Local governments make hundreds of decisions each year that determine where homes can be built, how neighborhoods grow, and whether it’s easier or harder to add housing. Most of them happen with little public attention.

Starting this week, Rezoning Watch will be a regular CITYBUILDER feature highlighting the meetings, rezonings, and land use decisions worth following across the Triangle. We’ll cut through the agenda packets, explain what matters, and point out the cases that deserve a closer look.

Many councils are returning from their summer break, making this a good time to launch. This week is relatively quiet, with one straightforward townhome rezoning in Durham and several communities easing back into their meeting schedules.

Durham

​Andrews Chapel Road Townhomes (Z2500032)​

📍 Tonight, August 3 at 7:00 PM
at Durham City Council Chambers, 101 City Hall Plaza

🏘️ Request to annex and rezone 4.5 acres within Durham’s Urban Growth Boundary to allow 28 townhomes

💡 Straightforward single-family to townhome rezoning in an established area. The site is already expected to develop. This allows more homes on the same land, expanding housing choices in an area already planned for growth.
💡​Inside the Urban Growth Boundary, this is the type of housing Durham needs to incrementally increase housing supply
⚠️ Expect the usual concerns about traffic and environmental impacts, despite the site already being designated for urban development

👉 Speak in person tonight by signing up outside Council Chambers before the meeting begins.

​How to Show Up

You don’t need to be an expert to speak. If you care about housing, that’s enough. Arrive early to sign up, wear green or any pro-housing gear so supporters can find each other, and keep your comments simple. Even 60 seconds makes a difference.

“I support more housing choices in this area. We need more homes, and this is a good place to add them.”

Housing decisions are made meeting by meeting. If you want a region where more people can afford to live, this is where it happens. Show up. Speak up. Bring someone with you.

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Hello CITYBUILDERs and happy August! We hope you’ve been having a wonderful summer.

There’s been a ton of events to enjoy around the Triangle, and maybe you’ve also made it out to other parts of North Carolina! Whether you escaped to the mountains or relaxed at the beach, having both just a short drive away is one of the many reasons we love calling the Triangle home.

Many of you have also joined CITYBUILDER for events this summer.

In July, we continued our summer film series in Cary. Shout out to Hearsay and everyone at The Matthews House for sharing their beautiful space with our community. We had a great turnout and another lively discussion. If you haven’t been able to make it to a film screening yet, you have one more chance to join us in Raleigh on August 26th. More info below.

We’re excited to re-start our monthly Policy Talks with a special series on Training the Triangle’s City Builders of Tomorrow. This back-to-school series in August and September will highlight the incredible wealth of knowledge we have locally at our major universities. Students are a unique and vital part of our Triangle communities. If you know any young or aspiring city builders, please tell them to join the calls! This is a chance for students (and all of us) to learn more about these local programs and opportunities.

If you haven’t already - be sure to fill out our CITYBUILDER survey. We’re building the next chapter of CITYBUILDER, and we need your voice. Take our 10-minute community survey to help shape our programs, events, and advocacy, plus you’ll be entered for a chance to win a copy of our next book club selection, Stuck by Yoni Appelbaum.

Thank you for being a part of building this movement with us.

Charlotte Chapman
Executive Administrator, CITYBUILDER

In Case You Missed It: YIMBYtown 2026

Be an Early Bird for YIMBYtown 2026!

Registration for YIMBYtown 2026 is LIVE! Early Bird ticket pricing ENDS on August 15th. Get your tickets now at yimby.town!

AUGUST EVENTS WITH CITYBUILDER

SUMMER FILM TOUR: Last Stop - Raleigh!

Wednesday August 26th • 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Trophy Brewing at Maywood Hall • 656 Maywood Ave, Raleigh
Get Tickets Here

Join us for the final screening of our Summer Film Tour!

We’re partnering with Better Cities Film Festival and Southern Urbanism to showcase a selection of short, documentary films highlighting housing and urbanism from across the country.

This will be a family-friendly evening, and a great chance to escape the summer heat, sit back, relax, and enjoy thought-provoking and inspiring films. Your $10 ticket to the event includes popcorn. Drinks will be available for purchase.

These films showcase lessons from other places, lessons from the past, and inspiration for the future that we can apply to our local Triangle communities. Thanks to our partners Southern Urbanism, and our sponsor The Rocket Shop for their support.

Interested becoming a sponsor of our Raleigh film night? Email us at citybuildernc@gmail.com!

POLICY TALK: How to Build a City

Practical Programs from the Triangle’s Top Universities • Part I with Eric Maribojoc, Professor of the Practice at UNC Chapel Hill

Thursday August 25th • 12:00pm - 1:00pm
RSVP here for this virtual talk

This fall, we’re launching a special two-part online series highlighting the incredible city-building programs at our local universities. The Triangle is home to some of the world’s top schools, and right here in our backyard, students are preparing to become the planners, architects, engineers, public servants, developers, designers, and advocates who will shape the future of our communities.

For our first talk in this two-part series, we’re excited to welcome Eric Maribojoc, Professor of the Practice at UNC Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, and Housing Affordability Initiative lead. Eric is a real estate professional, educator and researcher with extensive experience. His focus areas include future trends in design, zoning, and technology, housing supply and affordability, adaptive reuse, sustainability, and resilience.

Please share this free learning opportunity with high school seniors, college students, or anyone curious about a career building better places. These conversations will introduce you to the programs, faculty, and opportunities that can help turn your passion for cities into a meaningful career.

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MORE AUGUST EVENTS FOR CITYBUILDERS

RALEIGH AFFORDABLE HOUSING FORUM

Saturday August 25th 1:00 - 5:00PM
Raleigh Convention Center, 500 S Salisbury St, Raleigh
Learn more and sign up for updates

Raleigh is growing fast. As the population grows and development gets costlier, rents and home prices are rising. The City of Raleigh is committed to tackling housing affordability challenges to ensure every Raleigh resident has a safe, stable, and affordable place to call home.

This event will feature CITYBUILDER Founder Jenn Truman as a panelist.

Study Finds High-Income Housing Construction Creates ‘Moving Chains’ for Low-Income Renters

Multifamily math: Pew research has shed light on a study from 2023 that looked through the address history of 52,000 residents of new multifamily buildings in large cities. The paper by Dr. Evan Mast concludes that “constructing a new market-rate building that houses 100 people ultimately leads 45 to 70 people to move out of below-median income neighborhoods, with most of the effect occurring within three years.”

Moving chains: The pattern described above is known as a “moving chain”, and it illustrates the ripple effect that new high-income housing has across the market. It makes intuitive sense: when new luxury housing is built, the people who move in don’t appear out of thin air. They mostly come from cheaper apartments. Once they move, their old apartments are vacant, and they’re no longer competing with lower-income people for those cheaper units. Thus, lower-income people move in to their apartment.

Closer to Home:

Cary NIMBYs Kill Affordable Housing Opportunity

Read more

Zoning codes, fire regulations, and financing models have reinforced this binary for decades, leaving little room for the smaller, more flexible building types that once defined many walkable neighborhoods. Among these missing forms, the single-stair residential building stands out as one of the most powerful tools for improving housing affordability and small-scale development.

This piece was written by student fellows in collaboration with Single Stair NC.

Each semester, CITYBUILDER provides fellowship opportunities for aspiring student urbanists in the Triangle. This semester we’re focused on single-stair apartments. Single Stair NC is a new publication committed to advancing the pursuit of single-stair buildings in North Carolina.

Small lot zoning creates a regulatory environment in which single-stair buildings can thrive. The places we’re focused on are empty lots between single-family houses, and old vacant houses that could be rebuilt into something more useful. These “infill” lots are cheaper than the land required for large-scale apartment complexes or single-family subdivisions, making the investment feasible for aspiring developers. Single-stair housing fits perfectly in these smaller lots, blending in with existing neighborhoods and providing more affordable housing options for prospective residents.

Single-Stair Has Countless Benefits

A single-stair building is exactly what it sounds like: a multifamily residential building organized around one primary stair serving all units. Typically ranging from three to six stories and four to twelve units, these buildings are common throughout Europe and in older North American cities, but are often prohibited under modern U.S. building codes once a building exceeds a certain size or height.

The requirement for two stairs is frequently justified as a life-safety measure, yet in practice it imposes significant cost and design penalties—especially for small buildings. A second stair consumes valuable floor area, increases structural complexity, and often forces inefficient double-loaded corridors. For small lot developments, these inefficiencies can be fatal to project feasibility.

Allowing multiple dwelling units on modest parcels and removing artificial minimums tied to lot size or building footprint enables a housing typology that is cheaper, energy-efficient, and accessible to small developers.

Construction Efficiency Yields Savings

Affordability is one of the strongest arguments in favor of single-stair buildings. Detached single-family homes are among the least efficient housing types to build, requiring four exterior walls per unit, individual roofs, and fully separate structural systems. Even townhouses, while more efficient, still duplicate many other building elements such as mechanical lines, HVAC units, and water heaters.

Single-stair buildings maximize shared walls, floors, and ceilings, along with the aforementioned mechanical systems. The shared envelope components dramatically reduce the amount of exterior material needed per unit, while also saving time and money in construction. And, of course, eliminating the second stair itself further adds to these savings. Stairs are expensive: they require additional structure, fire separation, handrails, landings, and code-mandated clearances. Removing one stair can free up hundreds of square feet that can instead be used for mechanical or living space… or allow the entire building to fit into underutilized infill lots.

Compared to large apartment buildings, single-stair buildings sit in the sweet spot of efficiency: dense enough to share costs, but small enough to remain comfortable in neighborhoods. In contrast to deep, double-loaded corridor apartments, single-stair buildings usually allow for through-units or corner units with better daylight and natural ventilation. This improves occupant comfort while reducing reliance on mechanical systems.

Single-stair buildings are efficient to heat and cool as well. Shared walls reduce heat loss and heat gain, making these structures significantly more energy-efficient than detached homes. Units typically have fewer exposed sides, which translates to lower heating and cooling loads.

Lower operational costs matter deeply for affordability. Even when rents are similar, reduced utility bills can make a meaningful difference in a household’s monthly expenses. Over time these savings accumulate, particularly for lower and middle-income residents.

Lower Financial Barriers for Small Developers

Perhaps the most transformative benefit of single-stair buildings is who gets to build them. Large apartment projects require large loans, sophisticated financial structures, and institutional investors. This excludes most small developers and local builders from participating in multi-family housing production.

Single-stair buildings, especially when enabled by small lot zoning, dramatically lower the barrier to entry. The total project cost is smaller, the construction is simpler, and the loan amount is more manageable. A small developer (or even an owner-occupant) can finance a four to eight-unit building in ways that are simply impossible with a 100-unit complex.

For small, owner-occupied buildings (four units or fewer), Freddie Mac–backed loans work very differently than commercial apartment financing. Instead of asking the building to “stand on its own” with a debt-service coverage ratio, lenders underwrite the borrower, counting roughly 75 percent of rent from the non-owner units toward qualifying income.

The loan is valued using residential comparable sales rather than cap rates, often allowing higher per-unit valuations, lower down payments, and 30-year amortizations. In practice, this means a household can use its income and partial occupancy to backstop risk, making it possible to build or stabilize small multifamily housing with homeowner-style financing, one of the few rungs on the development ladder for missing-middle projects.

Because the initial investment is lower, the pressure to maximize rent is reduced. A developer can accept modest returns while still operating profitably. In some cases, the owner may live in one unit while renting the others, creating long-term stability and personal investment in the building’s success.

This model spreads out risk, distributes wealth-building opportunities, and keeps housing development rooted in the local community.

Mixed Unit Sizes and Internal Subsidy

Single-stair buildings are uniquely well suited to mix unit types. Because the circulation core is compact, floor plans can be highly flexible. Smaller studios or one-bedroom units can coexist alongside larger family-sized units within the same building.

This diversity enables internal cross-subsidization. Smaller, more affordable units can be offset by larger or premium units with higher rents. The building as a whole remains financially viable, without every unit being priced at a premium.

This approach allows affordability to be achieved within the building rather than through external subsidies alone. It also fosters social diversity, as residents of different incomes and household sizes share the same address rather than being separated by building type or neighborhood.

Developers Respond to the Rules We Set

Developers are not inherently predisposed toward large, expensive buildings. They respond to the regulatory environment. Entrepreneurs will be entrepreneurs: they ask what is legal, what can be financed, and what will pencil. Those questions are answered through very specific mechanisms, rent comparables, appraisals, loan terms, and underwriting standards that translate rules into built form.

To make money, a developer needs three things to align. First, rent comps must exist to justify projected income; lenders and investors will not underwrite hypothetical demand for a building type that is illegal or rarely built. Second, appraisals must support the cost of construction, which requires comparable properties that appraisers can point to with confidence. Third, financing must be available on terms that allow the project to carry its debt without excessive rents or equity. When any one of these breaks down, the project becomes unfinanceable.

When single-stair buildings are illegal or impractical to build, these mechanisms collapse in predictable ways. Without legal precedent, there are no rent comps. Without rent comps, appraisals fall back to single-family or large-apartment benchmarks. Without appraisable value, financing disappears or becomes prohibitively expensive. Developers are then forced into extremes: detached single-family homes which fit cleanly into residential underwriting, or large apartment blocks that can absorb regulatory costs through scale.

In this sense, regulations do not merely shape outcomes; they actively produce them. By prohibiting efficient, human-scale buildings, the rules foreclose the financial pathways that make them viable. Single-stair buildings demonstrate that affordability and profitability are not opposing goals, they are regulatory outcomes. When codes allow smaller buildings to exist, the market can generate the rents, comps, appraisals, and financing needed to support them. When they do not, the market is left with fewer options, higher costs, and less choice.

Aligning Policy, Design, and Affordability

Small lot zoning provides the legal foundation for single-stair buildings to re-emerge as a mainstream housing type. Together, they enable gradual, incremental density rather than disruptive total redevelopment. A single-family lot can become a six-unit walk-up. A corner parcel can support a three-story apartment building that fits comfortably into the existing neighborhood.

If the goal is to produce more affordable housing while maintaining neighborhood character and expanding access to development opportunities, single-stair buildings deserve a central place in housing policy. Small lot zoning makes them possible, and thoughtful code reform makes them viable.

The housing crisis is not a failure of the market; it is a failure of imagination constrained by outdated rules. Single-stair buildings offer a clear, proven, and human-scale alternative. When we allow them to be built, we align entrepreneurial energy with the public good, and unlock a housing future that is more efficient, more diverse, and more affordable.

Julie Powers is a Bachelor of Architecture Student at NC State University, with an LAEP minor.

Additional graphic and illustration support was provided by NC State Undergraduate College of Design in Architecture major Brenna Belcher.

This is ours.

Over the next year, Raleigh will rewrite its Comprehensive Plan, the document that sets the long-term vision for how our city grows over the coming decades.

Most people will never read it. Many won’t even know it’s being updated. But they’ll live with the decisions it shapes.

It’s important to note that the Comprehensive Plan isn’t a law.

Instead, it’s the lens through which the City’s decisions are made.

Future rezonings are evaluated against it. New policies are measured against it. Infrastructure investments, transportation priorities, housing programs, parks, and long-range capital planning all draw direction from it. When City Council weighs difficult decisions about Raleigh’s future, the Comprehensive Plan is one of the first documents everyone reaches for to guide those decisions.

If the UDO is the rulebook, the Comprehensive Plan is the vision those rules are meant to accomplish.

If you’re new to land use planning, Raleigh Forward published an excellent primer a few years back on what a Comprehensive Plan is and how it fits into the City’s planning process.

Earlier this year, we explored how Raleigh’s Unified Development Ordinance shapes what gets built in our city. The UDO determines what can be built on a piece of land. The Comprehensive Plan answers a bigger question.

What kind of city are we collectively building?

Right now Raleigh tests this vision one project at a time, one rezoning hearing after another. They aren’t just singular debates, they are chances to move closer to the city we say we want to become. That’s why consistency with the comprehensive plan is the main question in rezoning decisions.

At first glance, the next Comprehensive Plan might feel like just another plan update. It isn’t.

The Comprehensive Plan has evolved over the years, just like our city. Since the 2030 Comprehensive Plan was adopted in 2009, under Mayor Charles C. Meeker, by the full Council Mayor Pro-Tem James P. West, Councilor Mary-Ann Baldwin, Councilor Thomas G. Crowder, Councilor Philip R. Isley, Councilor Rodger Koopman, Councilor Nancy McFarlane, Councilor Russ Stephenson, Raleigh has changed and grown. The City has adopted a new Unified Development Ordinance (UDO) in 2015. The City completed a citywide rezoning that down-zoned many neighborhoods in 2016. Then in 2019, Raleigh made significant updates to both the Comprehensive Plan and the Unified Development Ordinance that embraced more housing choices, walkable neighborhoods and transit options. Those amendments can only go so far.

With the new Comprehensive Plan - for the first time in over 15 years - Raleigh isn’t just editing and amending individual policies. We’re collectively taking a step back to re-ask the big question.

What kind of city are we collectively building?

Raleigh has always been a growing city. The next Comprehensive Plan shouldn’t simply manage growth. It should embrace growth as an opportunity to welcome new neighbors.

The story of Raleigh’s current Comprehensive Plan is more complicated than many people realize. It wasn’t written all at once, and it doesn’t speak with a single voice. We’ll trace how the plan evolved from its adoption in 2009 through major amendments in 2019. And in a future article, we’ll spend more time exploring the history of Raleigh’s plans because understanding how we got here is essential to deciding where we go next.

Today’s conversations aren’t simply about maps and zoning and policies.

These conversations are about values, about the kind of city Raleigh wants to become. They’re about whether Raleigh’s next vision will ask where growth belongs or how every neighborhood can help welcome it.

the conversation has already begun

Raleigh’s Planning Department has spent the past year or more gathering ideas through its Reflecting Raleigh initiative. More than 12,000 residents participated in community conversations, surveys, pop-up events, and a civic assembly to help identify priorities for the city’s future.

If you haven’t explored the work yet, it’s worth your time.

The engagement reports, community inventory, and recommendations provide an excellent snapshot of where Raleigh is today and the conversations already underway. Whether you agree with every conclusion or not, they represent one of the largest public engagement efforts Raleigh has undertaken.

We encourage anyone interested in this process to check out the City’s summaries of Phase 1: Engage and Assess and the Civic Assembly.

CITYBUILDER’s role is different

The City’s job is to gather input from across Raleigh. City Council’s job is to decide what vision ultimately becomes policy. Which is why this 2026 election matters.

Our job is different.

As a pro-housing advocacy organization, CITYBUILDER exists to organize people around a pro-housing vision for Raleigh. A vision that welcomes growth, embraces abundant housing choices, and builds stronger neighborhoods. This Comprehensive Plan is one of the most important opportunities we’ll have to put those values into practice.

We’ll be advocating for housing choices in every neighborhood. Transportation choices that give people more freedom than simply driving everywhere. Infrastructure that grows alongside our population instead of becoming an excuse to stop it. We’ll champion a Raleigh that becomes greener as it grows and invites many hands into the work of building our city.

And when we say “builders” we mean all of them.

The homeowner adding an ADU.

The family opening a neighborhood coffee shop.

The carpenter restoring an old house.

The nonprofit building affordable housing.

The local builder of a fourplex.

The development teams and construction firms that create the apartments, offices and mixed-use neighborhoods that shape Raleigh’s skyline.

Cities aren’t built by one kind of person. Cities are built by thousands of people making investments, taking risks, opening businesses, creating homes and building the places we all live our daily lives. Everyone of these people helps make Raleigh a welcoming city. Because growth isn’t something that happens to Raleigh, growth is something we create together.

We believe that Raleigh should make it easier for anyone to be a city builder.

The way to build a stronger Raleigh is to make it easier for more people to build it.

So, we won’t pretend to be neutral. We’ll tell you where we stand, advocate for policies that welcome new neighbors and expand housing choices, and explain why. We’ll back our positions with evidence, examples from other cities, and honest reporting on the tradeoffs.

Over the coming months, we’ll explore how Raleigh arrived at this moment, what we’ve learned over the past fifteen years, and what the next Comprehensive Plan should say. We’ll also share CITYBUILDER’s recommendations for Raleigh’s future, along with the evidence and values behind them.

If you care about Raleigh’s future, be part of the conversation. Read along. Come to our events. Reply to our articles. Challenge our thinking. Share examples from other cities. Tell us what we’re missing.

And don’t just engage with us. Participate in the City’s Reflecting Raleigh process too. Read the materials. Attend community meetings. Submit comments when draft policies are released.

In our next article, we’ll look back at the 2030 Comprehensive Plan and the planning philosophy that shaped it. Before Raleigh decides where it’s going next, we need to understand how we got here.

Every generation gets the chance to shape the future of its city.

This is ours.

Jenn Truman is a young designer, leader, and advocate based in Raleigh, she is embedded in the local community through both her professional and volunteer work. Jenn is a regular contributor to and Founder of CITYBUILDER.

Massachusetts Might End Single-Family Zoning

Duplexes everywhere: Yesterday, an amendment (#372) that would legalize duplexes across the state of Massachusetts was added to an economic development bill moving through the state senate. If passed into law, this provision would ensure that duplexes can be built anywhere single-family homes can, with few exceptions.

Massachusetts is missing housing: The Bay State is the second-worst state in the nation for homebuilding and affordability, according to rankings from Realtor.com. This likely-to-pass reform is a welcome shift towards pro-housing policies.

Closer to Home:

UNC To Shut Down On-Campus Housing for Graduate Students

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The Triangle has enjoyed decades of consistent economic growth, at the same time that many established neighborhoods have refused to allow new homes. More dollars chasing the same number of homes means higher housing prices, and worse affordability.

More specifically, it means higher residential land values, since the houses themselves are aging and depreciating. Most Triangle houses were built last century, and have therefore aged to the point where most of the house may need replacement (age comes for us all!). A worn-down, inexpensive house on expensive land eventually becomes untenable, not only for buyers but more importantly for lenders. (The usual guideline is that once the land becomes more valuable than the house upon it, that ho…

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ROAD to Housing Act Becomes Law Without Trump’s Signature

Finally law: Last Friday at midnight, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law without President Trump’s signature. After nearly a year of negotiations and decades of inaction, a flood of new federal housing policies will start to reshape how America builds.

What this means: From bringing down the price of manufactured homes, to incentivizing communities to allow more housing, the ROAD Act has a lot worth celebrating. Here at CITYBUILDER, we’re focused on how North Carolina’s state and local governments can implement the reforms from this bill to unlock more housing. Stay tuned!

Closer to Home:

NC Senate Advances Regulatory Reform Bill

Read more

This piece was written by CITYBUILDER student fellow Lucas Nagel through the Allison Ramsey Architects Intentional Community Research Fellowship. A special thanks to Allison Ramsey Architects for funding research into the importance of design in creating a sustainable, thriving urban future.

This past spring, I had the pleasure of interviewing Ross from a student perspective. My underpinning objective was to learn how the societal characteristics and ideals of an intentional community are fostered by the physical hardware of pocket neighborhoods. My secondary goal was to understand the foundational pillars of Ross’ pedagogy for design and how the rest of the housing community could emulate this framework within our own processes.

Origins of the Pocket Neighborhood

Ross was originally drawn to pursue a degree in architecture as it presented a tangible combination of math and creative exploration. However, sensing a disconnect between purist design education and historic, human-scale context, Ross decided to broaden his global architectural literacy by traveling across Europe on bike, and visiting hundreds of small European towns along the way.

Before returning to school he had the chance opportunity to visit the UC Berkeley architecture library where the seminal text, A Pattern Language by emeritus professor Christopher Alexander was being prepared for publication. By drawing connections between his European travels and the methodical categorization of optimal patterns for the built environment, the seed of the pocket neighborhood was planted.

As he completed school and entered the architect profession, Ross designed his first residential project, Third Street Cottages (1998). His design for the small community proposed a ground-breaking alternative that addressed issues associated with placeless single-family sprawl. It suggested that compact living can yield greater benefits than standalone homes; it also provided evidence of the demand for community-oriented neighborhoods. The pocket neighborhood was born.

Pocket Neighborhood As a Typology

The impetus of creating pocket neighborhoods is to cultivate a greater vibrancy among small groups of people within a larger context. Ross says that there is nothing particularly new to this idea; it simply builds on the preexisting tendency of people to establish informal neighborhood groups. The pocket neighborhood recognizes this need and provides a solution that makes group finding and belonging easier.

While many American homes align their entry with the street front, pocket neighborhoods invert the orientation of private yards toward communal interior spaces, creating an inside-out effect. Furthermore, the vibrance of the interior is strengthened by the “coraling of the car.” Front doors and porches now orient inward, and they’re accessed by pedestrian paths and gardens, not a road. This allows for the infrastructure of the interior to be designed at the human scale, not for the automobile.

Finally, paths, landscaping, and community buildings are encouraged to be utilized as street front components as well. This provision ensures the sustained activation of all ‘surfaces’ along the site and allows for the replication of this pattern in adjacent properties which may become an interconnected network of “pockets” in the future.

Ross does not advocate for pocket neighborhood development as the product of a prescriptive checklist. Rather, he lightly proposes the metaphorical term, ‘pocket neighborhood’, as a template of intimate, community-centered design. Further, Ross suggests the architectural elements of pocket neighborhoods should follow a pattern set that embodies the values of a community. For example, this alignment may include an elegant ramp system for a community that co-sponsors multigenerational living, or methodical farm shed placement for an agriculture-focused CSA. Both examples contain a common design language that furthers the intentionality of the respective community’s space.

Pattern Languages and Design Hierarchy in Ross’ Work

Ross Chapin’s design process aims to respond at three scales: community, home, and room. This approach is in line with the premise of A Pattern Language which outlines: town, building, and construction. In architectural theory, this foundational hierarchy can be traced to Leon Battista Alberti's rewriting of Vitruvius in 1452, where he states “a building is a form of body,” where each level and system is interdependent upon the others. Ross’ pedagogy reinforces this idea, as his work not only functions at each of the three scales, but it vitally relies upon the interdependency of each component to create a living system for human habitation. To illustrate this example, let’s look at Fifth St. Commons in Langley, Washington, which many followers regard as the ‘magnum opus’ amongst Ross’ pocket-neighborhood portfolio.

Town

At the city or town level, Fifth St. Commons responds to a direct need: attainable housing for younger buyers in the heart of Langley. The neighborhood was designed to embody four characteristics: multi-generational, low-cost, environmentally integrated, and socially active. In outlining these pillars, the community came to life not only as a self-sustaining habitat, but in many ways a piece of the town’s infrastructure, expanding options in the Langley housing market.

Furthermore, the character of the development reflects the vibrancy of its surroundings, reaffirming the town’s identity. Ross also coined a term called “the scale of sociability,” calling for small housing groups and shared spaces in which “conversation is spontaneous.” Fifth St. Commons is built at a capacity of just sixteen units in four residential buildings, creating a compact and intimate community.

Building

At the building level, the scale shifts to an intentional creation of layering from the surrounding community towards one’s home. The “layers of personal space,” as Ross says, are a condition where pattern languages are highly impactful. Nested housing is a straightforward strategy that can go overlooked in efficiency-blinded subdivision development. In essence, the mechanism provides for two adjacent facades, one with windows and one without. Repeating this pattern, each home along a consecutive row has perpendicular facing windows on one side, while skylights and clerestory windows help balance natural light on the solid side.

Other methods to texturize layers of private space include porches, railings, gardens, non-obtrusive fences, trees, and sidewalks to create a gradual hierarchy from the public to private realm. Repeating these layers for all buildings and units allows for a more seamless flow between individual and collective space. For instance, every person should have their own window box which they can curate to their own aesthetic taste. At the next level, a building of two to four units may choose a common porch design with cohesive craft detailing and surrounding gardens. The variation of styles chosen for each building contributes to a more charming interior court. Finally, the shared public space is owned by the residents and requires a greater level of consensus as to how it should be designed. Identifying the core values of the community can help elucidate necessary shared amenities to include here.

Room

Finally, the room is a critical factor in the independence of community living spaces. For Ross, the porch is a highly impactful, but often underutilized room that defines a space for individuals to feel protected, yet present. While there are multiple facets to designing a good porch, the most important consideration is that the porch is an extension of the living space. In other words, if the porch is solely occupied by an occasional key fumble and holiday decoration storage, its utility is entirely misunderstood.

Conversely, a porch that is surrounded by landscaping, is over eighty square feet, has a low railing, and is offset from the primary axis of entry, promises a much improved potential for activation. Another design pattern at the room level is the ability to surveil shared space from inside the home. This provision functions dually as a way to insure the protection of children and elderly residents, as well as to facilitate informal community surveillance of chance intruders entering the shared space.

Fifth St. Commons offers a great example of how consistent patterns can make a huge difference on the environment and levels of a community. A more comprehensive explanation of the design choices that made Fifth St. Commons so successful can be explored on YouTube and on Ross Chapin’s website. Along with being an architect, Ross is the author of Pocket Neighborhoods: Creating Small-Scale Community in a Large-Scale World. He’s also a journalist, having written The Human Side of Housing which synthesizes multiple pattern language factors including psychology, anatomy, nature, and design.

If you want to see Ross Chapin’s neighborhood designs yourself, make sure to come to a CITYBUILDER Summer Film Screening in Cary or Raleigh! We’ll watch a film exploring two of Ross Chapin’s pocket neighborhoods in Seattle. Grab your tickets below!

Dates & Locations

July 22, 2026, 7-9pm · Hearsay, A Cocktail Bar · 317 W Chatham St, Cary

Get tickets to Cary

August 26, 2026, 7-9pm · Trophy Brewing & Taproom · 656 Maywood Ave, Raleigh

Get tickets to Raleigh

This piece was written by CITYBUILDER student fellow Lucas Nagel through the Allison Ramsey Architects Intentional Community Research Fellowship. A special thanks to Allison Ramsey Architects for funding research into the importance of design in creating a sustainable, thriving urban future.

This article was authored by Michael Kramer, a veteran multi-disciplinary residential design firm leader with 25 years of experience working in estimating, purchasing and architectural design for regional and national builders and design firms.

Build to rent housing is the most significant new product initiative in the housing market over the past decade. While often lumped together with single family rental housing, build to rent communities serve a distinct purpose. They are intentionally designed communities that provide renters with housing that feels more like a traditional home while remaining attainable for households that are not ready or able to purchase.

Recently, legislation around institutional ownership of rental housing has sparked conversation about potential consequences for this segment of the market. While the intent of these measures is often tied to housing affordability, the discussion should always consider how policy might affect community design, project economics and the long-term health of neighborhoods.

The challenge is not simply about ownership structures. The larger question is how current and future legislation might affect the housing choices that build to rent communities currently provide.

The Niche Role of Build to Rent

Many residents reach a point where apartment living no longer meets their needs. They want more privacy, more outdoor space and a housing experience that feels closer to a traditional home. At the same time, rising home prices, financing challenges and limited inventory often place homeownership out of reach.

Build to rent communities emerged in response to that gap. They have become the new iteration of “missing middle” housing our country so desperately needs.

The goal has been straightforward: Create housing that offers the feel of a single-family neighborhood while maintaining the flexibility of renting. In many cases, that means cottages, detached homes, townhomes or a mix of housing types arranged within a professionally managed community.

These communities were never intended as a substitute for homeownership. Instead, they became a practical option for residents seeking a transition between apartment living and a future home purchase.

Design Impact: Fewer Housing Choices

One of the contentious elements of the recently proposed build to rent legislation was its impact on community design by requiring the eventual sale of rental homes after a defined period. It was clear that the uncertainty surrounding long-term ownership threatened to introduce new risk into the development process. The developers I work with around the country were prepared to respond to this risk by adjusting product types. While revisions to the bill have significantly altered the details around ownership structure, it’s still a potential future concern.

If policy change causes detached rental homes to become more difficult to finance, manage or eventually sell, many builders may shift to more traditional multifamily formats. Garden apartments, stacked flats and larger attached products would become the safer option. This would reduce housing diversity.

Over the last several years, many build to rent communities have evolved beyond a single product type. Successful projects increasingly include a mix of detached cottages, duplexes, townhomes and apartments. This progression allows residents to find housing that fits their life stage while remaining within the same community.

Policies that effectively remove detached housing from the equation could eliminate this diversity. For example, single-story cottage products have become particularly attractive to active adults, retirees and residents seeking single-level living. Those housing types serve a different market than conventional apartments or townhomes. If legislation makes those products less viable, that segment of housing could disappear from future projects.

Municipalities may also respond by changing how communities are entitled and platted. In some scenarios, local governments could require different ownership structures or development approaches. Those changes can affect setbacks, density, and site planning, ultimately reducing design flexibility. In practice, communities may become more uniform and less responsive to the diverse needs of renters.

Affordability: Intentions vs. Reality

Supporters of build to rent restrictions often cite affordability as a primary objective for policy change. The concern is understandable since housing affordability remains one of the most pressing challenges facing communities across the country.

The question, though, should be whether these proposals actually increase affordability. New policies cannot change the fundamental issue in our industry: It’s expensive to build homes.

Land costs remain elevated in many markets. Infrastructure requirements continue to grow. Regulatory expenses represent a significant portion of development costs. Even when homes become smaller, many of the most expensive components remain the same. Kitchens, bathrooms, mechanical systems and utility infrastructure are required regardless of square footage. As a result, affordability is not solved simply by requiring rental communities to transition into for-sale housing.

Build to rent communities currently provide a housing option for residents who may not qualify for mortgages or who are not financially prepared for homeownership. If that housing option disappears, the affordability gap does not shrink. It widens.

Developers facing uncertainty may decide not to pursue these projects at all. In my conversations with developers throughout the industry, many are already taking a wait-and-see approach. Others have removed the product type from their pipeline entirely until greater clarity emerges.

When fewer developers are willing to move forward with build to rent communities, housing supply becomes even more constrained, placing additional pressure on rents and home prices alike. In this scenario, legislation intended to improve affordability may ultimately reduce the number of attainable housing options available to residents.

Community Building & Long-Term Local Benefits

All policy considerations extend beyond individual projects and into the broader health of local communities. Well-designed build to rent neighborhoods can create a housing progression that mirrors how people move through different stages of life. Residents may begin in an apartment, transition into a townhome and eventually choose a detached home within the same area.

That progression supports long-term community stability.

Residents remain connected to local schools, employers, businesses and social networks. Communities benefit from a broader range of housing choices without requiring residents to leave the area as their needs evolve.

If developers feel restricted by new legislation, that progression becomes more difficult to create. Communities that lose detached rental products provide fewer opportunities for households seeking a step between apartment living and homeownership. Young families, active adults and retirees could find themselves with fewer local choices that match their needs.

Many policymakers are attempting to address legitimate housing concerns, but build to rent communities are often misunderstood. These developments are not simply collections of rental houses. They represent a distinct housing model with unique planning, ownership and operational considerations. A productive conversation should focus on understanding how these communities function, who they serve and what role they play within the broader housing ecosystem.

Looking Ahead

Housing policy will continue to evolve, and thoughtful debate is essential. I hope future conversations consider the broader implications for design, affordability and community development.

Build to rent communities were created to address a specific housing need. They offer an alternative for residents seeking more space and privacy than an apartment while remaining unable or unwilling to purchase a home. So as legislators evaluate potential changes, I would urge them to consider whether proposed solutions address the root causes of housing affordability or simply remove one of the few housing options that currently helps bridge the gap.

The future of build to rent may ultimately depend on finding policies that preserve housing choice while supporting attainable development. If that balance can be achieved, communities will be better positioned to serve residents across a wide range of life stages and economic circumstances.

About the Author

Michael Kramer is a veteran multi-disciplinary residential design firm leader, managing operations and coordinating teams on regional and national design and development projects of nearly every scale and product type. With 25 years of experience working in estimating, purchasing and architectural design for regional and national builders and design firms, Michael brings a practical perspective to every new project.

He is a dedicated advocate of the AEC industry through professional development, networking, association involvement, speaking engagements and awards programs. As a past president and 2011 Builder of the Year for his local Building Industry Association, Michael helped navigate the association through one of the most difficult times in our industry. He continues to engage locally and nationally, speaking and writing about key issues and design trends in order to help his colleagues, peers and clients advance their respective roles in the industry.

NC Ends Parking Minimums (almost) Statewide

Signed by Stein: On Monday, Governor Stein signed the Parking Lot Reform and Modernization Act (aka H162). When the bill takes effect on January 1st, 2027, North Carolina will be the first state in the nation to eliminate nearly all parking minimums statewide (parking minimums are still active in coastal counties), covering 90% of the state’s population.

First in the nation: While some cities had already removed parking mandates, and other states have limited them on housing projects or in transit areas, NC is leading the way on ending parking mandates across the board for housing and commercial projects alike. Allowing businesses and builders to choose how much parking they need has been shown to reduce costs, and it also reduces the environmental impact and flooding risks caused by parking lots.

Environmental Impact: It’s no secret that parking lots lead to major stormwater runoff, flooding, and pollution across our state. That’s why Catawba Riverkeepers was a key part of making this bill possible. Included in the bill is a provision that grants local municipalities the ability to offer incentives to increase stormwater protections when properties are redeveloped. This is a big win too.

More room for housing: To top it all off, NC’s parking reforms will make room for more homes in walkable areas. Cutting down on 30-minute commutes? Count us in! If you helped us advocate for this reform in any way, from calling your state senator to being a paid subscriber, we sincerely thank you.

Closer to Home:

Raleigh Considers Bringing Back Exempt Plats and Minor Subdivisions

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A long time ago in a galaxy far far away… before exclusionary zoning became the norm in America post WWII, single room occupancy (SRO) was a common type of housing. Think of these units as smaller, simpler apartments: an individual rents a private room but shares kitchens and bathrooms with neighbors.

SRO housing can range from a guest bedroom rented out of a large single-family home, to a dorm-style boarding house that provides a cheap housing option for single adults, to repurposed office buildings with private rooms and shared amenities.

Unfortunately, in the Triangle SROs are mostly illegal. As part of the late 20th-century wave of zoning in America, SROs were outlawed or regulated into oblivion, and with them the cheapest housing available disappeared.

SROs provide a number of unique benefits:

• SROs are often the cheapest non-subsidized housing you can find. Median rents for SROs were historically hundreds of dollars lower than apartments of even modest size.
• They work for a surprising variety of people: students, young workers, folks in between jobs, single adults, and anyone who just doesn’t need a giant apartment.
• They can unlock existing housing capacity by using spare rooms and underused buildings without spending billions in subsidies.

Raleigh and Durham (like most growing cities) have a housing shortage and an affordability problem. We build lots of big, expensive living options, but the lower rungs of the housing ladder are sparse. Markets work when they offer a range of choices. Right now in Durham, SROs are only allowed without a special use permit on college campuses and in the downtown core. Raleigh has a strict occupancy restriction that sets a limit of 4 unrelated persons per “dwelling.” This effectively outlaws any sort of SRO outside of a specific “Co-Living” zoning district. So while SROs are not technically outlawed entirely, in both cities the regulatory environment eliminates their use outside of student dorms and other specific circumstances.

This is a complete shame. There’s already housing stock sitting unused or underused in many cities. The law shouldn’t force it into inactivity. Durham is in the process of rewriting its zoning code (an effort that’s currently paused). When that process resumes, Durham has a golden opportunity to make SROs an integral part of our housing market once again.

Currently the R-D and RX districts in the proposed zoning code (now called the LDC) are intended to permit various forms of buildings while limiting the density of different neighborhoods to different levels (I would encourage you to check out the draft materials). My proposal is to add specific language to the RD/RX districts that includes all the standards of the proposed RD/RX district, and allows for SRO arrangements without special use permitting. Removing this regulatory barrier will allow the flexibility of SROs to flourish and pay dividends to our housing market. I would encourage the UDO to adopt occupancy standards in line with the Fair Housing Act, along with reasonable environmental and health standards. What’s important is that one doesn’t need to apply for a special permit to take advantage of SRO housing options.

SRO setups would flourish along our transit corridors, near mixed-use districts in and around downtown. Allowing SROs is a form of upzoning, but one that doesn’t involve massive high rises, it is effectively a “gentle” density, legalizing a long lost form of housing that will help us in the 21st century.

With respect to Raleigh, they should ditch the odd “4 unrelated persons” rule for occupancy, take SRO out of a special zoning district, and add SRO to existing residential districts. SROs should be treated as a normal, viable form of housing.

For more info on policy proposals, especially those that could legalize SROs statewide, check out this model legislation from Institute for Justice.

Andy Lowe is a local Durham resident who is passionate about local politics and land use. To keep up with him and the Durham City Council, check out his substack. He serves as chapter lead for the RDU New Liberals.

We had a hunch that Durham was ready for this. We did not fully know how ready.

On June 25th, CITYBUILDER hosted the first stop of our Summer Film Tour at Fullsteam ATC on the American Tobacco Campus in Durham. It was a $10 screening of six short documentary films about housing, neighborhoods, and cities throughout our country.

We passed out popcorn. We handed out questionnaire sheets and little urbanist bingo cards. Sean from Fullsteam was pouring complimentary beverages and showing off the gorgeous new space being built out there, which opens in the fall. Twenty-five people showed up, spread across the room in ones and twos and small groups, and we talked about what we watched, and what it meant.

Who Was in the Room

One of the things that struck me most was who came. We had tons of new faces at this event, lots of people who had been part of our digital community for a while and had never made it out to an in-person gathering before.

They showed up solo. They showed up in groups. Some of them are active in local government. Others are involved with ULI Triangle. They’re exactly the kind of people you’d want in a room when the subject is housing policy and the future of our region.

And shoutout to the family with their 14-month-old in the audience, and the couple who brought their puppy. CITYBUILDER events are always kid-friendly, intentionally. Most of our team are parents. We want families in the room. We want the little CITYBUILDER generation to grow up thinking that this is just what people do on a weeknight, that you go somewhere, watch something, and then you talk about how cities work and who they’re built for.

The thread that connected everyone, whether they arrived already knowing the policy details or coming in fresh, was genuine curiosity. That’s what we like to see.

What We Watched

Saga City

An animated short about a fictional town drowning in sprawl, car dependency, and economic decline that decides to rebuild itself from the inside out. Infill. Adaptive reuse. Transit. More density, more greenery, more people. The film’s conclusion isn’t really about infrastructure; it’s about getting our neighbors, communities, and elected officials to see what’s possible.

CNU25 Pocket Neighborhoods

Architect Ross Chapin walks through two Seattle neighborhoods built at human scale, small clusters of homes arranged around shared courtyards and garden paths. He talks about the gift of constraints, and about the five layers of threshold between the sidewalk and your front door that tell your brain where public space ends and private space begins. One resident says of Chapin’s neighborhood: “It feels like an oasis.” Most of our zoning codes make these places impossible to build.

LA’s Forbidden City

This one’s a walking tour through the duplexes, fourplexes, and bungalow courts of Los Angeles. These housing types made neighborhoods vibrant and affordable, but were quietly banned one parking minimum and setback requirement at a time. This is the story of the Raleigh and Durham too. At every screening, we’re building a local version of that “forbidden housing” inventory: the buildings in the Triangle that people love but can no longer legally construct.

Before | After

One minute and forty-five seconds long, and it’ll make you want to call your city council member. This quick film is a collection of street transformations captured on Google Streetview by the team at Urb-i. It’s filled with formerly car-dominated roads redesigned for people, with paint and bollards and bike lanes and benches where parking spaces used to be. Cities on every continent are doing this. There’s no reason we can’t do it here.

River City Rising

A short documentary about Spokane’s response to its own housing emergency. The city looked backward to move forward, drawing on historic urban planning principles and the character of its original streetcar neighborhoods to shape housing supply solutions and zoning reforms for today. This one’s a great reminder that the answers to our present problems usually have their roots in the past.

Segregated By Design

All six films were great. But the one that really got the crowd going, the one nobody wanted to stop talking about, was this one.

The Conversation That Stayed

Segregated By Design is a 17-minute motion design film narrated by Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law. It traces exactly how American cities became segregated. Not by accident, not by the invisible drift of individual choices, but by the deliberate, explicit policy of federal, state, and local governments. The New Deal housing programs that demolished integrated neighborhoods to build segregated ones. The FHA loans available to white families and denied to Black families. Redlining. Blockbusting. The concentrated government machinery that created the conditions it then blamed on the communities it had engineered.

About six members of our audience had already read The Color of Law. The rest were encountering this history for the first time, in this form, at this level of clarity. That gap in the room, between those who had been sitting with it and those who were just now learning it, produced one of the most honest conversations I’ve been part of in a long time.

What made this discussion land the way it did was the personal experience people brought into the room. The conversation moved between history and the present, between what the government did then and what the maps of our own neighborhoods look like now, between policy and lived experience. People were connecting this new information to something they already knew but hadn’t had the language to describe.

The point Rothstein drives home in the film’s closing argument is this: if the policies that created segregation were unconstitutional, then we have a civic right and a civic duty to repair what they broke. That is not a comfortable conclusion, but it is a necessary one. And it’s the kind of conclusion that hits differently when you’re sitting in a room full of people, all of whom live inside the cities that those policies created.

After the Films

After the last film ended, Sean walked the group through the Fullsteam ATC build-out, the new space taking shape on the American Tobacco Campus that will open this fall. As we walked past the lounge area, pinball machines, and patio, the conversation just kept going, moving from the films into the space itself… into what it means for a neighborhood when a place like this opens.

We also got to watch Sean change out the marquee, which was one of those small, genuinely delightful moments. Our Executive Administrator, Charlotte, even got a turn at it. It was the kind of ending to an evening that you can’t plan for and can’t replicate, the kind that makes people want to come back.

What Comes Next

Our film tour moves to Cary on July 22 at Hearsay, A Cocktail Bar, and closes in Raleigh on August 26 at Trophy Brewing. Both are hyperlocal venues, intimate and genuinely good. The kind of places where a conversation can run long without anyone feeling rushed out the door.

The same six-film lineup travels to Cary and Raleigh. Every city gets the full program. What changes is the room, the audience, and the conversation that follows. That is the whole experiment.

Raleigh in August is the hometown show, and we’re programming it around what resonated most in Durham and Cary. The films that made people stay late, and the discussions that nobody wanted to end.

Bring Someone With You

We kept saying it in Durham and we mean it for Cary and Raleigh too: if you came, and you thought of someone who should have been there, bring them.

The strongest thing that came out of Durham was not any single conversation (though the conversations were great). It was the gathering itself: the fact that twenty-five people who care about this showed up on a weeknight and stayed late. Word-of-mouth invitation is how that room gets bigger. It is how we build the community that makes a conference like YIMBYtown worth attending, and worth hosting, and worth traveling to Raleigh for in November.

We are building this community together — a community of people who see the cities around them clearly, who understand the history underneath them, and who believe that we can choose to build something even better than what we have today.

Come watch. Come talk. Bring a friend. Come build it with us.

Dates & Locations

July 22, 2026, 7-9pm · Hearsay, A Cocktail Bar · 317 W Chatham St, Cary

Get Tickets for Cary

August 26, 2026, 7-9pm · Trophy Brewing & Taproom · 656 Maywood Ave, Raleigh

Get Tickets for Raleigh

All screenings are $10 and open to the public. Presented with Better Cities Film Festival and Southern Urbanism.

Brought to you by our Gold Sponsor

Hannah Moell is a Raleigh-based visual artist and housing advocate. As Development & Partnerships Director at CITYBUILDER. She leads sponsorship, fundraising, and partnerships, with a current focus on YIMBYtown 2026 at the Raleigh Convention Center.

Her art practice spans encaustic fractals, large-scale watercolor florals, and natural pigment on linen, all rooted in neuroaesthetics — the science of how pattern and the natural world trigger beauty and awe. She holds a BFA from East Carolina University and teaches through Durham Art Guild and the Makery.

Whether building coalitions or paintings, she’s drawn to systems that hold meaning and work that moves people.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of ordinary people made an extraordinary claim.

They declared that a nation could govern itself.

They did not assume perfection from the beginning, but rather trusted the continuous work of citizens willing to take responsibility for the places they shared.

One of my favorite reads on early American politics is Democracy in America, a book of observations by a young Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville, who traveled America just 50 years later. He wanted the same thing so many of us want today, he wanted to understand why this unlikely ‘American experiment’ seemed to work.

He arrived as the country was transforming from an agrarian nation into one of towns, canals, railroads and growing cities. Fascinatingly, he found that the secret wasn’t really in Congress or in the presidency; it was in our towns:

“Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people’s reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it. A nation may establish a system of free government, but without the spirit of municipal institutions it cannot have the spirit of liberty.”

- Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835

I’ve always loved that idea.

Not because I think town meetings are magical. Anyone who has been to even 1-2 of them knows better. Rather, because I like the lesson here about democracy being something we must practice.

We practice it every time neighbors disagree about the future of a street. Every time a community decides what to preserve, what to change and what kind of place it wants to become. We practice it everytime we argue about new apartment buildings, ADUs, bike lanes, parks or what belongs on that corner down the road.

For me, how we practice democracy and how we build housing are intrinsically linked.

Homes are more than buildings, building types, front yards and setbacks. Every line we draw on paper shapes who gets to live here, who gets to stay and who gets to become part of our community. That’s when the American experiment becomes opportunity.

Can your children afford to stay close to home?

Can a young family put down roots?

Can an older neighbor remain in the community they helped build?

Can someone new find a place to belong?

These are life-shaping questions that are often decided by abstract and arbitrary policies rather than by true opportunity. They are questions I repeat when I challenge our local leaders on housing.

Are we making room for one another?

Two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, America is still imperfect and unfinished. And that’s a good thing.

Each generation, we inherit the stewardship of this experiment. With the responsibility not to preserve America exactly as we found it (or our neighborhood either) but to leave it a little more free, a little more welcoming and, hopefully, a lot more capable of meeting the needs of the people who come after us.

Sometimes that work happens in Congress. More often, it happens in city halls, planning commissions, neighborhood meetings, construction sites, new business openings, long time loyal customers at beloved spots and, most importantly, in conversations between neighbors who care enough to show up.

Where we build community is where democracy is practiced.

That’s the optimism I’ll leave you with today. Two hundred and fifty years later, we’re still showing up: to argue, to build and to imagine something better for tomorrow.

Happy Independence Day.

Jenn Truman is a young designer, leader, and advocate based in Raleigh, she is embedded in the local community through both her professional and volunteer work. Jenn is a regular contributor to and Founder of CITYBUILDER.

China Builds 26-Story Apartment Building in 5 Days

Manufactured marvel: Five days. That’s how long it took 100 workers in China to construct a 26-story residential tower. But if that sounds crazy, wait for this part: The workers didn’t mix any concrete, weld a single beam, or saw a single board. As Fix the News reports:

The modules arrived on flatbeds, 12m x3m x2.4m each, the exact footprint of a 40-foot shipping container — pre-wired, pre-piped, pre-furnished, and locked together like the world’s tallest piece of IKEA furniture.

High-speed housing: By assembling 208 move-in ready apartments in five days, Broad Sustainable Building has proven just how rapidly manufactured housing can be deployed. With the ROAD to Housing Act set to finally unleash the full potential of manufactured housing in the United States, it’s time to see if American companies can rival their Chinese counterparts in constructing housing with speed on a large scale.

Closer to Home:

NC Parking Reform Heads to Gov. Stein

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Hello CITYBUILDERs and Happy July!

It’s been a great summer so far. It’s a privilege to watch this community grow as new people discover CITYBUILDER and our events, and it’s a thrill to see the same folks return with new friends and family in tow. Thank you for building this movement with us!

In June, we kicked off the first night of our Summer Film Tour. Thank you again to Sean at Fullsteam Brewery for providing space and refreshments. Not only did we get to watch inspiring films about housing and urbanism, but we got a sneak peek at the new Fullsteam Brewery space at the American Tobacco campus in Durham. Thanks to everyone who came out for an unforgettable evening!

Next, the Film Tour is headed to Hearsay in Cary! Get your $10 tickets ahead of time, or you can buy them at the door. We’re showing the same reel from Better Cities Film Festival at each location. If you saw the films in Durham and think there’s someone who needs to see them, send them to Cary on July 22nd or Raleigh on August 26th. It’s a family-friendly evening, and a great chance to escape the summer heat, sit back, relax, and enjoy thought-provoking and inspiring films. Thanks to our partners Southern Urbanism, and our Durham sponsor The Rocket Shop for your support.

Interested in sponsoring one of our upcoming film nights in Cary or Raleigh? Reach out for more info (citybuildernc@gmail.com).

Also in July, we’re excited to again be partnering with our good friends at RaleighForward and WakeUp Wake County for a Happy Hour on July 29th from 5PM to 7PM at Good Graces in North Raleigh. Come connect with the pro-housing community in Raleigh, and find out more about these three important, community-based organizations, working at different scales for Raleigh, Wake County, and the Triangle.

All that, and the 4th of July coming up! Whether you like to grill out, participate in a parade, watch the fireworks, or dig into our rich history, the Triangle has got you covered.

We hope you have a safe and celebratory 4th of July. We can’t wait to see you!

Charlotte Chapman
Executive Administrator, CITYBUILDER

In Case You Missed It…

Be an Early Bird for YIMBYtown 2026!

Registration for YIMBYtown 2026 is LIVE! Get your Early Bird tickets now at yimby.town.

Got an idea for a talk? Apply to speak! RFPs are open through July 17th!

JULY EVENTS WITH CITYBUILDER

SUMMER FILM TOUR - CARY!

Wednesday July 22nd • 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Hearsay, A Cocktail Bar • 317 W Chatham St, Cary
RSVP & Tickets

Join us for the second stop on our Summer Film Tour!

We’re partnering with Better Cities Film Festival and Southern Urbanism to showcase a selection of short, documentary films highlighting housing and urbanism from across the country.

The films showcase lessons from other places, lessons from the past, and inspiration for the future that we can apply to our local Triangle communities.

This will be a family-friendly evening, and a great chance to escape the summer heat, sit back, relax, and enjoy thought-provoking and inspiring films. Your $10 ticket to the event includes popcorn. Drinks will be available for purchase.

HAPPY HOUR with RaleighForward • WakeUp Wake County • CITYBUILDER
Wednesday July 29th • 5:00pm - 7:00pm

Good Graces • 540 St Albans Dr Ste 130, Raleigh
RSVP at the link

We’re excited to again be partnering with our good friends at RaleighForward and WakeUp Wake County for a Happy Hour on July 29th from 5PM to 7PM at Good Graces in North Raleigh.

Come connect with the pro-housing community in Raleigh, and find out more about these three important, community-based organizations, working at different scales for Raleigh, Wake County, and the Triangle.

We’ll see you there!

Hopefully you all had a chance to skim my take on Governor Stein’s Executive Order 36: “Increasing Housing Opportunities for All North Carolinians.” But if not, the tl;dr is: North Carolina is growing, we need more housing, the Governor gets it, and this EO has potential!

That last part is what I want to discuss today. This EO is just the first step, and its level of impact hinges on how agencies implement it. As I mentioned last month, I saw firsthand how this process typically worked under Governor Cooper for this type of EO: the Governor’s team and agency policy leads work together to craft a policy vision, draft the EO language, and then collaborate to implement that vision through changes to policies and programs controlled by each agency. However, the final result of that effort is highly dependent on a few factors:

1. How much internal buy-in within agencies is there for the policy change?

Yes, state executive agencies report to the Governor, who appoints agency leaders, but these leaders — particularly those that may not have come directly from internal ranks — rely on permanent civil servants throughout state agencies for guidance. And they should! Many of these folks were there before this administration and will be there after, doing the work, executing an already long list of priorities with limited resources.

However, this can mean that sometimes new top-down directives and processes are looked at with wariness, out of completely legitimate concerns about overstretching or reallocating these limited resources. If a new policy initiative is grown internally and/or agency staff are excited about it, ideas will naturally be more ambitious, face less skepticism, and progress more efficiently. But if seen as just another new task being forced upon staff without a clear articulation of how they fit into the vision, it’s going to take a little more pressure, time (often unavoidably at the expense of other important problems), and high-level engagement to drive things forward. This makes cross-cutting challenges like housing and land use policy that don’t “live” anywhere at the state level (outside of the NC Housing Finance Agency’s important, but limited financing mandate) particularly difficult to tackle.

I could see agencies needing a little extra pressure to really dig deep here.

2. How many internal resources have been allocated to overseeing EO implementation and where is it prioritized?

Building off the previous point, once an EO goes out, Governor’s Office staff must devote limited time to coordinating with agencies, tracking progress, and pushing things forward. The problem is that new stuff happens! As famed philosopher Mike Tyson once said: “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”, and no matter how well any administration plans, they’re going to get punched in the mouth. In this case, the appointment of a new Senior Advisor on Housing with the bandwidth to focus on this issue gives me confidence that once that punch comes, this EO at least won’t be forced to the back burner, at least not for too long.

3. How often is the Governor’s Office and agency leadership hearing about it from the outside?

A truth about governing that seems very simple, but I didn’t fully appreciate is this: it is not enough to have internal support for a policy idea. For any initiative to be prioritized at the level necessary to make real progress, political staff must be hearing about it.

The fact that Governor Stein even put forward this EO shows that he knows “housing” is a salient issue. However, as you all know, knowing that “we need more housing” is not the same as knowing that we need the deep and complex reforms to build more supply in high-demand areas, more diverse home types, and the multi-modal and pedestrian infrastructure required for greater incremental density to be practical in the long-run.

This is where housing advocates and the broader CITYBUILDER community can make an impact.

Believe me when I tell you that calling the Governor’s Office main line and voicing support for a new policy or asking about progress makes a big difference. There is always someone answering the phone (when I worked there it was a wonderful woman named Gwen who has more patience than I could ever dream of), tallying how many people call about various issues and relaying to staff when something in particular gets a lot of attention.

Of course this is not the only way to advocate, but the main takeaway is that elected officials are not going to spend the necessary time and political capital on issues that they don’t think are important to their constituents.

What Success Looks Like (To Me At Least)

I spent some time last fall digging into specific ways that agencies could complement priority legislative and local solutions, and really shift how we build in North Carolina. Listed below are some of these recommendations, and specific items that, I think, folks should be pushing for.

NC Department of Transportation

NCDOT is the most consequential in terms of its direct impact on the built environment. NCDOT now operates and maintains over 80,000 miles of roadway, second only to Texas in total miles, with many state highways intersecting urban and suburban communities across the state. The agency also has quite impactful driveway design and permitting authorities that shape the placement and design of schools, homes, and local businesses. As you can imagine, vehicle management and marginal congestion improvements are often prioritized over walkability and considerations for pedestrian improvements.

Transportation decisions shape the feasibility of community design, and the impact of NCDOT decisions on local communities does not stop at large highway or light rail projects — it influences every aspect of building.

Below is a list of reforms that NCDOT can and should be pushed to adopt under current authorities:

#1: Adopt a Context Classification System for roadway design as part of the North Carolina Roadway Design Manual. This should be modeled after Florida DOT’s first in the nation standards creating specific roadway design guidelines based on surrounding land use, including narrower lanes as well as more robust pedestrian and multi-modal considerations in urban and suburban areas. Crucially, this system requires highway engineers to justify wider lane size and increased capacity expansions rather than forcing them to justify reductions and other traffic calming measures as is currently required.

#2: Adopt a statewide 20% reduction target for vehicle miles traveled per capita and incorporate a proposed project’s impact towards achieving this goal into project scoring. Several states across the country already have similar targets. This would help focus investment decisions on systems that are more conducive to needed housing reforms.

#3: When “incorporating all components Complete Streets guidance into project design” as outlined in the EO, NCDOT should explicitly outline a hierarchy of components to be incorporated if a project does not physically allow for all elements. Additionally, it should be explicitly outlined that within urban and certain suburban area classifications and below certain targeted speeds (typically <40 mph), reducing the size and number of lanes should be considered before the elimination of any complete street component unless a roadway is explicitly exempted due to unique circumstances such as heavy freight traffic or other extraordinary, publicly documented considerations.

#4: Reform the Strategic Transit Prioritization (SPOT) Process voting procedures to ⅔ majority rather than current unanimous voting structure for high-level funding allocations by project type where the agency has discretion.

For context: The SPOT process is how NCDOT allocates flexible funding not bound by statute to highway projects (typically around 10% of overall funding levels). Currently, the internal requirement of unanimity across all voting members results in the repeated adoption of outdated allocations that set aside additional highway funding — beyond the 90% already allocated — to satisfy a minority of (predominantly highway engineer) holdouts.

#5: Reform Strategic Transportation Investment (STI) scoring to capture a more comprehensive suite of project costs and benefits along with their impacts on local communities. The EO calls on NCDOT to “explore metrics for transportation project impacts on community connectivity, housing availability, and local economic benefits and to collaborate with local planning organizations and community-based organizations to support transit-oriented development, locally driven housing development, and local connectivity”.

A bit of background here: STI scores are the metrics used to evaluate and prioritize projects submitted by local governments and regional planning organizations for NCDOT consideration.

Specific reforms include:

• Incorporate modeled impacts of induced demand into a project’s congestion reduction and freight benefit scores.

• Create a new point category for a project’s impact on state VMT reduction targets and other strategic multi-modal initiatives (post-adoption of reform #2 listed above).

• Rebalance the currently over-indexed value of localized congestion reduction in project scoring and consider dynamic system-wide safety and congestion mitigation benefits for local and regional public transportation projects as part of project scoring. Projects should be credited for local impacts as well as a proportional share of regional impacts if part of a larger planned system.

• Create a new scoring category that incorporates compatibility with local priorities for communities surrounding the project location — include potential impacts to land values, local tax revenue, community connectivity, and the economic benefits or costs seen by local communities.

• Incorporate bonus points for projects in locations that have adopted VMT-reducing land-use and resilient design reforms (e.g. parking, zoning, minimum lot sizes, other reforms targeted at incremental density improvements) into congestion mitigation scoring as these reforms will amplify benefits in those locations, particularly for public transit and multi-modal investments.

#6: Explore new partnerships with local governments to pursue federal USDOT public financing for transit-oriented development projects through the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act program, particularly along planned S-Line and future expanded Charlotte to Raleigh, Asheville, Winston-Salem, and Wilmington passenger rail routes. This work should build on the impressive “S-Line Mobility Hub” Program run by the NCDOT Integrated Mobility Division.

#7: Introduce a new “community roadway” classification for state highways in urban areas, complete with multi-modal considerations and lower vehicle capacity assumptions. Core considerations on whether a current highway should instead be a “community roadway” should include design speeds (35 mph or lower, unless a designated freight corridor should not receive highway or greater classification); surrounding land use; and whether the classification is compatible with local transportation plans.

#8: Partner with the NC Department of Public Instruction to create revised driveway and roadway standards. Develop new alternative site development guidelines for small-site urban public-school locations (current base guidelines almost entirely assume large-site, car-centered, suburban locations for new schools) that encourage walkability, increased childhood activity, and independence.

NC Department of Commerce

The Department of Commerce facilitates local economic growth through infrastructure grants, business recruitment and incentive programs, planning assistance, and data-driven research. Commerce conducts labor market analyses, publishes vital economic statistics for policymakers, and connects communities to resources that improve their competitiveness.

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Housing unaffordability and increasing commute times are consistently noted as drags on employers’ ability to hire and retain employees throughout the state. Incorporating requirements and incentives for local governments to enact substantive changes to their land use and housing policies as part of various economic development investments would be entirely within the mission of the Department and in line with this executive order.

#1: Create an internal “Division of Housing” modeled after the Washington Department of Commerce’s Growth Management Services that can oversee the integration of housing and land use considerations across all NC Commerce programs and initiatives, coordinate with local governments, and create resources and share best practices across the state.

#2: Develop a list of key priority supply-side housing and land use reforms for local governments to boost economic competitiveness and allow for a small percentage of relevant large infrastructure development funds to be utilized by local governments for local housing and land use planning that incorporates these reforms. Resources should be in the form of model ordinances that could easily be introduced and adopted at the local level, and include, at least, the following:

• Elimination of mandatory parking requirements for new developments and redevelopments (hopefully H162 will take care of this one!).

• Zoning reform to allow duplexes, triplexes, and small multifamily homes within greater amounts of residentially zoned areas.

• Expanded density flexibility and the elimination of proxy density restrictions — reduced FAR, increased height allowances, increased maximum lot coverage percentages, allowance of lot subdivisions, multiple housing units per plat, etc.

• Reduced minimum lot sizes.

• Accessory dwelling unit flexibility

• Allowance of residential development in commercially zoned areas

• Reduced setback requirements.

• Stormwater management requirements that are solely based on impervious surfaces and water quality/flooding impacts, not home type.

#3: Develop suggested pre-approved site plans for local governments to adopt as part of their ordinance planning processes. Early NC actors like Durham’s EHC and Raleigh’s preapproved ADU designs should be used as examples as well as others from across the country.

#4: Integrate considerations for local housing and land use policies into evaluation criteria and competitiveness factors for the One North Carolina Fund. Considerations should include available local housing supply, presence of prioritized local policies that allow for housing supply to absorb new residents, and the average expected commute times for new employees.

#5: Provide competitive advantages across programs for projects in locations that adopt key priority housing and land-use reforms.

#6: Incorporate considerations for locally accessible workforce housing into Megasite and Selectsite Readiness Program site analysis guidance.

#7: Introduce non-traditional housing design and construction (ADUs, cottage courts, rowhouses, duplex/triplexes, etc.), workforce housing on public lands, and allowances for faith-based housing initiatives as new workforce priorities for consideration by the NCWorks Commission and Golden Leaf Foundation.

NC Department of Environmental Quality

NCDEQ does not play as direct of a role in housing supply related issues as NCDOT or Commerce. Its most direct connections include stormwater management in key protected watersheds, state funding for floodplain management, and community resilience planning for severe storm events. Successful engagement from NCDEQ on this issue would ensure that its programs work to disincentivize further development into vulnerable areas while making it easier to advance incremental density improvements and more diverse home options. Suggested reforms include:

#1: Direct the newly formed NCDEQ State Resilience Office to incorporate the following as updates to the Resilient Planning Communities Guide as resilience improvement strategies:

• Prioritize local housing and land-use policies that encourage increased incremental density improvements and lower construction costs in non-hazard-prone areas.

• Stormwater Credit Trading Programs to allow for increased levels of infill housing in areas that are safe to build.

• In lieu fee stormwater management options in concert with local regional retention ponds and other stormwater capture facilities modeled after Tallahassee’s Blueprint Intergovernmental Agency, Capital Cascades Program, and Missing Middle Handbook.

• Local multimodal and pedestrian improvement projects that support reduced car-dependency, improved freedom of mobility, and increased housing options in areas safe for development.

#2: Ensure that stormwater management requirements in targeted watersheds are housing-type agnostic for residential dwellings and instead based solely on impervious surface areas. NCDEQ should ensure that homes built under the residential building code (single-family and 1-2 story multi-family) do not face any additional state stormwater management requirements based solely on housing type and only face requirements based on a project’s impervious surface and watershed impacts.

#3: Explore the feasibility of providing technical assistance to local governments interested in expanding stormwater credit trading systems by leveraging the Nutrient Offset ILF Program, the Department’s experience with local mitigation credit banks, and other in lieu fee-based credit trading programs across the country to provide guidance.

#4: Integrate bonus points into project scoring across competitive grant programs for stormwater projects in locations that adopt land use reforms that incentivize incremental density improvements.

#5: Quantify the per-unit emissions intensity of multifamily residential buildings in North Carolina compared to single-family homes under current building code requirements as part of the North Carolina Greenhouse Gas Inventory, and quantify overall per capita carbon emissions intensity by census tract to inform statewide sustainable community design. Previous work completed by the Rocky Mountain Institute and a soon to be published report completed by the World Resources Institute New Urban Mobility Alliance in partnership with NCDOT can be used as guidance.

In Conclusion

As I said at the beginning of my piece: This Executive Order is just the first step. But if implemented with strong internal buy-in and sufficient resources, EO36 could meaningfully increase North Carolina’s housing supply and contribute to more walkable cities and towns across the state.

Conor Mulderrig is an Independent Clean Energy, Housing, and Transportation Policy Consultant in Durham, NC. Previously he served as Climate Change Policy Advisor to Governor Roy Cooper where he worked to advance cleaner buildings, transportation systems, and land use reforms. He also served as Special Advisor for Clean Energy Deployment and Resilience at the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, Resilience Liaison to the Governor’s Recovery Office for Western North Carolina, and most recently was an Infrastructure Fellow for Arnold Ventures Philanthropies.

Trump Refuses to Sign ROAD Act; It Could Become Law Anyways

Congress passes ROAD Act: On Tuesday, the House passed the ROAD to Housing Act 358-32, one day after the Senate passed it 85-5. This is huge. After almost a year of negotiations, Congress just passed the most substantial housing reform bill in decades.

Trump refuses to sign: On Wednesday, President Trump refused to sign the bill, vowing to stonewall the legislation until the SAVE America Act is passed. However, Punchbowl News is reporting that House Speaker Johnson will present the ROAD Act to Trump on Monday, kicking off a 10-day window for him to either sign or veto the bill. If he does neither, the bill becomes law anyways.

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Like every other first year student at my university, I had to take a Writing 101 course. There were dozens to choose from, but the other courses on my schedule restricted the options available to me down to two. Since I had always been fascinated by ornate buildings and unable to tear myself away from architectural history books, I selected “Architecture and Anthropology,” thinking that if I had to write thousands of words about a subject, it might as well be something I was curious about.

That seemingly inconsequential choice fueled what was previously a dimly lit flame within me, one that burned to understand how the built environment around me determined my world. After a few months and a few dozen readings of Koolhaas, Bourdieu, and Foucault, I couldn’t walk around anywhere without thinking more critically about how every building, pathway, dorm, office, and concerted set of these on campuses and in cities shaped my every movement. I followed up on the passion inspired by that writing class with a digital humanities course on the architectural history of my university, which blossomed into a Board of Trustees involvement that was spun into a fellowship position after I graduated. In that fellowship I joined the team redesigning the undergraduate residential model and led a program that incorporated the historic built environment into a set of coherent, durable identities for all incoming students. And in my final report to the Board, I used not one but two references to the original readings from that class I took during my first year.

I graduated with degrees in neuroscience and linguistics, but the expected postgraduate pathways into medicine or doctoral studies had begun to strike me as decidedly not the most interesting and important thing I could be working on. I’d recently read Sarah Goldhagen’s book Welcome to Your World about the neuroscience of the built environment, and it only pushed me further in the direction of realizing that the big, looming problems my generation faces have big, systemic causes. I didn’t want to spend four or five more years in an educational setting preparing to narrowly treat or assess the negative conditions that are a long way downstream of their causes. What I really wanted to do was look farther upstream and discover what was causing all of the loneliness, isolation, mental illness, economic hardship, and ill health. The lack of abundant housing might not be the only upstream source of these issues (as the Housing Theory of Everything suggests), but it’s certainly one of the primary contributors and the one I believe is the most important to improve. And I have learned that the work of doing so also seems to undeniably attract the most interesting and thoughtful people around, a fact to which anyone involved with CITYBUILDER can attest.

What Gen Z Faces

Generation Z grew up native to the digital world, and we’ve so far endured major recessions in childhood, a global pandemic which interrupted our education and our formation of social ties, a social media environment that started out with startlingly few guardrails, and political polarization unprecedented in living memory. In addition to these, there is a widespread economic pessimism driven by poorer job prospects and higher costs than ever before, escalating evidence of ecological destruction, and the constant specter of mass-casualty gun violence. We’re encountering a fundamental upheaval in our early careers due to AI, which is not only making several hard-won skill sets obsolete (e.g. writing software code), but which is also incentivizing corporations against hiring trainees or recent graduates because much of the tedious work such a category of laborer would do in the past can now be done by the silicon minds housed in data centers (or so we are told).

Other commentators have written extensively about the polycrisis faced by our generation. It is not unreasonable that the generational cohort facing all the challenges outlined above as well as systemic exclusion from positions of power that can change any of it would develop widespread loneliness, isolation, depression, anxiety, financial hardship, and political pessimism. The polycrisis for Gen Z is tied up into a few significant knots, but more abundant housing and better cities is from my perspective the most crucial one to untie (or like Alexander, to cut!).

Why Citybuilding Meets the Challenge

So how did this Gordian knot of our housing crisis get tied in the first place? Flight from dense urban centers within cities was incentivized in the American post-war period by the economic shift from manufacturing to knowledge and service work, the poor state of sanitation and safety in cities, the rapid build-out of suburban developments, the relative affordability of automobiles and the expansion of roads and highways, and significant racism toward cities’ minority residents.

Where that has left us seventy-five years later is physically more distant from each other, and more socially distant as a consequence. It’s much harder to build strong social ties without the ubiquitous and spontaneous opportunities to encounter your peers that are available in walkable urban places. The deterioration of civic associations and other concrete social groups during the same period (cf. Bowling Alone) is an obvious downstream outcome. How can you justify participating in a social activity if the driving time there and back is longer than the activity itself? Social media platforms began as a virtual solution to this physical distance, but evolved to show just how much we still need to see each others’ faces in person, proven so even more by the coronavirus pandemic.

Cities that are instead built toward a gentle density where residents can walk around, run into the people they know spontaneously, and share in a full life together could untie some of the loneliness and isolation knot we face as a generation. The barrier to scrolling on social media is low, but if the barrier to spending time in person with the people you know and love were lower than it currently is, the greater satisfaction and sense of community that socialization creates would have a fighting chance of overcoming social media’s draw.

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The desirability of a dense, walkable city and neighborhood is well established on the basis of the evidence that it is these places which have the most expensive real estate in the entire country. Everyone wants to live in a place like Brooklyn Heights, but less than one percent can afford to.

That is the second key point in CITYBUILDER’s case for Gen Z. We know how to design and build great cities, but the only way to make those places actually affordable to our generation is to build like we have never built before. The most obvious way forward is safe, sustainable, gently dense developments that tip the housing supply in favor of the hardworking young people trying to build a home in a place where they know their families will thrive. Breaking through the bottlenecks of zoning, legislation, policymaking, regulation, and financing for this kind of development will make this goal possible, and we don’t have to look far to see evidence that increasing the supply to meet the demand drives prices toward affordability. In Austin, Texas, a city in the most regulatorily permissive state in the union, rents and housing prices have actually decreased since 2020, a fact remarkable only for how it seems to be unparalleled in most other cities. The relative affordability to rent or purchase a home in the state has driven extraordinary population growth which the supply of housing continues to grow in order to meet. Every other state in the union could do the same, but most are captured by policy gridlock and legislative stagnation.

Supplying Gen Z with options for affordable housing has the potential to address the ruptures in our social coherence caused by the rise of social media and the global coronavirus pandemic, in addition to easing the unprecedented financial hardship we face. But owning a home in a walkable city also makes possible a subtler and less discussed reality, which is the ability to put down roots.

Buying a home and forming robust social ties with neighbors goes beyond achieving social cohesion, it gets residents involved in local political decision making. The current political apathy incentivized by transient residence wherever one can afford is remedied in part by having a stake in one’s community, and being sensitive to the need for investing in improvements to that community. The knot of political polarization and pessimism can be untied with the same solution as the loneliness crisis and financial hardship: by increasing our housing supply and by building better cities. And insofar as denser urban developments are undeniably more sustainable and better for the environment, addressing the tight knot of climate change and ecological damage from human activity is another crucial role that citybuilding plays for Gen Z, the generation most actively concerned with the environment.

CITYBUILDER brings together designers, planners, developers, and advocates from all generations who recognize the challenges we all face and see the solution that citybuilding provides. This organization has from the very beginning connected college students to professionals working on the core issues involved in building better cities, which is an unquestionable boon to the rising Gen Z citybuilders who want to work on the problems far upstream of our generational challenges. I’m proud to be part of this organization, and I invite any Gen Z readers to join and contribute what you can to our future of better cities, abundant housing, and thriving roots.

Federal ROAD to Housing Act Gets Even Better

Near the finish line: After ten long months of back-and-forth between the House and the Senate, the biggest federal housing bill in decades is close to becoming law. On Tuesday, the ROAD to Housing Act’s lead sponsors in the House and Senate released an encouraging joint statement on the bill’s final prospects. Sen. Scott said on CNBC that he expects the bill to pass in 2-3 weeks.

This bill is big: Pesky provisions that restricted build-to-rent housing were removed from the most recent version of the bill. Surprisingly, some great policies that the House stripped from the ROAD Act have made their way back in! Tahra Hoops from The Rebuild has a great summary of why this bill would be so transformative if signed into law.

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