Jump-Starting Small-Scale Urbanism

welcome everyone to on the Park Bench a Public Square conversation brought to you by the Congress for the new urbanism on the Park Bench presents interactive conversations with thought leaders in New urbanism and Allied Industries providing an opportunity for the audience to engage in real time uh the webinar series is a platform for seeing new members to engage debate and collaborate on the pressing issues of the day today's webinar is jump starting small-scale urbanism it is with Brian Falk and Kevin klinkenberg uh if you have thoughts you can share your thoughts on on the park bench at tinyurl.com otpb feedback and be sure to join us for our upcoming webinars on Tuesday December 6th you can join us for zoning that supports physical activity with Dr Jamie shrieke a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago and she will discuss cdc-funded research that measures zoning reform Nationwide lean to ordinances ordinances calling for infrastructure that supports walking and biking and on December 13th you can join us for authors Forum place and prosperity with author William Fulton and CNU co-founder Elizabeth Moore as they discuss place and prosperity how cities help us connect and innovate this is Fulton's book and it distills what he has learned as a preeminent writer on urbanism as a planner as a former mayor and as an academic and you can see all of our on the park benches at cnu.org resources slash on the park bench and this is a reminder to submit your projects for the 2023 Charter Awards these submissions are due December 16 2022 uh projects that make places accessible and Equitable and embody a wide range of Charter of the new urbanism principles are strongly encouraged to apply we also accept student projects and you can learn more and submit your project at cnu.org Charter Awards and now for today's webinar we are joined by Brian Falk Brian is director of the non-profit project for lean urbanism and the Center for Applied transect studies he lectures internationally on the topic of lean urbanism and offers technical assistance to municipalities that recognize the value of small-scale Economic Development and want to create pink zones to enable it in their communities and Kevin klinkenberg for 25 years Kevin has worked as an urban designer planner and architect he's worked in the private public and non-profit sectors and now leads Midtown KC now as executive director his past experience includes 10 years as a partner and co-founder of 180 Urban Design and architecture in Kansas City which worked on projects in 27 States for all manner of public and private clients while living in Savannah Georgia Kevin led the sun development and renewal Authority as executive director for four years he's also worked on his own as K2 Urban Design with a goal to help public and private agencies make the position to the next generation of Planning and Development Kevin has also authored why I walk taking a step to in the right direction and the house hacking manual and I'm Lauren Mayer Communications manager at CNU and I will now turn it over to Kevin and Brian to start their presentations thank you Lauren it's very nice to be here with you today we appreciate the invitation to come and talk with you so I will share my screen does that look good all good great so I'll start first with um with an introduction to lean urbanism uh first of all lean urbanism recognizes the value of small-scale Economic Development and it provides methods to make that Economic Development possible uh I mean by that entrepreneurship but for the purpose of this discussion we'll focus primarily on the small-scale real estate development this first point you see there CNU has published a couple articles recently um on the topic uh hopefully to new urbanists we don't need to spend a lot of time talking about uh the benefits of a finer grain for good urbanism and walkability uh but all my slides not advancing just a moment there we go uh but CNU was published a couple uh really good articles on that recently uh one on the uh opportunities of of allies and Muse and and so forth uh and the other on uh the potential of interblock development sorry my screen's not advancing there we go and uh Kevin also uh wrote an excellent blog post a while back uh about the value of small parcels and so I would recommend that all of you go and check out these resources um regarding the uh the second and third points there on that list uh strong towns a really great advocacy organization and urban three have both done excellent work on um uh analyzing and presenting resources and information about those so I would direct you to strong Townsend Urban 3 for those as well that following point about the value of keeping wealth local uh we have a paper on our website that was written by Ann Daigle it's called The Lean business of place-based Enterprise I think that's an excellent resource if people are looking for information about that it a a couple primary points from it though are that almost all businesses have fewer than 20 employees so almost all businesses are small and that those businesses uh the smaller ones the locally owned businesses return 52 to 79 percent of their revenue to the local community versus only 14 from the larger nationally owned companies uh that's one paper that you'll find on the uh on our website uh you can go and find about I think 30 other position papers and case studies if you'd like more information about uh the value of small-scale urbanism this final point you see here about um about inclusivity and more participation is also really important what we're talking about is uh uh the difference between small scale and large-scale projects for the large scale projects the local communities involvement usually amounts to little more than uh giving their feedback at public Outreach meetings and either supporting or opposing projects but with small scale projects we're allowing more people to actually participate in building in building their homes their businesses their communities and and so that leads to enabling community-led growth and these are important not only for the strength of the community but also issues related to equity avoiding displacement uh to preserving or changing neighborhood character but based on what the community desires to lean urbanism also recognizes the obstacles that are faced by small-scale Economic Development the first two points you see here go together we have to recognize that when a city puts the same requirements on all projects regardless of scale that those requirements Place disproportionate burdens on the smaller projects and therefore privilege the larger projects what that creates is a system that excludes those that have fewer resources and in fact this closed system often requires the wrong types of resources so for example rather than knowing how to run a business to build or develop a project to be landlords what this system requires is that the project leaders know the rules that they have expertise in navigating the complex systems that they've instituted so um if a if an individual or if a company has enough resources they can hire this expertise but if not then they just have to figure that out they have to figure out how to navigate that process to learn what all the rules are and that unfortunately takes time that most businesses uh most small projects don't have so lean urbanism Works to make this small-scale Economic Development possible it does that by focusing on low-cost or no cost techniques that lower barriers to entry that create situations where all projects compete on a Level Playing Field regardless of scale where the processes of uh of development are easier faster and cheaper for the small projects at small town I'm sorry strong towns has done a really great job of uh documenting the power of small-scale Economic Development and what lean urbanism does is it lets communities unleash that power so at the project for lean urbanism we raise awareness of the value of small-scale economic development of the obstacles it faces and we provide free tools to make it possible we've also heard from people who would like to have pink zones in their community so they could employ lean urbanism strategies but either aren't able to or don't want to do it themselves so we also provide technical assistance to help with that so on our website you'll find our free toolkit the project for lean urbanism is a non-profit program so all the tools are free we've created six of them so far you see them there but we're adding more more will be available uh as time goes by so if you want to stay up to date sign up on the website and we'll do that also on in that tools section on our website you'll find a list of free resources that other organizations have created that we've compiled for your use so the two tools that uh Kevin and I will be talking about today are the Pink Zone manual and the house hacking catalog the pixel manual is our primary tool it offers a framework for implementing various tools and strategies to to make small possible a pink Zone if you're not familiar with it is an area where red tape is lightened it's an area where barriers are lowered where it's easier faster cheaper to create small businesses to develop small properties it's an area where new ideas are explored where new techniques are tested and it's almost always of a very small size so when you're thinking of the size of a pink Zone think of something smaller than a neighborhood scale for example the Pink Zone process has three parts to it the first part is the lean scan it's an assessment tool and uh its purpose is to identify obstacles in a local community to small-scale Economic Development also to identify assets that can be used and to identify a location for the Pink Zone the lean scan consists mostly of interviews it's meetings discussions with Municipal staff with local business owners with small-scale developers with lenders with the people who work in in that field this is an excerpt from uh from the manual you see here that that's the way it's laid out as a manual each section has specific steps in it and detailed instructions uh each section also has a checklist at the end to make sure that you're uh that you're doing what you need to do the second part of the pink zone is the workshop to create to actually create the Pink Zone so what you do is you take the info gathered in the lean scan and you bring to the table people who have the authority and the ability and the willingness to actually make the changes that are needed and you come to agreement on new protocols to remove those obstacles uh new urbanists might um it might help for new urbanists to to think of this as being a little bit like a charette except the difference is that it's geared more toward policy than it is toward design uh this section here in the manual includes guidance on how to choose the right format for the workshop and instructions for how to actually conduct it the third part of the process is putting the new protocols in place so this section includes instructions on how to write and implement the action plan on how to communicate with staff and entrepreneurs and small-scale developers in the community to make sure that everyone is aware of the new protocols and is taking advantage of them uh it also includes instructions on how to evaluate what works and what what doesn't how to make adjustments to it um the the results of this process for the community are that it gains momentum for redevelopment and the community members are now able to participate in this economic growth and those uh that that participation means not only that they're participating but also benefiting from that economic growth what the city gets is a replicable model this means that they learn what does and doesn't work and they can create other pink zones in the community or perhaps Implement some of those protocols city-wide the manual also includes a substantial appendix the appendix includes things like a checklist for for choosing the best Pink Zone locations it includes interview guides with questions for uh the different people you would be talking with and it also has an extensive list of the common obstacles that you'll encounter in a pink Zone process and strategies that you could employ uh to use it to to actually make the Pink Zone work that appendix also includes a section uh on meantime uses and I think this is uh important to bring up for the subject of jump starting small-scale urbanism we encountered a lot of property owners and prospective uh entrepreneurs Who had who had goals that were um maybe ambitious and the markets that they were working in weren't ready for the type of investment they had in mind for their projects and so a lot of these people assumed that their choices for their projects were binary it was 100 of what they wanted to do or it was zero percent and they would just decide that they could do it and do it all or they couldn't do anything and they would wait for the market to improve but the important point we wanted to make to them and especially to those who are looking to jump start small-scale urbanism is that there are a lot of things that can be done in the meantime and that's why we call them Mean Time uses that you can start small on projects you can take small steps to accomplish that goal rather than just one single big step you can start with the step that you can achieve and you can take the next step when it's affordable when it's justifiable when you have the resources to make it happen uh so the the examples here in this section uh in the appendix deal with both commercial and residential uh meantime uses I think that's a good segue uh to move on to the house hacking the house hacking catalog uh worked with and and known Kevin for a long time known that he's not only uh an accomplished architect and designer and uh uh uh organizational leader but also that he had done house hacking himself and uh that he is a moderator of uh uh Facebook group dedicated to house hacking and um I believe strongly that house hacking is an excellent way for uh community members to get on that first rung of the property ownership uh uh ladder but also for small-scale developers to take on their first projects and um I asked him to to come and work with this to create this house hacking catalog and I'll ask him now to step in and uh to explain exactly what it is so Kevin let me stop sharing my screen and I'll ask you to take over please all right well thanks Brian appreciate it um I can't say enough good things about the work that Brian and his group have done and you really should if you're interested in these issues dive over to the lean urbanism.org website the tools are fantastic in addition to this manual we also worked on a pink Zone together in Savannah Georgia and really learned a lot through that process and you know a lot of these tools maybe aren't um and even when I talk about house hacking may not be the most applicable if you're in one of the five or six really expensive Urban markets in the country um that um you know that are incredibly successful but for virtually anywhere else in the country um these ideas and these tools can work and they can help a wide variety of places so I'd really encourage everybody to take a look at the lean urbanism website all right let me see if I can uh make this happen um here there we go and I need to switch okay that look good uh Brian and everybody okay well um oops I want to head back up here to the beginning so house hacking is something that I um interestingly enough I guess I'd always been interested in um before there was really this kind of cool term for it and it's something that's really been with us for a very long time we've had this blip over the last I would say 50 to 70 years where the idea of home ownership and wealth building became a very singular idea of just kind of owning a single family house on its own lot and that was it but historically speaking what we're going to talk about today was incredibly common uh and I think it really hits the uh you know there's three bullet points that I think are incredibly important that I'll try to hit on today one is what Brian mentioned with this idea of creating fine-grained urbanism which is something all of us in the CNU I think really care uh care deeply about you know this notion of missing middle housing how do we actually create it who are the people that are really going to create it and my message today is the people are you it's it's you and me and us and all of us uh who will do this it's not the big developer who's going to create the missing middle um projects that we that we love so much and we'd like to see more of and also the the notion of building local wealth this is incredibly important as part of this topic and I think you'll see uh through some of the examples that I give and and how that ties to um really the incredible personal financial benefits of pursuing house hacking especially if you're able to do it a couple of times over the course of your life um so this one's a little bit uh a couple years old now but looking at just the the rise and Search terms for house hacking it's obviously become a very popular thing in the last few years seen a lot of articles about it real estate uh trade magazines and articles have really picked up on it and and why this is becoming a big deal this was the uh the original version we've got a new cover now that Brian has worked on for the house hacking catalog you can download that full catalog for free on a lean urbanism website that's the another really cool thing about the tools there is they're all free and downloadable so please take advantage of that there was also another book that came out a couple years ago by an author named Craig curl up called the house hacking strategy um I'm not going to talk too much about what he pursues in this it's a it's an interesting case study he talks a little bit more about the idea of a roommate house as something that he used in a more expensive Market a couple of times it's a really cool idea as well and um again there's a lot of different ways to to approach strategies for house hacking and then Brian mentioned this but I do moderate a Facebook group called choose fi house hacking um and there's um there's over five thousand members on it now and people all over the country all over the world sharing their own tips and questions about anybody interested in pursuing this approach so really some good good dialogue on that group so what I wanted to do is kind of roll through some case studies because I I think sometimes this is it's easier to understand the idea of house acting by working through some concrete examples the house hacking catalog that we wrote does detail the wide variety of types of buildings that are most likely to be seen for house hacking approach and that it also has a number of personal case studies three of which I'm going to share that I have done over the years and I think can be helpful as you begin to think about how how you might approach this and the general notion again here is trying to use your investment in getting a mortgage on a property as a way to create other income for yourself and so it's not just getting our mortgage to buy that single family detached house but it's getting a mortgage to see well is there other ways for me to have some income on that my first experience with this was buying this proper property in the mid 1990s which was actually built as a single family house originally but had been carved up over the years into three separate units so it was a Triplex and I bought I bought this at a time period when the neighborhood was still um not all that great the building I call this my not great Triplex because it was uh not in in you know terribly great condition but it had three separate units and I lived in one and rented out the other two and eventually fixed up the the property bit by bit over the course of about a decade made a lot of improvements so I've I've got some numbers on the screen that I'm going to share throughout this it's been a couple years since I've given this presentation so they're a little old but I think you can get the general gist of this so um the um the the inflation-adjusted value in 2019 for what I actually bought it at was a hundred and forty thousand and um that value of course is about double today what it actually prices out for so in real terms what that means is that um if it was 275 000 as a purchase price that you would you know if you were putting 10 down which you wouldn't have to you could buy a property like this for uh even three percent down with an FHA loan or five percent down with a lot of conditional mortgages but if you put 10 down you know you're looking about twenty seven thousand dollars in cash and a mortgage of about 1500 a month or 1600 a month now in my market the rents that you would get even if you lived on one of the floors and rented out the other two would exceed that sixteen hundred dollars a month and that was kind of my experience in owning this Triplex that I was able to cover the mortgage um with the rents that I received uh so there's obvious benefits to that I was a young person at the time one thing that it really allowed me me to do was it allowed me to go into business for myself at a young age and be an entrepreneur and do so without really having to worry about my housing costs um so and if you get an entrepreneur you know that sometimes it's a struggle the first year I did it was a real struggle uh economically and then it took off pretty well after that but having this property and effectively having you know no housing expense was really a great Catalyst for me the second time that I did it um I while I still had that house I decided to build a new house with a carriage house in back this was the house that I built in about 2005. call it Misadventures and new construction because it was it all ended up being way more expensive than I anticipated at the time so I spent more on the project than I really would have liked to but I did have a at the end of it I had a house that was about 350 000 value and I it had a it was a three bedroom uh house at the front but it had this really large one-bedroom Carriage House in the back with over a three-car garage so again this is what we would call an Adu today an accessory dwelling unit uh becoming very popular all over the country and in this case again if you were to buy this and say put 10 down that's a 35 000 down payment again you could buy this for a three percent or a five percent uh mortgage that cost was about 2000 in a month in my market you could easily rent that apartment for a thousand a month so you're living in effectively a really nice place for well under the normal cost of the market um third time I did this was living in Savannah Georgia um we my wife and I bought this townhouse that you see on the left hand side number 308 this is a five unit townhouse building that we're all individual fee simple townhouses it had a walkway to the back that led to this Carriage House in the back that was a one bedroom apartment over a two-car garage and in this particular case study we actually purchased this house it was not listed for sale we pursued it off market and were able to buy it you can see what we paid what the mortgage was and in that market in Savannah we were able to rent it we did monthly rentals instead of annual rentals and it basically paid the mortgage uh so again you can imagine um the the financial benefits that that leads to when you're able to cover your mortgage with some other rental unit on the property and in this case we hardly ever really knew it's one of the benefits of an Adu or a carriage house because we hardly ever knew that the tenants were there in the back um and so there was tremendous benefit to that um I'm showing you some some numbers just from the Kansas City Market this is obviously different Market by market um and some numbers of what our medium new homes cost and media new existing homes the point of all this is to show you that if you instead of purchasing a new typical home we're looking at a duplex or a Triplex you can get an idea of what your monthly payment would look like after the income and what your actual income is needed to qualify and they're significantly different than if you were buying a single family detached home if you can show the lender the income possibilities offer the duplex or Triplex you actually need less income yourself to buy the unit so that's a big deal from a personal financial side and if you happen to be a new urbanist and you're looking to live in a place where you don't have to drive very much and you can if you're two adults and you can live on one less car per household you can begin to see that the the expenses that you save over the course of just a decade how quickly those add up so the reduced housing expense the reduced car expense um you know if you look at a compound interest that's over a quarter million dollar savings in just a decade you start to multiply that a couple of times in your life and you get the idea so house hacking can come in a wide variety forms this is a typical duplex here's a mixed-use building where you can imagine three or four units over a store you could you could get a mortgage and live in that there are four plexes houses where Carriage Houses and and so on so one of the caveats obviously is that in many markets this type of housing is effectively illegal with our current zoning efforts and that's why we work very hard as new urbanists to try to change zoning where we can that Triplex it would not be allowed to be built brand new in that zoning District today uh the same uh was true of the house I did with the carriage house now we have fortunately just fixed that in my city where we've been able to legalize adus Citywide but in many many jurisdictions that is still not allowed uh when we did the the Savannah one that was legal so that was a that was a nice deal this is our current house and you know and again we may look to replace that little garage you see in the back where they with an Adu at some point and that's kind of the Hope here is now that we've legalized adus to be able to take uh advantage of that opportunity so uh I would just sum up by saying you know if you're looking to do this if you're interested in house hacking it's much easier to start with an existing building that needs you know a little bit of TLC and put in that sweating Sweat Equity yourself you can get a conventional mortgage of up to four units in one property so a four Plex and if you live in one unit you can get a conventional mortgage for that it may be chat more challenging you may have to talk to multiple lenders but you can do that those programs are out there and I think it's great to do this and rinse and repeat uh buy one live in it for a while and then if you're in the same city you could do it again and it really is a great it's almost like a great gateway drug to becoming a developer if you're all interested in that if you're not interested in that it still has incredible benefits for you and for your community in terms of providing this kind of housing and this choice for people so that is a quick summary and overview of house hacking I will come back and stop the screen share and happy to answer any questions that uh that you all have wonderful thank you so much Kevin and Brian those were some great presentations um I had a few questions kind of coming out of that presentation that I love to get your answers on um one of those is can you just give some examples of the most common types of red tape or what makes illegal uh that a house hacker or somebody in lean coding might encounter um and then if you just have any specific examples of how to work within that red tape or how to change it sure well a couple of um come to mind very quickly I think Kevin can probably list even even more but the first is the one that he mentioned um in most cities in the U.S 70 plus I think is the average of of Municipal land that is zoned for single family only residential and those just simply don't allow the building of an Adu or the conversion of a garage or the conversion of a basement or an attic into a duplex or larger so single family uh residential zoning I think is the the one that applies the most there are others when adus are allowed they often have owner occupant requirements that's often very difficult Kevin is talking about hacking uh but and in most cases the hacker does live there but he's also talking about rinsing and repeating and so if you move on to that second project you don't want to sell your first one you want to be able to rent both the accessory as well as the the main dwelling unit and where uh owner occupant laws are are there you can't do that there are other things related to um a lot of uh a lot of utilities have requirements for um second electrical meters that are very expensive to uh to install uh things related to water where um second Taps are required you actually have to to dig out to the street to tap into the main things that are just very expensive um there are things like parking requirements where each unit is required to have more parking that is feasible for the property um I had a couple other in mind that have escaped me Kevin I'm sure you you can list quite a few very quickly well I mean that's a great list Brian and it's going to vary a little bit City by City you know we've worked a lot of years in the CNU to promote form-based codes as a solution for a lot of this and they really can be but if if you're in a city where that's just not really likely to happen um you know in my city in Kansas City Missouri um it's just that's a slow unlikely path to happen uh for a variety of reasons we may get there eventually but I think if you can find Opportunities to just bite off some of these smaller um specific items uh to to change then you could have that's really I think a better way to go in in complicated jurisdictions um so we were able to get accessory dwelling units uh codified here in Kansas City Missouri by just focusing on that issue and nothing else uh it is that a perfect solution no it's not and there and it does have an owner occupancy requirement um but it's still a huge positive change that will impact the lives of a lot of people and open up that opportunity for a lot of people so sometimes you have to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good and look for ways to minimize the worst uh elements in your codes or other things that could be a problem wonderful thanks so much that uh dovetails nicely with another question I had which was what are the main characteristics of a successful house hack or small-scale urbanism project well it it had better make money it had better pencil out uh if it doesn't you know that where people can get in over their head pretty quickly as if they you know maybe aren't looking closely enough at the financials uh and uh get get in and over their head with a property that's too expensive and maybe doesn't rent for as much you know on the other side as they hoped for um so I I really do like to advise people if you have the opportunity if you live in a place where you can start with an existing building if you're young and you can go to a neighborhood that's you know like an up-and-coming neighborhood but not really the hot neighborhood now uh do that you know find a place where it's a little less expensive and allow you to learn you know because you're going to have to learn how to be a landlord uh among other things uh and um and none of that's hard none of this is rocket science and anybody you know who has the uh sort of stick-to-itiveness can do it um but um you know there are some things you're going to learn along the way especially about financing and dealing with tenants and everything else and it can be incredibly rewarding not just a financially rewarding but you know I've made great friends over the years I had great experiences with people that I've rented to uh and uh you know it's there's a lot of rewarding but you're gonna have to learn so just don't try to take on too much too quickly great um so kind of also on the topic of landlording and things of that nature um house hacking is a way to create income with a how with a house to offset costs at the same time there has also been a lot of discussion around the negative impacts of short-term rentals uh through things like Airbnb um and what is kind of the difference between house hacking and Airbnb and that style of short-term renting I can take that real quick and you know Brian feel free to jump in we talked about this a little bit in the catalog but there are different uh different ways to rent um and um you know I have rented to long-term tenants I've rented to monthly tenants and I've done a little bit of Airbnb um with our adus and you just have to figure out what works for you and your own personal goals in that regard you know much of the pushback in regard to short-term rentals has to do with larger corporate entities that come into a community and buy 30 40 50 properties and essentially are running almost like unlicensed hotels uh and um you know there's a gulf of a difference between somebody doing that versus somebody who owns a property lives on it and is renting a room out or renting out a carriage house or a separate unit or whatever to really benefit themselves so uh almost everybody we talk to has really done objection to that type of short-term rental they get really more nervous about like the the larger entities buying up multiple homes in the neighborhood converting them so I don't know Brian if you have any thoughts or a little bit a couple um I I think the the answer to your question Lauren is that there isn't necessarily any difference house hacking can be any of those formats any way of of renting but I I think when you're when you're talking about the resistance to short-term rentals and and how that's relevant to house hacking I think what Kevin said um is important that the the the two primary um objections I think are that uh you're taking valuable housing um off the market for in in a community where housing is needed um there may be a crisis uh this is a a place where if you're using it for short-term rentals where the community members can't use it and the other is uh the change to a neighborhood the effect it has on the character of a place and I think in both of of these cases you're when you're adding housing you're not taking it away you're not removing a a unit that existed before that a Community member lived in you're actually not uh uh reducing the number of housing units in a community but then also if all you have is a roommate or an Adu in the back or a little um apartment in your building you're not changing the character of the community that totally makes sense thanks so much um I'm going to ask one more question and then turn it over to the audience q a so feel free to get your questions in now um kind of my last question to wrap things up is about lean urbanism and how can issues of equity uh be addressed through the process of lean urbanism well Equity is at the heart of it um one of the problems we identified when we began the project was the the difficulty for community members to participate in community building that it was it was because of the system that we have created we have a situation where almost all we see is Big projects by big deep pocketed actors and the smaller projects are too difficult and so making small projects easier enables more people in the community to participate in it whether it's house hacking or building their home starting a business owning their the property where they have their business um just getting involved in the community and benefiting from that Redevelopment and that growth so it's a matter of uh inclusion um it's it's allowing more people to access this process it's a matter of uh character of communities it's a matter of well when I'm talking about character what I mean is that when people are actually taking part in the change of their Community they get to affect it and they get to decide whether they want it to change or whether they want to preserve it um and then also you have the the economic uh benefit from it the wealth building in the community I think it's at the heart of lean urbanism yeah and I I would add you know Brian um to my recollection I think nearly all the pink zones that you worked on were basically in lower wealth communities and it that was really baked into the whole notion of how can how can we use some of the tools that we've learned over the years as new urbanists to really help uh people get on that first and second rung of the ladder to build wealth for themselves uh and I think that's it's critical I mean it's just been like the slide you had with the meantime uses you know just through too many good intentions over like 100 years we've just made it incredibly hard for people to get started doing anything and this is this is an effort to try to show how we can correct some of that and help people out absolutely awesome thank you so much I'm gonna turn it over to some audience q a so I'm actually going to combine two that just came in which is the first part by someone is in reaction to Kevin's uh purchases of homes uh will the same be possible today in today's time with the recession is buying a house possible and combined with the mention that this house buying is difficult to do in popular expensive cities and what steps or resources do you recommend to a homeowner or a small scale developer uh that to talk about uh properties and getting them purchased in some of these areas uh we'll move out of those expensive cities you don't really want to be there anyway we and plus you know we'd love to have you in some of our less expensive there's a lot of very inexpensive markets that would love to have you and your energy um but you know um yeah I mean we're we're heading into a housing downtown uh I think we're going to see housing get a lot cheaper um it's already happening prices are starting to come down we're gonna we're probably gonna see some uh cheaper housing but I just would also you know I'm old enough now that the three to have seen sort of the ups and downs of the mortgage market and the housing market uh over a lot of years uh and I know everybody's starting to freak out about mortgage rates right now but I think the first I think that first house I bought I think that I think I had an eight percent mortgage on it you know historically speaking six seven eight percent mortgages are very normal now it's going to take some time for us to adjust to that new reality because we've had unprecedented historically low mortgage rates for a decade um but I think you know given a year or two the market will probably reset and and be okay so I would you know look for opportunities there's there are always deals in a market and in a down Market if you have saved some money up and have an opportunity to buy you're going to find opportunities in a down Market um and there are tremendous you know financing tools to help people get started if it's a first-time purchase you know this little great three and five percent programs or very low money down to really help and those can work for any of the sort of things that we've described today Kevin talked about the additional income that comes with house hacking and that's that it's the most obvious benefit is is making your uh house purchase and your mortgage more affordable um perhaps also being able to help you qualify it but yes as Kevin was just saying um rates look really high compared to what they have been over the last few years uh but may not be unmanageable and especially if you expect them to go down again in the near future if if having a roommate or a tenant helps you afford it now imagine what better position you'll be in when rates do go down and you're able to refinance yeah and and don't be afraid of going you know going to a part of town that's not the popular part of town or taking on a property that needs some work you're not going to be just judicious and you don't want to you know take on a money trap but uh my god when I bought that first try Flex in 94 or 95 whenever that was I mean I was a young architect making almost nothing uh in terms of an income and um you know it's it's very possible you may just have to look outside of the most desirable areas or even some of the most more expensive cities and look for places where you can live carlite as Kevin said um you know it's it's a it's a way not only of um increasing your income but also reducing your spent your expenses cars are the uh typically the second largest expense for U.S households absolutely thanks so much we also have a couple questions coming in about pink zones um so the first part of this question is is the downtown district the logical place to start in a city for establishing a pink Zone and followed that up with somebody saying Brian Hart saying in small towns such as the one I live in all the Lots in the core are from 25 feet to 66 feet wide already fine-grained why not pink Zone the entire cord not just one area okay so I'll answer that one first and the the primary reason why we suggest making it small is because it's it's more palatable to the municipality um primarily because it's easier to manage uh if you're if if you're piloting uh uh new protocols it's often more palatable uh to the municipal staff if you're talking about a small area so it won't overwhelm them with changes and also because of the uh typical psychological resistance to change if you're talking about small things uh in small spaces it's often easier um the first question was I think Lauren was uh our downtown districts the best locations for them and it really just depends on the place it might be that downtown is best it might be that as Kevin mentioned earlier that that the downtowns are um where the hot uh markets are depends on the place um you do need to have affordable properties really to make a Pink's own small scale development uh easy for easy enough for the people who live in and work there um uh if also if the downtown isn't uh if the the part isn't isn't zoned for residential um you know you want to have that as well as commercial you want to have a mix of uses in it um so typically I I think if we're talking about the most common uh best sites for location it's uh just outside of downtown where you'll have neighborhoods that have good bones were laid out well that are close to employment centers maybe that have either existing or previously had a neighborhood main streets so you can have businesses as well as residences you can get to places easily and hopefully where prices are still are are still affordable Kevin you have anything to add to that well just also people who are eager for change in the neighborhood that's another uh element to it so those you know emerging neighborhoods I think can be really good um and because you might find people who are really eager to see their neighborhoods improve and change and you know some of the more established neighborhoods that um you know already have a lot of great elements they're you know there's probably going to be more resistant to Enterprise mm-hmm absolutely um and this question is from Ryan Stevenson and they are asking are Kevin and Brian seeing group dwelling requirements as a barrier so uh I think if I get what Ryan is saying he's asking about like how some cities limit the number of people like on on um unrelated people uh within a house that can live together sometimes it's three or four or five people uh and sure that can be a barrier um just depends on on your city a lot of cities especially a lot of college towns have that as a way to try to they were trying to limit the spread of student housing um again I think that book that Craig kerlock wrote was really uh interesting in that regard because his strategy was to he lived in Denver uh expensive Market uh he would look to buy a single family house that maybe had four bedrooms lit in a bedroom and then rent out the other three to other people and then use that as a strategy instead of just you know having a separate unit and he details you know really how to do that approach and do it successfully but you could certainly run up against that as an issue in in some cities and I think that's an an example of a strategy that Kevin brought up earlier which is um to bite off what you can change to um not try to change the entire zoning code of of a city um that gives me an opportunity to very quickly bring up another of our tools which is the lean code tool and it was created for exactly that purpose so the Center for Applied transect studies is the home of the smart code the model transect based zoning code and so obviously we advocate for overhauls of zoning codes but we also recognize that most cities either won't be willing or won't be able because of the difficulty the the time the expense of overhauling won't won't want or be able to overhaul their code and so that tool is designed to help with exactly what Kevin was describing which is identifying the uh the Ops obstacles in a zoning code to small-scale Economic Development and providing strategies to make the changes to just the to make strategic repairs to a zoning code and uh the maximum number of unrelated uh inhabitants of a building might be an example of that kind of change got it we have just a couple more questions here as we start to wrap up this first one is from Carlton Johnson asking have you come across or studied and I deal a lot with for fine-grained urbanism it seems that 25 feet is historical standard but that seems to be an arbitrary standard that is based on being a roundish number versus being based on functionality yeah I mean I don't I don't really think there's an ideal uh number 25 feet was common historically here too it's just kind of a a virtual subdivision of the mile grid down um and you know I love the 25 foot Lots uh I think they can work really really well in a lot of conditions but uh with modern building codes they're also a challenge uh modern building and Zoning codes because you're often giving up at least three feet if not five feet off the side lot lines um which is unfortunate we didn't do that historically but we do that now um so I'm not it can be a little bit more of a challenge with some of the modern codes but you know there are also Legions of examples of you know Wonderful building types built on uh 25 foot Lots so I I just yeah I don't know that I've seen an ideal in that regard no I'm not I don't know of an ideal either I think if you can get 25 foot Lots that's wonderful um there's also a problem where uh sprawl Suburban zoning has been overlaid on uh older areas and because of uh not only setbacks but minimum lot sizes some of these uh places can be non-conforming and and difficult to renovate even if adus are allowed it might make renovation or construction of an Adu difficult you know having to get a variance to go do it or just forbidden so I I think you also have a lot of places where um where properties have been aggregated as uh the value in markets has declined a lot of a lot of people have bought up adjoining lots and and uh so you also need to make it really easy and fast and cheap to subdivide Lots that's for residential or commercial you know I think regarding commercial if you've got neighborhood main streets and um you know if everything is 25 feet that actually might be big for for what it it big enough to be sort of a barrier to entry because of cost for some uh entrepreneurs or prospective owners so if you can figure out ways to subdivide properties internally or make it possible to build smaller on empty lots that's also going to be helpful yeah all right thanks so much we are at one o'clock so thank you to our audience for the for the students thank you to Brian and Kevin for the wonderful presentation uh you can expect a recording of This available tomorrow for any of those who have missed it and uh you can learn more about uh the work that we do at cnu.org thank you so much for spending time with us on this Tuesday and we look forward to seeing you again thanks again Brian and Kevin thank you thank you Lauren