Call it the enduring American Dream, or call it old-fashioned, but homeownership still figures on wish lists for folks across the country. Even as definitions of “home” continue to evolve, owning a property remains a key way for many Americans to not just achieve financial stability or generate wealth, but also to create something they can call their own, and foster a sense of community in the process. And yet, never before has becoming a homeowner been so difficult for so many people, especially in urban centers.

Hem House by Chicago studio Future Firm is a 1,300-square-foot stand-alone in the East Garfield Park neighborhood that sold in summer 2021 at its listing price of $399,000. Homes nearby often sell for upwards of $600,000. Hem House’s cofounders and architects Ann Lui and Craig Reschke are currently replicating the prefab design in two more locations nearby.

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A perfect storm of soaring home prices, high demand, and tight supply in major metropolitan areas have resulted in what’s being called the “missing middle”—architect Daniel Parolek’s coinage for the dearth of medium-density housing priced for middle-income buyers. According to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, home sales over the past two years have risen at their fastest clip since the height of the housing boom in 2006, while total housing inventory has shrunk nearly 30 percent since March 2020. At the same time, the US Census Bureau reports a steady decline in the number of new mid-market homes being built, down from nearly 30 percent of total housing stock in the 1970s to less than 5 percent in recent years. For middle-income buyers seeking a forever home, or even just a a place to get started, the options in American cities are dwindling.

In response, designers and developers across the country are finding creative ways to fill the void in the housing market. Ann Lui and Craig Reschke, architects and cofounders of Future Firm, noticed the lack of housing options in their native Chicago and wondered if design could offer a solution. In particular, they wanted to take advantage of the city’s many disused lots to create single-family homes—several communities have voiced a desire for this, says Lui—comparable in price to a condo. They began by turning to history.

“We looked to precedents like the Eames House to rethink housing from a design perspective,” she says, evoking the famous Los Angeles residence that embraced prefabrication and off-the-shelf materials as a case study for more cost-efficient housing.

“If the Hem Houses and Tsuga Townhomes of the world provide middle-income buyers with a below-market price point, what prevents them from flipping the homes for profit?”

Future Firm’s answer is Hem House, a 1,300-square-foot stand-alone in Chicago’s East Garfield Park neighborhood that sold in summer 2021 at its listing price of $399,000. (At the time, new single-family homes elsewhere in the neighborhood clocked in at $600,000 and up.) To achieve a lower listing price without sacrificing quality, Future Firm worked with the Cook County Land Bank Authority, who provided a 25-by-125-foot parcel, and local developer Joseph Root, applying what they gleaned from their look-back and leveraging their experience in residential design. “Over the years, we’ve found ways to save money that don’t reduce the caliber of a home, but actually improve it,” says Reschke.

Future Firm oriented the home to the side of the lot rather than against the street, embracing the narrow space to make room for a side garden and let daylight into the home’s core. Omitting a basement lowered the price tag on excavation, and using off-the-shelf materials like painted dimensional lumber for the stair, prefab trusses for the single-sloped roof, and standing-seam metal for exterior cladding kept costs down. By eschewing proprietary building technologies, Future Firm created a low-cost solution they hope others will adopt. “Focusing on things like spatial organization, material selection, and scale means the design is open-source,” says Lui. Today, Future Firm is honing its Hem House kit-of-design-parts to create two new single-family developments in Chicago.

While their strategies provide one template for mid-market housing, Lui and Reschke insist that what works in Chicago shouldn’t define approaches elsewhere. Architect and small-scale developer Matt Wittman of Seattle firm Wittman Estes agrees. “Housing is very place specific,” he says. “As designers, we should focus on the neighborhoods where we live so that we create for a context we understand.”

In cities like Seattle, where housing and undeveloped land are in short supply, Wittman sees greater density as the solution for filling the gap. In 2019, he decided to try his hand as developer, architect, and contractor in his own Highland Park neighborhood, creating an urban infill project called Tsuga Townhomes. On a 5,040-square-foot lot—about the average size for a single-family home in the Seattle metropolitan area—is a dense cluster of two vertically oriented structures: a 1,650-square-foot main house fronted by a duplex of side-by-side units spanning 1,360-square-feet each, all with parking, ample outdoor space, and a tidy, contemporary design.

“We were inspired by the idea that as architect-developers, we can leverage our knowledge of real estate, construction, and design in a way that builds a higher ambition around housing.”
—Matt Wittman, architect

Here, Wittman found savings by zeroing in on an inexpensive site, a sloping plot with permitting hurdles that had made it less than desirable for most developers. Leveraging their network of engineers to quickly answer questions about the feasibility of construction, Wittman’s firm then pored over archival site records to uncover a permitting exemption allowing them to build. The slope led Wittman to design a clever stepped foundation that maximized outdoor space for all three units, while off-the-shelf windows and interior materials of white oak, stainless steel, and laminate casework kept costs low. The project clocked in at $185 per square foot—45% below average for Seattle.

The firm is now designing and developing a six-unit townhome in South Seattle that can adapt to future user needs, and to anticipated changes in zoning laws toward higher density. “The townhomes are based on a design where you can combine units to create a larger unit for a family, or divvy them up, so in the future it could be four units, or up to eight,” explains Wittman Estes designer Angela Yang. Like more firms in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, Wittman Estes is designing for a future probability of upzoning. Yang describes it as a “smart density strategy” that promises more equitable cities. “The more variety we can have within middle-market housing, the more diversity it invites,” she says. “It’s about encouraging different ways of living to intermingle.”

But questions remain: If the Hem Houses and Tsuga Townhomes of the world provide middle-income buyers with a below-market price point, what prevents them from flipping the homes for profit? And with such a limited stock, who gets to buy them? Perhaps most importantly, how can new mid-market developments avoid contributing to ills like gentrification and displacement? Social enterprise Frolic, founded at the MIT Center for Real Estate, is blueprinting an answer.

In a nutshell, the company’s solution to developing more equitable housing is audience participation. Frolic partners with homeowners to turn their existing single-family lots into higher-density co-ops that are affordable to build and own, for multiple generations to come. For each project, a new development LLC is created with the homeowner, allowing them to leverage their existing land equity, bring in outside investment from future co-op residents and community members, and get construction loans. The model helps everyday folks lead development in their neighborhoods by giving them the tools to work within financial systems otherwise designed to serve big development and construction businesses.

“In many cities, there’s a massive opportunity to create greater density, but how that happens can lead to very different outcomes,” says Frolic cofounder and creative director Josh Morrison. “We’re trying to level the playing field for development so that everyday people can interact with it.”

“How can we create systems that allow for homeownership to be more than a wealth-building tool, but a means towards stability and planting roots? It has to be something that all people in this country can access.”
—Tamara Knox, Frolic CEO and cofounder

Currently, Frolic is developing two multifamily projects in Seattle targeting median down payments of $10 to 20K. If successful, they’ll be proof of concept for future iterations.

“We’re not trying to make a cookie-cutter project that you can repeat thousands of times,” explains Frolic CEO and cofounder Tamara Knox. “We’re helping communities pool their resources so they can lead development in their neighborhoods. The process has flexibility, so it can respond to the particularities of its context, wherever that is.” Currently, Frolic is in talks with developers and community land trusts across the country about adopting their model, from Boston, Minneapolis, and Baltimore, to Chicago, San Francisco, and Oakland.

No matter how we choose to solve for the missing middle, whether it be architecturally or financially driven, the common denominator, it seems, is collaboration. No one profession—architects, developers, urban planners, or lenders—can tackle the issue on its own. “There should be a diversity of approaches, which then produces additional interesting outcomes,” says Future Firm’s Lui. “There’s not going to be a single solution.”

Project Credits:

Future Firm / @futurefirm

Wittman Estes / @wittman_estes

Frolic