Missing Middle Concept Could Breathe Life into Dallas Housing Crisis, Experts Say

A housing crisis has been declared, and many piecemeal efforts are in place to solve it, but one big call to action looms before Dallas: What is missing middle housing and how do you fix it?

Missing middle housing is defined as a range of multi-family or clustered housing types compatible with single-family neighborhoods. It’s intended to meet the demand for walkable neighborhoods and provide housing at different price points. And it often looks like duplexes, fourplexes, and courtyard apartments common before World War II but now “missing” from metro areas like Dallas. 

The Dallas City Council has talked about an intentional effort to attract this type of housing with the West Oak Cliff Area Plan and multi-family developments like the Standard Shoreline. 

It’s not a simple task. Neighborhoods are concerned about gentrification, having low-income renters next to their luxury residences, and the effect such development will have on their property values. 

Meanwhile, the missing middle is still missing. 

Missing Middle Is Still Missing

National Association of Home Builders Chief Economist Rob Dietz said that duplex and fourplex construction is lagging across the country, with just 12,000 starts in 2021.

“While townhouse construction has trended higher in recent quarters, the multi-family segment of the missing middle has disappointed,” Dietz said in his Eye On Housing report published Nov. 23. “For the third quarter of 2022, there were just 5,000 two-to-four-unit housing construction starts. If accurate after revisions, that would mark the best quarter for this market segment since the middle of 2008. However, the gain is small, so it is not statistically significant. Nonetheless, it does match a pickup in permits for two-to-four-unit production registered earlier in 2022.” 

Avoid These Mistakes When Enabling Missing Middle Housing

Experts with California-based Opticos Design Inc. say the missing-middle concept aims to “highlight the need for diverse, affordable housing options in walkable urban places […] through zoning reform and form-based coding.”

The Opticos designers and architects launched MissingMiddle.com to help cities get it right.

“If there was a simple solution, much more missing middle housing would have been built over the past few decades,” Daniel Parolek wrote in a September report on the Opticos website. “To put it bluntly, not all planners and zoning code writers have the right skill set to effectively plan and zone for the effective delivery of these types. If they did, missing middle housing wouldn’t be ‘missing.’ Cities need to get the zoning right to enable an ecosystem of builders to evolve, local banks to get comfortable financing these types, and other barriers to systematically be removed. Getting the zoning right first is the most important step to correctly implement missing middle housing.”

Dallas Director of Planning and Urban Design Julia Ryan is leading an effort to overhaul the city’s 35-year-old development code and “fix the zoning problem.” The city currently has more than 1,200 planned developments or PDs, which make it more difficult to build in those areas. Rezonings can take up to nine months to get approved. 

Five things municipalities should avoid when launching a missing middle solution include the following, according to Parolek’s analysis:

• Allowing types or build-out scenarios that do not deliver attainability or livability. 
• Unbroken mass from front to the rear of the lot (bulk at the rear of the lot). 
• Massing that looms over adjoining neighbors. 
• Dead ground floor and bad frontage on the street. 
• Build-out that creates an unlivable and undesirable block form. 

“Missing middle is not a one-size-fits-all solution,” Parolek said. “We often suggest considering three degrees of change: maintenance, evolution, and transformation.”