Dallas Urban Planners Say Missing Middle Housing is Key to The City’s Affordability Woes

As city planners update the ForwardDallas comprehensive land use plan, they’re paying close attention to alternative housing options such as accessory dwelling units, duplexes, and fourplexes to close the “missing middle” gap, officials said Tuesday. 

Dallas Senior Planner Lindsay Jackson and Chief Planner Lawrence Agu III hosted a webinar Tuesday on missing middle housing. About 25 participants joined the discussion. 

The ForwardDallas plan was last updated in 2006 and needs an overhaul, the planners said. 

“The city is supposed to grow by 300,000 people in the next 20 years,” Agu said. “That’s the population of Plano. We have to find housing and provide jobs for that amount of people in the city of Dallas.” 

The next ForwardDallas LunchNLearn, hosted by Agu and Arturo del Castillo, will cover urban design from noon to 1 p.m. April 18. 

Missing Middle Housing

Housing, affordability, and displacement are concerns that city planners hear daily, Jackson explained. 

Missing middle housing is “a range of house-scale buildings with multiple units compatible in scale and form with detached single-family homes located in a walkable neighborhood,” according to Daniel Parolek, an architect and urbanist credited with coining the term. 

Ultimately, missing middle housing is diversification of housing types, Jackson said. 

“The goal is that these diverse housing types would create some affordable options,” she said. “Through ForwardDallas and our land use efforts, we want to explore what new housing types could be introduced in this area.” 

Residents on the webinar asked about accessory dwelling units, placetypes, parking minimums, and economic development incentives. 

Middle-class people who need affordable homes are having difficulty qualifying because they’re told they make too much money, said Leon Davis, economic development manager for the City of Dallas.  

Agu acknowledged that some affordable housing programs are focused on higher-risk individuals. 

“We’re not really over housing programs; we’re more about land and land use,” he said. “What we can do is develop policies and think through providing more opportunities for housing on the land we have in the city. If we keep the current way that land is developed with single-family and multi-family, we’re going to perpetuate more inequities. We need to think about how we can provide more flexibility for other income brackets, specifically the middle income.”

Solving the Housing Affordability Crisis

Missing middle housing and zoning reform are not just priorities in Dallas; planners across the country are talking about what can be done to solve the housing affordability crisis. 

Congress for the New Urbanism published in its Public Square Journal last week a study titled “Top code reform priorities for the housing crisis.” 

Key takeaways from the article, written by builder and developer R. John Anderson, include: 

• Eliminate minimum off-street parking. 
• Allow Accessory Dwelling Units as-of-right on all residentially-zoned lots.
• Amend your local building code to allow four dwelling units or less in a structure covered by the International Residential Code. 
• Shed orderly-but-dumb metrics that will interfere with competent small-scale infill such as minimum lot area and lot width per dwelling unit. 
• Exempt ADUs from dwelling unit counts that establish maximum density in dwelling units per acre. 
• Limit the size of ADUs to be 1,000 square feet or half of the conditioned floor area of the principal house, whichever is greater. 
• Get rid of requirements for covered vehicle parking. 
• If you want to encourage a wider range of housing choices, calculate local fees based on the building’s square footage, not by dwelling unit count. A $20,000 impact fee per unit translates to $8 per square foot for a 3,500-square-foot house. For a 500-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment, it is $40 per square foot. Per-dwelling unit fees disproportionately impact small units. 
• Before you go down the road of figuring out how to fairly apply inclusionary zoning, take a look at your current zoning map. Is 70 to 80 percent of the land reserved for detached single-unit houses on large lots? That’s exclusionary zoning. Get rid of the gross exclusion, before you experiment with inclusion under duress. 

Residents can weigh in on ForwardDallas by submitting feedback or attending a meeting.