Homegrown housing represents a range of incremental residential, commercial and mixed use building types represented within a continuum centered on the ubiquitous detached single family homes and flanked to either side by small, and middle and large housing. Once commonplace in every American neighborhood, the “missing middle” housing types are now almost exclusively built by local, neighborhood-strengthening incremental developers—what we call home grown.

Incremental developers also build projects smaller than single family homes (in the backyard like ADUs and cottages, or by reconfiguring single family homes into multi unit dwellings (called “house hacks”)).

Incremental developers also build a range of incremental commercial projects, as well as mixed-use projects which combine residential and commercial uses.

Project Type: Backyard Infill

Name/Location: South Bend, IN

Developer: Mike Keen

Problem: In many older core neighborhoods housing values make most new construction cost prohibitive.

Incremental Actions: Smaller units cost less. Putting them on the same property as another primary dwelling saves even more on the avoided land acquisition costs. Here, two of Mike’s zero net energy tiny homes fit on an existing lot.

Resulting Value: Called “mortgage helpers,” ADUs, cottages and tiny homes can be built by an existing property owner and add a rental revenue stream. For gentrifying neighborhoods, such revenue streams can offset property tax increases thus serve as an anti displacement strategy for longtime residents.

Project Type: Renovation House Hack of Single Family into a Bootleg 3-Unit Apartment House

Name/Location: Roommate House, Midlothian, TX

Developer: Monte Anderson, Options Real Estate

Problem: Single family houses dominate today’s landscape but their size, configuration and costs fail to meet the diversity of needs represented by a number of different types of American households today. But one example is the single, aging empty nester.
Incremental Actions: Looking for a “right-sized” residential option for his aging father who had too much house for his current needs, master incremental developer Monte Anderson looks at turning single family homes into 3-unit dwellings in single family home-zoned neighborhoods without a variance. In this version of his “roomate house” three tenants each get their own private apartments. Monte innovatively “hacked the code” and avoided triggers for variances–such as additional kitchens (with a stove). Instead he installed convection microwaves, induction hot plates and full wet bars to give the functional equivalence of a kitchen to tenants. Lockable but operable doors between units in place of sealed walls.

Resulting Value: While other places have pitched battles about easing single family-only codes, innovative incremental developers are finding completely permissible ways around these restrictive regulations and creating multiple times the value and number of residences in otherwise single family landscapes–whether suburban or urban, doubling and tripling densities at very flexible rental price points that increase housing accessibility beyond those who can meet the high financial bar for single family home purchase.

Project Type: New construction residential (Duplex)

Name/Location: Pre-approved plan missing middle homes

Developer: City of Kalamazoo, MI

Problem: Like every Great Lakes region city and town, Kalamazoo, Michigan needed housing at a price point working people/residence could afford. The development-savvy Assistant City Manager, Rebekah Kik, systematically identified and removed policy and regulatory-induced cost barriers within local government’s control–zoning, permitting, fees. But end costs were still too high.
Incremental Actions: So she commissioned a set of building plans for missing middle housing types (duplexes, 4 and 6 unit apartment buildings) that produce energy efficient multi-tenant buildings.

Resulting Value: The developer savings in architecture design costs was helpful, but even more so was the speed and certainty of the pre-approved plan route through the government processes. And the energy savings to tenants help control costs as well.

Project Type: Single residence conversion to neighborhood commercial mixed use

Name/Location: Kayla’s Pies

Developer: Bernice Radle, Buffalove Development

Problem: The “corner store” was a building type found throughout Buffalo, NY neighborhoods 100 years ago. Subsequent decades of urban renewal-era zoning changes made hundreds of these building types illegal, instead turning them into oversized default single residential units.

Incremental Actions: Zoning reform, initiated in 2009 by then-Commissioner of Economic Development (Homegrown Housing co-founder Brian Reilly), made legal this mix of uses again after 50 years. Developer Bernice Radle knew the almost exclusively residential neighborhood needed some commercial activation, so she made a cost effective arrangement for a new business owner to set up shop. The residential unit in the back provided her reliable revenue that enabled flexibility with the new retail tenant out front.

Resulting Value: While zoning reform is necessary to make legal once-viable diverse missing middle and incremental building types, it takes entrepreneurial small-scale developers to test business models and deal structures that enable them to become an economically resilient part of the neighborhoods again. Once demonstrated, other incremental developers have very quickly followed suit, activating other once mixed use corner stores in neighborhoods throughout the city (e.g. blue building to right).

Project Type: Adaptive Reuse, Commercial (Commercial-Retail)

Name/Location: Toast Breakfast Bar, Rural Maine

Problem: Single purpose auto-oriented services development (gas stations, muffler shops, etc) litter the landscape and are hard to reuse.

Incremental Actions: Sited originally as an auto-oriented use, the reactivation of these spaces often requires creating a destination worth traveling to, or that makes use of the traffic volumes. Creativity (and really good food) can create that destination.

Resulting Value:
The 11-year business and financing model for outlot or other auto-oriented retail buildings create properties that sit, shuttered. The lack of competing demand for these places can offer relatively inexpensive space for homegrown entrepreneurs, frequently those who become incremental developers themselves. Financially they reestablish a taxable uses in buildings that visually blight areas, often for a long time.

Project Type: Mixed Use (Main Street)

Name/Location: Dickerson’s Building, Marshall, MI

Developer: Calhoun County Land Bank

Problem: Land banks are usually the “owner of last resort” after a string of failures, often after any remaining value is stripped by subsequent extractive owners. Here a single 2 story brick building was carved up into multiple ownerships, roof leaks caused extensive wood rot, and a past dry cleaner suggested environmental problems. Of three storefronts, only Dickerson’s music shop was the sole viable tenant, having been in business 40 years and serving as a destination for musicians within an hour’s drive.

Incremental Actions: It took an incremental development perspective to see the opportunity where no single owner could cost-effectively develop their own property. The approach of “making the problem bigger to solve it” involved the land bank offering its fully vacant building to Dickerson’s owner to move the business two doors down. But it would allow him to sell his current residence and buy at favorable terms a live-work space, activating the upstairs that had been dark for decades. Income from the sale would allow the land bank to renovate a second upstairs apartment and its cash flow could enable the next move toward full reactivation.

Resulting Value: This entrepreneurial approach, central to incremental development, enabled a government entity to solve an otherwise intractable problem. Further, public funds are often easier to give to outside companies than local “mom and pop” retailers. Here real estate became the means of transferring value without running afoul of regulations. The result was retaining a local business that anchored this three block main street and a path forward to three new residential units to add customers to that commercial strip.

Project Type: Commercial (Micro Retail)

Name/Location: Press Bay Alley (108-118 Spring Street, Ithaca, NY)

Developer: John Paget

Problem: When Ithaca, NY’s hometown newspaper left downtown for the suburbs, it left behind not only an empty mid-sized office building but a harder to reuse large-bay garage that once stored the enormous rolls of newsprint.

Incremental Actions: Serial entrepreneur John Paget put his tech company in the building and others followed, enjoying the vibe he created. But the bays formed a dead zone along the alley from the building to the sidewalk. So John created micro retail spaces-an exciting mix of take away foods and boutique goods, with farmers markets and social events in this formerly dead “in-between” place.

Resulting Value: The density of uses in one small footprint urban property has created one of the highest value per acre figures in the entire county. John’s development company now focuses on creating more engaging urban space that inspire “delight through practical community use,” and its string lighted narrow corridor is included in almost every tourist guide and promotion for this central New York state town.

Project Type: Mixed Use (12 units, Ground Floor Retail)

Name/Location: Prairie Flats, Fayetteville AK

Developer: David Kim (Architect)

Problem: Creating mixed use urban places is essential for liveable and economically-thriving neighborhoods. Monocultures of residence-only places are economically fragile for owners and tenants. It is challenging to get desired densities and diversities with urban infill.

Incremental Actions: This new construction project utilized urban-scale parcels (avoiding assembly) and the cash flow from units above to take the risk on the ground floor restaurant and retail amenities.

Resulting Value: At the mid to larger scale of incremental infill projects, it provides a good ratio of in-demand market rate housing and neighborhood-strengthening commercial uses. As a 12-plex, the proforma is replicable in a number of settings.

Project Type: Commercial (multi-tenant on transit Corridor)

Name/Location: The Grove, Albuquerque, NM

Developer: David Blanc, Compass Realty

Problem: A place can only support so many restaurants. While the Grove remains one of the go-to places in the city for great food, the real story is all around it.

Incremental Actions: Behind the restaurant is a small office conversion that embodies incremental developer David Blanc’s ideas of economic development–a cluster of over a dozen small business tenants in a highly amenitized location that represent one of the largest employment clusters on the city’s main street. In front of the restaurant, Blanc encouraged even more of the parking lot to be devoted to people. The new covered seating area stretches toward the new transit station recently built just across the street.

Resulting Value: The daily office workers pass the coffee bar on their way to the elevator. These employees help keep the restaurant in business. Employee job centers are central to siting transit stops (and this one is already here). The transit also connects this retail business to over 10,000 residents citywide who can now get here in less than a 20 minute transit trip. Incremental developer projects that mix uses and add use diversities mutually benefit from transit systems.