Tag: cottage court

BUILD would legalize pocket neighborhoods across Illinois

May 21, 2026 / / 0 Comments

BUILD fact of the day: The plan includes a middle housing component that would allow cottage clusters, courtyard buildings, and pocket neighborhoods across the state.

A pocket neighborhood with 12 homes broke ground in Evanston this year. The rest of Illinois has most likely never seen one built in decades. The BUILD plan would change that.

Photos of the construction site by Steven Vance and renderings of UrbanEco

What is a pocket neighborhood?

A pocket neighborhood (also called a cottage court or cottage cluster) is a small cluster of detached homes arranged around shared outdoor space. Each home has its own front door and a measure of privacy, but the units face inward toward a common courtyard or green space rather than outward to the street.

Chicago has pre-1950s examples, mostly on the South Side, but current zoning in Chicago and most Illinois municipalities makes new ones nearly impossible to build.

What’s being built in Evanston

Developer David Wallach of BluePaint Development broke ground this month on UrbanEco on Grant, a 12-home pocket neighborhood at 1915 Grant Street in Evanston, steps from the Metra Central/Union Pacific North line. Each home is approximately 600 square feet with two bedrooms and one bathroom over one story. Prices start at $369,000, and five of the twelve homes were already under contract at the time of the groundbreaking ceremony.

The project occupies roughly 30,000 square feet across two parcels (inspect this property on Chicago Cityscape); there was previously a vacant lot and a single-family house. Evanston updated its zoning code to allow the project, but it wasn’t easy: the development faced substantial neighborhood opposition before City Council approved it in March 2024.

At the groundbreaking, Evanston Community Development Director Sarah Flax acknowledged the challenge: “I don’t think there’s any one thing that’s going to solve the problem — we got to be open to lots of different things.” Developer Wallach credited the city directly: “This city takes on really, really big issues, and they’re certainly to be commended for it.”

One of the twelve homes is currently listed for sale at $369,000 — a 600-square-foot, two-bedroom detached home with shared outdoor amenities including a landscaped courtyard with fire pit and grill, near parks, schools, and transit.

Why this housing type is almost impossible to build in Illinois today

Outside of Evanston, pocket neighborhoods collide with standard zoning rules at every turn. In Chicago, I identified at least six separate zoning barriers that prevent them:

  • Most codes allow only one principal building per lot — pocket neighborhoods need multiple detached buildings on one site
  • Minimum lot-area-per-unit rules make small clusters economically unworkable
  • Lot subdivision rules block individual fee-simple ownership of units
  • Rear setback requirements conflict with inward-facing courtyard designs
  • Side setback standards prevent the close clustering the typology requires
  • Parking rules restrict placement in ways that break courtyard-oriented designs

Getting around these barriers, as Evanston did, requires a years-long rezoning process with no guaranteed outcome — and, as the UrbanEco project shows, significant community opposition along the way.

Next door to UrbanEco is another kind of pocket neighborhood, a set of five ranch townhouses built in 1962.

Five ranch townhouses next to the new UrbanEco development.

What the Illinois BUILD plan would change

Governor Pritzker’s BUILD plan includes a middle housing reform (SB 4060) that would require all Illinois residential zoning districts to permit cottage clusters — along with duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, townhouses, stacked flats, and attached and detached courtyard housing.

The bill allows between two and eight units per lot depending on lot size, with middle housing types permitted on lots as small as 2,500 square feet. Crucially, municipalities couldn’t simply decline to update their codes. Whatever barriers each municipality maintains would have to come down.

Evanston spent years navigating a contentious public process to allow a single pocket neighborhood. Under the BUILD plan, that fight would be nearly moot everywhere in Illinois — the housing type would be legal by default.

Two views of the same one-story floor plan showing two bedrooms, a bathroom, a terrace, and combined kitchen, dining, and living rooms.

One of the twelve UrbanEco on Grant homes is currently listed for $369,000. Delivery is scheduled for summer 2026.

Show your support for pocket neighborhoods and unbanning other middle housing types by sending emails to your two state legislators.

screen grab from Kirsten's video that is an aerial view of the enclosed yard

Exploring Radish: a model for cottage courts from Oakland

December 23, 2024 / / 0 Comments

One of the many benefits of allowing pocket neighborhoods and cottage courts is being able to share high land costs. That, and sharing child care duties, are primary reasons that Phil Levin and Kristen Berman created “Radish”, a pocket neighborhood in Oakland.

Phil founded Live Near Friends, a website advising people on which steps to take to eventually live near friends and family and live happier by focusing on the hard part of finding appropriate real estate, setting up community standards, and arranging rent and legal concerns. He also is a co-founder of Culdesac, in Tempe, Arizona, an apartment complex with a traditional design of close-together buildings and shops near transit.

Phil takes Kirsten Dirksen, who produces videos about uncommon homes, on a tour of Radish, where the viewer can meet the residents, and learn about the architecture of the buildings and outdoor space plus a little about the process to combine two lots into what he calls a “friend compound”.

I previously wrote about cottage courts and how the Chicago zoning code does not allow them, primarily by disallowing more than one house per property. For Chicago, cottage courts can additionally offer the benefit of achieving the same density as a series of two-flats – so as not to reduce the population or population capacity of a neighborhood – while responding to the demand for detached housing and yards – which are putting pressure on two-flats and leading to their deconversions or teardowns. Two-flats have been a typical way for Chicagoans to live in a multigenerational setting, something that cottage courts can also promote.

Radish comprises two properties that started with two existing apartment buildings and an existing backyard house. Levin et. al. added another backyard house (ADU), a small building for a coworking office and shared kitchen (called “Blueberry” on the site plan below), and an RV for housing guests. All of those additions encircle a large shared space with a grassy yard, communal and scattered seating, a fire pit, a hot tub, and a sauna, separated from the car parking area by a privacy fence.

The lot area of the two parcels is about 18,859 s.f. The site plan is from 2020 and the population count reflects that year. Site plan: Supernuclear

In total, there are eight dwelling units on the property in four houses on an 18,589 s.f. set of two parcels. That lot area is the equivalent of six standard size lots in Chicago, on which 12-18 dwelling units will typically be found. But, that large lot size is atypical for Oakland.

Another aspect of cottage courts is that they can facilitate sharing food, high-cost resources (like a hot tub), and child care. Phil, the other residents, and even former residents who live nearby and stop by during the filming, describe how the cooking and child care is shared in the video. Phil’s blog details how he and his wife, Kristen, “built Radish to be a great place to have kids”.

Stay tuned for another blog post on this topic. I worked with Jamin Nollsch to create a cottage court site plan specific for Chicagoans to pair with a memo and sample ordinance that I wrote to promote legalizing this form of housing and living here.

Allowing cottage courts in Chicago requires changing the zoning code

August 21, 2022 / / 3 Comments

Cottage and bungalow courts (also called clusters and pocket neighborhoods) are a common multi-family design typology in cities outside of Illinois. You’ll find them in California (where they’re more often called bungalow courts) and Tennessee, for example. They are characterized by having multiple detached one or two-story houses on a single and compact development site. The houses commonly face a shared green space and have shared parking behind them.

A primary benefit of cottage courts – and smaller footprint housing, generally – is that it creates more for-sale detached houses (which are in very high demand in Chicago) while sharing land [1]. In other words, cottage courts create more detached houses using less land.

It is not possible to build a cottage court in Chicago because of how the zoning code is written. The purpose of this article is to discuss specific text amendments that would have to be collectively adopted in order to allow this housing type.

screenshot of a page from a guide about Missing Middle housing in Chattanooga, TN. The image has a site plan for a cottage court, an isometric view of the rendered cottage court, a narrative about the sample project, and statistics.
A sample cottage court intended for an audience in Chattanooga, TN, created by the Incremental Development Alliance.

Zoning code barriers in Chicago

  1. The Chicago zoning code allows only one principal building per lot. A detached house constitutes a principal building and only one of them is allowed. The code would have to be changed to allow more than one principal buildings per lot. If the city council wants to limit this allowance to cottage courts then other code would have to be modified to define a cottage court (similarly to how it has a definition of a townhouse). (Section 17-1-1300 – this anti-housing provision is in the first chapter of the Chicago zoning code!)
  2. Cottage courts should be fee simple [2], to make them easier to mortgage and sell, which means subdividing a lot into one lot per house. The Chicago zoning code does not allow subdividing a lot below the minimum lot area for the particular zoning district governing a lot. For example, currently in RS-3, if more than one principal building per lot was allowed, each cottage court house would have to occupy 2,500 s.f., which is an untenable size for cottage court development.
  3. Minimum lot area per unit standards also severely restrict development of cottage courts. To build four houses in an RS-3 zoning district one would need a 10,000 s.f. lot!
  4. Rear setbacks would need to be reducible, preferably without the need for a variation from the Zoning Board of Appeals. Because the houses are oriented to face a common green space at the interior of the lot (not at the front or rear of the lot), the rear of the house may be close to the side property line, violating the rear setback standard of ~30 feet.
  5. Side setbacks would need to be combinable or eliminated as a requirement for cottage court development, so that the houses could be closer together or the designer could have more flexibility in their orientation.
  6. Parking requirements would need to be more flexible, both in quantity and in design. Parking is currently allowed only in the rear setback, but these houses may not have a rear setback because of their inward orientation. To maximize shared green space parking requirements should be reducible for this housing type. The Chicago TOD ordinance may be relevant here, as it now applies in RM-5, and higher, residential zoning districts, but the cottage court needs to be allowable in the RS-3 and RT-4 zoning districts (as these are for more common).

Attorneys, designers, and developers: Are there any other Chicago zoning code standards missing?

Examples of cottage courts

I know of a few cottage courts in Chicago (et. al. means there is an address range):

  • 7436 S Phillips Ave (et. al.). These were built prior to 1952, according to historic aerial images, and are individually parceled (see barrier #2 above).
  • 7433 S Euclid Pkwy (et. al.). The houses were built between 1938 and 1952, according to historic aerial images, and are individually parceled. Two of the parcels are vacant.
  • 1802 S Kildare Ave (et. al.). The houses were built after 1950.
  • 3020 N Waterloo Ct (et. al.). This townhouse court was built between 1970 and 1975. These houses are arranged like townhouses but they are not compliant with the present townhouse code (adopted in 2004) because they are too dense and have too little parking. The density is equivalent to 2.5 homes per standard lot (which, in Chicago, is 3,125 s.f.).
  • 511 W Deming Pl (et. al.) at Geneva Terrace. This looks like a hybrid cottage and townhouse cluster. It has a large front yard and a shared interior courtyard. Each of the five units is an individually owned and taxed parcel.
3020 N Waterloo Ct has 25 homes and one car parking space per home.
551 W Deming Pl has five homes.

All of the images below are from the Missing Middle Housing website, created by Opticos Design, an architecture firm that has popularized the term “missing middle”.

Three photos of existing cottage courts, and a site plan showing how a cottage court could be arranged.

Cottage court codes

Burlington, VT, approved a zoning plan in March 2024 that permits “cottage courts” in places “where lots make it feasible”. Read their new Neighborhood Code, which created the graphics below showing before and after the code change.

Graphics showing the new housing types that are allowed in the updated Burlington, VT, zoning code. (I made the collage.)

Notes

A tiny house village may also be considered a cottage court. The influential architecture firm, Landon Bone Baker, once designed a proposed tiny house village (knowing full well it was not legal) for Thresholds and Easter Seals in Chicago.

[1] It’s also assumed that sharing land means sharing land costs, and land costs are a significant part of purchasing a house. In the areas where demand for detached houses is the highest, land costs are also the highest. Cottage courts create more detached houses with less land.

[2] fee simple has a legal meaning, but here I mean “the house owner also owns the land beneath the house”, and the pair are collateral for the lender that, on paper, looks like any other detached house the lender has mortgaged.