A Los Angeles couple set out to build a 400-square-foot backyard home for about $300,000, only to watch the final cost climb to $600,000 in a project recently profiled by Lisa Boone in the Los Angeles Times. Norm Van Eeden Petersman talks with Tamara White of Small Housing and Mary Coddington, founder of 12 Incorporated, about what pushed the cost so high. The couple chose an ambitious design and built on a difficult site, but they also had two major advantages many small housing projects never get: they already owned the land, and they were allowed to build. If the land and permissions were already in place, what made the price skyrocket, and how much of that complexity could actually be removed?
So you want to build a place for your kids, but it's really costly. That sounds pretty familiar. That's definitely a story that we hear in lots of different places. We want to talk today in Upzoned, where we take an article from the news and we talk about it from a Strong Towns perspective with amazing guests.
We want to talk about a story in the Los Angeles Times written by Lisa Boone, about a couple in northeast Los Angeles who built a 400-square-foot ADU, or as we like to say, just a house on their property, and it's a fascinating story, partly because of what goes wrong for them. So the original headline for the piece actually described the fact that their costs had doubled from $300,000 to $600,000, and just challenges like the pandemic price increase, some of their ambitious architectural choices, difficult site to build on a ridgeline, and some of the construction complications all sort of added up to this package or this new build being quite expensive for them.
But there's also an old Sherlock Holmes idea that keeps coming to mind here for me as I think about this from a Strong Towns perspective about the dog that didn't bark, because one problem basically never appears in the story: “the city wouldn't let us build it.” That's especially interesting when you look at what they were trying to do. They were taking their 1,300-square-foot house, and they were looking to add in an additional 400-square-foot backyard cottage or ADU over and above their detached two-car garage. They took a portion of their property that was storing cars and they upzoned it. They turned it into a place for people to live while still retaining that car storage function.
That's a very Strong Towns kind of increment, and they had design choices that drove up their costs. We'll talk about it a bit in our discussion. The timing was rough for them, but what stood out to me is that they were able to do it, and in the piece it documents the real opportunity that came. They controlled the most expensive ingredient, the land, and then the ADU rules allowed them to take that asset and do more with it.
This is important for us as we think about the need to provide the next increment of development as something that is just normalized and possible within our communities to make things like accessory dwelling units something that owners are broadly entitled to build with clear rules, with clear timelines, fewer parking barriers, and real fee protections for smaller projects as well. What do we need to do? We need to make permission predictable. Given the land building that I already have, we should be able to say what is the next useful thing I can do with that.
Joining me to talk about this are Tamara White, who is the co-executive lead of Planning Innovation at Small Housing, a nonprofit housing policy and education organization working to make small-scale housing a normal and achievable part of communities across British Columbia and the rest of Canada and increasingly other parts of the world as well. Welcome to Upzoned, Tamara.
Thanks. Great to be here, Norm.
We've also got Mary Coddington, founder and principal of 12 Incorporated, works with communities across Colorado on housing and housing policy, especially about how to deliver homes at prices that actually bear some relationship to what local people actually earn. Mary, welcome to Upzoned.
Thanks so much. Happy to be here.
Why don't we start with Tamara? When you hear these stories of the challenges people face navigating the real construction costs and all these barriers, what stands out to you, especially in that framing that they didn't have to battle the city, but they still had to battle cost overruns and challenges of that sort? Do you want to offer some initial reflections on the piece?
Yeah. I think, unfortunately, it's not an uncommon story to hear where folks enter into construction with a big vision and a great idea of what they're going to be able to do, what they're able to accomplish, and then the complexity of the project coupled with any other number of factors ends up mushrooming the costs at the end of the day. But I think within the what we call the gentle density space, within the gentle density scale of construction, we often see that there's these false comparisons that are made when folks are really balking at the per square foot cost of new homes, but their reference point is often older homes in the neighborhood.
New construction is expensive these days, and the more useful comparison is to look at what other options there are for people to be able to purchase into the neighborhood. How much would it cost to build a single detached home in that neighborhood? This new home that you're building might be expensive, but if you were to build another single detached home, it would be even more expensive, so we still need to be looking at these options as a way of continuing to build the housing stock in our less dense neighborhoods.
They spent twice what they thought they would spend, and it's still the cheapest home on the block. That tells you about the power of these types of housing choices. What about for you, Mary?
I mean, I think it's great that they were able to do this, and that they did it in a way that was so aligned with their values. Working in this space of affordable housing a lot, or housing tenures that people are less familiar with, finding ways to do it beautifully is really helpful in showing that these kinds of things can fit into any neighborhood, and they can be done in ways that fit into the character. But to your point, Tamara, as well in terms of the cost expectations, I work a lot in multifamily housing, but typically at the smaller scale.
One of the things that we deal with a lot is you still need an architect, which isn't much cheaper if you're building an ADU, four units, or 24 units. There's somewhat of a fixed cost there, and the fewer units that you're building with that, the higher the per unit cost for each of those line item pieces is, and so I think that recalibration of what is an appropriate price for something that's smaller is a really important point.
I'm curious about your mentioning of you still need an architect. At what point? I'm not sure what the regulations are in the U.S. Versus here for when you need an architect involved.
Certainly in BC, we are working with standardized designs and looking at other options that are out there where you might not necessarily, need to either hire an architect or spend as much time with an architect or a building designer in order to get your home designed and built. I think it's definitely a piece that we're doing a lot of work on as well. So what does it look like in Colorado?
It varies from city to city in Denver, where I am, you still need to have designs that are approved by the city. We're not at the point of having pre-approved designs citywide, although we do have a nonprofit that's run through our housing authority here called West Denver Renaissance Collaborative, and they have an ADU program where they have pre-approved designs, and they've been working with Habitat for Humanity, and I think that's a huge piece. That kind of brings up another point I was thinking of in this article: what would you have to rent this for in order to recoup the cost to build it?
Assuming a 7% interest rate for a project that's $600,000, it would be about $6,000 a month in order to bring that cost back. Looking at ways to bring the cost of financing down, the cost of the project down through pre-approved plans, I think, is really important. Then, in bringing the sort of incremental thought space to even the process, what's the next step? If you have pre-approved building designs, can you bulk buy materials?
Can a jurisdiction hedge buy them so they're protecting against random tariffs that might be charged between places? I think that there are opportunities, as we're moving through pre-approved plans in places where that works. But then, what can we do for the next step after that to bring costs down as well?
Well, that can be with panelized construction in particular, where you can create the supply chains if there's a knowledge that hey, a significant number of these buildings are going to be constructed with pre-approved designs. They've already been run through the gamut of tests and tribulations that a lot of our planning staff are really insistent they need to go through, this extra layer of review. All right, then why don't we review it once and then create the conditions in which this happens?
As I was mulling over the piece, what stood out to me is that, yes, I want people in one sense to be able to lose their shirt, which is a very crude way of saying I want people to be able to do something risky. This couple they wanted something, and if you go and check out the piece, it's got gorgeous views. They've done a really interesting job with great finishes, and in 400 square feet, they've managed to put in some really interesting features that make it really livable. I want people to be able to do that.
I also want people to be able to do a much more scaled back version of this. I want what LA is also seeing a lot more of, which are also a lot more affordable: the pre-built off-site units that are craned into a backyard, and if you compare the experiences that these people would have had, this is a very different bespoke approach. I think what it hopefully does is, if we can say, let's always have room available for people to do it in their own way, a bespoke approach, but we should also introduce that other version that allows for craning in a pre-constructed building. LA, I think, has taken the lead in this.
Then I look at other places that have easier site accessibility, easier access to natural resources, construction costs would be lower. If they can do it, we really, really, really should be able to do that. Especially up in British Columbia, where we've got forests for days, we've got great softwood lumber that now is going to be more and more available after tariffs are applied on the American side. So hey, our building materials are ready, and yet we've still missed that piece that's there.
I know, Tamara, with Small Housing, your team is working at that and trying to get some of the panelized or modularized construction techniques to be just normalized, normal and not scary and easy to access. What does that look like?
Absolutely. Wow, there are so many threads. That's my specialty. Where to go from here?
Prefabrication, off-site construction: it's the future of construction, and it's also the past of construction. It's this really interesting time that we're in when you look at all of the post-war rapid reconstruction that was done to bring homes to returning soldiers and to build out communities and really provide so many Americans and Canadians with the promise of home ownership and a little plot of land that could be theirs.
We did that through having standardized designs and having kits of parts and having prefabrication, and it's been some years, but we're coming back around to that again, to recognizing that we are legitimately in a housing crisis, and it requires that same type of kind of post-war coordinated effort in order to bring our housing supply back up to what our residents' needs are, and just the population growth that we've experienced.
We're strong fans of prefabrication, and there are some changes that are needed in order to bring it back into being normalized and simplified through regulatory pathways, so I think municipalities need to dig into their bylaws and their zoning definitions and their permitting processes and kind of start to uncover where there can be unintended biases towards on-site stick-build construction and pull those out. It's time for a spring clean on multiple fronts, but in prefabrication in particular. Then there's a lot of work to be doing as well within the construction sector to be integrating prefab components. Norm, you spoke to panelized construction.
There's all kinds of components, panels, hybrid systems, volumetric modular. There's lots of different technologies that are out there, material technologies as well. We need to be looking at how we can embrace those and support more productivity in our construction sector, which unfortunately has been one of the slowest to improve in productivity across all sectors, so we need to bring in these modern methods and normalize them, and bring the small builders along the way. We need to make sure that our single-family builders, those small organizations, sometimes just a few folks on board and a small crew, are the folks who are building, two to four homes a year on average in BC.
We would like to see them multiplying that by bringing in modern methods and also by bringing in more gentle density forms. We've got all the ingredients, but it's about movement building and a bit of systems change as well, yeah.
For one, making sure that fees are proportionate, so that if you are building 400 square feet, you're exempted from certain types of fees, or there is a ratio rather than an absolute figure that gets applied. That's a killer for so many projects. Fees, permits, all of those processes, every one of those on a smaller project takes a bigger bite, and trying to find ways to help with that. Mary, you're working across a lot of different municipalities in Colorado.
I would imagine there's some hope that offsite construction can help, but I would imagine there's still a ton of barriers and burdens that people are facing. We don't want people's project, if it's a modest, simple addition of housing to run over by 300,000, because that can be devastating to people who aren't in LA and able to charge, maybe higher rents and things of that sort. What are some strategies or tools that you think are worth looking at here?
I actually have three projects that are in various phases of development right now, two of which are using modular, and the third is using panelized. The project that's using panelized construction is a group out of Southwest Colorado called Timber Age, and they're using cross-laminated timber. So it's again that idea of what resources do we have on hand, and how can we use them better to address both our need for forest management and our need for housing? So that's a really beautiful project.
The modular is interesting because I think that there are barriers both at the jurisdictional level in some places, but also from a financing perspective. The modular companies we've worked with need a 40% deposit upfront to pay for the materials to reserve your space in line in their production schedule, and it's a really different model than what most lenders who finance construction are used to, where you build something and you send them evidence that's been built, and then they pay out for it. The idea of spending almost half the project cost upfront is very scary.
A lot of people who are lending and development really like doing things that they've seen be successful in the past, and so asking them to step out of that comfort zone is a tough space. As much advocacy and conversation as we can get to encourage sort of the money to also flow to these construction methods that are coming back, I think is another important piece.
Maybe I'll share. I referenced at the beginning the different experiences that people have and the story that both Tamara and I are very familiar with by Frances Beulah, who is currently running for city council in Vancouver, but she was a longtime city hall beat reporter and a very thoughtful participant in community life. She wrote about trying to build a laneway home for her family for, I believe, her daughter at that time. The actual construction took about eight months, and they were able to manage that process, but from the first check they paid to the city to the date they got to move in, five years passed.
In this article, it talks about the impact of supply chain disruptions. It talks about the rise of any number of other threats and problems and things of that sort. Five years is forever, especially when you're trying to do something that is less than 1,000 square feet. It's not rocket science, and yet she would face more than four years of navigating processes through City Hall, and so that to me was the point where this piece feels hopeful.
This piece feels like where we can get to, and I think even the city of Vancouver is taking steps to get there. Denver has definitely made huge strides. We see some statewide action that is making this more possible. Are we getting close to turning a corner on this, where people can go and do fancy architectural stuff in this article, but people are also able to go and do what Chuck would say are the penny-loafer version.
If this is the Gucci version, and there's always going to be a market for Gucci, but his point in The Housing Trap is we actually created the conditions in which we said everybody should be like Gucci or just below Gucci, and we ruled out this whole subclass of great housing options that just didn't meet what I often see in even the vision of some of my city leaders. They say, well, I want everyone to have a house and a life just like me, and then we always will ask, well, did you ever live in a place that was 500 square feet?
Well, yeah, when I was in college, I rented this tiny little shack and met my friends and it was great, but nobody should have to live that way. One, a lot of people would love to live that way, and two, if you needed it, surely at your stage in life, almost certainly everyone else or many other people have that same need and same desire. So, yeah, I just hope. I mean, Tamara, maybe I'll ask you the same question: Are we starting to make progress?
Absolutely, we're making tons of progress, especially here in BC, with province-wide legislative change that has required all municipalities to change what their local zoning bylaws are, and yeah, ADUs really aren't even a question anymore here. But they might not be as familiar from one city to the next, and there are lots of those penny loafer options out there. ADUs from a design and regulatory perspective are actually pretty straightforward. I think that the that what's next on the horizon is coming to more standardization and simple plug and play models for backyard duplo.
For other types of infill form that actually provide for even more housing, so yeah, ADUs are simple. It should just be considered a given. But I'm functioning in a little bit of a bubble here, and I know that's not the case for all Strong Towns listeners.
Small Housing is being consulted by a lot of municipalities across the province who are saying, "All right, we understand the rules changed. Help us understand how we can now apply these rule changes. Mary, do you want to share? That's a big part of your work as well as leading people into best practices, but also doing so in a way that doesn't stir up this sense.
Oh, we've changed everything, or this is meant to favor some subclass of our of our community. Can you share how to make this so normal that it's just the background thing that nobody even takes note of? I feel that really matters as we try to do this work.
Colorado has a strong sentiment running through the state of a preference for local control, and so the statewide initiatives are sometimes really challenging. But I think some of the most successful legislation that the state has passed is more in the carrots bucket, or incentives, and so the state passed this idea of ADU-supportive jurisdictions, and it's a classification that different jurisdictions can meet, and if they do, they have access to different grants. It's not grants for individual homeowners to build; it's grants for the jurisdiction to take it even further.
So, one example is it could fund the creation of pre-approved plans that residents would potentially benefit from, and so I think that is a really great sign of progress, as part of that. Denver, as a city, invests a lot in housing. A lot of it is in gap financing for bigger projects, and I think that's important and laudable.
But I keep thinking about this thought that was triggered, I think, by Escaping the Housing Trap around this triple-net approach of what this incremental housing does in terms of creating additional places for people to live, creating stability for homeowners who might otherwise have to leave their home because they can't age in place or because property taxes are going up, and so it creates this other stream of income. That's the second benefit, and the third benefit is the overall increase in property value and building that resiliency in our cities.
It just seems like there should be some portion of funding if we're going to be investing in housing to do it in a way that has this sort of triple bottom line benefit, as opposed to an approach that does create more housing units, which is important. But a lot of that gap funding and a lot of the funding that goes into those projects also exits the community because there are a lot of investors at different scales putting money into those projects, and so thinking about it beyond just the terms of how many units are we creating, to what is the overall benefit that's coming out of this work?
Something came up for me as you were saying that piece, Mary, and I think another important piece to consider is that within the financing for new housing production. Sometimes we, think about what the government investment is in housing and how much government money is being used to support housing production. One of the most important selling features for gentle density and incremental homeowner led development is that we are able to tap a completely different set of capital: equity from these homeowners to help support the housing development ecosystem.
So these are monies that would otherwise not be available and that are trapped as equity in somebody's property, so it is a massive boon to the supply possibilities when you can bring that money into the mix as well. I think that's not something that I've seen any government really be able to wrap their heads around yet.
Well, and that stands out: if the two big problems are land price and building cost, We can actually do this amazing thing with an existing homeowner, which is, hey, the land price has already been dealt with. We rarely get into a situation where the problem that we're going to face, half of it has already been dealt with decades ago or years ago. This couple bought in 2011, before a spike. They bought for $600,000 in LA.
Oh, that worked. Good money, good timing. It's interesting. It's not backdating a problem.
It's actually creating this situation, which you've just taken a significant portion of the problem away, and now you've still got building costs. You've still got a process to go through. But I do think that this is one of those sweet spots that can really work well in a lot of our communities, and this is where Ashley Salvador. I reference this frequently.
She's a council member in Edmonton, Alberta, and she did a master's thesis on who is it that's building backyard cottages or backyard suites, and she asked, "What are they renting it for? Who are they renting it to, and third, how many vehicles do they typically have in those backyard units? The answer on vehicles was surprisingly very few. On who do they rent to?
Most of it was friends and family. What do they rent for? A significant number were at no cost or next to nothing, a nominal fee. Okay, so now not only have we dealt with the land problem of not actually being a problem right now, because land then serves as the base from which you can borrow, but it also creates the conditions which people, in their own best interest, are creating mutually beneficial relationships with people that are moving in and sharing in what they're doing and really helping that way, so that they're not having to maximize the rent taken in order to basically break even on a brand new project.
Mary, what about for you?
There are two threads there that I wanted to pick up on. One relates to something, Tamara, that you said in the beginning: they were able to buy for $615,000 in 2011 in LA, and that's the comparison price point in the article to the $600,000 accessory dwelling unit that they built. Not what their home is valued at today, which I'm sure is significantly higher. My conservative guess, having not looked it up, would be at least double, and so the relative cost of their ADU isn't, “Wow, this cost almost as much as their house.” It's that this cost a half to a third as much as their existing home value.
Then the other piece that you were talking about, in terms of who folks with these accessory dwelling units are renting to: I just think that there are so many chain effects from that, because you have that community that's built in by having a friend or a family member, somebody living there, but also there's the place that person would have been living otherwise that is now available, and so I think there's a lot of chain reactions that come out of this work.
You're essentially providing affordable housing that does not show up in the data, and doing it on your own dollar with very little government investment required. So, if you can think about what types of government investment can stimulate the market shift and some of the structural pieces that are needed to incentivize more of this type of housing to come online, it's a massive multiplier effect in terms of what the housing output is at the end of the day.
Where does that threshold for requiring subsidy rest? In the Lower Mainland in British Columbia, it feels as if your household income is about $100,000 or less, you require subsidy. That is a much bigger portion of the population than it would be if we could somehow bring that requirement of subsidy level down to say $50,000 household income. You then put into play a lot more people who are able to do it.
You also remove people from waiting lists. You create the conditions in which a scarce product, public subsidy for housing, can be applied in very focused ways, rather than, well, shucks, we've got to provide first-time homebuyers credits for everybody, which we know just drives up the price, but at least it gets them in. We've got to get into our way of, well, what if we just cut GST, and what if in government sales tax in our area, what if we begin all of these things to just try to bring the cost down, and well, we can also allow this, and so it's not a silver bullet solution.
Laneway homes in Vancouver are an example where, as difficult as they were to get built, just the fact that they could start to be constructed in sites that met the criteria meant that over time, they began to pop up. But it was not a flood, not a tsunami, not a deluge that no neighborhood could recover from. Instead, it began to percolate, and I see this when I go for walks in my neighborhood now. Ever since the province, I'm maybe a very eager observer of this, but from the point that the province said, "Hey, this is now allowed, and the city of Delta updated official community plan from 13 low-density residential zones to one.
The result has been: I go and I see the indicator species of life occurring. It's all of a sudden as if we've removed that blanket, and the grass is coming back. It was always going to happen. That demand was always cooped up, and these are people building on that opportunity.
Some people are buying the lot and doing the conversions. Others are just, "Oh, Grandma, you want to move in? I think we found a solution. That, to me, is what stands out.
Before we go into the downside, I do want to pick up one last element, especially from you, Mary, because your company, 12 Incorporated, is based on permaculture and a lot of those core insights there, and there was a great section where they talked about the fact that this couple posted on Craigslist and a Buy Nothing group: free garage and the concrete it sits on because they had to remove a structure on the property in order to then build this new garage-home combo. Do you want to share where that goes?
Because people were able to reuse the studs, they took the light fixtures, the shelving, the wiring, even the bent garage door left the site and didn't have to be hauled off to the dump. We've got to be doing better with this, especially in Vancouver where we've got old-growth fir that we chop down mountainsides to build these homes, and then we say, what if we just toss it in the dump? This fires me up. This could be a whole other topic, but Mary, you go first, and then Tamara.
We're all chomping at the bit on this one.
One of the 12 principles of permaculture design is do not waste, and so this definitely jumped out to me in the article. Part of me wished that this was the focus of the article was just tracing the life cycle of these materials, but the idea of taking something that not only would just be waste, but also be another line item of cost in the development for demolition and haul-off. That's actually contributing to the new life cycle of something else. Another principle is value the marginal and use the edges, and so finding out ways to reuse some of these pieces, I think, is really in line with that as well.
It sounded as if one was going, I think you mentioned, to an artist studio in the desert. I think there are people who, it's great to sell these and put these back in the community for free. I think there's also probably an opportunity to sell some of it too, and to reduce your costs that way.
Tamara, you're working with existing homeowners, helping people. I'm sure some of them are saying, "Well, we got this old shed. We can't stick a match in it anymore." That's what we did with our farmhouse when we replaced it.
But that was a scary moment.
I think there's a great place now for house movers and relocation initiatives and some good organizations that are popping up to be able to support that. So yeah, we should absolutely be looking at the housing resources we have, and if we can keep it as housing and located elsewhere, absolutely, that's the right move to make.
What it also allows is, in this case, a community spirit. People were traipsing in and responding. I love that it was in the buy nothing groups where there are people who are already thinking that way, and all right, let's work together. Let's make this a win for us as we do that.
So, just before I say something on that—
Sorry for interrupting, but I think that there's something with incremental development within neighborhoods that really does add vibrancy. Whether it is somebody doing something in their backyard and everyone else is peeping to see what it is, and they're all worried at first, but then they look at it and say, “Oh, I want to do that too.” There's another family that moves into the neighborhood, and often provides opportunities for younger folks to move into neighborhoods. I think if we're considering our neighborhoods as these static spaces that are cast in amber, there's something wrong there.
They're supposed to be living and evolving, and you use the term indicator species of life, and I see infill kind of in the same way that we shouldn't be monocropping. We should really have this diversity of species in our neighborhoods to demonstrate the vitality and resilience and productivity of these spaces.
You're not scraping the entire block. You're not completely ripping up the entire tree canopy. I actually see a lot of projects that are very clearly oriented to save a mature tree because that's a core part of making that backyard renovation work really well. Or I'd love to see a lot more front yards because we still have these ridiculous front yard setbacks that are designed.
I don't know. I have my reasons why I'm very critical of that because that's a lot of wasted space. I was up in Port Alberni, British Columbia. Port Alberni is a mill town.
It's really struggling in a lot of ways economically, and they have these massive front yards, massive streets, and then another massive front yard. The homes are so far apart, you probably need a telescope to be able to tell if a neighbor's home. In that context, hey, we could probably reuse some of this and actually boost the municipal tax base. It could really help each other and, I think, build community.
If we can park an RV there, we can put a house there, and that to me would feel like a good performance metric. Is it something that one of those large RVs can manage? Hey, then we're totally fine. That is just a way forward for us.
I hear it and I see a piece like this, and this gives me hope. This feels like the process of normalization is well underway, and Mary, that's a core part of your work. So why don't you jump in with final thoughts as well?
I just wanted to share some work that is happening in Denver that I'm pretty excited about. They're working on a project called Unlocking Housing Choices citywide, and they've broken it up into two phases.
In recent years, we've had a lot of projects where people are coming in and scraping older homes that provide a little more naturally occurring affordability in the communities, and putting in million-dollar-a-side duplexes, and that's been really tough, both economically on people, but also the rapid cultural shifts in the neighborhoods, and so with this first phase of this unlocking housing choices, Denver's allowing multiple dwelling units per lot, but requiring either that one of the units be income-restricted affordable housing or that the existing unit be preserved, as a way to dissuade those scrapes, and so it is really promoting that incremental, slower infill that isn't just wholesale removal of what existed before, but is allowing the process to start in a slower way before it opens up more widely a few years down the road, and so that just feels like a really sensitive way to approach the work.
I think the city's doing a great job; they're on a good track.
I love that. Tamara, just to brag on Vancouver a little bit, can you share a little bit about what they've done with heritage homes and the capacity that they've created for homeowners that are in heritage-designated homes.
Absolutely. Heritage homeowners can put in a backyard ADU and can stratify it so it's actually available for ownership. So it really helps to incentivize the construction by creating a cost-recovery model that is much more attractive than the trickle of rent income that you would be getting otherwise, and it's a model that we would like to see more broadly adopted and not just for heritage homeowners.
The front of the home retains a lot of its character, its features, and then the back end, kind of like a mullet, you can do whatever you want back there, and it's really cool because then you get this great persistence of the street presence. It still feels familiar, but you've souped up the underworkings of it, and now all of a sudden it's capable of accommodating more people. It becomes a lifeline for people who own a heritage property that is maybe starting to be dilapidated. You don't just have to do the same thing with the building, because we've never treated buildings that way in human history.
They are shells in which we do lots of different things, and if we can retain that, it will certainly help us. All right, this has been awesome we're going to go into the down zone and just for fun, I'm going to play sound effect because why not? Let's go. Which is the opposite, I guess.
It should be chill. I got to find one that is chill. But we are now in the down zone. Tamara, do you want to start?
What is something that you're taking in or excited about that you just want to share as your Downzone item today?
I am fully immersed in co-housing these days, so models for micro-community and revillaging neighborhoods. I think this is kind of one of the gold standards for city and community planners, and certainly something that I've dreamed of making happen since I was in my early 20s. My partner and I are currently building a co-housing project here on Vancouver Island in Courtney, and we are looking for our future neighbors. If it's any of the listeners out there, go to justupthewblock.com and come check us out.
It's been such a whirlwind of a ride to be on the developer side for the first time and put that hat on. What a learning curve it is! I have so much more respect for the developer community, having been through the amount of this development process that I've been through, and being able to do it with real purpose in mind, and knowing that we're going to be building a connected neighborhood for my daughter to grow up in, and for me to enjoy and thrive in. It's kind of a dream come true, even though it hasn't fully come to fruition.
We'll be moving our first household in next spring.
I love it. I got to convince my wife. Let's move. Then Mary, over to you.
Totally. That's awesome. I'm coming too. You've got Norm and I signed up already.
Similarly, work in various forms is my Downzone and Upzone, but I just started teaching this fall, for the first time, a real estate and development finance course at the School of Architecture and Planning with the University of Colorado, and so really excited about that and to be working with folks who are at an earlier point in their careers, most of them are students of urban and regional planning. We have some other disciplines in there, and I'm just really excited at their interest in learning the development side of things.
I think that's so important to have that interdisciplinary understanding and to take the scariness out of a pro forma, and so that's what I'm working on and enjoying in my free time.
It would be intriguing to compare what the curriculum was like 30 years ago compared to what it's now become, and that too I think gives me hope for optimism as well, and certainly is exciting. Normally, I do fun stuff, but I can't help but plug the Voters' Guide to Asking Candidates About Housing. It is a Small Housing BC tool that's been put together in collaboration with Strong Towns, so we participated in it together. But we have municipal elections in British Columbia.
A number of other municipalities or regions are going to be having municipal elections, and so we wanted to say, how do we put in front of candidates good questions to ask them? But my favorite part of it, and this is something everybody should be doing, is not just asking a question, but there are these great explainer boxes, that explain why this matters, and it helps candidates for local office, some of whom are running just to save a neighborhood park. It helps them to understand why this also matters and helps them understand why we need to do everything that we just talked about in our session today.
Definitely check out the Voters' Guide to Asking Candidates About Housing. It's on the Small Housing website under toolbox. Smallhousing.ca. You can definitely go find it there.
It's an awesome piece of work that Tamara's done, along with Dan Weiner, Stephen Watts, and Bridget, I think, another person on the team. So excellent stuff, great resources. Please do check out Small Housing. They've got an awesome toolbox, and it's got a lot of different guides and resources.
I think you guys are really good at collecting resources from other jurisdictions and bringing them in. Then Mary's work with 12 Incorporated is excellent as well. You're mainly in Colorado and now teaching in Colorado. But yeah, people can reach out if they want to get in touch with you as well.
With that, thank you both for coming on Upzoned today.
Thanks so much, Norm.
Thank you so much for having us on. It was a really fun conversation and great to meet Mary. I think we will make fast friends.
Love it. I hope that the takeaway for everyone is not how to lose $300,000 on a housing project. Instead, it's how to make meaningful progress in our communities so that we can see the next increment of development actually occur in our communities. Sometimes it'll be painful.
Sometimes it'll be costly. Sometimes it'll be perfect. In all cases, it will have been a step in the right direction in so many different ways. With that, thanks for listening to Upzoned this week.
Please do come back next week. Same Bat Cave, new crew, but the same format. I'm just really excited for this work. As you do so, take care and take care of your places.
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/member.