I probably won’t actually submit my idea to the Chicago Prize, a $10 million grant competition to revitalize neighborhoods, so I’m posting it here for everyone to read.
Basically, I want to use the $10 million as seed money to start a small organization that does design, construction administration, and property management to help homeowners build 1,000 accessory dwelling units in the form of new construction detached rear houses, attached rear houses, and renovated basement and attic units. $10 million won’t build that many, so there will be a small finance team to assemble additional grants as well as collect money through a crowdfunding initiative so anyone with $50 or more (up to $1,000) can invest in the program.
I thought solving this problem took longer than it should have. I thought there would have been an integrated function in PostgreSQL to pick the lowest (smallest or minimum) and highest (largest or maximum) numbers in an ARRAY of numbers.
LEAST and GREATEST didn’t work, since those work on expressions, not arrays.
MIN and MAX don’t work because they are aggregating functions, and I didn’t want that.
Given an array of numbers, pick the lowest and highest ones using two custom functions.
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION small(anyarray, int)
RETURNS anyelement AS $$
SELECT (ARRAY(SELECT unnest($1) ORDER BY 1 asc))[$2]
$$ LANGUAGE sql;
The second argument in this function is to extract the Nth smallest number. In my case I want the smallest number so I set “1” for the second argument.
You can rewrite the query to select the Nth largest number by changing the “ORDER BY 1 asc” to “ORDER BY 1 desc” (reversing the order of the array’s unnesting.)
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION small(anyarray, int)
RETURNS anyelement AS $$
SELECT (ARRAY(SELECT unnest($1) ORDER BY 1 asc))[$2]
At the YIMBYtown conference in Boston, Massachusetts, last week, I heard from a panel comprising a developer, an architect, and a manager of special housing projects at the City of Boston. I forget who described this novel (sort of) multi-family housing configuration, but I noted it because it has benefits similar to Chicago’s coach & rear houses.
Here’s how it works.
There would be a residential building full of condos. Each condo would have a few bedrooms. One of the bedrooms would have its own kitchen or kitchenette, bathroom, and direct entry to the building’s corridor. The bedroom would be “locked off” from the rest of the condo.
The condo owner would rent the bedroom to a tenant, providing them housing that would most likely be less costly than an equivalent (new construction) apartment.
As the condo owner’s household changes – perhaps the family has another child – the tenant can move out and the owner can remove the kitchen to create another bedroom or closet.
Lock offs are heavily also present in time shares.
The zoning question is whether this condo is treated as one unit or two.
If you’re trying to increase affordable housing in your municipality, it’s necessary to classify this condo configuration as a single unit. Anything more and it wouldn’t be possible to build any of these, as the building developer would run into minimum lot area per unit and FAR limitations.
My friend Jacob Peters quickly drew a floor plan for what a lockoff condo would look like.
According to the speaker, the project didn’t get off the ground because the developer couldn’t get lending because of lenders who don’t understand the model. Said the speaker, “We need spaces that can evolve as our lives change. And we don’t have that flexibility in our housing stock.”
Benefits of accessory dwelling units (ADUs) like coach & rear houses
Increase the supply of affordable housing
Increase income for homeowners
Support aging in place – ADUs give families flexibility to share property and living spaces with extended family members
Increase work for small and local architects and contractors
Boost local business support by restoring a neighborhood’s historical density
Using the footprints of parking lots and garages drawn into OpenStreetMap as a data source, the area of land in Chicagoland occupied by parking lots and garages is 247,539,968 square feet. (The data was exported using HOT Export Tool; you can replicate my export.)
Short answer: To provide more shoppers for the local businesses. Read on for the longer answer.
Over on Chicago Cityscape I added a new feature called “market analysis” which measures the number of people who live within specific walking areas (measured by time) and driving areas (measured by distance).
I am in favor of removing apartment & condo bans in Chicago, especially in areas where they were previously allowed and near train stations.
Jefferson Park is centered around two co-located train stations, serviced by CTA and Metra respectively. There have been multiple proposals for multi-family housing near the stations (collectively called the Jefferson Park Transit Center) and some have been approved.
Always, however, there are residents who resist these proposals and the number of originally proposed apartments or condos gets reduced in the final version (classic NIMBYism).
There’re four reasons – at least – why more housing should be allowed near the Jefferson Park Transit Center:
Locally owned businesses require a significant amount of shoppers who live nearby and walk up traffic
More people should have the opportunity to live near low-cost transportation
It will include more affordable housing, through Chicago’s inclusionary zoning rules (the Affordable Requirements Ordinance, ARO)
There will be less driving, and therefore lower household transportation costs and less neighborhood pollution
To support the first reason, I used the “market analysis” tool to see just how many people live in a walkable area centered around Veterans Square, a mixed-use office and retail development adjacent to the train stations.
Comparatively, 19,707 people live within a 10 minute walk to The Crotch, or the center of Wicker Park, at the intersection of Milwaukee/North/Damen (get the Address Snapshot). The Blue Line station is about 75 feet south of the center point.
I would grant the low Veterans Square number a small discount based on the proximity to the Kennedy Expressway, which severely truncates walking areas up and down the northwest side. Still, even with that discount, ending up with less than half the amount as the one in Wicker Park, is disturbing. Wicker Park is hardly characterized by high-density housing. In fact, all of the new high-rises are just outside the 10 minute walk shed!
