Norm Van Eeden Petersman 0:19

Hi there and welcome to Upzoned, a Strong Towns podcast where we take an article from the news and we talk about it from a Strong Towns perspective. I guess I should introduce myself. I'm Norm with Strong Towns, Director of Membership, and with me today is Edward Erfurt, who is our Chief Technical Advisor for Strong Towns and our Director of Community Action. Welcome, Edward, to Upzoned.

Edward Erfurt 0:38

Thanks, Norm, for having me. It's always great to get on the podcast with you. I love chatting through all this stuff.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 0:46

Folks, you may not realize this, but even though we spent a week together down in Florida for our staff retreat, we talk about these kinds of things all the time. So this is just a carrying on of those conversations that are happening.

The article for today is from Realtor.com. They have quite a site here, quite a collection, certainly on housing and all of these things. The article we wanted to discuss is called "Massive Multi-Generational Home Addition Sparks Furious Debate in Virginia Community." It's by Julie Taylor, posted November 17th. Neil Heller, who is with the Incremental Development Alliance and a small-scale developer, posted about this and said, "This is yet again another great example of the disparity that really exists between what is allowed and even permitted for single-detached housing within our communities versus what counts as multifamily."

In this article, it talks about the rise of multi-generational living that can look like grandparents living together with children and their grandchildren as well in a single home. Often those homes then are modified or adjusted in order to do that, and that's the situation here in Fairfax County, Virginia. A three-story addition was added to a single-detached house in the neighborhood, and the county came back to nearby residents who began to complain and said, "Look, this is actually permitted. This is allowed. There was no prohibition in the zoning laws for this type of addition to be made, and in fact, these types of additions are pretty normal."

We certainly have other examples that we can point to in our own communities. In my community in Lethbridge, Alberta, we had the Monster House, as it was called. Ads were taken out in the local newspaper saying this is going to destroy the character and vitality of our neighborhoods. Now you drive by and you wouldn't even notice that there had been such a furor about it.

But this article goes on and says the people living in the home that's being added to—the neighbor says they're a great family. "We've never had any issues with them whatsoever, but they're doing something to their home." The concern is the idea that this overhanging building is going to create privacy issues, create property value issues, create some of the other things that emerge of "What if this happens here? What will happen in many other places?"

Very predictably, I would say—maybe I'm adding a little too much editorial content here—but the local supervisor from the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors says, "We're going to look into this, and we're going to do something about this. This does not belong in this neighborhood directly next to and in such close proximity to adjacent properties."

Edward, this is perhaps not an unfamiliar type of article. There are stories like this, but what are some of the things that stand out for you that kind of highlight how we would think about this from a Strong Towns perspective?

Edward Erfurt 3:40

Yeah, I mean, I want to empathize. This is something that is occurring in communities all across North America. We can find many stories like this. This one has just gone viral, partly because of where it's at. It's just outside of the DC area. If you were to pull up a map, this is just south of the Dulles International Airport, so very central location.

This is also—when you look at the building, the addition that's being added—they've essentially taken the one-car garage and extended it out and up. So it is a rectangular box, a highly efficient box, but clearly stands out in this particular neighborhood.

When we talk about this—and this comes up many times when we're having our housing talks—if you follow Strong Towns long enough, you start to hear us talk about allowing that next increment of development by right, that we should see communities break out of being stuck in amber. We need to allow for folks to thicken up, to do those small additions, to add pieces on here.

When we look at this neighborhood, there are two different descriptions of this addition. There is the description from the folks that live in a one-story home in the neighborhood, and there is the description that is coming from the staff, from the planning commission, from the county, saying this is being built within the zoning code.

When I look at the next increment of development, we sometimes describe it because people have a hard time understanding what we mean. For years and years and years, for the last eight decades, the type of development we've seen has been giant leaps. But in a neighborhood, if when I go out and I talk about housing and I talk about the next increment, a way to think about it is that if you have a one-story neighborhood, everybody by right should be able to go up to two stories. And then if you've got two-story in the neighborhood, then you should be allowed to go up to three stories.

This kind of increment is occurring in this particular neighborhood. On this street, there are combinations of one- and two-story buildings. The zoning code is accommodating that next increment by right, which is going up to three stories. What's so jarring with this is that it is a three-story against a one-story house. So that transition—that next increment—appears to be quite large. This is an outcome of the type of regulatory environment that has been set up in this neighborhood.

A lot of the things I'm hearing in this are the things we can throw into the NIMBY crowd, anytime there is change within a community. I'm hearing all of that. But the first thing I saw with this is that there are no winners in this discussion. You've got a zoning code that is really complicated. You've got that allows for what is conceivably the next increment of development in a neighborhood where there's a combination of one or two stories—three stories, putting those in—but you do have homes that are not going to grow up in that type of structure. So it is jarring on this particular street.

I can tell you, as somebody that has been within local government on the other end of that complaint line when new buildings come in, these are all of the complaints that I would hear time and time again when something like this would be built.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 7:52

You said that you went and looked at some of the complaints that have been posted. Did you want to share what were some of the common themes that kept emerging?

Edward Erfurt 8:01

So it's typical when you would see a home closer to another home—there's a challenging of setbacks. This one, looking later into the history of the site, there is a discrepancy of where the footers were put in. There may be that encroachment, getting too close to the property line, blocking sunlight. That's another one. So it's going to shade my whole yard. Again, a three-story wall against a one-story building—I empathize. That is a stark difference, but that's going to cast shadows over the yard.

The other one I always heard a lot were windows. So if your windows were higher than my windows, then you're going to look down into my house, or you're going to look down into my backyard. I would hear this all the time. I again empathize with that, but sometimes we stretch that a little bit too far.

What I found really interesting with this one—I've never heard before, which I found fascinating—is that the community, because this is in the county, not a city, the residents identified that they were not in an HOA, a Homeowners Association, adding that extra level of bureaucracy and decision-making. I have never met anybody that lives in an HOA that wants to go have another HOA, that looks at neighborhoods and says, "Oh, that neighborhood is beautiful to me because there is an HOA."

But because local government has broken down here to such a point that they have such mistrust in the capacity and what is happening at local government, they would want to put on that extra layer themselves to create an HOA in this neighborhood. That is a new one for me. But I understand where that's coming from. I'm not sure that's the conclusion I would jump to.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 10:07

Yeah. Well, it's certainly—maybe I should do a better job also just describing sort of the look and feel of it for those that are listening here. So you have a simple home that's built in the middle of the property, and so the lot is, much like you see it across the suburbs, all of these homes are sited right in the middle. Then you have the driveway, and off to the right is where the garage would have been. That garage now is just a three-story, fairly narrow kind of shoebox-looking structure that is three stories tall with a flat roof on top, or a very limited pitch roof, and it just juts straight out along that right-hand side that would be next to the adjacent property where the property owner said, "Hey, I'm concerned about what's going on."

There are punch-outs for windows, but those windows, as is often asserted, they look directly into the neighbor's property. There's a small, modest setback between the building and the fence line that would be an opportunity in time for the addition of landscaping or bringing in something to help manage the view. But there's an interesting way in which some of that is also a situation where neighbor to neighbor, there can be discussions of, "Hey, can we put privacy screening on the glazing of the window? Is there something that we can do with an awning or a canopy?"

One of the reasons why a lot of apartment buildings have those awnings is because then you have not only weather protection, but you also have view protection. People are not looking down and into your buildings. And yet the modernist style is much more just everything is clean back, and as a consequence, you miss some of what's dismissed as ornamentation but can actually be quite useful in helping to address those things.

But the other element of it is, if you imagine this site, it does stick out. It's a bit of an eyesore from the street level. But once you brought in that next building, say, two doors down, another building began to mimic that type and look and feel, you would start to get used to a neighborhood that had this as its distinctive character—that you had homes of various sizes. This is that element of allowing a neighborhood to mature and to thicken up.

I've likened it to a pimple—that if you continue to suppress all of the activity that should be happening on your face, you're eventually going to get a blowout or a breakout. Or, maybe a less vivid image would be of a volcano. If you continue to suppress that demand over time, you will then get a significant jump.

The other flip side of it is this is a far cry from an eight-story tower, and yet it's really being described in much the same way. You're only one story off from that next increment of development from a height perspective. I'm fascinated by the way in which this is capable of just being perceived as such a threat, in part because of the bill of promise that says this neighborhood won't be subject to change. The only change that will happen is you and your family, but your built form won't change all that much.

Edward, you've had to advise cities on how to help their neighborhoods thicken up. What are some of the tools that can be used here to help in this situation—maybe not with this project, but with others that would come on the same block?

Edward Erfurt 13:23

Well, yeah, I look at this site, and Neil Heller, who has shared this with us at Strong Towns, has also posted on this. He's gone into some of the cities that he's working with on their advising on the codes. This is something that could be repeated in many, many communities.

So what am I seeing on this particular site that stands out to me, that makes this a blemish and not a beauty mark? The thing I see is that there are multiple things occurring that are all changes in this built environment. Somewhere along the line, the building setbacks, either by the regulatory component or just what was understood when the first builder came to the neighborhood, have changed.

So this particular building, this addition, is coming out closer to the street than the rest of the homes that align on the street. Coming out closer to the street, because of some of the topography, this three-story building looks taller and it's coming out. The other component is on the massing. This massing of this addition is starkly different than what's been—it's being added to.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 14:41

So you're using an architect's word. What is massing?

Edward Erfurt 14:45

So when we look at houses, think of houses as a box. When we think about those four-dimensional shapes—spheres and cubes and rectangles and all of those types of volumes—when we look at massing of houses, if I was to ask my boys to draw a house, they would draw a rectangle with a triangle on the roof. That pyramid shape would be on the roof.

This is actually a two-story house. It's a ground-floor rectangle with the second story under a really big roof. The addition is an extrusion out. Imagine just taking a long rectangle on the driveway and shooting up three stories. When we look at it, it's not stepping back from the street. It's just a true extrusion of the building. So there's no stepbacks. There's nothing in there to break up that form. So again, I would describe it as a highly efficient rectangle that's going up, but architecturally, not a lot going on with it.

The other component, when we look at a building like this, is fenestration, or windows and doors. When you look at the windows and doors on this particular addition, there are windows on it. On the side that's closest to the neighbor that's most distraught with this, it's a hodgepodge of windows. There's no composition of it. I'm sure on the inside it's being designed around bathrooms and staircases, being put on bed walls. So there's just no kind of artistic layout of those windows.

When we look in the front, they're big picture windows, where the rest of the community either is kind of a mid-century type ranch style or a neo kind of colonial with a porch. In its siting and where it sits on the lot, the tallest part is on the edge of the property, up abutting on the sideline and also on the front of the property.

The mass of this is not only three stories, but it's exactly from the earth to the sky the same volume all the way up. So there's no kind of change to that piece. I'm not sure what the outside of this is going to look like. This neighborhood has got a combination of materials, sidings, and brick. I didn't look at the building permits, but right now it is a plywood box that really sticks out. You can imagine the light-colored plywood with very little—there's no shadow on it, no shade. It really stands out a lot.

Now, when I think about this and the process, the things that we have described are things that don't normally get reviewed in a building permit. So when a building permit comes forward and somebody says, "Hey, I want to add an addition onto my house," the first thing that happens is you talk to the zoning desk. "Am I allowed to have a house on this property?"

Another thing that is occurring here is that it's going from a single-family house to a three-family home. I'm not sure how all that works in their zoning, but that type of intensity is allowed. So the zoning desk looks on the table and says, "Whatever our category you are, you're allowed to have up to three families." Okay. Then the zoning desk is going to look at the building setbacks. "Are you within the eight-foot side and the 15-foot front, or whatever the dimensions are?" That's what's shown on the plans. Check.

Then it goes to the building department. The building department is going to look and make sure that you have a structural package. That's if you have a detailed building permit, that you have a building official that's looking for these sorts of things. You may or may not need signed and sealed engineering plans for the structure. But basically, the house plans are just the layout of these things to show that the hallways are the right size, that there's egress—emergency windows—the hallways are the right dimension, the bathroom is the right size, that you've got detailing that you're going to do the right house wrap and insulation, and you've done energy code for this, and you've done evaluation of your heating and cooling system. All that gets submitted.

Rarely do you look at the style or the massing of the building or even what's adjacent to it. We work within those boxes. The building code is going to be the same across all of Virginia. The way that houses are constructed to make sure they meet wind loads and fire safety and egress and all of those sorts of things—that they're built properly—that's just agnostic across all your communities. But on the zoning, where this thing sits and what the massing is, that kind of performance standard gets tweaked over time. What is allowed on the property is the other piece that gets tweaked over time in these codes.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 20:32

Part of it that stands out to me is if this was a teardown and rebuild, you would be able to have this amount of square footage easily within a two-story context. The benefit here is that the primary structure didn't have to be torn down in order for the addition to be added. There's a real benefit of not having to have everything be a teardown and rebuild.

But especially in Fairfax County, where you have significant wealth, and when people are doing that rebuild, I see this in my city all the time—they will build to the max of what they're allowed. So you go from what the neighboring house here looks like—maybe a 1,500-square-foot main story or first story—to the ability to have 2,500 square feet per floor. You get yourself that 5,000-square-foot home that in the Fairfax County market actually makes sense or pencils out based on the lot price versus the amount that it would cost to move into there.

Maybe one of the questions that I would ask is, how is it that the property next door hasn't changed a bit since the day that the builder left? That is one of those elements—we're not asking that every neighborhood constantly be changing every single building, but it looks virtually the same except for the tree has grown to the day that it was first constructed.

This is that trap that you find yourself in in the suburban pattern of development, that the neighborhood here is just convinced that it is and always shall be as it was. That can be that real objection then to any kind of change, let alone something that's a little bit more drastic.

We're seeing this also in the city of Edmonton, for example, where the city of Edmonton has allowed up to eight units. A different sort of nomenclature here—in their instance, it's eight distinct units or homes on a lot versus a single home that basically could manage eight different households or eight multi-generational groups.

But I think we're bumping up against some of those limits of who gets to define specifically who lives in a house, how many of you are allowed? What are some of the core things that we're looking to get? Especially if we look at urban zoning standards back in the day—yes, there was a health and safety concern, but there was also in the documents themselves this very clear bias or rejection of the idea that low-status households could have multiple generations within them.

There was this pivot from everybody living normally—Sheena from our Strong Towns wrote a great piece: "Multi-generational Living Isn't Immigrant Culture, It's Human Culture." I really love that sentiment because this is something that checks out as we learn the story of our ancestors, and even today in many parts of the world.

But you then see the suburban experiment with its assumption of unchangeableness and the exclusion by class and status and the assumption of auto-dependency. When you build all of those things in, you get a situation like this where people are furious that such a change would even be allowed, and then especially under the guise that there might be multiple members of the same household living together in that space.

We've seen it in other places, like in Boulder, where they had to adjust their regulations on the number of unrelated people that could live together. But this is almost like one of those things—well, so long as they're related, is there anything that we can do to prevent them from living together? I think to your point, if the property standards are being followed, if the setbacks are being respected, perhaps this is the type of thing we should expect. Do you think that this is something we should expect in these places?

Edward Erfurt 24:13

I think this is happening because of the financial push right now and the housing crisis. What I found in this article—and I think this is where the zoning desk, where the county is struggling—the framing of the neighbor, I would be as concerned. But the neighbors are talking about this not in the performance standards of the delivery of the unit next door. They're talking about this as a financial product.

They're talking about, in their complaints—when I read through the article, the first complaint is that this looks more like a large townhome and not a single-family home. When I hear people talk about in those terms, they talk about townhomes as being a lesser value, as something that draws down the economics of their single-family home. That's farthest from the truth in all of these neighborhoods.

I know this region because this is in my backyard. Townhomes—the per-square-foot sale cost of townhomes is greater than that of single-family detached. In areas where those are mixed, we're also seeing the single-family—the value of those actually increase.

The other terms here is, "What if we sell? What if we decide to sell?" So we're talking about our financial investment. I understand homes are our largest financial investment. What is the impact of this? These are all valid concerns, but these are concerns that your county can't understand. The zoning code doesn't take into account the fiscal impact of any building.

I hear this in resident complaints. I also hear this from developers. Developers say, "Oh, I can't put in that sidewalk. I can't put in that type of fancy fencing because it costs too much. Oh, I can't do this type of development pattern you want because the market won't support it." AKA, "I can't make money."

When we look at these sorts of things, if I'm going to city hall and I'm going to complain about building in my neighborhood something that's dramatically different than the rest of my neighborhood, I can talk as much as I want about the impacts that I feel it's going to have against the value of my property. I could talk about the impacts of how this would be if I tried to sell this home. Clearly, the properties all around here have made all the international news, and the way they talk about it is so negative it's driving down those prices.

But there is no input at city hall to be able to provide a response back to that. When I looked at all of these different components, that's the first thing that we need to understand is that the residents are talking about this in financial terms, which is incongruent to the way that a municipality sees this in their codes. I've rarely, if ever, seen a zoning code linked to a financial model and outcome. It just doesn't happen.

If I'm looking at this as a neighbor and I have concerns about that built environment, I would look at, what are the performance standards? What are the zoning, what are the setback issues that are with this? Is it meeting the building code? What they found after—and the number of complaints in the article, there's a link of all of the complaints that have come in—it's a lot. It's a significant number of these. Most of them are being discounted because of the way they're being framed. "Does it meet the code?" Yes.

When the first reviews—because this has happened to me where things get built, when I'm administering a code or following new building at a municipality, something gets built that's new, it's shocking. The neighbors complain. The first thing we do is we go to the plans. What did the municipality approve? We look at the plans and we discredit the neighbors next door because the plans meet the code. It's new and there's construction next door, and you're probably going to have cranky neighbors about it. But we discount that as plan reviewers.

Where traction has occurred on this particular phase is not the fact that it has been built to code, but somewhere along the line the builder has made a mistake. I think the story here—

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 29:05

It required an eight-foot side yard setback. It says as currently built—

Edward Erfurt 29:10

So I think what's happened is somebody's gone out with a surveyor and they figured out that this home is being built instead of eight feet off the property line. It's probably seven feet, 11 inches off the property line, which—look, this stuff happens. Many home builders don't get all the survey work because they fail to acknowledge infill development. It's not measured in feet. It's measured in inches.

Somebody has found a survey that said that they have encroached into one of the setbacks, and this has now put this building in a really terrible spot. I suspect the thing that's going to have to happen at this point is that the builder and the homeowner are going to have to go and request a variance, which will be a very public process. It's going to put a lot of political pressure. If the county administrator is already saying they don't want this ever to happen again, they're very unlikely to go and approve a variance or waiver for the setback.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 30:25

And there's something very showy about watching it be deconstructed in order to move it back that two inches. There's a foul against anybody that would consider doing something similar.

Edward Erfurt 30:37

Yeah, not only teardown—what could be even worse is that the building stands. Under most municipal codes, you could go and just continue to apply your permit, seek renewals or get inspections. There are many spite buildings across North America. These are buildings that were built in spots they didn't think could be built, or they're under perpetual construction.

So this building—I'm sure it's financed. Nobody's paying cash for this type of building. It's being financed. As long as the financing continues to roll, as long as the builder is still liable for all this, it will be years of this plywood box sitting there untouched. Because who's going to fix this? Where is this going to be resolved?

There are really no winners on this, and we have to recognize that this home is being added onto so three families could live together in a multi-generational house, which is an incredible aspiration for communities. I didn't see anything in the article where the neighbor said they didn't want that. What I did see is that the actual built form—the architecture, the look, the massing—is what they didn't like. What they're grasping at are things like parking and sunlight and impact to property values to try to get this to halt and stop where it's at.

So this is a really difficult thing, and it's kind of sad that this has now become the poster child of zoning. This is the intended outcome of zoning. This is the thing that if we built—if the builder built everything to the T that's in the permit that's been issued, it would be built and it'd be done, and we'd be upset about it. Neighbors are upset that this is happening.

The only thing you could do is go and update the code so that what could change—and in the article, I know there's the salacious part of the article, but really working with the neighborhood at a fine grain, not jumping to an HOA, but what types of things would feel more comfortable to be added to this house? What type of form could it change? What type of architectural piece? Where windows are at, where setbacks are that would be acceptable to the neighborhood that would feel like incremental change and not giant leaps?

That type of technical review is something that planners aren't always equipped for. It may require bringing in architects and illustrators to experiment in a virtual environment of what would be acceptable to address this type of—to be able to get three families on one of these lots.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 34:01

In a different piece, Daniel Herriges made the point that there's a double standard between multifamily townhomes and multi-generational homes. So with the former being multiple units or distinct properties—or not just properties, but units on title—versus a multi-generational household where you're going to have multiple stoves, most likely, you're going to have various cooking areas and other areas that are zones within each home. But the single structure is on a single title, and as a result, it falls under a very different category.

How would a Strong Towns approach really grapple with the needs of many people to be able to live together, as well as the opportunity that's presented to reduce the amount of upfront purchase costs for anybody? If you're, say, purchasing a triplex on a per-square-foot basis, your quality can be just as good as a brand-new home, but you're able to pay the amount that you can afford. Whereas in a multi-generational, you have to pool everybody's resources together in order to buy the one unit.

We think of, back in the day, the New England triple-decker was a great example of this, where someone would build a three-unit structure. They might live in one of the units and rent out two of them. Then if they brought family over from another part of the world, they would then remove that one tenant and move their own family members in. They might knock out a wall so that way they had more access. You can kind of see that fluidness of these types of sites.

Do you want to touch on this? Because I do think it speaks to that question of where do we draw the line between multifamily versus multi-generational? Ostensibly, it's degrees of relation, but even then that wouldn't necessarily apply. Is there a way that we can move forward on that point in our zoning standards as well?

Edward Erfurt 35:52

Yeah. I think when we talk about multi-generational housing, it is an emotional description. It's a relatable description to achieve multifamily housing. When we walk through and try to familiarize folks—remember, we're in eight decades of the suburban development pattern where we're trying to deliver one house type at scale across thousands of acres all at once.

When I talk to folks that have grown—and I grew up in the suburbs in the single-family detached home where all the homes in the neighborhood all look the same—there's so much of that out there that we've now had multiple generations. That's all they know. It's hard to tell somebody in a neighborhood where there's all one type of house that there could be the possibility of two families under one roof, or two separate ownerships adjacent to them or in proximity to their home. That's a hard thing to comprehend.

As soon as—and this is part of the planners and zoning officials out there—they need to stop with all the naming they've created. All these names that are just—they sound like diseases. They don't actually sound like any type of housing we want to live in. We point out at Strong Towns all the time, ADUs—accessory dwelling units. That's a terrible name. Nobody wants to be accessory. Nobody is in a dwelling unit. We use the term "rear-yard cottage" a lot because that's something we can connect and visualize.

When we talk about multi-generational housing, that term is something that people can visualize. So I'm living in a house, or my parents are in a house. They're aging. They need some assistance. They don't need as much space as they had originally. They're able to move into a small portion of the house, and my family can move in, and we can take care of each other. My parents can watch my children. My wife and I can watch my parents. That type of thing—that is legally two separate families, two separate households merged into one.

This is my grandparents. This was just commonplace to them. When I look at how my family survived through the Depression, it was four generations in one house. I mean, this was just the norm. We now are struggling with that because of the way we've segmented everything out.

If I want to talk about trying to do what the planners call multifamily or apartments, the comfortable way, the way to kind of bring the story along is, "Look, here's an older couple. A younger family moves in. They help each other out. There's nothing wrong with that." What happens when the older person passes away or moves to a different housing condition? Could another family come in that's also young? Is that acceptable? Well, of course. What's the difference between the two? We carried along the story of something that is now more familiar.

When I look at this, what would it matter if it's all of the same bloodline or if it's just three different non-related families? The living condition is really all the same. How those individuals all work together—slightly different dynamics—might actually be easier if they're not blood relation, but they can live in those spaces.

In this particular neighborhood, why would something like this emerge? And it's not just because the zoning says it can. One of the things is that we're seeing dramatic shifts in what people need for housing and what they're more familiar with and willing to or what they're targeting in their markets. So the idea that the way that all the families are—the way that there's lots of single individuals in the world—this idea of getting people that are not related together in the same home is one approach. It's also a financial piece.

This particular community is one of the most expensive places to live in the United States. It's just really, really expensive. Having family in close proximity—that's a good idea. When you look at how you would finance this type of addition, our folks at Neighborhood Evolution—Monty Anderson has shared his roommate house. In that roommate house, there was no way that one individual could afford the house and all the renovation. Just the cost of that building is so expensive right now.

But if you look at it differently and you start to say, "Well, what if somebody comes in, somebody that can't afford a full house but could pay a certain amount of rent?" When you look at individuals, what they need for their living—maybe the construction loan is what they would have otherwise had to pay for a mortgage. These are ways that we can be more creative in our financing to help cover the heavy burden of those costs.

So it's not just a zoning thing happening here. It's a market trend because we are in a housing crisis. Housing is especially unobtainable. Housing is in such a shortage. If I look at this particular neighborhood, just go on the map—anybody that would look, find the Dulles International Airport, look around there—there are no new subdivisions around there. This is an area in the country where we're going to see this thickening up of neighborhoods because the land values are such and there's still a desirability of people moving in.

The other thing is the financial component to it. It may be very hard to go out and get a mortgage on a house. It may not be as hard using the collateral and equity in that property to go get a construction loan to build something like this out. I love the idea of thickening up the neighborhood. The story is even better than just being a multifamily house. The story is even better that it is a multi-generational condition that's happening here. The idea that somebody is making an investment in the community—this is no modest investment on this property.

The struggle is thinking through how this builds out and how this plays real time in the community. The built form, the things we look at from the street, and the way that interacts with the other houses on the street is really in this story where the heart of the problem. This is something that I will tell you—there's not a planner that is trained in this type of thinking. Even architects have a hard time with this. This is kind of where this career that crazy people like me call ourselves urban designers—trying to look at all of these complicated aspects of the built environment. How do we balance all of these out?

I'd be really curious looking at the house plans and figuring out there is a different way to lay this out that is more contextual to the neighborhood. You could achieve everything you want to achieve but have a different look from the street. I would describe this as a design problem, and if we could get the design right, the neighborliness, the administrative stuff, all of that would work itself out.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 44:28

One of the things that was interesting to me is that there actually are windows on the side that faces the neighbor, because a lot of our standards actually limit the number of windows that you can have there. So then you get this—there's no option but to have that blank wall, that blank monolith that just is there in your view, rather than anything that resembles beautiful spaces, something that's designed with some thoughtfulness. An element of that is just, "Well, what if they look in my window?" I mean, there are so many other ways that you can manage that with awnings and other things like this.

I'm pleased at minimum that there is some variety there. But because you're bumping up against your property lines, you're not doing any of the—there's no mini balconies or things like that to sort of break things up. I do think that it's an interesting experiment to say, how would you rebuild this in order to make it work in a much more adaptive way that the lot just improved because of it?

But I feel like we've taken a good shot at this. I would say that this is one of those stories that is just emblematic of so many other stories like this across the North American landscape, other communities as well, in other countries too. We're seeing this again. As I mentioned way back in the '90s, my community in Lethbridge, Alberta, was grappling with this Monster House. You drive by today and it is virtually indistinguishable from the other types of homes that are nearby. Some interesting features to it, and you just move on. Life goes on, especially as the trees grow, things get hidden a little bit, and away we go.

There's so much more there. If anybody is interested to think through how do we introduce more multifamily housing into our neighborhoods, definitely go to strongtowns.org/housing to be able to look at the toolkits that we've released on creating the pathway for—I think much more the respecting the local context type of small-scale development that we need to have in our communities, or incremental development, I should say. It doesn't have to be small. It should be to the next increment, as well as helping to establish the conditions for a swarm of small-scale developers to be able to do that work.

But let's go into the Downzone, which is where Abby, as well as all of our hosts, like to ask our guests what they've been reading or exploring or discovering that is connected to Strong Towns or maybe not at all. Edward, do you have anything for the Downzone today?

Edward Erfurt 46:53

Oh, I have been—we are in that holiday season. We've just finished up Thanksgiving. We're in the middle of December, and I am in a total panic of how I'm going to get everything done between now and Christmas. So this is that crazy Advent season. My plate has been full thinking about sugar plums and Christmas ornaments right now.

For those that don't know, I am a big, avid collector of the hand-blown Christmas ornaments, the shiny ones that go on the tree. Nobody's allowed to put any ornaments on the tree except for me because if they break, I'm the one that needs to get blamed for it. But yeah, so it's that pleasantly stressful time of the year at our house right now.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 47:46

That's awesome. Yeah, I am in book 11 of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. I mentioned that to a friend, and he was like, "Whoa, Norm, you made it to book 11." So I didn't realize how much of an achievement it actually was because these are just sprawling epics in which I believe there are probably about 40 main characters. I can't do Sudoku, and I can't do the other things that are recommended to keep dementia at bay, but I feel like reading Robert Jordan is having that effect on me because most of the time I know who he's talking about.

I'm trying to listen to it as an audiobook. It's just even more of a challenge where I'm definitely having to go back and reread it or re-listen to it. I'm excited for book 12, which will be my Christmas reading project because I'll read that on a Kindle, and that'll help smooth things along.

If you're looking for something to get started, definitely check out Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series. They turned it into an Amazon series, and it was really poorly done is my impression of what I saw when I watched it. The book itself is much, much, much better, which is pretty common to say, but in most cases it's true as well.

Edward, thank you for being on Upzoned today. Thanks for dropping in to take up this question. I love that this is yet again an example of taking a particular element and extrapolating it or seeing it in the bigger context. I appreciate you offering that to us today.

Folks, if you're listening, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. I hope that as you continue to find opportunities to connect with loved ones, that brings a lot of warmth and joy and happiness to your life. Especially to all of our Strong Towns members, thank you for continuing to fuel this movement. What a year 2025 has been, and as we kick off a brand new year in just a couple of weeks, I hope that you're being fueled by a sense of enthusiasm, that energy that certainly is contagious and growing. So keep doing what you can to build a strong town, and we'll see you in the new year.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 49:45

This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.