these models have produced housing units in inner cities, they have often done so at the expense of neighborhood stability and without offering a pathway for existing residents to participate in the economic upside of their community’s appreciation. And most of the housing has remained much the same: large single-family homes with oversized and underused yards built for an idea of what the American family looked like in 1955.

Meanwhile, long-term property owners are sitting on their most valuable asset: their land. Current zoning, building, and subdivision regulations are complicated, expensive, and frustrating to navigate for even the most seasoned developer. And the development climate they perpetrate frequently makes residents turn toward historic designation1 as their only salve from the onslaught of development.

The truth is, our financial, regulatory, and political influences have fostered a climate inhospitable to building the entry-level housing necessary to confront the deepening housing crisis. We build what we subsidize and code for. And it’s often the opposite of what is attainable. There has to be another way.

And there is. But it involves us making it easier to say yes in our backyards, quite literally.

Here in Indianapolis, neighborhoods like the Near Eastside, Martindale-Brightwood, and Riverside are experiencing rapid valuation shifts. This means long-term homeowners face a precarious binary: sell their primary asset to outside speculative capital and be displaced,or remain in place while struggling against rising property tax assessments and a lack of liquidity. Big woof.

But, but…

What if residents could simply develop themselves?

Instead of apartment buildings, or giant single-family homes, there’s a third, more transformative idea: Hyperlocal Development. This concept posits that the most stable, equitable, and sustainable form of urban regeneration is driven by the people who currently live in the community. It encourages resident-developers. By empowering existing Single-Family Housing (SFH) lot owners to act as micro-developers (specifically by splitting their lots to create a second buildable parcel or by adding significant density through accessory units) the city can simultaneously address its housing crisis and create a robust engine for generational wealth building.

As an example of how this may work for a community, we introduce our first of three2 toolkits on how existing owners or residents can take advantage of their biggest asset: their land. Using Indianapolis as an example, Double Up Housing (DUH)** is a comprehensive operational framework that helps municipalities allow residents to grow wealth as investment flows into their neighborhoods.

**It’s duh because it should be a no-brainer: property owners should be able to do what they want with their land (in the realm of reasonability). While we can argue DUH is probably not the best name for a possibly transformative housing policy, I do also enjoy that it is HUD spelled backwards.

Drawing strategic inspiration from California’s Senate Bill 9 (SB 9), which legalized the ministerial splitting of single-family lots to increase supply, this proposed Toolkit adapts those principles to the specific regulatory, financial, and physical realities of Indianapolis as an example. It leverages existing but underutilized zoning tools, activates existing provisions for Minor Subdivisions, and bridges the financing gap through the creative application of existing funding sources. Furthermore, this stratagem connects these abstract rights to concrete realities by establishing a “Builder Match” ecosystem, linking homeowners with vetted local construction partners.

Most every city could follow this same playbook based on local conditions.

This begins with the idea of a “Homestead Infill Opportunity Overlay,” that cities could adopt. The HIOO is essentially a policy intervention designed to streamline these processes into a cohesive, user-friendly program that protects against displacement while unlocking the latent value of your city’s land. The overlay is matched with an administrative inventory of developers/builders/and lenders to ascertain feasibility and support actual construction.

Simple enough, right?

Let’s dig in.

A Bit of Background

Indianapolis, like many mid-sized American cities, is suffering from a housing deficit. The housing stock is polarized between detached single-family homes on large lots and large-scale apartment complexes. The intermediate options (things like carriage houses, duplexes, triplexes, townhomes, and cottage courts) which historically provided more affordable entry points for working families, have been effectively zoned out of existence in many neighborhoods or are too difficult to build under current regulations which mandate things like setbacks and parking that eliminate the possibility of additional structures on a single parcel.

At the same time, “financialization” of housing has reached critical mass. Institutional investors and large-scale developers, armed with low-cost capital, are acquiring properties in appreciating neighborhoods, demolishing existing affordable stock, and replacing it with high-end inventory. This process extracts equity from the neighborhood. When a long-term resident sells their property to a developer for $50,000, and that developer builds two units selling for $300,000 each, the value creation ($650,000+) leaves the community. Property values rise, but long-term residents feel overshadowed by the new spaceship houses next door.

The Double Up Housing framework reverses this flow. It enables the homeowner to retain the land, execute the lot split, and either develop the second unit themselves or sell the newly created lot at a market rate to a builder who agrees to community standards. This keeps the decision-making power, and profit, in the hands of the resident. That’s how it should be, duh!

This strategy also meets a critical demographic reality: the changing needs of the American homeowner. A significant portion of residents in these established neighborhoods are aging in place or find themselves as 'empty nesters' maintaining family-sized homes and massive yards that no longer serve them. For them, that 80-foot deep backyard isn't as much a playground for long-gone children but now a liability to mow and maintain. The DUH framework flips this script. It transforms that burden into an open canvas, a financial lifeline that allows them to downsize their maintenance responsibilities without leaving the community they love.

By monetizing that surplus land, they gain the liquidity to retrofit their home for accessibility or simply enjoy retirement, effectively turning a weekly chore into a nest egg. We all love nest eggs, right?

The Inspiration

The DUH is chiefly inspired by California’s Senate Bill 9 (SB 9), signed into law to address that state’s out of control acute housing crisis. SB 9 fundamentally altered the concept of single-family zoning by allowing two primary distinct actions by right:

1. ✅Urban Lot Split: The division of a single-family residential parcel into two separate parcels of approximately equal size.

2. ✅Two-Unit Development: The construction of two residential units on a single-family lot (or one on each of the two new lots resulting from a split), effectively allowing four units where one previously existed.

The critical innovation of SB 9 is not just the density it allows, but the process by which it allows it. SB 9 mandates Ministerial Approval, meaning that if a project meets objective zoning standards, the local government must approve it without a public hearing or discretionary review. This removes the “political risk” that often kills small-scale development.

Key SB 9 provisions relevant to other cities include:

• Owner Occupancy Requirement: Applicants must sign an affidavit intending to occupy one of the units as their principal residence for at least three years. This prevents corporate speculators from utilizing the streamlined process.

• Parking Relaxations: Local agencies cannot impose parking requirements if the parcel is within one-half mile of a high-quality transit corridor.

• Objective Standards: Agencies can only deny a project based on specific health and safety impacts, not subjective “character” arguments.

While most states (thankfully) operate under different state statutes, the core principles of California’s SB 9 (administrative streamlining > owner-occupancy protection > density-by-right) form the intellectual backbone of our proposed model. If cities wanted to, they could realistically pass their own micro version of SB 9, and set the stage for much-needed incremental housing construction.

The Inspiration pt. 2 The Indianapolis Opportunity: Deep Lots and Alley Access

Indianapolis (alongside many other Midwest metros) possesses a unique urban morphology that makes it arguably more suited for this strategy than many California cities which feature hilly, ungraded, or odd-shaped parcels that aren’t as easy to subdivide. The historic “City of Indianapolis” (pre-Unigov boundaries) is characterized by a grid of deep, narrow lots, often measuring 25 to 50 feet in width and 130 to 200 feet in depth.

• The Spatial Inefficiency: A typical 5,000 to 7,000 square foot lot in Center Township often features a house positioned near the street, leaving a massive rear yard of 60 to 80 feet in depth

• The Alley Network: Unlike many suburban environments, these lots are frequently served by a robust (albeit crumbling) network of public alleys. This infrastructure provides independent vehicular and pedestrian access to the rear of the lot, making backyard development physically feasible without disrupting the street frontage. This again is typical of many legacy cities across the United States, particularly within the Midwest.

Currently, this backyard land is “dead capital.” It requires maintenance (mowing) and generates property tax liability but provides no income. The DUH activates this land. However, the current regulatory environment makes accessing this potential incredibly difficult for a non-professional. DUH acts as the bridge between the physical potential of the land and the regulatory permission to use it.

So how do we go from this to this? We follow the DUH framework.

The Double Up Housing Framework follows 6 basic steps.

1. Identification of development pressure zones that are primarily single-family or low-density residential.

   

2. Adopt a Homestead Infill Opportunity Overlay (pronounced “hi-oh!”): The Overlay grants specific rights to property owners who meet the definition of a “Homestead Developer” (defined as an owner-occupant of at least 3 years). This is the meat of the model. Much like SB 9, this amendment could probably eschew minimum lot sizes and traditional parking requirements and encourage more efficient residential layouts and circulation patterns. Such an amendment may encourage shared parking drives, flag lots, etc. All of a sudden, the lots available to develop in an in-demand neighborhood could double overnight without any additional land being created. This would create an ecosystem of small, entry-level parcels that are easier to develop than large multifamily units. The amendment would have criteria that residential homeowners must have lived on the property as a primary residence for three or more years. Thus, a database of applicable parcels is created as eligible for the zoning amendment.

   

3. Permit by-right allowances for minor subdivisions within the HIOO after very basic criteria is met. This facilitates efficient use of staff and private sector time to further streamline development. The HIOO establishes “Safe Harbor” setbacks for split lots — by-right allowances would be permitted for parcels that meet a checklist criteria. This is simply allowing the subdivision to occur if the lot is wide enough, if it has adequate setbacks, or has enough area, for instance. If these three or four boxes are checked, then the lot can be subdivided.3

4. The legislative body, by adopting the HIOO, has effectively "pre-approved" this density in the designated zones, rendering individual hearings redundant. A town or city’s website could have a basic intake form that allows the resident to input their lot dimensions and existing structure dimensions. In conjunction with approved survey, once these are verified, the subdivision is by-right approved and ready for doubling up.

   

5. Now, this is where the DUH toolkit comes in. It’s the potatoes of the process. Once the new HIOO parcel is created, it is listed on an online repository matching property with development partners. Think of it as an online matchmaker of the three main entities needed to make development happen. Property owners could choose to a.) do nothing b.) self-develop or c.) sell to a development partner. The Civic-created inventory of subdivided HIOO parcels is matched to developers, builders, and lending partners. The cosmic gumbo of each municipality’s DUH repository relies on a Service Provider List that allows property to contact for:

   1. vetting of development potential to ascertain feasibility on site by site basis

   2. list of builders and/or contractors willing to work on such projects

   3. community financial institutions willing to support or facilitate such development

      

   Cities usually already have a gauntlet of community development corporations and CDFIs to pull from as investment partners to administer both local and federal funding. Creative places could look to these entities and their baseline of general contractors to establish a tertiary list of approved vendors for these types of DUH subdivisions. This process makes it easy for residents to a.) either build the property up themselves or b.) sell it on the market to a developer or CDC willing to invest upfront, allowing the original property owner to recoup their equity and grow wealth. Ideally, the city has a pre-approved catalog of housing typologies that could be suited for such parcels.

The end result is a variety of new parcels created from no additional land, and hopefully a civic ecosystem that thrives on supporting long-term residents while making way for new neighbors. It’s a town, place, or city taking stock, fostering opportunity, and matching those opportunity partners. It’s a lot like matchmaking, but wealth-building instead. Actually, that’s what every good match should be anyway.

In the DUH model, density is actually the antidote to displacement. Perhaps, eventually Grandma will even have some family move in with her as she ages, allowing what was once just one parcel to become a multi-generational, multi-family village. What can your land do for you?

All photos @2025 Proformus (unless otherwise noted)

Author’s note: dear reader, the subsequent text gets into the nitty-gritty minutiae of what such a model could actually look like and gets very planner-y. Feel free to skip.

Okay, but like how would this actually work in the real world?

Let’s be real for a second. Most cities don’t have pre-approved typologies. Most don’t probably have the bandwidth or internal capacity to set up a catalog like the toolkit listed above. However, most cities DO have a housing crisis and are understaffed with limited capacity for existing staff review, permitting, etc. But most already have these resources listed somewhere online. What they don’t have is 1.) the zoning amendment and 2.) a site putting all the resources together.

To construct a functional DUH Toolkit for an example community, say, like Indianapolis, we must first perform a quick audit of the existing zoning codes to see what is preventing housing. Or better yet, which zones are best for a single to double conversion. You don’t need to be an urban planner or lawyer to look up your city’s zoning code. Most towns and cities have these published online. You want to look for residential zoning districts that have limited setbacks and feature smaller footprints.

Specific to Indy, the Indianapolis Zoning Ordinance (Chapters 740-744) establishes the dimensional standards for development. Most single-family neighborhoods are zoned D-2, D-3, D-4, or D-5. These districts typically mandate large minimum lot sizes (e.g., 15,000 sq. ft. for D-2, 5,000 sq. ft. for D-5) that preclude lot splitting on standard parcels.

However, the ordinance contains two specific districts that are ideally suited for the Single to Double goals: D-5II and D-8.

The D-5II District (Dwelling District Five-Two)

The D-5II district would be the “scalpel” of any future zoning amendment. It is explicitly designed for high-density, single-family contexts.

• Intent: The ordinance describes D-5II as providing “the smallest single-family lot size in the zoning ordinance” and notes it is intended for “built-up areas... where infill development is necessary”.

• Dimensional Superiority:

  • Minimum Lot Area (Detached): 2,800 square feet. This is the critical figure. It creates a mathematical possibility that D-5 (5,000 sq. ft.) does not. A standard 40’ x 140’ lot (5,600 sq. ft.) can be split into exactly two 2,800 sq. ft. lots under D-5II zoning.

  • Minimum Lot Width: 40 feet. This matches the historic platting of many Indy neighborhoods, reducing the need for variance requests regarding lot width.

  • Zero Lot Line Option: D-5II permits zero-lot-line development, allowing a structure to be placed on one side property line. This aggregates the side yards into a single, usable open space on the other side, a crucial design feature for maintaining quality of life on small lots.

• Strategic Application: D-5II is the target zoning for homeowners who wish to execute a Fee Simple Split, essentially creating two legally distinct pieces of land that can be sold separately.

The D-8 District (Dwelling District Eight)

The D-8 district would be the hammer of Indy’s DUH Toolkit. It is a flexible, high-density residential classification.

• Intent: Designed for “urban dwelling” including single-family, two-family, and multi-family mixtures. It supports densities from 5 to 26 units per acre.

• Dimensional Flexibility:

  • Minimum Lot Area: For single and two-family dwellings, the D-8 district has no required minimum lot area other than what is necessary to meet setbacks and coverage. This is a massive advantage for irregular lots that might fall slightly short of the 2,800 sq. ft. D-5II threshold.

  • Permitted Uses: D-8 allows for duplexes and triplexes by right, whereas D-5II is primarily for detached or attached single-family.

• Strategic Application: D-8 is the target zoning for homeowners who wish to Densify and Hold: building a duplex or a substantial Carriage House (ADU) to generate rental income without necessarily selling the underlying land.

Multiplication and Subdivision

While zoning dictates what can be built, typically towns, counties, or cities have a subdivision ordinance that dictates how a new lot is created. We have to look here to see the mechanism by which we can double up. Here in Indy, we have a distinct pathway for small-scale splits called the Minor Subdivision.

• Definition: A subdivision is classified as “Minor” if it:

  1. Results in three (3) or fewer lots.

  2. Fronts on an existing street with adequate improvements.

  3. Does not involve the construction of new public streets.

  4. Does not require the extension of municipal facilities (sewer/water mains) other than laterals and sidewalks.

• Relevance: A Double Up Housing project, taking one lot and making it two, fits this definition perfectly. This exempts the project from the onerous requirements of Major Subdivisions, such as traffic impact studies or complex bond requirements.

Public Hearings are a thing

Often, a significant barrier to small-scale development is the public hearing process. Hearings are unpredictable, expensive (requiring legal representation and notice mailings), and prone to neighborhood opposition based on subjective aesthetics.

However, Indiana Code (IC 36-7-4-701) and the local ordinance allow for a Waiver of Public Hearing for Minor Plats.

• Mechanism: The Plat Committee may grant primary approval without a public hearing if the subdivision complies with the Zoning Ordinance and Subdivision Control Ordinance and involves no new streets.

• Strategic Importance: This waiver is the Indianapolis equivalent of SB 9’s “Ministerial Approval.” If the Toolkit can ensure that a homeowner’s application is technically perfect and compliant with the zoning (D-5II or D-8), they can bypass the public hearing entirely. This reduces the approval timeline from 3-6 months to approximately 30-45 days.

Structural Barriers to Implementation

Despite these favorable regulations, significant structural barriers prevent widespread adoption:

1. The Rezoning Barrier: Most eligible lots are currently zoned D-3, D-4, or D-5. To access the benefits of D-5II or D-8, the homeowner must first file a Rezoning Petition. This is a legislative act requiring a public hearing before the Metropolitan Development Commission (MDC) and potentially the City-County Council. It carries a high filing fee ($600+) and significant political risk. These high fees and bureaucratic hurdles discourage resident-developers.

2. The Infrastructure/Drainage Hurdle: Even Minor Subdivisions require drainage review. For a single lot, hiring a civil engineer to design a drainage plan ($3,000-$5,000) creates a disproportionate cost burden.

3. Appraisal Gaps: In many target neighborhoods, the cost to build a new unit exceeds the current appraised value of the surrounding homes, making traditional financing impossible.

Our theoretical DUH Toolkit is designed specifically to dismantle these three barriers.

DUH Toolkit Mechanism Part 1 – Policy Overlay

To operationalize the Double Up Housing concept without requiring thousands of individual rezoning hearings, let’s say we adopt a “Homestead Infill Opportunity Overlay” (HIOO - remember, it’s “hi, oh!”)

The HIOO would be adopted as a text amendment to existing zoning ordinances. Here in Indy, it could be mapped to coincide with the Compact Context Area (the historic urban core) as defined in the Comprehensive Plan.

Key Provisions of the HIOO

The Overlay grants specific rights to property owners who meet the definition of a “Homestead Developer” (defined as an owner-occupant of at least 3 years). This is a standard definition in line with other exemptions for homeowners, especially first-time buyers.

Instead of the discretionary legislative rezoning process, the HIOO creates an Administrative Map Amendment process.

• Process: A Homestead Developer submits an application to the Planning Division demonstrating that their lot meets the dimensional standards of D-HIO.

• Review: Staff reviews the application for technical compliance.

• Outcome: If compliant, the zoning map is updated administratively to D-HIO. No public hearing is required.

• Justification: The adoption of the HIOO effectively pre-approves backyard sublot density in the designated zones, meaning we don’t need hundreds of individual staff meetings. They’re already overburdened. This saves so much time.

The “Safe Harbor” Building Envelope

To additionally streamline development, the HIOO establishes “Safe Harbor” setbacks for split lots.

→ Front Setback: Averages of the block face (contextual).

→ Side Setback: Fixed at 3 feet (minimum for fire separation) on one side and 0 feet (zero lot line) on the other, or 5 feet aggregate.

→ So What?: Projects designing within this envelope are exempt from Variance of Development Standards requests, further eliminating hearing risks.

Parking Reform

Mirroring Cali’s SB 9, our HIOO would prohibit the requirement of off-street parking for any unit created under this program if the property is located within 1/4 mile of a transit line (IndyGo).

→ Impact: This saves approximately 160-300 square feet of land per lot and $2,000-$5,000 in paving costs, making tight lot splits physically and financially feasible.

DUH Toolkit Mechanism Part 2 – The Process Workflow

The Toolkit replaces the current opaque development process with a clear, step-by-step roadmap for the homeowner.

Phase 1: Feasibility and “The Cut”

1. The “Split Check”: The homeowner uses the Toolkit’s digital portal to verify if their lot (e.g., 6,000 sq. ft.) can support a D-5II split (needs 2,800 sq. ft. x 2). No cost.

2. Survey & Plat: The homeowner engages a surveyor from the DUH Service Provider List to create the Preliminary Plat. Cost is on homeowner, typ. $1k to $4k.

   1. Note: the policy solution of DUH is to eliminate cost burdens for households facing development pressures. A rotating fund should be set up if possible to alleviate cost burden by cash-strapped households for soft costs such as surveys.

3. Waiver Application: The homeowner submits the Minor Subdivision application with a request for Waiver of Public Hearing, citing the HIOO/D-5II compliance.

4. Recording: Upon administrative approval, the plat is recorded. The single property is now two legal tax parcels. We are cooking!

Phase 2: Financing and Development

1. Project Budgeting: The homeowner selects a builder or developer from the Approved client/vendor list.

2. Loan Origination: The homeowner applies for the INHP Revive Indy + Build loan (see below), utilizing the future rental income of the second unit to qualify.

3. Construction: The vetted builder constructs the unit.

Case Study: The Tale of Two Futures

To truly understand the impact of the DUH toolkit, we have to move beyond zoning theory and look at the “kitchen table” economics of a typical family in the Near Eastside.

Let’s look at The Williams Family. They have owned a home on a 50’ x 150’ lot for 20 years. Their house is paid off, but it needs a new roof and other nagging issues like a leaky foundation. Their property taxes are rising year over year. The house is worth $140,000 on paper, but they are cash-poor.

Here is how their future plays out in two different regulatory environments.

Scenario A: The Status Quo (The “Cash-Out & Get Out” Trap)

Without a clear path to utilize their extra land, the Williams family is approached by a speculative wholesaler. “We buy houses for cash,” the flyer says. Facing tax pressure and repair costs, they sell.

• The Transaction: They sell the entire property for $80,000 (a “quick cash” discount).

• The Displacement: The family moves out. They must now rent or buy in a cheaper, further-out suburb, disconnecting from their community network.

• The Developer Play: The developer demolishes the house. They split the lot and build two “tall skinny” modern homes, selling each for $325,000.

• Total Value Created: $650,000.

• Value Retained by Family: $80,000.

• Value Extracted from Neighborhood: $570,000.

Scenario B: The HIOO “Double Up” (The Wealth Building Engine)

Under the Homestead Infill Opportunity Overlay (HIOO), the Williams family has options. Instead of selling the whole farm, they sell the back 75’.

• The Transaction: Using the DUH Toolkit, the family finds a surveyor through the online vender portal and files a minor subdivision by-right ($2,500 total cost). They now own two deeds: their house, and a vacant buildable lot in the back.

• The “Builder Match” Sale: They do not have the desire to build, so they sell the new rear lot to a vetted local builder (from the Toolkit list) for $45,000.

• The Renovation: They use the $45k proceeds to put on a new roof and pay property taxes for the next decade.

• The Outcome: The builder constructs a new unit on the rear lot. The Williams family stays in their home.

• Value Retained by Family: $185,000 ($140k Home Value + $45k Cash).

• Value Extracted: $0. The equity stays with the resident.

The Bottom Line: In Scenario A, the family leaves with $80k and the neighborhood loses a legacy resident. In Scenario B, the family stays with $185k in total wealth, the neighborhood gains a new family in the back, and the “gentrification” pressure is absorbed by the backyard, not the existing home.

Anti-Displacement and Equity Measures

Again, this is just a theoretical exercise and the following institutions I have not talked with at all. But the most potent criticism of density initiatives is that they accelerate gentrification. DUH should integrate structural safeguards to ensuring the wealth generated benefits existing residents with existing community partners.

The Owner-Occupancy Covenant

To prevent the Toolkit from becoming a loophole for institutional investors:

• Requirement: Any applicant utilizing the Administrative Rezoning, Waiver of Public Hearing, or INHP Revive Financing must sign a recorded commitment.

• Terms: The applicant must occupy one of the units on the subject property as their primary residence for a minimum of three (3) years following the completion of the project.

• Enforcement: Annual residency affidavit. Violation results in the revocation of the Certificate of Occupancy and the clawback of fee waivers.

The Community Land Trust (CLT) Partnership

Look for land trusts as potential partners. Here, Indianapolis Community Land Trust (Indy CLT) and partners like Kheprw Institute could play a vital role.

• The “Split-and-Preserve” Option: Not every homeowner wants to be a landlord.

• Mechanism:

  1. Homeowner splits the lot using the Toolkit.

  2. Homeowner sells the newly created lot to the Indy CLT at a negotiated rate.

  3. Indy CLT utilizes public subsidies (HOME funds, HoTIF, TIF) to build a permanently affordable home on the new lot.

  4. Benefit: The homeowner receives a cash infusion (for the land) without taking on construction debt. The neighborhood gains a permanently affordable unit. The CLT handles the development risk.

LISC Emerging Developers Support

For homeowners who do want to build but lack expertise, the Toolkit leverages LISC’s Emerging Developers Growth Initiative (EDGI).

• The “Fee Developer” Model: EDGI trains local minority developers. The Toolkit creates a mentorship pipeline where an EDGI graduate acts as the “Project Manager” for the homeowner.

• Role: The EDGI manager handles permits, builder draw requests, and inspections. They earn a fee (e.g., 5% of project cost), gaining portfolio experience while protecting the homeowner from contractor disputes.

The “Double Up Indy” Pilot

I recommend launching a pilot program in three distinct neighborhoods: Near Eastside (high appreciation pressure), Riverside (large lots, historic context), and Mars Hill (working-class stability).

• Target: 25 Projects in Year 1.

• Incentive: Full waiver of all City filing fees (Rezoning, Platting, Improvement Location Permit) and a $5,000 “Pre-Development Grant” for surveys and soil testing.

The City should update its GIS tools to create a “Split Potential Map.”

• Criteria: Identify all residential lots >5,000 sq. ft. with alley access and applicable zoning (D-5II, D-8)

• Outreach: Direct mail campaign to these owners: “Did you know your backyard is worth $50,000? Don’t sell it, develop it.”

Policy Levers

To enact this Toolkit, the City-County Council should:

1. Adopt the HIOO Text Amendment: Codifying the administrative rezoning and parking reductions.

2. Revise the Fee Schedule: Creating a “Homestead Developer” fee class that reduces costs for owner-occupants.

3. Fund the Pattern Book: Allocating budget to the Department of Metropolitan Development (DMD) to commission the standard plans that could be part of a pre-approved typologies for resident-developers.

Fin.

The Single to Double Housing Toolkit would represent a fundamental shift in how Indianapolis conceives of growth. It moves away from the reliance on outside capital and empowers the city’s most committed stakeholders, its residents, to build the future of their neighborhoods. By aligning the regulatory permissions of the D-5II and D-8 districts with the financial innovation of INHP and the construction capacity of local builders, Indianapolis can create a housing market that creates wealth for the many, rather than the few. While this is a housing strategy, so many things are downstream of adequate shelter. This is just as much a neighborhood stabilization and economic justice strategy, turning what we call missing middle into a found opportunity.

Interested in learning how your town, place, or city could double their housing potential overnight? Let’s get in touch. jeffery@proformus.com

If the 1990s taught us anything, it’s that everything huge eventually needs a reinvention. Just as music videos gave way to reality TV, the enclosed shopping mall, the cathedral of American commerce, is facing its own existential crisis. But we shouldn’t just look back in anger.1

In my previous piece, From Strip to Hip, I talked about how we can surgically repair strip malls. But the shopping mall is the final boss of suburban retrofits. It is massive, monolithic, and often surrounded by a moat of asphalt so wide you could lose a Ford Bronco in it.

Here is why some malls are destined to become villages, why others are just “Fake Plastic Trees,”2 and our six-step Mall to Village Model© for making the transformation happen.

The “Why”: Reasons to Convert a Ghost Mall

It’s not just nostalgia. From Austin Community College to Mashpee Commons, it’s easy to see why some developers have municipalities salivating over their own shopping center conversions.

→ Property tax revenue: Shopping centers (for better or for worse) are often one of a municipality’s greatest sources of tax revenue. When a shopping center collapses, it takes with it a large tax bill. This means cities across the United States are losing billions of dollars of potential revenue from dead malls. Cities are thus anxious to make sure they at the very least offset future tax losses with a revived mall campus - whatever that looks like.

→ Infrastructure Goldmine: Malls are already plugged into the grid. They have massive sewer capacity, heavy-duty electrical loads, and major arterial road access. In a world where extending infrastructure to greenfield sites is prohibitively expensive, the mall is a “plug-and-play” density node.

→ The “Third Place” Vacuum: Suburbs are desperate for walkable centers. People don’t want to just buy things; they want to be somewhere. They want to be seen. The demand for “experiences” over “goods” is the economic engine that makes a mixed use village model viable.

The Dealbreakers (Why Some Won’t Work)

As I discussed in From Strip to Hip, not every carcass can be revived. To separate the comatose from the corpses, we utilize the Shopping Center Potential Index (SCPI), a planning filter or triage tool designed to calculate a site’s “Re-Use Readiness Score.”3

We don’t guess; we measure four distinct “buckets” of viability: A. Physical Bones, B. Market Demographics, C. Connectivity, and D. Municipal Alignment.

For a mall to qualify for the full MTV treatment, it must score as a Tier 1: Catalytic Candidate. In this specific case, the SCPI flagged the site as a prime target because it passed the “Fatal Flaw” filter, avoiding the nightmare of fragmented, condo-ized ownership, and scored high in Bucket B (Market & Demographics). The data revealed a massive arbitrage opportunity: the surrounding 1-mile radius had high residential density and growing income, yet the site suffered from extreme “Retail Leakage.” In short, the algorithm confirmed a town was trying to get out, but the building or parcel was holding it back.

If you’ve gotten this far, it means our shopping center may just be perfect for the Mall to Village (MTV) six step strategy. Here we go.

The Mall to Village Model in 6 Steps

So, you have a high-SCPI site. The zoning is receptive. The anchors are playing ball. How do we get from “U Can’t Touch This” to a walkable neighborhood?

We use the MTV Model.

A textbook example of this model in action is some of the concept work I did4 with the City of Elkhart at the Woodland Crossing Shopping Center (formerly Pierre Moran Mall). While we only did concept work for a couple of the first steps, this playbook is fully in motion. Recently, funds were released from the State of Indiana’s READI 2.0 initiative for up to $12M for Elkhart’s redevelopment of the Woodland Crossing Retail Center into a vibrant, walkable neighborhood featuring housing, retail, healthcare, and educational services.

The city didn’t want a facelift. Instead, they wanted to fundamentally change the site’s function from underperforming shopping center to a place where residents could get everything they needed within a short walk or drive. They organized the redevelopment around the concept of a “Neighborhood Opportunity Hub”— a centralized campus designed to anchor essential services within the community’s daily path.

By partnering with Goodwill Industries and Heart City Health, the city is helping to transform a dormant retail strip into a vital engine for economic mobility, healthcare, and job training. This shift proved that a dying mall could be reborn as a Town Village Center, a place where commerce, care, and community intersect. It’s truly a Mall to Village in the works.

How do you execute a pivot that massive? You follow these six steps:

Step 1 → Swap Big Boxes for Daily Rituals

Stop hunting for “Department Stores”; start hunting for “Daily Habits.”

Strategy: The first step is accepting that no new Macy’s is coming. Like town centers used to work, folks had to come into town for necessary tasks like mailing a letter or selling wares, then perhaps shopped around incidentally to that initial action. Shopping is becoming more experiential, not merely consumptive. Folks can get things online, why do we still insist on going shopping then if not for the idea of seeing and being seen. The Mall-to-Village Model works because it swaps discretionary retail anchors (clothes, electronics) for non-discretionary civic anchors.

Keep in mind, some of this will involve “right sizing” or breaking down the mall into smaller components to make leasing and redevelopment easier. It’s the same path that places like Glendale Mall in Indianapolis have taken, as I’ve spoken about here. Once right sized, the real work can begin.

You must identify partners who generate guaranteed daily foot traffic regardless of the economy: a Community College (students), a Library (families), or a Grocery Store (residents). Anchors could include post offices, community gyms, or a non-consumptive use that allows citizens to interact with themselves as equals – this is essential to build the idea of Commons, or “the village”.

Elkhart did this right and took the lead by acknowledging a reset was needed, but starting from a place from advantage (an existing grocer and a public library) that could be leveraged. This is the right lesson: build around assets, but don’t sink them with oversaturation. Complement, don’t suffocate.

At this point, it’s also helpful to identify where strategic “breaking up the massing” might work to create better overall site circulation down the road.

Step 2 → Stabilize the Core (The “Public-Facing” Phase)

The Public Phase: Insert the Civic Engine into the existing shell. Before building anything new, repurpose the best existing box (e.g., the old Sears or J.C. Penney) for your new civic-focused Anchor. These cavernous spaces are structurally perfect for libraries, community colleges, or large-format workforce hubs.

The Strategy: Be honest about your current tenants. If they are dying, plan for their exit. If they are thriving, elevate them to “Mid-Anchors.”

→ Case Study: Woodfield Crossing. The city didn’t hunt for a Dillard’s replacement; they secured Goodwill Industries for the former Sears. This wasn’t a thrift store if that’s what you’re thinking. Instead, this complex includes their Excel Center School and CTE training academy. Instantly, the site’s function shifted from “commerce” to “community,” bringing daily foot traffic that doesn’t depend on retail spending.

The “Pulse” Check: Luckily, this specific mall already has a huge advantage: a functioning Kroger. This removes the stigma of “blight” and proves to private developers that there is a pulse on site. Take cues from what is working and what is not.

The “Test Lab”: For the smaller empty stalls, think flexibly. Or, think like the stae fair. Merge several inline units to create an “Exposition Hall”; think of it as a retail incubator that functions like a curated flea market for local artisans. Small stalls, an agglomerative economy. This lowers the barrier to entry for entrepreneurs who might become your future long-term tenants. It builds a creative culture that national chains can’t replicate

Do not try to simp out and attract national chains yet. You aren’t ready for them, and they won’t value you until you have the “place.” They maybe never will. But that’s okay! Thinking hyperlocally means we build off talent and goods we have in our own neighborhoods.

Step 3 → Break It Down (Lay the Infra and Replat)

The Concept: While we are visualizing this concept specifically for the Woodland Crossing site in Elkhart, Indiana, this move could work for appropriate shopping centers across North America.

The Action: Break the Superblock into sellable pieces. You cannot develop a 100-acre parking lot as one piece overnight, at least, not without a billion-dollar investment trust. By legally subdividing the “Sea of Asphalt” into a traditional street grid of smaller, manageable parcels, you lower the barrier to entry. Suddenly, a local builder can afford to buy a single pad site to build a 6-plex, rather than needing a national developer to finance the whole district.

It is not wise to try and eat a giant cake in one bite. Creating smaller blocks allows for incremental phasing, taking small, manageable bites.

Additionally, be smart about parking. Your core anchors will still need to retain some parking and if your mall is like most other malls, it probably is still in a car-centric area. It will take time to become a village, so keep some parking lots strategically placed within the development zone to help augment and support future redevelopment efforts.

The Public Investment: Cities often ask how to incentivize this. The answer isn’t a tax break; it’s the road. Cities should use TIF or other financial tools to fund the “re-gridding” aka laying the physical streets and utilities. For millennia, cities simply laid the grid and let the market build the houses. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel; we just need to pave the street.

Step 4 → Create a Wonderwall (Perimeter Density)

Strategy: Build the “Buffer” to fund the center. With the site subdivided, focus vertical construction on the outer ring of the parking lots first. By developing the street frontage, you achieve two critical urban design goals simultaneously:

1. The Screen: You physically hide the view of the “sea of asphalt” and the vacant mall interior from the main road, immediately changing the perception of the site from “blight” to “boom.”

2. The Captive Audience: You create the density needed to support the future uses before additional uses open.

   

The Product Mix (Think Outside the Complex): We must avoid the trap of building generic “luxury” apartment complexes that only serve transient young professionals. To create a village, we need a “chaotic good” mix of housing typologies:

→ Live/Work Units: Ground-floor workspaces with living quarters above, activating the sidewalk all day long.

→ Owner-Occupied Density: Townhomes and condos that encourage long-term stakeholders, not just renters.

→ True Family Housing: This means units with 3+ bedrooms and access to village amenities (parks, libraries), rather than just a private clubhouse.

The Toolkit: To accelerate this, cities should pair this subdivision with Pre-Approved Housing Toolkits (similar to the successful model used nearby in South Bend). If a local developer buys a “re-gridded” lot at Woodland Crossing and uses a pre-approved plan, they get expedited permitting. These lots should have minimal restrictions, encouraging a “chaotic good” mix of diverse housing types.

The Result: By removing the regulatory risk, we enable small-scale local developers to build missing-middle housing that big REITs ignore. We don’t just build units; we build not just a neighborhood. We build a village.

Step 5 → Build Zones of Participation (The “Living Room”)

Strategy: You have the people (Step 4) and the purpose (Step 2). Now we need the reason to stay. We transform the residual space between the new grid and the old anchors into the community’s “Outdoor Living Room.”

The Hardscape (Creating the Room): An open parking lot is agoraphobic; a village green is cozy. We’ve define the edges of this public space with our new liner buildings and active storefronts to create a sense of enclosure. Central green spaces become the “Third Place” where the community gathers not to buy, but to be. Or just to watch the world go by.

Programming (Active Participation): Don’t just plant grass and put up a “Keep Off” sign. We need engagement. Activate the central plaza and support recreational activities. Expand the Food Hall or Micro-retail incubator concept. This lowers the rent threshold, allowing local businesses to create a unique cultural identity that makes the place “cool”— something a chain restaurant can never do.

• Low-Cost Recreation: Convert dead loading docks into skate spots or outdoor stages. Turn excess pavement into pickleball courts, experiential art, or playgrounds. These are low-cost activators that bring youth and families on evenings and weekends.

• The “Soft” Infrastructure: Programming is just as important as pavement. Weekly farmers markets, food truck rallies, or outdoor movie nights turn the space from a physical location into a habitual destination. Give visitors and residents both a reason to come out.

Outside Connections: A village cannot survive as an island. Mall retrofits should explicitly connect the internal “Living Room” to local trails, bike lanes, and greenspaces. This means creating various (safe) ways to get to the village, not just by car. We stop treating the mall as a fortress and start treating it as a place.

Step 6 → Let it Go!

Unlike Elsa in Frozen, by Step 6, the heavy lifting is done. You have removed the number one killer of real estate development: Uncertainty.

• In the beginning, banks wouldn’t lend because there were no “comps” (comparables) and no foot traffic.

• Now, you have students attending a workforce development seminar (Step 2), residents headed home (Step 4), and kids biking over to play soccer or grandparents playing pickleball (Step 5).

The Market Tipping Point: We no longer need to subsidize or incentivize every single brick. We can let standard market economics take over. The remaining empty parcels, which were once worthless asphalt, are now premium real estate because the village is self-supported.

• The Office Tenant: suddenly wants to be here because their employees can walk to lunch.

• The National Retailer: (who ignored you in Step 1) suddenly wants a lease because they see 18-hour-a-day foot traffic.

The Exit Strategy: The development transitions from a risky “turnaround project” to a “stabilized asset.” This is where the municipality creates Value Capture. The increased property taxes from the new density begin to pay back the bond used to build the street grid in Step 3. The “Village” is no longer a project; it’s just a part of the city.

While what ends up happening at Woodland Crossing in particular will be up to market forces, civic leadership, and development partners, I think this site in particular is on the right track.

From this:

To this:

Things to Watch Out For

Before we try to save a mall, we have to check for a pulse. Two things usually kill a retrofit before it starts...”

• The REA Nightmare (Reciprocal Easement Agreements): This is the silent killer. Department store anchors often own their own lots and have agreements that allow them to veto any changes to the rest of the mall (including the parking lot). If Macy’s says “Talk to the Hand,” the project is dead. You need unified control or a cooperative anchor.

• The Geometry of Doom: Things like Residential conversions require light and air. A standard mall is 100+ feet deep. You can’t put apartments in the middle of a JCPenney without carving out a massive light well (the “donut” method). If the structural grid doesn’t allow for economical carving, the building is better off as gravel. So, come in with an open mind. It’s not just shopping to residential. Or office to shopping. Think outside your assumptions first.

Conclusion: Restoring the Village

If you can navigate the REAs and solve the geometry, the reward is far greater than just a stabilized asset. We’ve created a village.

In her book A Love Letter to Suburbia, Diane Alisa Tuft argues that while we constantly say “it takes a village” to raise a family, we have spent the last century effectively illegalizing the construction of one. We built distinct zones for sleeping and distinct zones for shopping, but we forgot to build places for living.

Retrofitting these key catalytic sites is our chance to reverse that. By turning those dead malls and vacant strips that should be redeveloped into Town Centers, we aren’t just solving a real estate problem; we are legalizing the village again. We are taking the spaces that divided us and transforming them into the places that finally bring us together.

The six steps of the Mall to Village Model are a good start.

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Look at the numbers.

(Charts pulled from Bobby Fijan on X.)

Between 2005 and 2024, the under-five population — tthe clearest indicator of where young families are choosing to live — exploded in Sun Belt metros and collapsed in many coastal and legacy cities. Austin (+98%), Orlando (+89%), Raleigh (+87%), and Charlotte (+81%) surged. Meanwhile, Chicago (–31%), Boston (–33%), New York (–34%), Los Angeles (–36%), and the San Francisco Bay Area (–38%) lost enormous shares of their youngest residents.

Two patterns emerge:

1. Families with young kids are flocking to places that let them live in attainable housing near schools and green space.

2. They are leaving places where these basics are too expensive, too rare, or too regulated to build.

This is not a story about “people fleeing cities” or “everyone moving to the Sun Belt.” It is a story about housing types, or, who gets to live near parks, good schools, and work and what forms of housing our zoning codes allow there.

And it leads to a difficult but necessary truth:

The problem isn’t single-family housing.

The problem is that we refuse to evolve what “family housing” looks like.**

Why Cities Are Losing Young Families

Demographers have been documenting this trend for years:

• Families are having children later and having fewer children.

• The cost of raising those children, especially childcare, has outpaced wages.

• In high-cost metros, anything with 3+ bedrooms is priced like a luxury good.

But the structural issue is zoning.

More than 70% of residential land in many U.S. cities is reserved exclusively for single-family homes. And in most places, “single-family” still means:

• one household

• in one structure

• on one lot

• with one front door

• with no other units allowed

This is an extraordinarily narrow definition of “family housing,” especially given that:

• Multigenerational households are at their highest level in more than 50 years (Pew Research Center, 2022).

• Immigrant and BIPOC families are significantly more likely to live in multi-generational settings.

• One-third of U.S. households now include unrelated adults living together in cooperative or extended arrangements (U.S. Census, 2023).

Families today look different from the nuclear-family image baked into 1950s zoning. Yet we keep planning and regulating as if “family” still means a breadwinner, a stay-at-home parent, two children, and a car for every adult.

Cities are losing young families not because families don’t want urban life, but because urban life rarely offers the types of housing families need.

What Family-Oriented Housing Actually Requires

Look at the metros gaining young children: Austin, Orlando, Raleigh, Charlotte, Dallas, Houston.

These places, despite their flaws, have three things in common:

1. Flexible zoning that allows many forms of low-rise multifamily
   Duplexes, triplexes, 4-plexes, courtyard apartments, ADUs, and townhomes can be built at scale.

2. Abundant 3–4 bedroom options
   Family-sized units (whether in single-family homes or multifamily) are attainable to middle-income households.

3. Homes near parks and schools
   The essential ingredients of family life (play, nature, education) are within reach.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, Boston, New York, LA, and the Bay Area, the largest declines occur in neighborhoods where multifamily is allowed — bbut family-sized multifamily is not.

Nearly every major apartment developer will tell you some semblance of what I’ve heard repeated ad nauseum:

“We would build more 3- and 4-bedroom units, but zoning makes it impossible and financing makes it irrational.”

Unit-count caps, FAR limits, minimum parking, and density bonuses structured around “number of units” rather than “number of bedrooms” all collide to create a system where developers maximize yield by building studios and one-bedrooms and not the family units cities desperately need.

In other words:
zoning is family-blind.
It regulates units, not households; square footage, not family size. Most zoning codes use dwelling-unit caps (“X units per acre”) or minimum lot sizes per unit.

A 3-bedroom unit “uses up” one whole unit allowance even though it houses more people. A studio also counts as one unit.

So developers maximize the unit count by building:

many small units (studios, 1BRs) and fewer large units (3BR/4BRs).

Fewer families.

Stop Arguing About Single-Family Housing. Start Expanding Its Definition.

There is a tired debate in American planning circles: Should we “ban” single-family zoning?

Hell no!

And it’s the wrong question.

Most people want some version of a single-family home: a front door, a yard, privacy, and room for children to grow. But that form can evolve.

Instead of eliminating single-family zoning entirely, cities can expand the definition of low-rise, family-oriented housing to include:

• multigenerational single-family homes with internal lock-off suites

• 3–4 bedroom townhomes arranged around shared greens

• fourplexes with family-sized units

• stacked flats designed for families, not investors

• small-scale courtyard housing with play space at the center

• co-housing and cooperative family clusters

• ADU compounds where grandparents or adult siblings live alongside parents and children

These are still “single-family” in spirit—one household, one extended family, one community—but they break out of the rigid one-unit-per-lot template that excludes so many families today.

This is the core argument:

**Don’t ban the single-family idea.

Reinvent it so more families can participate in it.**

A Practical Solution: Family Housing Overlays Near Schools + Parks

Zoning reform doesn’t have to be ideological. It can be strategic, targeted, and extremely practical.

Here’s a path forward:

Create Family Housing Overlays (FHOs) within ½ mile of schools and parks.

For cities looking to encourage more families, here are six fixes as part of a Family-Housing Overlay. These overlays would:

1. Allow multifamily housing only if units include 3–4 bedrooms

No more buildings full of studios next to elementary schools.
Require developers to meet a minimum number of family-oriented units.

2. Permit multigenerational single-family housing by right

Internal lock-offs, attached ADUs, and dual-entry configurations should be legal without variances. We should stop demonizing people who decide to expand their property to include multiple members of their familia - allowing families to upzone their own property means less demand pressure in the adjacent neighborhood and corrals the chaos, so to say.

3. Replace unit-count caps with “bedroom caps” or FAR-based regulation

This rewards developers for building homes, not microunits.

4. Reduce or eliminate parking minimums for family-sized units

Families with young children often own fewer cars than assumed, especially near schools.

5. Encourage courtyard-oriented designs

Shared greens, play areas, and cluster housing create safety and social fabric. For more on courtyard urbanism, I suggest a follow to the one and only Alicia Pederson.

6. Allow subdivision of large single-family lots into “family clusters”

Think: three units around a shared yard rather than one oversized house.

This approach respects neighborhood character while expanding choice. It supports schools by adding children. It increases housing supply without resorting to mid-rise construction. And it aligns with demographic reality: families are changing, and housing must change with them.

Why This Works

Evidence from cities around the world is clear:

• Vancouver legalized “gentle density,” tripling its family-sized housing supply while preserving neighborhood form (City of Vancouver Housing Report, 2019).

• Portland’s Residential Infill Project increased production of 3+ bedroom units after eliminating unit-count penalties (Sightline Institute, 2022).

• Minneapolis’s 2040 Plan shows missing-middle housing has stabilized enrollment declines in several school clusters.

• Tokyo, the fastest-growing family city in the developed world—allows small-scale multifamily everywhere (Shin & Kawaguchi, 2020).

The lesson is simple:

Cities that allow multiple forms of family housing keep families.
Cities that restrict it lose them.

If Cities Want Families, They Must Make Room for Them

The next generation of urban policy should not be about picking sides in a culture war over single-family zoning.

It should be about asking one clear question:

Can a working- or middle-class family with young kids realistically live in this neighborhood?

Historian Yuval Harari, in Sapiens, reminds us that humanity’s superpower is our ability to create intersubjective realities, shared ideas that exist only because we collectively believe in them. Corporations, nations, and currencies have no physical bodies; they are abstractions we imbue with meaning. A dollar bill, materially worthless, becomes valuable only through a mutually agreed-upon fiction. Because humans can ascribe value to ideas, we build mathematical systems, economies, governments, and ultimately, cities.

Cities themselves are physical manifestations of these shared constructs , agglomerations of people who make meaning together. Planning, then, is not merely arranging buildings but curating the conditions that allow ideas, relationships, culture, and purpose to flourish. If we want better cities, we must be intentional about the intersubjective realities we design into law.

This is where the concept of “single family” demands reexamination.

The term is not a natural law. It’s a regulatory fiction — an idea we’ve chosen to define narrowly, historically tied to a mid-20th-century vision of the nuclear household. But what if we understood “family” in its older, broader philosophical sense, more Godfather than zoning code? In that world, a familia includes blood ties, marriage, business partnerships, mutual care networks, chosen family, and the people with whom one shares daily life and responsibilities.

Under this more human definition, we’d recognize that co-housing with bandmates, roommates who become lifelong friends, multi-generational households, siblings living together, and even small cooperative living groups are all, in essence, single-family arrangements. They reflect real human behavior and not the narrow, idealized template we’ve regulated for.

If cities are places where ideas and relationships take form, then clinging to a brittle, outdated definition of “single family” limits how people can live, support one another, and create meaning together. Expanding the definition doesn’t abolish the idea, it just brings it back in line with human reality. It aligns our regulations with the way people already form families in practice, and with the intersubjective truth that “family” is something we create together, not something prescribed by midcentury zoning language.

In short: because cities are built from the shared ideas we choose to believe in, we should choose ideas that support human flourishing. And rethinking what “single family” means is a critical step toward that.

If the answer is no, it is the zoning code—not the family—that needs to change.

The future of American cities depends on this shift. Families anchor neighborhoods, stabilize schools, and build intergenerational wealth. They keep parks full, sidewalks lively, and civic life meaningful.

We don’t need to eliminate single-family housing.

We need to expand its possibilities so it can meet the needs of the families who are still choosing cities, still building communities, and still trying to make place.

“When retail’s built for everyone, it’s built for no one.”

Walk through any of America’s “it” neighborhoods and you’ll notice the same paradox: a row of darkened windows in places otherwise bursting with activity. The demand is there (read: people, money, energy) yet prime storefronts sit empty. Why? I reckon the issue isn’t a shortage of entrepreneurs; it’s that the math isn’t mathing for everyone. Our real estate, development, and leasing patterns have combined to set up established corporate tenants, not mom-and-pop. In the process, we’ve built for Starbucks, not for the soap-maker down the street.

But this isn’t just a market failure, it’s a big thinking problem. The problem isn’t that people stopped shopping or dreaming. It’s that our built environment and real estate processes forgot how humans actually create commerce: in small, adaptable, hyperlocal spaces. What I’m saying is …wait for it…

Yes…we need to think big by thinking small.

What We Lost: The Local Scale of Retail

I’ve written before that for most of history, commerce happened at the human scale. Read: where we live and walk. From Roman insulae and medieval workshops to Japanese shotengai to Chicago’s corner stores, retail was embedded into daily life.

Physical retail historically comes in about six forms: freestanding, embedded, mixed-use, agglomerative, interstitial, and itinerant. The first four are the ones most of us are familiar with. And for the last 100 years, we’ve pretty much banned them from anywhere near where people live.

Modern cities, especially in the US thrived on these first four forms. Then came the 20th century when the archetypical urbanist boogeymen of zoning, automobiles, and modernist planning pried apart living and working, shrinking opportunity into 5,000-square-foot boxes with 15-foot ceilings suited for brands and corporate tenants. Fancy malls on the periurban edges became the hot new thing at the detriment of neighborhood-facing stores. Retail became Big Corporate, and floorplans became massive, similar, and predicable to maximize sales per square feet. We built so much retail that our building of commercial real estate in the latter 20th century outpaced the rest of the world two-fold. Currently, the United States has significantly more retail square footage per capita than other major countries, with figures around 24-36 square feet per person compared to around 5 square feet in Europe and 11 in Australia.

We overbuilt, just a wee bit. A correction was due - and you probably know the story but beginning in the 1990s, after the mall heydays of the 1980s, enclosed shopping centers and big box strip malls began to decline.

And then came the internet.

Online shopping promised endless convenience and endless choice, and soon, the narrative quickly shifted. Physical retail was declared dead. Vacant Main Streets, the new normal.

But that story misses the truth.

Roughly 80% of all retail purchases in the United States are still made in physical stores. Why? Because we humans still like to see. And to be seen. And we love to touch things. No, really. Study after study shows that once a shopper handles an item, they are more likely to buy it. And to this day, unplanned purchases make up the bulk of purchases - spontaneous acts of discovery that no algorithm can replicate.

Retailers know this. The comeback of once-digital brands like Warby Parker and Allbirds into brick-and-mortar storefronts is proof that people still crave the physical experience of going out and buying a thing, whatever that thing happens to be.

We never stopped wanting stuff.

But we want novel stuff. The allure of shopping is the mystique of a great find, akin to a treasure hunt. Shopping locally at local shops with local vendors gives greater opportunity to find the weird, the esoteric, even the strange perhaps — an experience that the $5 DVD bin at Walmart simply cannot provide. And how many Macys does one really need, anyway?

However, our current real estate climate isn’t doing so well at producing the type of spaces upstart, entry-level vendors need. Development was once neighborhood-driven. It’s now Wall Street-driven and backed by outside capital. Construction costs have soared, leaving only well-capitalized developers (aka those backed by institutional or outside capital) with the means to build and maintain mixed-use projects. It’s a sharp departure from the era when individual property owners financed smaller buildings and leased them to neighborhood businesses. We got stuck thinking in the box, the Big Box that is.

As such, in many large developments, ground-floor retail is treated like a rounding error, an obligation penciled into a pro forma (the financial calculation that measures a project’s feasibility) rather than a real opportunity. Developers often include it reluctantly, viewing it as a loss leader that’s expensive to build, lease, and maintain. It’s left to sit, mom-and-pop be damned.

Even reformed zoning codes, often form-based, mandate first floor retail without stipulations on size or bearing on proformas, meaning we get a glut of first floor retail that remains vacant. There is no lack of entrepreneurs or small businesses, though! And there’s no lack of space, either! So, what’s the real issue?

Our zoning, real estate development, and commercial leasing deals eschew a “missing middle retail” that we once had. These involve more local forms of embedded and mixed-use retail, and embedded forms of less-local retail.

The emergent forms of retail throughout history involved informal typologies as seen on the left of the table above. As these typologies were developed before the car and still thrive in dense, walkable communities, they are inherently hyperlocal in nature. Meaning, they serve their direct community. As the commercial real estate industry made retail space a commodity, the modern disposition of retail is similar to our current housing industry: oversized product that’s overly expensive, unattainable for most and mostly accessible via car. Legal restrictions and building codes mean some of these typologies are outright banned in most areas. Atop of this, the zoning codes of municipalities have onerous restrictions on land use and commercial activity that all but prevents it anywhere near residents. Heck, even the Canadian urbanist playland of Toronto is trying to find ways to bring neighborhood-retail back after decades of outright bans.

For millennia, the easiest way to make a quick buck was to sell product near or where you lived. Now, for many, that path is illegal.

Because most retail is now either individuals selling online (non physical locations) or largely corporate spaces (read: oversized physical spaces) there’s a huge missing middle of the retail spectrum. A missing micro-middle that is either banned or not considered commercially viable. Let’s change that.

We need a gradient of retail opportunities - affordable, entry-level spaces that support everything from the street vendor’s hustle to the small entrepreneur’s vision, all the way up to the corporate players. This would mean encouraging, designing, and incentivizing flexible, scalable options that lower barriers to entry while still accommodating growth, blending adaptability with practical solutions for the U.S.’s regulatory and spatial realities.

Let’s not forget that economic mobility begins with spatial mobility: the ability to experiment, sell, and grow close to home. If cities are the soil, commerce is how we let people plant their money trees. It’s not just building economically infeasible live-work units, either. It’s allowing smaller retail options to happen in the first place.

Microretail??

microretail (noun)
mi·cro·re·tail | \ ˈmī-krō-rē-ˌtāl \

A small-scale commercial space, typically under 500 square feet, designed to lower the cost and barrier of entry for local businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs.

Microretail gives entrepreneurs room to start, test, and grow without the weight of long leases or oversized spaces. These compact, street-level shops bring flexibility back to main streets and creativity back to the neighborhood economy.

Cheaper than conventional commercial spaces → Traditional storefronts often demand rents that only national chains can sustain. Microretail flips that logic and instead offers smaller footprints, shared infrastructure, and lower overhead so local makers and small businesses can actually afford to show up. A 350 SF stall at market rent of $27/SF is far more affordable than a 3,000 SF at a much lower price per square foot.

More accessible for proof of concept and new ideas → For a first-time entrepreneur, a 3,000-square-foot lease is a risk few can take. Smaller, more manageable stalls allow small experiments (pop-ups, seasonal stalls, short-term tenancies) that let ideas be tested in real time before scaling up. Think of them as test kitchens.

Low barrier to entry, easy to maintain → Smaller spaces mean fewer upfront costs, simpler permitting, and more adaptable design. These units can evolve as fast as their owners—expanding, contracting, or changing use as markets and neighborhoods shift.

What If We Built Local Again?

Imagine a coffee counter in a converted garage. A shipping container turned into a pottery studio. A former alley reborn as a micro-village of 300 SF shops that serve things like locally produced Kombucha or flowers grown from native plants. That’s exactly what some cities are doing - to impressive results. Here are some examples:

• Press Bay Alley (Ithaca, NY) – A derelict printing press transformed into 200–500 SF stalls for bakers, jewelers, and microbrewers.

  

• Stackt Market (Toronto) – A shipping container campus turned creative hub.

• Camp North End (Charlotte) – a former Ford factory reborn as a creative campus, where micro-retail, food stalls, and maker studios coexist in reimagined industrial halls.

Each example makes a radical point: retail vibrancy doesn’t need to be big to work.

In Indianapolis, the St’Artup 317 Accelerator has embraced this idea. Partnering with developer SomeraRoad, the city created a 500 SF retail stall that doubles as a community-facing incubator, a proof of concept for small business growth. Once these entrepreneurs gain traction, the city helps connect them with local property owners to find a permanent home.

Yet even with this progress, true small-scale retail remains rare. And while the above examples look cool - they typify only agglomerative retail. What we still lack is the missing middle, spaces between the online shop, the food hall, and the corporate lease.

The Microretail Strategy Cities Could Adopt

There are online businesses running their shop from home and there are 3,000 SF stalls that remain unfilled. We need missing middle retail. And to do that, cities should strategize to create an ecosystem of retail opportunity - this can be done with intentional level-setting and holistic visioning on where opportunity lay - and matching it with those risk-takers willing to take the next step. This involves a spatial retail strategy and matchmaking the best fits. Why not a Tinder between small spaces and entrepreneurs?

Cities could take a page out of a good commercial realtor’s book - map the future hot spots, have a client list, and let the market do the rest. But the key should be on crafting, curating, and encouraging that missing middle retail: between 100 and 1,000 SF - this is enough to let an entry level entrepreneur see if their idea can take off, but not enough that they’ll go bankrupt paying for oversized rent. Let the size of space fit the size of the idea.

How to Build Your City’s Retail Strategy

1. Map the Potential

First, cities could establish a priority list of potential retail corridors, areas, or nodes that could support a viable retail concept with decent foot traffic and activity. You don’t want to insist on a field of dreams situation for a fledgling small business i.e. thinking if you build it, they will come. Small businesses work best around agglomerations of other businesses and first-time shoppers. They are still growing and should be located around and just off current activity corridors/areas or areas that have potential for future commercial activity. Areas with good bones, so to say with formerly mixed use property or zoning designations.

Once identified, these corridors or areas eventually could be granted “Opportunity Corridor” zoning overlays that offer incentives for property owners to include spaces for small businesses. The 21st century city is changing, and retail needs are changing to be more hyperlocal and experiential. We should stop merely mandating first floor retail, and shape that into a better, perhaps smaller form to meet entry-level entrepreneurs. Partner policy to match strategy.

➡️ Avoid “field of dreams” syndrome — locate where people already walk, bike, and gather or where they once did, natural nodes and corridors of business.

Opportunity Corridors could be tiered by emphasis zones based on proximity to existing businesses, commercial activity, and accessibility.

2. Build Relationships, Not Just Zones

Appoint a Retail Liaison to bridge small business owners and property managers within these Opportunity Corridors. They can inventory vacancies, mediate leases, and even coordinate short-term pop-ups or shared stalls. Also, a repository of in-state v.s. out-of-state owners could help to identify those property owners who may be really invested locally, and those who aren’t.

3. Develop a public-facing Retail Opportunity Registry

Cities could also go a step further by curating a partner network of emerging local businesses: a living, breathing roster of mom-and-pop shops, makers, and entrepreneurs seeking their first physical space. In parallel, municipalities could pair this with a registry of property owners willing to lease small spaces or host temporary micro-tenants (more on this later).

To encourage participation, cities might offer property tax relief or credit incentives to owners who provide affordable space for these emerging businesses, essentially rewarding those who act as incubators for local enterprise.

Together, these two databases would form an open-source marketplace where small businesses could find, and match with, the right kind of space. (I pitch this as the Tinder or Hinge of physical microretail and thirsty entrepreneurs - pun intended)

This platform could feature:

• Available spaces under 1,000 SF suited for pop-ups, startups, and small retailers.

• Property owners open to shared or flexible leases that lower entry barriers.

• Move-in-ready or modular micro-units that can be activated quickly.

• A “growth ladder” system that allows businesses to scale—moving from a 200 SF kiosk → 600 SF shop → full storefront as they grow.

4. Incentivize Developers to Think Small

Encourage inclusion of microretail stalls (under 600 sf) within new mixed-use developments. Offer trade-offs: fewer total square feet required (instead of a general regulation on “first floor retail”, and relief from managing vacant ground-floor space. New developments utilizing public monies could be encouraged through incentivization to include incubator spaces for new businesses.

Policy Hook:
“Right-size retail”: not every ground floor needs to be 3,000 SF. How can interior fit outs utilized shared bathrooms and amenities to maximize floor space? Entitlements could encourage more creative mixture of retail floor plates rather than monolithic stalls. Or, rather, allow more first floor residential than you normally would that could accrue more rent in exchange for some microretail within the development.

5. Pair Businesses with Hosts

We talked about maintaining a registry of emerging “mom-and-pop” entrepreneurs seeking space matched with property owners open to flexible arrangements. This is the first part of the Retail Opportunity Registry. The second is:

Provide property tax relief for landlords who lease to these start-ups → To make participation attractive, cities could offer targeted abatements or tiered credits to landlords who rent (and fix out interior stalls) to verified local entrepreneurs. In essence, it’s a civic investment in neighborhood vitality: a modest fiscal trade-off that reduces vacancy, supports local wealth creation, and turns “for lease” signs into storefront lights again. Over time, such policies could help rebalance commercial corridors away from corporate monoculture and toward the messy, human-scaled diversity that defines authentic urban life in and near residential neighborhoods that need them.

6. Zoning for Microretail

Cities could adopt zoning amendments along Retail Opportunity Corridors to permit live/work and garage-based businesses by right and incentivize the conversion of existing mixed-use properties into smaller-scale retail stalls. Just as Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) expanded housing choice, Accessory Commercial Units (ACUs) could expand economic opportunity giving residents and small entrepreneurs a foothold in their own neighborhoods. And most importantly, near where people live. Here are a couple things a zoning amendment might include:

1. Enabling small business use of garages, front yards, and accessory structures.
Cities should allow limited commercial uses (cafés, studios, repair shops, or maker spaces) in garages or outbuildings, guided by clear, performance-based standards. Shared restrooms, sound limits, and signage caps can manage impacts while keeping entry costs low. Pilot programs within designated Retail Opportunity Corridors can help cities test these uses, collect data, and then expand “by-right” permissions where they prove successful.

2. Reduce barriers through tailored code adjustments.
Modernize zoning and building codes to reflect the reality of small-scale retail:

• Permit low-impact retail uses by right in mixed-use and transitional zones.

• Relax off-street parking requirements for spaces under 1,000 square feet.

• Prioritize adaptive reuse of garages and ground floors over new construction.

• Allow shared restroom facilities across multiple microtenants, recognizing that most don’t need (or can’t afford) full code separation.

How to Make Retail Happen

Cities like Rochester, Indianapolis, and Toronto are already testing microretail’s promise. In each, the formula is nearly the same:

1. Start small.

2. Fill vacancies fast.

3. Keep it flexible.

4. Let residents become developers of their own blocks.

Microretail restores what cities lost: the permission to create.

When the smallest space becomes possible, the city begins to grow again, not from the top down, but from the garage or front yard up.

I don’t think we have a retail crisis. We have an imagination crisis. Microretail is not nostalgia, it’s strategy to empower our next generation of entrepreneurs. A new-old way to re-localize wealth, reduce risk, and rekindle civic life.

It’s time for cities to stop planning for brands and start strategizing for beginnings. →

The next wave of urban reinvention isn’t rising in skylines, it’s right underneath them. Or, rather, next to them.

Across cities, garages are being redefined. Once car temples, they’re now studios, micro-homes, workshops, even cafés. As driving declines and housing demand surges, these overlooked spaces are proving to be one of the most flexible and affordable building types we have.

This isn’t about big plans or bold gestures, it’s about small, cumulative change.

A garage here, a garage there until the alley becomes a place again.

“The garage is no longer an afterthought. It’s a new threshold between private and public, work and life, storage and story.”

Why Garages Are Turning Inside Out

Several converging forces are reshaping this most ordinary of structures:

Automobility in retreat → Space in cities is running out, and efficiency now asks what we’ve long avoided: maybe the car shouldn’t own so much of it. Emerging data show that Gen Z is less attached to cars with fewer licenses, less reliance, and lower priority placed on ownership. Meanwhile, because car access is now nearly universal and per-capita vehicle use has likely peaked, the growth of car-dominated spatial regimes is entering a limit.

The housing squeeze → Cities need new units, but large developments often stumble on financing or zoning. A garage conversion can add gentle density at human scale. In places like California, thousands have already (perhaps illegally) turned their garages into living quarters for themselves or renters.

Work-from-home trends + microbusinesses → The pandemic and its aftermath have stimulated growth (or resurgence) in craft, artisan, boutique, and small-scale creative businesses. The garage offers privacy, acoustic buffer, and flexibility for post-pandemic work-from-home lifestyles that makes it perfect for studios, makers, or small entrepreneurs. The cheapest place to build your business is in the property you already live in. With a continuing increase in hyperlocal small businesses across the country, garages are easy places to start.

Who wants a table saw in the house, anyway?

Regulatory cracks opening → ADU ordinances and zoning overlays are turning the once-illegal emergent garage unit into the possible, finally!

Affordability & incrementality → Garages are cheap, adaptable, and reversible, essentially a playground for emergent urbanism.

Typologies of the New Garage

Before we get to what garages become, it helps to remember what they are.
We can think of them in two primary forms: street-facing and alley-facing.

Typically embodied by more suburban development, street-facing garages sit at the front line of neighborhood life. They shape the public edge and how a parcel greets the sidewalk. When reimagined, they can repair the street, turning blank doors into transparent thresholds, or transforming dead facades into small civic rooms, studios, or micro-shops that invite eye contact and activity. In best case scenarios, they can replace the best emergent properties that porches originally held before they themselves were replaced with garages. Depth of the garage setback from the street is crucial for any sort of future activation: those closer to the street can create a more porch-like atmosphere, while those away create more of a sense of intrigue and intimacy - both have their advantages.

Alley-facing garages, by contrast, occupy the city’s hidden spine: the back-of-house realm of bins, fences, and utility poles. Usually found in older neighborhoods built before advent of automobile-centric development, they’re the quiet, forgotten spaces now primed for reuse. Their challenge is activation. How do we turn storage into social space? How do we make the alley walkable, livable, and alive again?

Both forms matter. One repairs the front, the other reclaims the back. Together, they expand the vocabulary of what a lot could be - the idea is that there is no true “front” of a lot if there doesn’t have to be.

We can rethink the lot to be two sides - and a microvillage of its own.

How to Make Garages into Places

Garages are blank canvases but small moves matter.

Face the lane → If alley-facing, treat alleys as real streets. Add windows, lights, and entry doors that open outward.
Stay flexible → Sliding walls or folding doors let interiors breathe.
Bring in light → Skylights and vents turn “storage” into “habitat.”
Be honest → Keep original shells. Retrofit instead of rebuild, it’s greener and more authentic.
Link don’t isolate → Stitch garages together with shared paths, planting, and lighting.

Remember that design is less about transformation than revelation, it’s letting a space become what it could be.

The Place Effects

When garages come alive, the neighborhood does too.

Positive outcomes:

→ More active edges and connected centers of activity

→ A broader mix of uses and scales

→ Affordable, incremental density

→ New micro-economies and creative energy

Look out for:

→ Infrastructure strain (plumbing, fire access)

→ Regulatory friction (setbacks, zoning regulations on accessory structures)

→ Neighborhood buy-in (it should go without saying, but please establish relationships with your neighbors before opening a pop-up coworking hub in your garage - people like to be in the know.)

→ HOA restrictions

Cities can channel the positive and buffer the risks - if they design for coherence and permission.

How Cities Can Help

Land use, at its best, does two things: it creates wealth and it creates connection. The smallest regulatory gesture can unlock the largest field of imagination. When we permit garages to host small enterprises like a studio, a café, or a makerspace, we invite both economy and empathy to grow in place. Entrepreneurship and belonging start at home.

1. Pilot a block. Two or three visible conversions can shift public imagination.

2. Get ahead of HOAs: Bar HOA restrictions on garage resuse and adaptability → many subdivisions require garage doors to remain closed, for instance.

3. Create a garage pattern book: Show how it’s done → façades, details, and retrofit kits.

4. Re-allow Accessory Commercial Units → Many cities across the United States once had no problem allowing for stores to open in front of houses as demand for space increased - converting a garage into a shop is cut from the same cloth.

5. Rezone alleys/corridors. Make it easier to convert than to demolish → Allow garage conversions by-right in emphasis areas to spur redevelopment and economic activity.

6. Fund the first movers. Micro-grants and low-interest loans spark clusters → imagine a Creative Garage District designation that incrementally turns alleys into Golden Gai-lite shops ways.

7. (Slowly) Upgrade the infrastructure. Repaving, relighting can turn an alley into a civic corridor → Facade grants for street-facing garages can help to make it feel more like a place than just a home for cars.

Imagine a quiet midwestern block. Behind each home, a row of garages faces a narrow alley.

At first, it’s dark and forgotten. Then, one garage becomes a ceramics studio with a roll-up glass wall. Another turns into a micro-flat. The city adds string lights and brick paving.

A year later, there’s a print shop, a tiny café serving cyclists, and a corner garage hosting Friday-night open mics. Kids play between doorways. Neighbors linger.

What was once a service corridor becomes the neighborhood’s living room.
The garage door is the new front door. The alley is the new main street.

Takeaway

The garage isn’t obsolete. It’s latent.

Like the porch before it, it sits at the edge of public and private and waiting for a new social role.

When we think small - one lot, one door, one block at a time - we rediscover how cities actually change: not through grand masterplans, but through the quiet accumulation of adaptation.

The garage could the new porch. But it could also be much more.

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Cities aren’t only made of buildings and streets.

They’re made of thresholds - those in-between spaces where private life meets public experience. Few architectural inventions bridge that divide better than the porch. Neither fully public nor fully private, the porch operates in a liminal zone that is both buffer and bridge. It’s the handshake between the house and the city. Yeah, I’ll say it. Porches are underrated.

The porch teaches us something fundamental about urbanism: intimacy requires proximity without intrusion. The most meaningful civic encounters happen not in plazas or parks, but right around six to ten feet from the sidewalk. This is close enough to greet, far enough to feel safe. It’s the handshake of development.

That narrow band of shared awareness, repeated across a block, can build an entire culture of belonging. And they’re a marriage between place and space that can make places go.

The Lost and Found Art of “Porching”

Before air conditioning, television, and two-car garages pulled life indoors, porches were our living rooms. They were cooling devices, gossip forums, and front-row seats to the neighborhood. People leaned out, waved across the street, shared a drink, or simply sat in quiet recognition of one another’s presence.

Porching is and was an art form. It balanced distance and intimacy, privacy and exposure. It was how neighbors tested the temperature of the street, how cities learned to breathe together.

Then we planned it out of existence.

A new generation of Americans post-World War II took to affordable mass-produced cars that offered a new transportation option rather than the walk-bike-transit options that had always existed before. And cars created a convenience which made sense - folks could live further away, travel farther with a new sense of autonomy. But mid-century planners took this as the only future and subsequently planned and designed explicitly around the car instead of simply with it. Developers simply followed their lead.

New zoning setbacks stretched the front yard into a moat. Garages replaced stoops. Subdivision requirements meant garages could not remain open. Building codes prioritized curb appeal over community. Fire separation, parking minimums, and floor-area ratios all combined to turn what had once been a stage for daily life into an architectural afterthought. Our houses began to look like cars, not people, lived there.

The result was a generation of houses that look at the street but do not speak to it. Streets became corridors of movement rather than rooms of encounter. Front yards became useless strips of grass, with the insular grilling and parties happening in a fenced-off, private backyard that eschewed any potential spontaneous community-building. In the planning field, we call these “snout houses”, since the large street-facing garage resembles a large snout of a pig.

No more was it easy to begin a new friendship with a simple wave from your porch.

Yet the instinct to porch never disappeared; it only went underground. It reemerges in sidewalk chairs, pop-up parklets, and balcony lights. It shows up in people turning their stoops into micro-cafés, or setting a folding table at the trail’s edge. These are not nostalgic gestures. They are acts of emergence.

Porching is one of our most democratic forms of urbanism. It does not need a permit or a public meeting. It creates “third places” without passing through a maze of zoning and capital. It reminds us that community was once built from wood, shade, and the willingness to sit near a stranger or to say hello to a passerby. It many ways, it symbolizes the idyllic, small-town Americana feel of a yesteryear that was “great”.

It is time to bring re-emphasize the porch.

The Intimate Distance

Urban sociologists have long noted a sweet spot of social trust, a band of space between six and ten feet where strangers become acquaintances and neighbors become friends.

Anthropologist Edward T. Hall’s proxemics theory (1960s) introduced the concept of “personal distance” in human interaction: intimate, personal, social, and public distances. While Hall’s typology is not a perfect template for architecture, it helps us see that humans calibrate comfort zones in social settings. A social distance (several feet) is where strangers can nod or speak without violating personal space.

Sociologist Erving Goffman’s concept of civil inattention describes how urban strangers acknowledge one another with a glance and then disengage, enough to affirm mutual recognition without intrusion. Civil inattention works best when the distance is neither so close that privacy feels threatened nor so distant that recognition is impossible. This is between that 6’-10’ space.

At that distance, you can exchange a glance, a wave, or a few words without invading someone’s privacy. It is close enough for empathy, yet far enough for comfort.

Bruce K. Ferguson’s work Architectural and Personal Influences on Neighboring Behaviors shows that front porches and low fences facing the street positively correlate with informal neighbor interactions. The presence of a porch facing the street makes it easier for residents to sit outside, watch the street, and engage socially.

When a porch or threshold sits roughly six to ten feet from the walk it does four things reaaaally well.

1. Visibility is preserved. A person seated can see the sidewalk clearly, and passersby can look up without visual obstruction.

2. Acoustic permeability is plausible. A voice at conversational volume can carry across that span (especially outdoors) without needing to shout.

3. Psychological comfort is maintained. The distance allows enough buffer so the sitter still feels private, yet not isolated.

4. Gesture works. A wave, a glance, or a short comment is possible without stepping off one’s porch or crossing the sidewalk.

This, in essence is the invisible geometry of community. Porches that sit within that range invite contact. Those set too far back break it.

If you cannot see the sidewalk from your chair, you are not part of the street’s life.

Elastic Architecture

The power of the porch lies in its flexibility. It is the smallest room with the biggest range.

It can host dinner, serve as workspace, or become a stage for small concerts. Curtains and vines shift its permeability with the seasons. At dawn, it is quiet and contemplative. At dusk, it becomes communal.

Porches are small arenas of agency. They let people decide how public they want to be. They do not prescribe behavior. They invite it. They imbue flexibility and creativity that helps support the emergent, cultural economy.

Porches and Balconies in Multi-Family Living

Porches are not exclusive to single homes. While porches are often a first floor element, we can consider patios and balconies the porches of multi-story and multi-family. buildings.

In apartments, duplexes, and mid-rise buildings, balconies and stoops perform the same civic role, often with amplified effect. Extra-floor patios and balconies can become arenas for public life just as well as first floor porches if developed intentionally.

Where multi-story isn’t possible or a full 6’-10’ width isn’t possible to fit in, developers and architects should think through how their future tenants may use the space, even sidewalk-adjacent patios or spaces can act as personal balconies.

Missing Middle Porchin’

A recent study by my firm Proformus ideates missing middle housing options in North Carolina. Our study relied heavily on porches to create intimacy between multi-family housing units. These simple diagrams showcase how triangulating and locating porches to share sightlines and frontages creates additional opportunity for community building. These simple typologies showcase how gentle density can afford both communal and private charm - acknowledging each is desired and needed for people, especially families with young children. The porchin’ helps to develop the famed “eyes on the street” Jane Jacobs once discussed.

Trails

Along trails and greenways, balconies can create a vertical version of the porch. Walk the Monon Trail in Indianapolis or the BeltLine in Atlanta and you can see it. Residents lean on railings, wave to joggers, or light string lamps at dusk. Private life spills out just enough to be visible. When deep enough to occupy and transparent enough to see through, they turn trails into social corridors. A cyclist, a dog walker, and a resident above all share the same theater of life in motion.

Trails can be the new quiet streets. And the best ones are porched on both sides.

But developers and planners must be careful to not create insularity along these sides. Sometimes, restrictions over liability concern mean porches open out onto trails, but with no access. Without access, these porches or patios create an air of osmosis but neglect the possibility of it. This means these activity nodules can be treated more like back porches or storage than front yards stimulating socialization.

Emergent Urbanism, One Threshold at a Time

Porches reveal the logic of emergent urbanism. They do not require a plan or a grant, only repetition. One porch becomes two, becomes ten, and the pattern multiplies.

When enough thresholds are occupied, a neighborhood gains self-awareness. The porch is the smallest civic sensor. It monitors the street and strengthens trust.

Every person sitting outside is participating in an invisible act of city-making. Together, they form a distributed network of care.

A porch is not decoration. It is soft infrastructure for democracy.

Designing for the Six-to-Ten-Foot Zone

Whether designing a cottage or an apartment, a few principles hold. Here are my thoughts on how developer and planners can maximize the porch:

For houses and cottages:

→ Place porches within six to ten feet of the public walk.

→ Elevate them about two feet for privacy and visibility.

→ Make them at least eight feet deep so they can be used, not just admired.

For apartments and mixed-use buildings:

→ Provide balconies that are at least five to six feet deep.

→ Use transparent railings or screens to balance openness and shade.

→ Orient balconies toward public space, not inward courtyards.

→ Allow porches and patios to interface with public right-of-way, not block access to it.

Depth, height, and transparency are not aesthetic details. They are behavioral tools that decide how a building participates in public life.

How Do We Make Better Places Happen with Porches?

Municipal policy:

→ Allow porches to extend into setbacks.

→ Incentivize balcony depth instead of quantity.

→ Recognize the social value of the six-to-ten-foot zone.

→ Allow porches to extend to public right-of-way along trails.

Many form-based codes or zoning codes don’t discuss porches or even patios. What if cities developed a pre-approved “kit of parts” that could be added on to residential or even commercial properties by right? This could allow for emergent uses over time and placetypes that develop with residents as they see fit.

Developers and designers:
→ Treat porches as primary frontages, not decorative extras.
→Align them along shared corridors, alleys, or trails.
→ Publish design guides that normalize usable porches and balconies. Juliet balconies are out, deep boys are in.

Neighborhoods and residents:
→ Host porch nights, stoop concerts, and front-yard gatherings.
→ Use porches for posting events, sharing produce, or informal exchange.
→ Celebrate visible occupation as a civic act, not a nuisance.

Building and allowing development without elements like porches is taking a toll on our society. Continuous studies show we are getting lonelier, having a harder time making friends and keeping friends, even though now we all have cell phones.

If we want to get back to traditional, small-town America where we know our neighbors, we have to rethink our neighborhoods and relax rules on what land use should be to allow more emergent uses in and around our places.

We need to go back to guide the future. Porches are an easy start.

It is the locus of a collision between institutional authority and community memory. The question is this: which side is imagining the future, and which is clinging to old privilege?

The Church of the Hol…

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“We find it tiresome to live and die at home, we require public display, big events, these trees, the cabaret, to witness us for better or worse – we like to pose, put on a show, to have an audience, a gallery, witnesses to our life.” – Alfred Delvau

This article is part three of my ongoing series on four-dimensional planning. Read part one here and part…

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As a concept, Thinking Big by Thinking Small is my attempt to explain the principles of four-dimensional thinking in terms of urban planning and city design. I hope to represent an approach to urbanism that goes beyond traditional planning and spatial considerations which integrates functionality over time. This affords us the dimensionality of intersubjective realities responsible for human actualization – things like meaning, purpose, joy, productivity, innovation, and community.

In essence, “making places go” as an idea seeks to create cities that are not only physically functional and aesthetically pleasing but also adaptive, resilient, and capable of fostering joy, wealth-building, and efficiency through emergent patterns that sustain momentum over time cycles. This is similar to how ants know to follow each other, or a flock of birds flying synchronously without being told. Good urbanism should create a flow of place. And create an order without design. The big question is: how can planning allow such emergence? Planning is inherently a top-down, process-driven procedure, whereas emergent phenomena is bottom-up, spastic, and unpredictable1.

As I have lived in and experienced the built environment throughout my life, I have been curious about what made some cities thrive and others not, even when controlling for amenities, densities, population, and services.

What I have found is a lack of flexibility within the macro-lens of contemporary urban planning that affects the innate ability of cities and places to emerge. My work intersects with how to eschew this paradigm in lieu of empowering individuals to co-create communities with the tools of “good” urbanism. Modern planning processes by definition are slow to adapt and are reactive, rather than proactive, leaving little room for the organic, bottom-up development that fosters real, human places. Because civic vision is often outsourced to consultants, long-term plans occur infrequently and struggle to keep pace with the evolving needs of a place. This results in engagement fatigue and plans or codes that are outdated by the time they’re implemented. And it’s just not as fun as true co-creation. How can we make places sing?

I am fascinated by the seismic shift in urban theory that has increasingly flattened since Richard Florida published The Rise of the Creative Class. Florida’s groundbreaking book (at the time) posits that cities compete by attracting talented professionals with vibrant, “consumable” lifestyles2. With the rise of telecommuting and even more so since the Covid-19 pandemic, we have seen a deeper “flattening” of cities – in a world where work-from-home means workers can work anywhere, places are valued for livability over proximity to jobs and economic activity is increasingly decentralized. Our current models of the city are perhaps outdated3, due to their skewedness toward either spatial or economic schema of the city, and my work hopes to achieve a marriage between increasing hyper locality and dispersed markets in a world where firms are choosing cities based on where employees want to live, not just labor pools. I think the time is now to explore a new model – one of finer granularity within urban scales. One that is both hyperlocal and procedural. One that is flexible and systems-based.

In Western cities, we waste significant resources developing complex strategies for large-scale projects or macro-grain zoning patterns, while neglecting the opportunity to reform parcels or codes to allow for smaller, emergent uses on a meso- and micro- scale that would enable incremental, affordable development appropriate given market and rents4. Eschewing traditional paradigms of granularity, what we allow is inherently macro-scale and expensive, stifling the kind of organic growth that leads to adaptable cities. These are the regulatory structures that have stifled places like Hammond and Gary, even when the macro trends haven’t done them any favors. These are serious issues that encourage trends like displacement as part of gentrification and disallow community gardens due to code violations, for example. Instead, our regulatory environs disallow rather than encourage hyperlocal, community development.

“How do we let places happen?”, then, is the key question of my work.

The Four Dimensions Explained

The chief premise of this philosophy is land use should be for two things: wealth-building and co-creation. This can be achieved through getting small spatial elements dialed in through the four dimensions of planning (place, space, relata) to allow emergent co-creation to emerge. This process emphasizes the dynamic, evolving nature of urban spaces and the complex interplay between physical environments, social relationships, and cultural activities over time. As the dimensions are fractals of each other, they can all play at a micro or macro scale, helping to create multiplicity necessary for emergent urbanism. Each dimension works at the granular (product, or design) and the high-level (process, or planning). In this way, each dimension creates a spatial spectrum of approaches to create more dynamic, emergent places. Our planning processes should unlock these tools to actualize our communities. Each “dimension” must be actualized to order to unlock the next dimension level – much like Maslow’s Hierarchy, basic needs of place need met before actualization (flow of place) can occur.

1^st dimension: Place – Buildings, workplaces, structures, parks, “the host of nouns, where people could be”

The foundational element of 4DP involves the process of planning, designing, and organizing physical spaces in a way that supports emergent activities. Buildings and lots as the “cells” of urbanism should add up to a sum larger than their parts. This includes ensuring accessibility, variety, and dynamism within parcels (individual plots of land) and neighborhood units. By getting the “easy stuff” right, such as the spatial realm – public-private osmosis, approachability, diversity, and active uses, we set the stage for more complex, emergent urban phenomena to take root. Many of these principles are addressed in movements such as New Urbanism and form-based codes dealing with traditional neighborhood development. But in contrast, they are the first step towards a better urbanism, and not the end result. In this way, the first couple dimensions borrow heavily from these movements, but all of these dimensions push beyond mere form in lieu of prioritizing relationships or relata. First dimensionality of planning should not focus on, overregulate, or place demand based on subjective aesthetics, but rather the relationship of building and lot to the fabric of the neighborhood and the relationships and activities it encourages between people.

2^nd dimension: Space – Streets, open space, backyards, patios, “the space between where nouns live, the area between places”

Beyond emergent patterns can form, people have to have places to be and to see. How can planning create an emergent public realm? One that is a place to be. Beyond individual parcels, this dimension considers how open space standards, transportation hierarchies, public spaces, and infrastructure can be designed (or deregulated) to augment productivity, movement, and connectivity, encouraging the flow and inspiration of people and ideas. Many of these principles have been addressed in the work of Gehl (particularly Life Between Buildings and William H. Whyte’s Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.

3^rd dimension: Relata – Nodes, zones, urban design principles, placemaking, placekeeping, “relationship between place + space”

The third dimension emphasizes the social organs of urban environments. It involves connections and relationships between spaces, enclosure, zoning, programming, and activity centers that enhance experience and activity. It regards the relationships of the built environment between places and spaces, and their reflection of place. The third dimension ensures that urban development reflects the needs and aspirations of its inhabitants, promoting a sense of ownership and belonging. This includes the popularly termed “placemaking”, but that term eschews existing placekeeping efforts, maintenance of existing environments, and ongoing change to present places. We don’t create places, places emerge.

4^th dimension: Abstract Meaning, Emergence and Co-Creation – Spatial movementality, meaning, purpose, actualization “how space empowers ideas”

At this stage, meaning, purpose, and actualization can occur for residents in their aim for quality lives. The final dimension or “flow of place” does not require action at all but is the flow of place or “spatial movementality” stemming from proper quality of the previous three dimensions. The final dimension or state forms the emergent properties of urban systems that allow for clustering, innovation, and self-actualization of residents. This dimension acknowledges that cities are not static; they evolve and adapt through the interactions of their residents over time. Both planning regulations on the macro and design elements at the micro should be cognizant of functionality of use over time. As our cities are ever-changing, evolving entities, planners and designers should think beyond mere use. By creating a “petri dish” for complexity through the first three dimensions, where the initial conditions support spontaneous order and innovation, 4DP allows for the organic growth of vibrant, resilient, and joyous urban spaces.

Implementing Four-Dimensional Planning

Implementing 4DP requires a shift from traditional top-down planning methods to a more flexible, bottom-up approach. My work hopes to provide a framework of various ideas, or basic rules, that scale from more concrete (design vernacular or urban design) to more abstract (zoning, spirit of place) that can help us move from designing rigid outcomes to crafting adaptive typologies, flexible codes, and fluid, evolving processes.

In this way, the process outlined in Four-Dimensional Planning (4DP) provides a framework for spontaneous order, creating an active garden for emergence to mitigate bureaucratic red tape, hegemonic corporatism, and inane design review inherent in contemporary development patterns. This is a strategy of getting the first three dimensions of urbanism that can be designed or planned right (place, space, relationships) that foment wealth-building to allow the natural by-product of emergent urbanism, spontaneity, and co-creation (abstract meaning). Planners should take a deep breath, understand what tools are available to make co-creation possible, and deregulate or augment land use provisions to allow emergent activities. This book is an attempt to identify the spatial scale on which these provisions lay in the physical realm in order to suggest strategies and approaches to enact better, hyperlocal places (emergence). This process follows a continuous and responsive time cycle between context, process, and product, acknowledging the planning principles, design principles, and contextual principles along the way that help shape the four-dimensional, hyperlocal city.

In an era defined by rapid urbanization, shifting demographics, and corporate development, emergent urbanism stands as an alternative pathway for places to co-create outside the bounds of regulation, formality, and corporatism. Through their flexibility, the approaches outlined in this book (aka blog) can help redefine our neighborhoods as flexible, living and breathing places, offering a glimpse into the future of sustainable, resilient, and dynamic communities.

We should urge planning to embrace a more organic approach to urbanism. I advocate for cities to evolve naturally, with planners serving as facilitators rather than controllers, acknowledging the limits of their ability to dictate urban life. This would be a paradigm that recognizes the importance of little things, small details, and emergent complexity in creating vibrant, resilient cities. By focusing on place, space, relationships, and abstract meaning, Thinking Big by Thinking Small provides a framework for building urban environments that empower individuals, foster community, and support sustainable growth. Through this approach, we can create cities that truly reflect the needs and aspirations of their inhabitants, offering a path towards more joyous, wealth-building, and efficient urban futures. By embracing these principles, everyone from urban planners, local leaders, neighbors, residents, business owners, and developers can create cities that are not only more functional and efficient but also more joyous and wealth-building. This approach aligns with the understanding that the most vibrant and resilient urban spaces are those that emerge organically through the collective actions of their residents, rather than being imposed from above. It’s combining top-down systems with what can allow emergent meaning. Best of both worlds, if you’re into platitudes.

While many of the solutions are seemingly design-oriented, the process is planning-oriented and qualitative, this functionally offers less prescription in terms of use and form and more prescription in terms of function and relationality of urbanism elements.

We’re going to get to some of these ideas …soon.

But first, I am going to provide thoughts on why rethinking the city and planning is needed. More on that next week »

The Bottleworks District was supposed to mark a new era for downtown Indianapolis.

When it was first pitched, renderings showed hundreds of new apartments above boutique office space and ground-floor retail. It was the perfect pitch for an 18-hour corridor that could support itself through the overused planning aphorism of “live-work-play”.

That vision has not materialized. Instead, Phase III of Bottleworks will be an office tower for Ice Miller law firm on top of a parking podium. The project is shorter than originally proposed, contains more floors of parking than leased space, and offers neither housing nor retail. A development once hailed as the model for future mixed-use in Indianapolis now looks like a return to the one-trick-pony mistakes that have hollowed out downtowns across the United States .

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The following is an excerpt from our white paper Thinking Big by Thinking Small released in summer 2025. You can find more about Proformus and our full white paper here:

There is a key difference between the way we used to build places and the way we do now. For instance, in Chicago, traditional neighborhoods were built incrementally, shaped by emergent processes and market forces rather than blanket master plans. The city’s iconic neighborhoods grew on the backs of 25’ by 125’ parcels, subdivided from larger tracts of land.1 These parcels were sold to a diverse mix of small-scale investors, developers, and homebuilders, each contributing to the patchwork of the urban fabric.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this organic growth was driven by the convergence of several factors: a burgeoning population of immigrants, the availability of small parcels for affordable investment, and a lack of restrictive zoning regulations.2 Investors built two-flats, three-flats, and small commercial buildings, which enabled density to emerge naturally. Neighborhood commercial corridors like Clark Street or Halsted Street arose where transportation nodes such as streetcar lines intersected with residential demand.3 The result was a fine-grained urban environment that balanced housing diversity with walkable access to local businesses, schools, and community spaces.

The emergent model allowed Chicago to adapt to changing needs over time. Landowners were free to build according to market demand. Residential areas included homes for a variety of incomes, while commercial corridors hosted local grocers, cafes, and specialty shops, sustained by the surrounding community. Density was not imposed but evolved naturally as families converted single-family homes into flats or added storefronts to accommodate economic activity. Home owners could rent units to immigrants or those otherwise unable to afford new construction, allowing more affordability.4 What made this model successful was its flexibility which allowed filtering of use over lifecycles and micro- and macroeconomic trends.

The grid layout of Chicago’s streets provided a framework for growth, but it did not dictate how individual parcels were developed. Instead, the interplay of individual decisions by property owners and entrepreneurs created neighborhoods that felt authentic and vibrant. Today, areas like Wicker Park, Pilsen, and Old Town retain the character of this organic development, showcasing a mix of residential, commercial, and cultural uses. So… what the heck happened?

1. The Rise of Zoning + Regulatory Constraints >>>

In the early 20th century, cities introduced zoning laws to address public health and safety concerns. While these regulations served an important purpose, they also imposed rigid standards and a bureaucratic legalese that limited organic development. Minimum lot sizes, bans on single-stair towers, setbacks, and floor area ratios (FAR) began to dictate how land could be used, making it difficult to replicate the mix of housing, shops, and cultural spaces found in older neighborhoods.5 Over time, these rules grew more complex, effectively making the development process extremely confusing.

2. Economic Barriers to Small-Scale Development >>>

The financial landscape of urbanism has also shifted dramatically. In Chicago’s early days, an individual or small developer could purchase a 25’ by 125’ lot and build a modest home or mixed-use building. Today, land costs (average cost of residential land in Chicago is estimated around ~$37/sf 14) and hard construction fees (+$300/sf) make it difficult for low-equity developers to compete.6 Lenders typically favor large, uniform developments with predictable LTV (loan to value) ratios,7 further sidelining the possibility of incremental, diverse growth. Standardized FDIC underwriting criteria historically aligned with lender preference over missing infill, like townhomes or sixplexes.8 Mixed-use or creative, funky development is even harder to finance.9

3. The Influence of Transportation Infrastructure >>>

Early Chicago neighborhoods grew along streetcar lines, where transit accessibility encouraged compact development.10 This organic growth pattern was disrupted in the mid-20th century as car-centricism reshaped cities. Parking minimums of municipal codes prioritize automobile access over cheaper pedestrianfriendly design. Building for the car also meant hard construction costs increased as well,11 and often including parking in a development can range from $10k to more than $40k a stall.12 These cost externalities are often pushed on residents, regardless if they drive. More space for cars mean less for development.

4. Consolidation of Development Power + Institutions >>>

A significant shift has been the loss of local culture around infill development. Historically, neighborhoods were built by a diverse array of small investors and property owners. Today, urban development is dominated by global capital, CDCs, and institutional investors with the necessary equity.13 These entities often prioritize economies of scale, LIHTC requirements,14 and risk management over architectural diversity or community integration, resulting in more monolithic projects. This process typically prefers large tracts that can support required parking and loading rather than small infill parcels15

Together, these forces—rigid regulations, skyrocketing land costs, car-centric infrastructure, and the consolidation of development power—have coalesced to make small-scale, incremental development prohibitively expensive and inaccessible, effectively sidelining middle-class builders and homeowners from shaping the neighborhoods they call home.

Cities are and have continually been byproducts of markets and labor pools, but as land is finite, costs of land will always increase within in-demand labor pools. But as cities are also centers of consumption and services, how are the workers that enable consumption and services able to provide without entry-level places to contribute to the city? Meanwhile, if cities obviously have demand to support density in megaprojects then corporate development patterns have benefits.

But what are those benefits? >>> Follow for Part 2 on How Cities Lost the Art of Incremental Growth next week!

Life is all about balance, or so I’ve heard. But when it comes to urban planning, the adage seems really suited to the precipice where current and contemporary thought lay. For one, we have decades of top-down failures, and currently, a hyperlocal…

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