Housing is an issue of territory as much as it is of building. A downtown regeneration proposal for an industrial brownfields site, the Markham Square Housing District is a housing-first approach beginning with the concept of a “living transect” that connects square and shared street to building frontage, shared housing court and patio, and interior space—all articulated as a series of rooms. This invokes Christopher Alexander’s pattern language to design the front edge of the building as a place. Building frontages create a “fuzzy urbanism”. Thick building edges accommodate a variety of social activities through urban building frontage (porches, balconies, decks, stoops, and terraces); liminal spaces not specific to one housing type. Besides correcting for ecological dysfunction, the housing district is a mixed-income neighborhood with construction costs between $110-180/sf to answer local racial and income segregation. The formula of Frontage + Type creates “prospect and refuge”, a spatial formula that adds value to both housing and public sector investments.
The two primary place types around which housing is clustered include an extroverted residential square and an introverted hillocks, both providing landscapes for ecological and social repair. The new square and surrounding street network feature “wilded” landscapes for ecologically-based stormwater runoff management in a downtown prone to flooding. All housing is affordable walk-up residential multifamily typologies—rowhouses, bungalows, triplexes, courtyard housing, and townhouses—that have not been built since the hegemony of suburban policy in the 1950s—what is called missing middle housing. Compatible with single-family housing, these affordable types (between 900 and 2,100 sf) are key to revitalizing small and mid-sized downtowns without the population dislocations accompanying gentrification. The goal is to incent living downtown by structuring an imageable mixed-income neighborhood for a downtown that lacks a tradition of multifamily housing.
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