Urban Math: the multiplying power of small scale multi-family

[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

The backyard would have more space if the building was moved closer to the street. I'm not saying that outdoor space should be reduced, just that the building should be closer to the street.

Yes very true. If all the space was consolidated it would be much more useful than a little bit in two or more places. Plus backyards can easily be more communal if people take down their fences. I spent part of my childhood in a duplex and there was no separation between the two backyards or between that of the other duplex next to ours allowing the kids to circulate freely. We thought it was great. Plus the adults regularly talked to each other from the back decks when hanging out clothes and stuff. So it's really a matter of implementation.

Front yards can be useful for kids in a similar way if it's not too busy a street, but otherwise balls can roll out onto the road, there's more noise and exhaust, you have strangers passing by on the sidewalk, etc. so it's less optimal.

[homebucket]

Originally Posted by JManc

That's a hot take because that particular example (Philly) is not that attractive of a streetscape while the Wrigleyville street is picturesque.

This one looks pretty nice: https://goo.gl/maps/pWwJU15fJmnYNM5S8

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

Plus backyards can easily be more communal if people take down their fences.

that's extraordinarily rare in chicago from my experiences.

less so out in the burbs, but i ain't living in no fucking burb

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

Front yards can be useful for kids in a similar way if it's not too busy a street

i think it's pretty clear from context that i've been talking about quiet residential sidestreets, not busy commercial main streets.

[JManc]

My apartment here in the Bay Area is right next the sidewalk and I hear every car or truck go by..or the neighbor bringing their garbage cans out front. Where as my house in Houston has a big front yard and much more insulated from the street noise. The trees in front yard also blunt some of the harsh sunlight too.

Originally Posted by homebucket

This one looks pretty nice: https://goo.gl/maps/pWwJU15fJmnYNM5S8

Yeah, I could def. live there.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

the overwhelming majority of chicago flat buildings (like >95%), have interior front staircases, so your unit's front door would open onto the stair hall, not directly to the exterior.

for the back stair, they are very frequently of the open variety, with attached porches, though sometimes people enclose them for weather protection purposes.


here's our building's back stair, it's obviously "open" style:

I wouldn't be ok with people being (theoretically) able to walk up to my window and look in.

[Steely Dan]

^ well, as i said, there are A LOT of 2 and 3 flats around town with "enclosed" back stairs/porches for weather protection, extra storage space, and i guess maybe to prevent people being (theoretically) able to walk up to their window and look in.

i myself much prefer the "open" style as it provides additional outdoor space.

also, all of our windows have shades for when we want privacy.

[JManc]

Originally Posted by mhays

I wouldn't be ok with people being (theoretically) able to walk up to my window and look in.

You should visit the Netherlands. Homes are right on the sidewalks and they tend to have huge plate glass windows...wide open half the time.

[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

I 1000% prefer the first one.

In Romania, you often have the worst of both worlds: setbacks, but with fences going up to the sidewalk.
https://www.google.com/maps/@44.4358...7i16384!8i8192

(this is the street my mom grew up)

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by SIGSEGV

In Romania, you often have the worst of both worlds: setbacks, but with fences going up to the sidewalk.
https://www.google.com/maps/@44.4358...7i16384!8i8192

(this is the street my mom grew up)

That looks very Latin American.

[bilbao58]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

the overwhelming majority of chicago flat buildings (like >95%), have interior front staircases, so your unit's front door would open onto the stair hall, not directly to the exterior.

for the back stair, they are very frequently of the open variety, with attached porches, though sometimes people enclose them for weather protection purposes.


here's our building's back stair, it's obviously "open" style:

Chicago does that three-story/three-flat thing really well. Your photo reminds me of the back of the 3-flat building my sister lived in years ago. This street view shows the fronts on the block she lived on.



ETA: I remember standing on the balcony out back at night listening to a fog horn on the lake.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by bilbao58

Chicago does that three-story/three-flat thing really well.

the "chicago 3-flat", the "boston triple-decker", the "montreal tri-plex".

any other cities where this "3 homes stacked on top of each other" arrangement is so common that it has its own local name?


it's a really nice middle ground between maximum-density full-blown apartment blocks and detached SFHs. they can allow for the necessary unit density to make things more functionally urban at the neighbrohood level, while still sorta maintaining the scale, feeling and intimacy of a SFH neighborhood.

for instance, without ever being taught/told to do so, my kids both instinctively refer to our 3-flat unit as "our house", not "our building" or "our apartment". it's totally not a "house" in the conventionally understood way, but because it is small-scale, with some small shared yard spaces and a somewhat individualized sense of place to it, these kinds of buildings do blur the lines nicely, particularly because they can work really well for city families by often being larger than units in a typical apartment block (and also WAY more affordable than a detached SFH).

it's like they took a regular old bungalow, and then just multiplied it vertically by 3.

[MPLS_Const_Watch]

Great discussion in this thread. As a fellow missing-middle resident with kids, I agree with a lot of the points here.

In Minneapolis, the vernacular is duplex, triplex, fourplex instead of 2-flat, etc. We have tons of historic duplexes and fourplexes, while older triplexes here tend to be mostly duplexes which were later converted. Like in Chicago, units in small scale multifamily are typically family-sized.

Duplexes are typically originally 2-3 bedrooms. Unlike the traditional flat-roofed 2- and 3-flats in Chicago, older duplexes here typically have steeply-pitched gable roofs like an SFH. For the most part these roofs were built as full height attics with full staircases, but left unfinished initially. Most have been finished off, and while some have been finished off as a third unit (often illegally), more commonly they are finished as part of the upper unit, resulting in quite a few duplexes where the upper unit is a 2-floor 4- or even 5-bedroom unit.

Fourplexes are almost always 2-beds, though some 1-bed fourplexes do exist. Two units per floor, two floors, flat roof. A fair number of fourplexes here have had a 5th or sometimes 6th unit added in the basement. Buildings originally built with 6 units are less common, but are almost always the same form as the 2-bed fourplexes, just with a third floor on top. 8-unit buildings, where you have 4 units per floor, are generally the smallest building type that were traditionally built out with 1-bedroom units.

I much prefer Chicago's tradition of smaller and more functional front yards than Minneapolis' of larger and less utilized front yards. Even in our neighborhoods where larger missing middle buildings result in back yards that are very small or nonexistent, the cultural focus really is on the back yard and not the front. Front porches are common and get a lot of use, but the culture of small front yard patios, usable gardens, low decorative fences, etc. that is common in many of Chicago's missing middle neighborhoods does not exist here.

[Steely Dan]

^ good stuff!

Originally Posted by MPLS_Const_Watch

Fourplexes are almost always 2-beds, though some 1-bed fourplexes do exist. Two units per floor, two floors, flat roof. A fair number of fourplexes here have had a 5th or sometimes 6th unit added in the basement. Buildings originally built with 6 units are less common, but are almost always the same form as the 2-bed fourplexes, just with a third floor on top. 8-unit buildings, where you have 4 units per floor, are generally the smallest building type that were traditionally built out with 1-bedroom units.

i don't know if this is exactly the kind of 8-unit building you're talking about, but when i was in college up in St. Paul, myself and a lot of my friends lived in buildings like these:

https://www.google.com/maps/@44.9401...7i16384!8i8192

4 units per floor, for a total of 8 "regular" units (and yes, usually 1 or 2 "illegal" garden units down in the basement). in the particular buildings pictured above, the front units were all 1-beds + den (which college kids all used as a 2nd bedroom) and the rear units were straight-up 1-beds.

i don't remember if it's a common typology over in minneapolis too, but these things (and variations of them) line grand avenue through the west side of st. paul.

they are certainly a solid unit-density increaser, but i don't recall many families with children living in them because of the smaller unit size, at least not where we were at around macalester college, where they seemed to be overwhelmingly college/grad students and young single 20-somethings.

[Doady]

Compare Mississauga to Aurora or Naperville, 2.4k per sqkm vs. 1.5 per sqkm. Does 328 high rises vs. 2 and 1 high-rises really make that big difference? 50 times the high-rises per capita, but 1.6 times the density.

I think biggest difference maker is transit, and that is where Mississauga is still lacking compared to a real city like Chicago. Reduce the parking demand, get rid of the parking lots around offices and retail, building housing closer to the offices and retail, that is how you increase the density more directly and make the city more walkable.

More multi-family doesn't mean anything except to reduce walking distances to transit. Even small reduction can have a HUGE effect on transit ridership. That is why Mississauga Transit has twice the ridership of the entire Pace system (approx 60 million boardings vs. 30 million boardings in 2019). Increasing multifamily along arterial roads and can increase transit ridership and so increase the density, but that is only an indirect effect, and it is merely one factor in ridership.

More multi-family strategically placed around transit corridors and stations is good, but even that is only one element of several TOD measures. A far more important TOD concept is "permeability": the ability for pedestrians and buses to travel directly through the urban environment in a straight line without obstruction. That means having side streets and arterial roads spaced closer together, and even building pedestrian walkways to connect to the arterial roads if the side street doesn't connect to the arterial. In other words, increasing the amount of streets, sidewalks, and transit corridors within a given area.

I think if you really want to increase the density, think not about the amount of units on a lot, think more about the size of that lot, the size of that block. The biggest problem with the post-war suburb, the main thing that separates it from the pre-war inner city, it is not the lack of multifamily, it's the huge size of the blocks due to lack of concern about permeability or even deliberate attempt to reduce permeability, which is exacerbated by the bigger lots. It's not high-rises but permeability that is the real reason for the lower density and transit ridership in Aurora and Naperville compared to Mississauga, and the increased car dependence itself is not only further limiting the density in Aurora and Naperville, but across the entire Chicago region.

Increase the permeability of neighbourhoods, increase the transit ridership, reduce the parking demand, to reduce the size and amount of parking lots in commercial areas, that is the most important thing to increase density. I see it every day here in Mississauga. It's not the density of residential areas that's the biggest problem, it's the density of commercial areas that is limiting the overall density the most. The retail buildings surrounded by a sea of parking lots, the complete lack of office towers because of the huge parking garages that would be required, those are the problems that we should be focusing most on.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by MPLS_Const_Watch

Duplexes are typically originally 2-3 bedrooms. Unlike the traditional flat-roofed 2- and 3-flats in Chicago, older duplexes here typically have steeply-pitched gable roofs like an SFH. For the most part these roofs were built as full height attics with full staircases, but left unfinished initially. Most have been finished off, and while some have been finished off as a third unit (often illegally), more commonly they are finished as part of the upper unit, resulting in quite a few duplexes where the upper unit is a 2-floor 4- or even 5-bedroom unit.

A LOT of flat-roofed chicago 2 & 3-flats have had the 1st floor unit combined with a finished basement level to make for pretty spacious 2-floor units, known in the local real estate market as a "duplex down". other, usually newer-build, 2 & 3-flats sometimes have a loft level on the roof that the top floor unit is combined with to make for a 2-floor "duplex-up" unit. (like NYC, the word "duplex" in chicago means a 2-floor unit, not a 2-unit building).

my family has a 3-bed/3-bath 2,300 SF "duplex down" unit in a vintage chicago 3-flat. in a lot of ways, our home isn't radically different than a typical chicago bungalow with a finished basement, except that we have neighbors in the two units above us instead of an attic. when most outsiders hear "we live in a condo in the city", they usually aren't picturing a unit as large as ours.




it makes for a vey blurry line between a conventional city apartment and a full-blown detached SFH; true "missing middle" style housing, and as i pointed out earlier in the thread when i compared my multi-family street to a typical outer bungalow belt street in chicago, this style of housing can have a very meaningful impact on population density, and, by extension, the level of functional urbanism in a given neighborhood.

[jmecklenborg]

A coworker just told me that his daughter just moved back in to his 2-bedroom house, along with her five kids, aged 8-13 (yes, she had 5 kids in 5 years and one of the dads is in prison).

So they have 7 people living in a 2-bedroom house...the three girls are sleeping in bedroom #2, the daughter is in the den, and the boys are in the basement. His mortgage payment? $490.

I'm posting this to illustrate what I mentioned earlier in this thread - that the SFH is a much more flexible housing type than an apartment (and especially a professionally managed apartment, which is less likely to bend on the lease).

[homebucket]

Must be nice to have a basement. A place where you can go to have discreet conversations, as long as your lamp doesn't get bugged or something.

[Steely Dan]

^^ neat anecdote.

but if your co-worker's home was ripped down and replaced by a 3-flat (three - 2 or 3-bed units), that property would house more people, on average.

1 SFH x 2.5 people = 2.5 people
3 MFHs x 2.0 people = 6 people

and that was the point of this thread: small-scale multi-family can be a serious density increaser over conventional detached SFHs when done at scale, while still retaining some of the scale, character, and "individualization" of SFH streets that many families seem to desire.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

A coworker just told me that his daughter just moved back in to his 2-bedroom house, along with her five kids, aged 8-13 (yes, she had 5 kids in 5 years and one of the dads is in prison).

So they have 7 people living in a 2-bedroom house...the three girls are sleeping in bedroom #2, the daughter is in the den, and the boys are in the basement. His mortgage payment? $490.

I'm posting this to illustrate what I mentioned earlier in this thread - that the SFH is a much more flexible housing type than an apartment (and especially a professionally managed apartment, which is less likely to bend on the lease).

Eh, you'd be surprised at how many people a Dominican family in the Bronx can fit into a 2-bedroom apartment... without the luxury of a basement lol.

[Chef]

One of the exciting things that is happening in Minneapolis now is that local developers seem to have found a formula for building new missing middle housing so we are starting to see it crop up in increasing numbers on lots that were single family houses. Most of it looks like this - not beautiful but it works:

https://www.google.com/maps/@44.9621...7i16384!8i8192