Arlington County kicked off its Missing Middle Housing Study on October 28, 2020. View the recording, slides, and summary of polling responses on the County’s website.
As Arlington County studies Missing Middle Housing, AHS is doing its part to help the community understand the concept and why it is important in order to help Arlington be the diverse and sustainable community it strives to be. Learn more below and view our other resources on Missing Middle Housing, including our recent Ask the Authors webinar with County staff.
1. What does “Missing Middle Housing” mean?
Daniel Parolek, architect, urban designer, and the founding principal of Opticos Design and creator of the www.missingmiddlehousing.com website, coined the term in 2010 to describe “a range of house-scale buildings with multiple units—compatible in scale and form with detached single-family homes—located in a walkable neighborhood.”
Small scale Missing Middle Housing such as duplexes, triplexes, and four-plexes are generally the same scale and can be indistinguishable from single-family homes.
The term can also apply to small scale apartment and condo buildings (sometimes called multiplexes) that co-exist with other housing types and are often used as transitions to more dense places such as a commercial corridor.
The iconic Missing Middle Housing diagram by Opticos does a good job of showing the range of types and how they fit into a community.
2. Is Missing Middle Housing Affordable?
While the definition of Missing Middle Housing is that it’s a specific set of housing types, AHS believes the motivation for trying to have more of it should be primarily about affordability.
Missing Middle Housing isn’t the same as “affordable” housing, which often implies a subsidy for construction or operations combined with income requirements. However, allowing more of these options will help provide more lower-cost, modest housing that is naturally more affordable than the large single-family homes that are currently allowed.
Missing Middle Housing is also one of the tools we need to help meet the overall demand for housing in our area, which impacts affordability across the board.
Increasing Missing Middle Housing options also makes existing programs that address homeownership affordability—like down payment assistance and community land trusts—more effective because there will be additional lower-cost homes in more places that are potentially within reach of moderate-income buyers.
As Arlington develops its approach to Missing Middle Housing, it can learn from other communities that have used approaches such as size limits, financing tools and incentives to make more of the new housing that’s built accessible to households of modest incomes.
3. Is this type of housing really missing in Arlington, and if so, why?
Modest home types like duplexes and triplexes are already part of the fabric of some of our older neighborhoods, but these familiar homes are mostly illegal to build now.
This summer Arlington County released five research bulletins focused on Missing Middle Housing. Their data show that 23.9 percent of the county’s housing stock is single-family detached and 46.9 percent is mid- or-high rise multifamily housing. That means that just over a quarter—29.2 percent—of our current housing stock falls into the “Missing Middle” category, but the vast majority of that housing is in our declining stock of older low-rise garden-style apartment buildings.
Only 3.7 percent is townhomes and a mere 2.2 percent are either side-by-side or stacked duplexes and these are only allowed in a small number of areas within the County. The data also show that 73.2 percent of residential land in the county is zoned exclusively for the most expensive type of housing: detached single-family homes.
That means it is currently illegal (or very difficult, time consuming and expensive) to build many types of lower cost housing in the majority of the county. As a result, people have limited choice of type of housing, price points and locations to choose from when looking for a home to rent or buy in Arlington.
How we got here is no secret—we simply need to look at Arlington’s 90-year-old zoning history.
In 1930, the first Zoning Ordinance divided the county into six zoning districts with specific guidelines about what types of housing could be built where. In the following years, zoning policies continued to be modified to limit where and how duplexes and other multi-family homes could be built. For example, in 1938, row houses were completely banned from the county, and duplexes were eventually no longer allowed by-right in most areas.
AHS created this image as part of our work on the 2016 Leckey Forum: Finding the Missing Middle.
Just 2.2 percent of Arlington’s housing stock consists of duplexes, like this one in Waverly Hills. Photo by Arlington’s Department of Community Planning, Housing, and Development (CPHD)
The side-by-side duplex is a small, detached structure that consists of two dwelling units arranged side-by-side, each with an entry from the street. Photo by Opticos Design
“Areas designated ‘Single Family’ and ‘Two Family’ have remained almost unchanged for nearly 60 years.”
Arlington’s Zoning Legacy
Zoning policies, combined with redlining (the refusal to finance a mortgage) and racial deed restrictions, made it next to impossible for African Americans to live anywhere in Arlington but a few neighborhoods for most of the 20th century.
While the Fair Housing Act of 1968 made significant changes to the access for people of color, Arlington’s zoning laws have continued to perpetuate racial and socio-economic segregation.
The fourplex is a detached (2 to 2.5 story) structure with four dwelling units, two on the ground floor and two above. It can have shared or individual entries from the street and has the appearance of a medium-sized single-unit house. Photo by Opticos Design
“In 1938, row houses were completely banned from the county, and duplexes were eventually no longer allowed by-right in most areas.”
The areas that did allow for duplexes and other small multi-unit buildings also allowed for higher density multifamily buildings, and it was the latter that became more common over time.
Meanwhile, the areas designated for detached single-family homes remained unchanged. In these areas, as the region grew and land prices rose, older modest homes have been replaced with larger newly constructed homes.
In fact, the average size of Arlington single-family homes torn down in the past 10 years was 1,515 square feet, while the houses replacing them averaged 4,750 square feet with an average sales price of $1.7 million.
Absent any change in our zoning, this trend is highly likely to continue.
4. What are the benefits of “Missing Middle” housing?
Our current development pattern is leading to growth on both ends of the density spectrum: larger and larger multifamily buildings (with small units) surrounded by larger and larger single-family homes, with very few options in between.
Missing Middle Housing provides homes of all shapes and sizes for people of all incomes. That means options for people of all economic means and family sizes—including people who are essential to making our economy and community strong, like teachers and firefighters, administrative assistants, childcare providers, nurses, retail store employees, accountants and case managers.
For many young people aspiring to homeownership, a "starter home" is out of reach. Since 1970, average sizes for new detached houses have soared by 64 percent. That's a huge driver of rising home costs.
Providing more Missing Middle Housing options also means empty-nesters and retirees can downsize and stay in their neighborhood—and their adult children can find a place to live where they grew up.
Missing Middle Housing is a form of environmentally sustainable infill development that reduces urban sprawl, traffic congestion, and carbon emissions because people can live near where they work, go to school, and play.
The additional density provided by Missing Middle Housing will allow local businesses to thrive. County staff have said that it takes roughly 1,500 homes to support one block of neighborhood retail. Allowing more of this type of housing will help support the “Main Street” style retail that we love – like the kind we see in Westover or Del Ray in Alexandria.
5. Does this mean the end of single-family housing in Arlington?
The Alliance for Housing Solutions advocates adding to our housing options, not taking them away.
Arlington should explore adding a variety of types of Missing Middle Housing where they make the most sense throughout the County. Some areas may be most appropriate for duplexes, while other areas could accommodate small multiplexes. There is no one-size fits all strategy.
Any change would be incremental, and with the right incentives and guidelines in place it can be done tastefully to maintain and improve the overall sense of place in the neighborhoods we love. This is why some people refer to this strategy as a “gentle density” approach.
By adding options where they make the most sense, we can also protect our tree canopy, update infrastructure like sidewalks, bike lanes, and storm water management, and even create new green spaces.
In short, updating our decades-old zoning policies can be a win for everyone by creating options to suit people of all walks of life. This is the kind of policy change we need in order to make Arlington for Everyone a reality.
Learn More
Watch our Sept 2 webinar to hear from the authors of Arlington’s Missing Middle research bulletins. They gave an overview of their research and took questions from the community.
Visit the AHS Missing Middle page and view our Missing Middle Housing Gallery to see what kinds of homes could be built.
View real-world examples of Missing Middle Housing at Sightline Institute’s photo gallery and AARP’s photo gallery.
Visit Daniel Parolek’s Missing Middle Housing website.
This post was originally published September 28, 2020. It is revised and updated as new information becomes available.