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Building More “Missing Middle Housing” Typologies
Daniel Parolek
Author, Missing Middle Housing
‘Missing Middle Housing’ refers to a range of house-scale buildings with multiple units—duplexes, fourplexes, cottage courts, and multiplexes—that fit seamlessly into existing residential neighborhoods and support walkability, locally-serving retail, and public transportation options. The housing types are “missing” because they have typically been illegal to build since the mid-1940s and “Middle” because they sit in the middle of a spectrum between detached single-family homes and mid-rise to high-rise apartment buildings. These ‘middle’ housing types have delivered affordable, high-quality housing choices to middle income households for decades, and can continue to be an ‘affordable-by-design’ solution to address the growing housing affordability crisis in America.
As author of Missing “Middle Housing: Thinking Big and Building Small to Respond to Today’s Housing Crisis,” and founder of Opticos Design, Dan Parolek works with cities across the country to remove barriers and provide incentives for ‘Missing Middle Housing’ types through planning, zoning, policy changes, in addition to working with developers to design and deliver much-needed and innovative Missing Middle housing choices on projects, including Culdesac Tempe (Phoenix), Daybreak (Salt Lake City), and Prairie Queen (Omaha).
