Making Good Design Affordable:Pre-Approved Building Program

so welcome to on the park bench a public square conversation brought to you by the congress for the new urbanism on the park bench presents interactive conversations with thought leaders in new urbanism and allied industries providing an opportunity for the audience to engage in real time the webinar series is a platform for cnu members to engage debate and collaborate on pressing issues of the day and today we're going to be talking about making good design affordable pre-approved building programs with matthew petty matthew hoffman and lindsay hackett our guests and and myself the interviewer rob studiville so share your thoughts on hashtag on the bart bench www.tinyurl.com otpb feedback and pre-approved building programs are sometimes called pattern zones and uh they are attracting growing interests around the us and uh we're going to talk about case studies lessons lessons learned and a roadmap for taking this idea to scale pre-approved building plans is a relatively recent idea that came out of the cnu workshop on lean urbanism i believe a number of years ago bryan texas won an award from cnu's charter awards uh program a couple of years ago for its pattern zone the idea has had some growing pains but uh of course every idea has an incubation period and trial and error period and but in the last two years the this idea has made a lot of progress we're going to hear a lot about that today and matthew petty is a planner educator and small-scale developer operating out of fayetteville arkansas he is a city councilman in fayetteville matthew hoffman is an architect and director of urban design with mbl planning and president and co-founder of pattern zones company and lindsay hackett is a city planner who formerly worked for bryan texas and is now a consultant and all have been at the forefront of pre-approved building plans development i'm rob studeville editor of cnu's public square and first the panelists are going to present uh followed by a discussion uh with among the panel and myself and then q a from the audience so please use the q a function of zoom to ask your questions as they occur to you we'll probably get to those questions more or less in the order that they are asked and now i'm going to pass this along to um to matthew hoffman thanks rob it's great to be here i'm glad everyone could join us um as matthew's getting our slides up i just want to say a couple things about sort of why we're interested in this work and maybe why some of you might also take interest in this work first thing in terms of public engagement we think the highest form of public engagement is actually giving people the tools they need to participate in the evolution of their own neighborhoods so this is fundamentally different from a kind of standard planning approach where you're simply soliciting input this is a program where we actually form meaningful partnerships the second thing and maybe maybe more important thing arguably is that this is a program that actually places design at the very center of the conversation so again as as opposed to a kind of typical zoning and entitlement regime where it's all about code language that most people don't understand or maybe massing diagrams that can go any any number of ways this is an opportunity to actually have real conversations with people about this building and as we all know anyone who's ever done a visual preference survey you know you can get super majorities of people 70 80 of folks out there in a public meeting will will agree generally on on what good urban design is and what it what it can do so if you're going to solve something as pernicious as a lack of housing choice or a lack of housing supply we think you have to start with the biggest tent possible the the firmest most common ground possible and that that means starting with good design at the center of the conversation i love that so as we get started i'm gonna run the slides for our team and we've got a little bit of back and forth and handoff we'll do and because this is a panel we might even start with you know some friendly interruptions of one another so that we can establish kind of an atmosphere of dialogue as we go along so lindsay matt and and vice versa um we wanted everybody to know that uh that's the way we present that's what we wanted to inspire in terms of our approach to the dialogue we're so happy to be here to talking about this today we've been working on this for for about five years now really the concept started as rob said about six years ago we're really excited to show you what we've been able to do and what we've observed around the country with this happening the first thing we wanted to talk to you about is that you know we've got a real mission here and the mission is to see neighborhoods grow incrementally and to support incremental growth and for us that means really making uh this kind of small-scale development kind of the main order of business that the sector performs and really trying to make it convenient we show this diagram i'm going to go back a slide and forward a slide in case you missed the animation because it can be kind of subtle we start with this graphic and it's only three units per acre which were the average conditions of the project area that we had in bryan texas and what we guess or you know our theory of incremental development is that neighborhoods can grow and evolve and they do set they do so over a decade or two and if that growth happens with buildings that are by and large familiar to the residents that are already there then the end result is a neighborhood that still maintains that retains its original identity that made people love it and want to be there and we call this kind of the familiarity principle and it's something that can really only happen with incremental development this climax diagram that you see on the screen at the end of this this animation is uh an increase in density by a factor of six starting at three units an acre and through each progression more or less doubling up to 18 units an acre and you can imagine let's show it again you can imagine that with each transition this takes somewhere on the order of you know five years perhaps a little bit more or a little less and that's the natural order of neighborhood growth and development across the country and what we're trying to support this other thing we've observed has really led us and inspired us to look for a novel solution and we believe strongly and if you're in any kind of decision making apparatus in your city you probably observe this too that developers in the marketplace make decisions not just according to what's marketable or what's allowable but oftentimes their highest consideration is what is convenient in our hometown for matt and i of fayetteville arkansas we have something we not so affectionately refer to as the lot split loophole where despite making so much progress over the last 15 years with form-based codes and continual iterations we still have this persistent use of the lot split loophole which is a threshold that allows administrative uh lot splits and subsequent exemptions from things like tree preservation reviews and storm water reviews and so it is the highest order of convenience and the most popular development application to receive in our town despite having what we consider to be pretty darn good codes and pretty darn good plans and uh for us for me as a city official um and for anybody else i think whenever you start to reflect on this is something of a revelation you know we were wrong we had this idea that if we would just change what's allowed that would be enough and it turns out that hasn't been the case our efforts haven't produced the results we wanted and that's why we turned to pre-approved building programs and trying to build up components that enhance that notion because we believe that if you want to solve an old problem like infill quality infill across scattered sites the solutions we've tried haven't already worked and we need something that is probably a new technique yeah so so if you take one thing from that diagram and maybe from this presentation it's that we are trying to curate a specific path of convenience that that leads towards the best outcomes for for a town i mentioned that you know we we place design at the center of the conversation we do that typologically so we start with specific building types that address either specific needs or specific problems that we're seeing in in the study area whatever community we're working in um just going to show you a few of the buildings that we pre-approved over the years a good example is is the building that you're seeing on the bottom of the screen there so we did a study in in the neighborhood that we were working in at the time and brian that showed that we had a lot of young families and also a lot of empty nesters so we knew that we needed a building type that that could grow and shrink over time allow people to grow with their families in the same place or maybe allow people to age and age in place and in the same structure so this is a building that has it can either be a one over one duplex you can see the stairs on the side to get up to the second unit or with a with a simple sort of four digit uh renovation very low cost renovation it can go in into a full single family house and back again so again it allows folks to actually age in place if they want or it allows a family to grow into the same property another good example of that we've worked in a lot of college towns over the years and one of the most common complaints and questions we get from city councils is a lot of college towns a lot across the country are seeing epidemics of what they call stealth dorms and use air quotes there what stealth dorms are they're basically student boarding houses that get put into existing neighborhoods on the basis of the fact that they're technically single family houses so you'll see a house that's got five bedrooms and five baths and only one kitchen and and one living room and what we see is that uh in those kinds of situations specifically in college towns uh if if all the kids who are renting those by the bedroom didn't know each other before two weeks into their lease agreement uh they're all best friends and it's animal house 2.0 so uh what what we propose uh in that situation is is what you're seeing at the top of the screen that's actually an apartment house uh depending on the local codes it could have three four maybe five units um the one you're seeing is actually a three unit building that we pre-approved in brian texas um and and what we do by creating smaller units is we actually create a situation where the average household size is more uh similar to the rest of the neighborhood so you don't have that kind of party action taking place in the shared kitchen living room all the time and uh again placing design at the center of the conversation it actually looks like a house it actually looks like something you could place in in a neighborhood so those are the kinds of conversations and the kinds of of actions that we can take with regard to urban design and architecture that actually move the conversation forward and allow us to do things like put a multi-family building in the middle of an existing neighborhood by the way before we jump to the next slide every building you see in these renderings the colored buildings and the wire-framed buildings were variations that were pre-approved in bryan texas and that is one of the core principles and best practices that we we advise we're going to talk about a little bit is that variations on a theme are emphasized in the program so the title of this uh uh panel presentation uh was centered on how to make good design affordable and so we want to talk a little bit about the direct savings that are inherent to the program and these are actual construction numbers uh from 2017 though mind you so we expect that these uh these are actually conservative against today's dollars and these are direct savings that are possible in a pre-approved building program to applicants um now there are different kinds of pre-approved building programs and their simplest form it is just a a plan set that a building safety official has reviewed and stores a permit letter on file for but we advise uh going quite a few steps farther than that and actually if the cities will license the plan sets in addition to providing the pre-approval itself then in our programs what we're able to do is we can provide both an expedited review and the plan set which means an applicant doesn't have to know who the best architect is in town they don't have to already have a handle on the process they can show up with a parcel in mind and if it's eligible they can get both the plan set and the permit and they can go straight to a contractor they can literally take those documents to the bank and that represents significant direct savings and professional services as you can see here primarily on architecture but it also represents a significantly accelerated time to market and we don't put a number to that because that's value differently than everyone but this is an important thing of the accelerated time to market for us to understand about these programs and why we recommend one of the reasons we recommend widespread adoption because we've sold and implemented two of these prototypes which we're going to tell you about as case studies bryan texas and claremore oklahoma and we've also started to see that this is a trend that's emerging across the country there are a handful of california cities oregon and washington cities there are michigan is looking at a version of a statewide program and we've of course got our projects in the midwest brian and claremore fayetteville arkansas upcoming and overland park is underway and so we wanted to use this opportunity to try to uh set at least tentatively some standards and best practices that we might follow as a sector because if this is going to be an emerging trend a lot of us might be working on pre-approved building programs and we think just like any other code it will behoove us as an industry to establish some best practices so we want to propose some nomenclature simply this all rests on the core component of a pre-approved building and a program that uses pre-approved building programs and that's just about plan sets being pre-approved by the building safety official but if these best practices are implemented that is a significantly enhanced pre-approved building program and we refer to that as a pattern zone and that's how we describe and understand and refer to projects and for us that means that a pattern zone follows important and very valuable of best practices number one it can work with a conventional code or with the form based code it stands aside and in parallel which means that applicants opt in it's a voluntary program it's not prescribed that applicants must use a pre-approved building they still have access to the conventional application and review process and they can propose custom buildings just as they might today in some cities we've wanted uh some cities have wanted to implement the program under the existing zoning and just high pre-approval status to the zoning designation but others have wanted to get more granular and pre-approved specific for instance four plexes on corner properties or edges of neighborhoods where they couldn't otherwise support a general up zone to allow all four plexes so we think these are really important they make the program a lot stronger and these tend to address a lot of the upfront concerns that cities have whenever they're evaluating this as a novel idea that they haven't quite seen before so in bryan texas when the city was looking for something to respond to some key changes we found the city of ryan found the mbl planning team and was able to take on this great program so the context that brian was in at the time was that there was a key neighborhood just north of texas a m university that was being overrun with these stealth dorms as matt mentioned earlier and in addition to that there was a golf course just a few more neighborhoods north of that area that had been turned over from public land to this public-private partnership development and we the city of bryan knew that the area around that park was going to see a lot of response and growth with the edges next to the park releasing a lot of demand and so with these two different components kind of merging together at this time the pattern program the pre-approved pattern buildings and the pattern zone program were a really great response for how to blend the demands in the neighborhood of students and the young families that would be coming and wanting an interesting neighborhood to move to with the program coming in we were able to have the four different building types ranging from the smallest little cottage all the way up to a large three-story walk-up that had up to 12 bedrooms and the response that we've seen was really focused on the walk-up building and so you would see not not as many of the you know smaller developers but really those professionals that come in and want to see a big turnaround for their projects um for the the smaller applicants that were coming in there was you know interest in the cottage in the flex house but they and they were able to really have a variety of locations that would allow any of these and so the blend that was able to get pre-approved for the different neighborhoods was really successful for how the existing neighborhood could grow and change like in the image that was shown earlier with the animation next slide so in claremore there was there was a response to uh the the different choices that were available for the city of brian there was those building types and variation within each one but the lesson learned from that was that applicants are you know they're they're clever consumers and a smart consumer that knows what they want is looking for a variety of choices and so the focus for the claremore project was to bring in more variety it was a similar town in that it was also a college town but the process was more builder focused and so bringing those builders on board and making sure that they're involved in the process was was another success point um the another key point that was very successful in claremore as well was bringing in this pilot project and so that was bringing in these four buildings that were reviewed and kick-started early on and what that did is it allowed for this point for folks to look at when they're interested in the program and say well here this is already being moved forward this is already being successful here's how you can do it too and so this was recently approved in december of last year and there's been a lot of success so there's already 30 applications that have been under review for their downtown area just in the first few months and the impacts that that's having for the city of claremore is going to be really successful because the permit volume that they're seeing for such a small community really shows how people are hungry for something new and that this is really the convenience factor that that folks are going to be looking for for development so we wanted to take the opportunity as well to be a little bit um self-critical and this is the basis of of the changes that we're making to these programs and and what we're trying to do to iterate on these for the next cohort of cities that is uh innovating and pursuing pre-approved building programs first um these were in some ways some hard lessons for us to learn right we did post planning evaluations and we had original ideas when we got started and some of those ideas turned out to be correct and some of those turned out to warrant further study the main uh or most important lesson we learned is that we still weren't providing enough buildings there seems to be something relevant to human nature there's a goldilocks zone if you will in the number of choices that people have or want with anything there's an ideal number and it turns out it's somewhere eight ten or twelve and if you've got more than about a dozen choices you're paralyzed with the choice and if you have fewer than about eight you feel like you don't have enough choices to make a good decision and we wanted to find a pro a way to produce these programs for cities and towns that could address this and generate 10 to 12 choices per building type that's included in the program that's a dramatic increase we're talking about moving from something on the order of 6 to 10 or 12 total buildings spread across a handful of building types to dozens of buildings total in a program for what we think is going to create the highest impact and be the most successful the other thing is that cities have a desire to be able to change the program over time who would have thought and it turns out that if we come in no matter how good of a job we do with visual preference surveys or discovering the community's values producing 3d printed models and showing these off and doing exhibits in town halls and high school gymnasiums we still might get it wrong and at the least if we pre-approve dozens of buildings there's going to be a bottom 10 or 15 percent that aren't used as much and so cities need a way to swap these out all this kind of comes together into a solution that also we'll create some architectural device variety and maybe make these kinds of programs accessible to cities that don't have a hundred thousand or two hundred or three hundred thousand dollars for a planning project and what we've come up with is that uh we are going to launch this platform for all pre-approved building programs ours that we're helping cities implement but also we want to invite colleagues in cities and towns everywhere to use this pre-approved building programs take on a lot of different forms as i said earlier the minimal version is it's just a building safety official they could even be acting alone and just establishing reviews and pre-approvals for architectural plan sets and we can incorporate those kinds of programs here as well but principally what we feel we need to do is we need to build a network of colleagues that can implement this and that can provide architecture for regionally uh to make architecture to ensure it's regionally appropriate to ensure that it's locally relevant we feel this is very important and we believe that pre-approved building programs and pattern zones are new technology for cities to use just like form-based codes and we need to drive adoption for these as quickly as we can if we can see the kinds of success that claremore is seeing in other communities it's important for us to do that so we're building this out now any city would be able to use this any program it's white labeled it's branded it looks like the city owns it and someone could search by address or parcel and browse and explore what the pre-approval program allows and they could see on a parcel by parcel basis which buildings are pre-approved they could cross-reference other codes and they could review other program components like site diagrams that are specific to the common parcels in the community that deploys a program like this the end result is someone can make a choice they can choose the parcel and they can choose the building and they can submit an inquiry with a complete package to the planning department to start the process we think this could be really valuable because personally having worked for cities on the private sector side and worked for cities on the public sector side all three of us we're really tired of the days of programs that live in three ring binders and in filing cabinets and have to be updated one pdf revision at a time it's it's uh you know it's it's it's a good year to be working on a program that's not just new for what cities can do with infill but also might be new in making it easy for them to manage and clerk these kinds of projects this is our last slide you know when we talk about the scale there are roughly 900 or a thousand or so places of significant population in the united states 10 000 or more people maybe spread across multiple jurisdictions but clustered in place and we guess that there's at least one worthy application that can be mission driven for pre-approved building programs and pattern zones in each one of those places and what we're obsessed with is how can we reach all of them and so we've been studying the science of how new ideas get adopted whether that's a television or a new app or something else and it follows this typical curve we call an s curve or an adoption curve and it's split into each one of these phases and right now if we believe there are about a thousand of these programs out there in the country the innovators only make up the first 20. the early adopters will think differently than the innovators and the majority jurisdictions will think differently than the early adopters and so on and there is no way that we can act alone and do even 20 of these a year right and that's what this scale calls for it calls for all of us who are qualified and interested uh and enthusiastic to implement this pro these types of programs if we believe it will work and that means we we need to kick off kind of a new era of coordination about it so we would love to to work with any of you and we hope today and the dialogue we're about to have can be some kind of a beginning thank you well thank you uh thank you all let's uh get into a little bit of a discussion and then we're going to go into q a once we're getting some questions already q a um and once again um you know use that q a function of zoom to ask your questions uh and it's really great to see people from all over the country who are in now mentioning that in the chat where they're from i wanted to ask all three of you or um or point out that you know it might remind some viewers of the sears roebuck houses of the early 20th century it combines that with a public policy aimed at reducing bureaucratic red tape in theory it could help with both quality and affordability in practice is it living up to its potential yeah that's a great quick great question first i want to talk a little bit about the sears catalog because that's something that that we've thought a lot about and and is really important to us you know the sears catalog is is uh and sears modern homes by the way is what it was called um it's something that lasted about 40 years there was dozens of architects involved they designed about 350 buildings and there's not a lot of great information on this because unfortunately the archives were destroyed but we think that about 80 of the of the designs were used to build about 80 000 homes across the country so when we're thinking about the scale of the issues that our country faces and how pattern books might be able to to to solve those problems certainly looking to the sears catalog has been really important to us and and you know that's part of the reason that we we've we've thought about okay we're going to need a lot of collaborative collaborators right only two percent of the homes in in uh in this country are designed by architects right now so there's a lot more room for that um to the to the idea about whether or not this is this is living up to its potential i i think again that's a really interesting conversation you know i think it sort of reminds me of of maybe asking someone who's working on form-based codes in the mid-90s whether or not they thought that technology was living up to its potential you know the the answer i don't know what the answer would have been at that time but certainly this is a new and exciting technology that i think there's a lot of reason to be optimistic about yeah and i want to add a little bit to that uh answer in in the context of the scale of the problem and the scale that we're obligated if if we care about our mission and we care about our code of ethics and so forth we're obligated to try to address and in northwest arkansas alone where we live we need something like 90 000 new housing units constructed by 2035 or something just to maintain housing prices where they are today and so that's a problem of a of a growing region there's a problem of contraction and especially of high quality construction in the contraction for regions that that are shrinking and when we talk about the scale we're talking about thousands of units right and how can we achieve thousands of units and so we don't know yet whether or not this is successful we've seen um what we judge to be a very good indicator of high permit volume out of claremore and we've got some lessons that we've learned from brian and some assumptions that were challenged but what we keep coming back to is this is the only kind of incentive that we can find that is designed from the beginning for scale so imagine for instance that a city in the in the case of ryan and claremore they spent around a hundred thousand dollars for the architectural development uh portions of those scopes every time an application comes in the door they're getting the value of the plan set in the expedited review no matter how many applications come in the door and so the value of that pretty quick and aggregate is going to exceed the initial investment and that's something that is not possible with any other kind of incentive program where there's a direct incentive and it's also not something that is possible with almost any project review scheme that is out there in our planning departments and so trying to solve the scalability of both of these these challenges is at the forefront and we still think it's successful obviously we're evangelists for the idea now but we still find it's very compelling even though it's still early it's a it's a technique today for people who have an innovative or an early adopter attitude though it's not quite proven if we're being strictly honest so talking about innovators um you know why brian why claremont how does the community get interested in this concept at this early stage maybe lindsay could talk about brian sure yeah i think um you know like i mentioned with the context that brian had at the time what they did was they put out a request for proposals in specific response to the increase in stealth dorms and wanted a plan that could respond to that type of housing demand and so what the city of ryan did also included an area plan and so it was it was this additional piece that came in but what that plan was able to do was was to show support of how a program like this could be successful and could respond and so because brian was one of the very first communities it was helpful to have that support piece and so the context like i mentioned before an increase in student housing students were living in the neighborhoods where there was a lot of older architecture but developers were seeing that and so they were tearing down older homes that were run down and you know needed to be torn down but the development that went in place of that was these you know four five bedroom five bath homes with one you know kitchen and living area and so the response from the community was was very strongly negative and folks had a lot of you know the second they would see a home like that the response was i'm assuming that this is going to be uh very negative and so coming in with a response that brings in units that could be more affordable to you know students or young families would allow for you know development to respond to the need in the area where there was demand but also it would provide that housing type in a way that could blend better with the existing community of the existing housing structures and the existing folks that were already residing in that area does that kind of answer your question um sure and then you had claremont but in general you know office of community more interested and move forward with this concept when it's so new it it's so claremore and brian both um had to be pitched and persuaded on the concept in general you know it wasn't something that they sought out and uh but it was something that we recommended uh as an experiment um that would be related to their place making efforts and both communities um had made observations and were skeptical or frustrated of the success that they were having with pat with past efforts and were worried about the administrative overhead that would come with pursuing kind of a gold standard form-based code approach and so that was how we landed on uh trying out a program for pre-approved buildings in those communities now since then we call it an emerging trend there are half dozen more communities on the coasts uh and in the midwest and a couple of new communities that we're working with um that have seen what's going on in our and are interested and are making inquiries specifically for pattern zones and pre-approved building programs so we we really feel that um it's right on the edge of in terms of that adoption curve of the phase transition between the the innovators which is maybe where we're still at in the phase of how this gets adopted and who's interested but moving into early adopter the early adopter phase where people have some inspiring case studies but ultimately they still want a unique program that's going to require some tweaks and and that's what we expect to be kind of the trend across the sector if pattern zones and pre-approved building programs continue to be popular and continue to show success we expect that it's going to be early adopter attitudes for the next couple of years um where are you getting your design plans and how do you choose uh yeah that's that's that's a good question so the uh there's really kind of a two distinct paths that we've taken the the first is the is the two prototype projects that we showed you those are really boutique architectural design product projects where we went and we did the planning process we identified the building types and here in our office in that studio right over there we designed all of the buildings under this under this one roof to try to kind of do our best to meet the parameters of the project again we learned a lot from that process uh probably the main thing being that it just wasn't physically or or economically possible for for one office to provide all of the options that uh the the market is demanding uh for in these kinds of programs so part two uh and this is the direction that we're moving in now is to create the uh the portal that we showed a couple slides ago and the idea there is that we can work with architectural collaborators across the country who you know may have more expertise than we do and within specific regions um and we can curate actually an architectural catalog that's not unlike the sears and roebuck modern homes catalog where we can meet the challenges regionally across the country and we can do that with a much higher number of prototype buildings than any one office could do so at the moment we're recruiting primarily from our colleagues in the cnu and in the urban guild and are organizing the launch catalog for the first quarter or next year with the new new cohort of cities and then over time we would expect to revise the catalog on a annual basis and are still devising a a process for that um uh so it's it's something that we're we're evaluating but we want to be um genuine and transparent you know we recognize pretty early on there's no way to hit most towns price points and there's no way to really reach as many cities and towns as we feel are are necessary if we're trying to do this on our own and so we are we're trying very hard to come up with a curatorial process and a launch catalog with a broad and diverse network of um of of uh of providers now i wanna i wanna just shout out to the urban guild for for a second my colleagues in the urban guild have been really really helpful with this and we're really uh we're really glad to have that that community of practice now we did talk a little bit about the sears houses they were not as i understand it maybe i'm wrong customized for a local maybe they had local regions but they weren't customized for individual municipalities are you trying to customize really calibrate your plans for each individual municipality the way we do that is by having a really robust planning process that focuses on building types first so you know i i think a lot of the in terms of where where the juice is with the squeeze it's it's in the building types and making sure that we're we're bringing in buildings that are solving local problems and and you know taking advantage of of local strengths um and and then yeah you know in terms of the the the specific porch detail or the specif specific overhang you know maybe that's something that's more regionally relevant based on uh the the assets that we have in the catalog yeah rob it's a little bit of a mix and match as well so um you know you there's a real common question especially because cities want to be unique right but but they also want high quality designs and they may want a lot of them and what we talk about a lot are that there might be different kinds of sameness and it's probably okay to have a mix and match portfolio where um some uh might be appropriate in a much wider geography and some might be more locally oriented and we often ask people when they ask these questions you know if they ever get tired of seeing main streets even though they all look the same um or if they get tired of the buildings in paris looking the same and then they never want to go back and uh so we know that there are different kinds of sameness and whenever we're coaching cities on the short listing process we try to get them thinking about this in a similar way and uh and and to consider you know what might be regionally appropriate and beyond what might simply be um uh acceptable or well known in the low in the local conditions this might be a question uh for for lindsay but um you had mentioned that there there were four building types in brian and a number of different variations on those types but you've discovered that you need more variety how did you learn this and do you think that you're getting it right now in terms of the amount of variety yeah i think that's a great question so um the way that we like to kind of describe it is if you would imagine when netflix originated and i know not everyone's going to remember this but you had to write out which movie you wanted they would mail it to you got it three days later and you know you could watch it and then you would mail it back and then you would get a new one and so if you were to kind of think about the the brian catalog being like that there was you know a process to get some structures and uh the selection that we had wasn't very broad and so the process to gain you know more variety takes a little bit longer so as netflix you know grew and responded to demand they were able to bring in uh way more you know viewing options for folks and then create this subscription service where you have a rolling selection of options and so that's the way that the program has grown as well is um bringing in the subscription option with with a variety of of changing building types with you know focus preference on what the community the city that's subscribing wants um so i guess your your question about how did we identify the need for variety i mean i think it ties into what matthew was saying where you you want to see you know different things changing over over time and so while you may have sameness you you still want to be able to look at something and say well this is the newest version this is the best and greatest that we have now because you know the culture today likes to see you know new ideas coming forward quickly and so the subscription service is something that really responds to that type of demand i wanted to get to some of the questions from from the audience and there's a lot of them um so i'm going to paraphrase a little bit on combine some of them but taylor was asking you know their pre the the the cost of approving the cost of design plans is one thing um but uh there is um uh the cost of building is uh now very high in in um uh in terms of for for materials and uh even if you have pre-proved plans you're not the builders wouldn't be able to recoup the building costs in many locations do you have any response to that what issues are you seeing in the cities that you're working with around the country uh we do have a response to that but it's probably not going to be very satisfactory because this has been something that's been troubling us as well and um the long story short is we wish that this could solve that problem but it can't and it's been the most uh it's been the primary limiting factor in the conversion of permit applications and the certificates of occupancy and both programs and brian and claremore and it doesn't take much exposition from tariffs to the pandemic to ongoing construction and and labor uh cost escalations to to tell that story so there's two things that we're thinking about that number one we're really excited in um in overland park that we're gonna be able it looks like to emphasize uh smaller buildings and we think this is probably the number one thing we can do from a design and planning perspective to control housing costs with new construction you know there's a lot to unpack there but we've seen some some examples and some case studies one from one of our new urbanist colleagues uh eric kronberg in atlanta where they're able to achieve market rate rents of uh i mean i shouldn't say market rate rents that's not right um they're able to achieve cash flowing rents on guest suites that qualify for households at 80 or less ami in new construction and they do they do that by controlling the size and by clustering the buildings and so from a design perspective or program perspective we're excited to make that attempt but it's a it's a good question and it's a fair question and it's a challenge we're all going to struggle with and this only gets at the margins of those cost increases one one thing i also want to say about that and and we're seeing this in claremore right again same story um you know really really difficult environment right now with regard to construction costs but the the same is true of uh sort of our our competitors in the building type space right the same is true of of the suburban prototypes the same is true of the the single family farms so what what these programs have done arguably is is get to a situation where at least now missing middle has a shot at competing and it may be uh maybe they're they're as difficult as as some of the less desirable building types but at least now from a from a zoning and entitlement perspective they're not more difficult so brian uh notices that all of the um the uh the designs that you've shown are neo-traditional building forms and quote he asked is this a response to local heritage neighborhoods or an appeal to the fact that everyone remembers grandma's house that's a great question so the the uh the first thing that we did when when every time we had a stakeholder meeting every time we had a public meeting in brian literally the first thing we did is do a visual preference survey um and the results of that were extremely conclusive i mean again super majorities of people preferring uh more or less traditional architecture certainly performing preferring traditional town form so you know if you if you let most people choose between a snout house and a front porch house they're going to pick the front porch house if you let people choose between a modern town house and a more traditional townhouse they're generally going to prefer the more traditional townhouse and you know look i'm an architect who is educated as a modernist i think that there's absolutely uh space for that in in this world but when you're pre-approving a building i i think that there's a sort of a different level of responsibility there that says okay you know if someone's if someone's paying for this on their own and they're doing it all on their own and they can afford it you know and and they choose contemporary architecture more power to them but if this is a if this is a public program where we're going to subsidize the design of something we think it really needs to be pretty normal and something that that a super majority of people would agree they want to see across the street from their house in their neighborhood yeah and that said you know in the past these prototype programs have been limited to a handful of buildings relative to what we're doing going forward those are kind of scarce programs in terms of the offerings of buildings they provide the new programs where dozens of buildings can be pre-approved for more or less the same cost to the city those we might think of as very abundant which means we've got a much longer wider deeper portfolio and so we're excited to be able to experiment with incorporating some more contemporary architectural styles when appropriate into the mix when we've got a little bit more space so to speak in the program to consider a wider variety of styling um jeffrey uh um a i believe a guild member is asking um a technical ques so for some technical questions is the city paying an initial one-time fee for design and engineering and then giving the plans to people who want to develop in the zone how is the design and engineering service fee covered and how does the city cover the liability to the consultants and contractors a lot of questions uh jeffrey it's good to hear from you man um so let's see uh design fees uh one time or not um again the the prototype projects that we showed those those were boutique projects where we were doing uh specific architecture design for that town uh so that was uh that was a one-time fee where the city covered the cost of that architecture and they and they now hold a license to that architecture within the study area the the portal that we're proposing to work on with our architectural planning collaborators across the country that is going to be a subscription based service that will allow us to swap in different buildings over time so you know it's it's not kind of a one and done thing where a city pays for a building whether or not it whether or not it works uh you know with the subscription service we now know okay if a building's not working we can take it out and swap swap it with something that that is working um engineering uh is is not something that that we work on thresholds are really important uh and and so we tend to try to stay underneath threshold requirements that would get us into heavy engineering service requirements um what am i missing yeah um i i think you covered most of it but maybe to put a button on on a couple of points so if it's if it requires engineering uh in the plan sets um that is typically also going to need to be performed at the end and so their additional or companion program components that need to be set up so the the armature for these programs can be ibc ready international building code ready um but it requires additional program components to do that and and that's a fairly straightforward thing that we're we're working with one of the new cohort cities on and we kind of had to work around in brian and claire moore for for addressing ibc buildings and that worked well enough but it was it wasn't quite as perfect as we wanted um liability always goes back to the design architect but we've got really good licensing clauses to try to minimize all that so we try to keep it as kind of as close to parity with a private sector agreement as absolutely possible and what we're doing right now instead of doing the bespoke architecture and by the way open invitation to any any architects on the call um we'd love to work with you right so so reach out to us we we've worked out with with other colleagues what we think is a really great royalty model to be able to to make your architecture accessible to these communities um and we did that because we realized working with these communities that they want to have access to wider architecture right so that's that's part of our mission is making sure that more more than two percent of homes across the country get get actually get an architecture an architect's um expertise with them this may be a question for lindsay but um who did you partner with to make this happen in bryan texas the city council architect city attorney how did this happen in terms of public process sure um so with our consultant team that came in and the partner was there was a core work group with the city and so that was primarily the city planning team at the time so i was the project manager and we had a small group of city staff that headed that up partnerships also included the the midtown plan advisory committee it was a committee made up of about 20 to 30 folks that represented elected and appointed officials and neighborhood representatives there's a good variety of builders and developers on that team as well and so the steering committee that group was a steering committee that was able to kind of stay involved at different benchmarks throughout the process yes the city attorney was was very involved in making sure that the ordinances and that the key items that were moving forward for adoption met the requirements for state and local codes and they were involved as well in making sure that the licensing and liabilities were something that the city was comfortable with as well for the architect question the architect was you know nebraska slack planning and architects but there was also involvement in availability rate architects on the advisory committee as well a shout out to ryan terry and tim terry our rt studio uh was our was our local architectural partner there and they they did a great job uh both helping us out with the design and that and then also sort of clerking the works after the fact helping helping people navigate the program so as a follow-up on that uh randy asks um what has the feedback been in in brian and and perhaps also in claremont both pro and con sure so uh there's been a lot of excitement in brian when folks hear about this plan um it's been really positive people are really excited and i think it just you we got bad timing with the pandemic and then with the prices of construction going up it's just been really difficult um but it's still consistently we're getting a lot of excitement and brian and claire claire moore and there's not a t on that and it's claire moore um claremore has you know as we've seen we've already had you know 30 plus permits submitted and so the feedback's been really positive as far as you know demand for the program and then you know responses that we've been able to look at what was done and learn and grow you know as far as any cons but i think we've mentioned a lot of those already and how we're responding with the program i apologize to claire moore i i think i got that right wrong a couple of times claremore oklahoma um the designs you've shown us are mainly it seems uh residential uh um can are you looking at the pre-proof building plans for mixed-use buildings corner corner stores that sort of thing uh we are and actually we did approve a three-story vertical mixed use walk-up in in brian uh we chose not to go that route and in claremore and again as as uh matthew described uh those those sorts of ibc buildings are just a little bit more complicated and so they they really uh require additional programmatic elements bear in mind too that in most towns and cities across the united states even even metros the majority of the urban fabric that's in place today can be significantly improved in terms of its capacity to generate tax revenue to address loneliness to support local economies almost strictly if we had to hold ourselves to it straight holding ourselves strictly to compact single-family uh fabrics and forms would still get us 80 or more of the way they are in a majority of the united states and most of the cities that we work with recognize that for themselves and so they they naturally want to weight the program or preference of the portfolio to compact single-family formats now that's not to say that there are there are still a lot of nodes and a lot of interest in seeing more and more intense formats at the edges and on the corridors but still we expect going forward most programs will preference compact single family in terms of the the majority of their portfolio so many good questions um is there a way thomas asked to incentivize or prioritize local incremental builders will the vacant infield loss uh immediately spike in price and cas and cash offers from from large developers dominating the market yeah is that a concern it is a it is a concern um and we we pay attention to the news and the trends and and that that's a concern for us and if if you're not concerned about that stuff you probably should be um so yes um and we have experimented with requiring certain things like uh variability rules um in our supplemental criteria for the program so for instance requiring the different types can't be adjacent or that an individual or an entity can't undertake pre-approved building projects on more than say three adjacent parcels right so we're trying to control and enforce a small grain and we'd like to experiment with that a little bit more and one of the things we were inspired uh was rest in peace uh hank ditmar proposed a rule in an experiment savannah that set for a pre-approved program experiment there that no adjacent parcels could be developed by the same person or the same entity and we thought that was a a brilliant rule and look to rules like that that are a little bit more algorithmic or generative to control some of that stuff but with regards to property values increasing or spiking again most of the time look at how these portfolios are weighted most of the time is permitting a higher quality or pre-approving a higher quality version architecturally or in terms of site design than what is already permitted so there's not an associated spike in value with that um or it's nominal in cases where cities might up zone or might use a program to do a limited up zone to allow pre-approved plex like a four-plex or an eight-plex or something like that um the increase in value would be commensurate with the same kind of increase in value you might see from up zoning uh generally um so we haven't seen that that's really been an impact that is outside or unique to the program uh yeah and all that's obviously based on the fact that our our interest is primarily in incremental development and a lot of the early adopter cities that are choosing to work with us are focused on infill development specifically but i also want to say that you know we think that there's a role for this this kind of program uh you know in in greenfield we think that we can we can uh potentially improve the quality of suburban projects and and and create walkable environments uh in that space it's it's just not something that we've been asked to do yet and and not uh something that's been a primary focus well we are it's it's now um at the hour and uh uh um i don't know whether you all want to continue to answer some more questions or have some time or ability to do that we can continue on with this if you do um what do you all think uh let's do two more questions yeah that's fine be available for that okay and we are once again going to be posting the uh the video of this uh tomorrow um let's get some uh somebody's asking when you mentioned future improvements you mentioned 10 to 12 choices per building type to provide the right level of choice can you clarify what you mean by that and are the building type variations just different architectural styles are they variations actually of different building types it's it's it's both it's it's both in so again the the planning process starts with building types we we have to sort of think of it as as pre-qualifying certain building types within a neighborhood so that might be adus uh it might be one over one duplexes it might be uh you know name your your building types to jour from there we can look to our architectural catalog for all of the buildings that we have that that are of that type and you know in in one neighborhood and in a study area where we've pre-qualified say three or four different building types we may have three or four dozen uh architectural variations that would fit that building type and that's that includes uh different floor plans that might also be different uh sets of elevations for similar floor plans it's sort of an all of the above strategy i guess if hopefully that answers your question um [Music] maybe this is the final question but mary asks that she's really intrigued by this effort but having spent the last two decades working on form-based codes and knowing how loosely the term is now applied she's wondering if uh you've been thinking about ways to pre-empt preempt the bastardization of the concept folks cranking out plans for pre-approved building types for new pattern zones but ignoring the concepts that cnu promotes context walkability compact development sustainability um what's your response to that uh well first mary reach out to us because we want your help uh oh look we're we're so worried about that we're like we're obsessed about that and that's why we made um matt and in early talks uh and and now we get to talk with lindsay and collaborate with her every week and we we made a call that we wanted to not hold all this to ourselves we we didn't want to make all the information and design choices and lessons learned proprietary just just for us for exa for exactly that reason because we wanted to get ahead of that and that's why we want to use this opportunity to start to talk about industry standard vocabulary and and some standards of practice and so on and so forth and so you know that's just that's to say um we're worried about it um we do a little bit of naval gazing or soul searching ourselves and ask us you know like what kind of quality do we feel we need to insist on for the programs we're implementing and you know when we think about that we wonder you know like how much of the suburban market for instance um do we want to capture and try to guide or how much do we of it do we want to ignore and and we don't know the answer to that we us we assume that um some developers or some cities who see the value of the technology in the new process but that don't care about our charter or our principles are going to pick up on this and are going to try to do something and our our best strategy as far as we know so far again we'd love to have some help and some insights here the the best strategy we know so far is to try to do this as quickly as possible and to try to do it on a platform basis so that we have something that is a really high value to offer to those communities so that they're not so sorely tempted to half asset right we want them to do a really good job and we want to make that convenient and try to solve that problem for them and if there's a better way we want to hear it but right now that's kind of our approach to do the best we can with that concern i think before before we jump off there's one last question i think i want to make sure it gets answered and it was from brian that says what's the next step to learn more and get involved and we definitely want your involvement um and so be able to reach out to us you can start at patternstones.com and i'm going to see if maybe matter math you want to you know mention some more ways that folks can get involved no you covered it lindsay that's the number one thing you know that website is just a form right now to fill out um so that so that we can make connections so whether you're architect whether you're a planner or a decision maker whether you're on the private sector site you're doing planning and design projects you know we want to help you execute these kinds of projects for your client and make pre-approved building programs some of your offerings whether you're at the city and you're offering it to applicants or whether you're in the sector and you're offering it to municipalities again we're evangelists for this we believe really strongly in it and are trying really hard to solve all the challenges that come up along the way well clearly there's a lot of interest in this topic i'm sorry we couldn't get to every question uh that was that was put forth um but um a really interesting discussion thank you so much uh matt matthew lindsay for being on on the park bench uh once again this video will be posted to cnu's website probably within 24 hours and thanks for all of those who attended and i look forward to uh seeing everybody on on the park bench in the future and have a great day thank you thank you take care