Shane Phillips 00:00:06
Hello! This is the UCLA Housing Voice podcast, and I'm your host, Shane Phillips. 

We're continuing the conversation from last time on pre-approved building plans, this time joined by Alkarim Devani and Eric Kronberg, to give us a practitioner's perspective on what makes these programs effective and some of the most important things for policymakers, advocates and builders to keep in mind when designing and implementing them. 

When done right, pre-approved building plan programs can speed up permitting and construction, they can lower costs and they can improve design. If you haven't already listened to our previous episode with Seva Rodnyansky, that's the place to start for an overview of what these programs are and how they're going in the U.S at a high level. Both Al and Eric have been in the trenches of designing and building middle housing across North America and they've worked with some of the cities and towns with standout pre-approved plans programs and seen firsthand what can keep them from succeeding. They were very generous with their time and this is a slightly longer episode, so I'll keep this intro brief. 

As I mentioned last time, this is a sort of new format where we are pairing a research episode with a practitioner conversation. So let us know what you think and if you have any ideas for future topics or ways to just make them more useful or actionable. 

The Housing Voice podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, with production support from Claudia Bustamante and Tiffany Lieu. You can reach me by email at shanephillips@ucla.edu, and our Substack is at uclahousingvoice.substack.com, where every other week we publish an overview of research reports, articles and other things that we've been reading and listening to. 

Last week's reading list covers a huge new study on what happened when a small Australian suburb reduced its minimum lot sizes for housing, surprising results from an analysis comparing returns from home ownership to other financial investments. An interesting theory to explain the extreme creativity and occasional weirdness of Japanese architecture, the transit version of everything, bagel, liberalism and more. 

With that, let's get to our conversation with Alkarim Devani and Eric Kronberg. 

Alkarim Devani is co-founder and CEO of middle, based in Calgary, Alberta, and Eric Kronberg is the founder of Kronberg Urbanists and Architects and co-founder of Inc Codes, based in Atlanta. Both are evangelists for missing middle housing, with a ton of experience designing and building it, helping cities and towns change policy to make it build a bull and educating others about how to design and build great communities. Al and Eric, thanks for joining us and welcome to the Housing Voice podcast.

Eric Kronberg 00:03:12
Shane, thanks for having us, so excited to be here.

Alkarim Devani 00:03:14
Same Shane, obviously a big fan of the show and really excited about all the great work you do, and so such an honor to be here.

Shane Phillips 00:03:21
We have no co-host today. Two guests is enough, I think, so we're just gonna jump right in. I know both of you guys do listen to the show, so you know our first question, which for a lot of people—myself included when I've been the guest—is the most stressful question: What is a place you love and what do you wanna share about it with our audience?

Eric Kronberg 00:03:38
I'll go first. Yeah, absolutely, I've been thinking about it a lot, benefit of being a regular listener of the show. I want to talk about Atlanta and starting in Cabbage Town, which is a traditional mill village just east of downtown, original 1880s cotton mill workforce housing village, Carroll Street, this amazing mixed-use development from 140 years ago. And it's just a great pattern of a neighborhood of dense, small lots, infill housing, naturally affordable when it was built. And instead of walking, in Atlanta we have these great neighborhoods you need to e-bike to catch neighborhood to neighborhood. And as you move east away from downtown you stop by Reynolds Town, which was historically founded as the African-American neighborhood for employment at the factory, just further away from the White Mill Village, and then you move from there a little bit east to Edgewood, where I live, which was founded in the 1880s, 1890s, to Kirkwood, to Eastlake, very east side kind of trajectory. But it's really about the platting of the neighborhoods, the lots and the blocks, and you can see the progression from the 1880s to the 1890s, 1910s, 1920s, to see how the lot sizes adapt and modify and they go from Cabbage Town from like a 30 by 90-ish lot which is very similar to a lot of neighbors in New Orleans to a 50 by 150 is a relatively standard platted lot in the 1920s which we see as a really common lot size throughout the southeast and a lot of the middle part of the Midwest and so that's a really common increment of development that we use to talk about how to fit housing in. So this progression of development patterns gives us these increments that we designed to and they're just wonderful places with streetcar stop, traditional downtowns, many downtowns and corner stores and great stuff that is fully illegal in most of Atlanta today. So that's my quick e-bike tour.

Shane Phillips 00:05:17
Is that all in Atlanta proper? I know Atlanta, what people think of as Atlanta, is actually kind of the Atlanta metro area because the city is shockingly small for its cultural impact.

Eric Kronberg 00:05:28
Very good question. So it actually is. From just east of downtown, Eastlake takes you to the city limits on the east side and you butt up to Decatur as a separate municipality. So this—and I want to be honest, this is a very white-coded space. Now It's been very gentrified, very developed. But the same level of development pattern you can see to the southwest, to the other parts of town, where the closer to downtown the smaller, more interesting, more regular lot sizes you had, and it really regularized across standard neighborhood platting, kind of radiating out from the core.

Shane Phillips 00:05:59
Got it.

Eric Kronberg 00:05:59
And I've just been on the east side for 30 years, so I know these neighbors like the back of my hand, their lot sizes. But we work across the city, we see the same platting everywhere, all within the city limits. And, yeah, we're about 520,000 people in the city of Atlanta in a metro of 5,800,000. To give you a sense of population.

Shane Phillips 00:06:13
Al, how about you?

Alkarim Devani 00:06:16
It's funny, Shane, I've been thinking about the question a lot because I've had the chance to travel, obviously immensely. I've been to Copenhagen, I went to Sweden and Malmo and all across North America now, and seeing some of the coolest fabrics that I love and have really become accustomed to learning more about. But I would say the one that, like, probably is the closest to home for me is a community in Calgary, Alberta, that I grew up in, and the reason why it keeps coming back to me is because I only lived there for about five years, I think, until about grade two or three. But it was like that first suburban kind of growth, but kind of 70s, so not quite the 80s. It was still gridded with like minor cul-de-sacs within it. Most of the cars were still parked around back There was mature trees. I like can always reminisce about what it was like to grow up in that neighborhood. I got to walk to school. There was a convenience store. My parents generally always felt it was safe for us to like run around, but my mom, both of my parents, were immigrants and they quickly understood the North American dream was a double car garage and, you know, a new suburban community. So we eventually moved to that kind of 90s—you know—suburban community. And I'll never forget—I tell this story all the time—coming off of the bus because there was no schools and going into my cul-de-sac: there's no sidewalks, there's this huge stormwater management thing in the middle that we never get to play in, and I never knew any of that stuff until much later in my life. And so that whole idea of like what is it like to live in a place that was built for walkability versus vehicular, and the close knit—like you know, when I used to live in this community of temple in Calgary, Alberta, my neighbors used to make fun of me because my mom always used to cook curry and they used to smell it. I always used to feel like so embarrassed about it. But growing up now I'm like first of all, I crave it, and that diversity was always so cool because we were always so close. But I didn't realize that until I was much older and realized the impact that had in my life. And so I would say, you know, that established neighborhood community, those trees which exist in so many different cities, is something that I really, really value more now than I ever have.

Shane Phillips 00:08:18
And that's interesting to hear that, you're talking about 1970s development. I think of that still as very auto oriented, very suburban, modern. But you're saying, I don't know, maybe this is a distinction between Canada and the US, or maybe it's just even here in the US there is a pretty big difference between the neighborhoods we were building in the 90s and the neighborhoods we were building in the 70s.

Alkarim Devani 00:08:41
And you have to appreciate, like being in the prairies, like we just continue to grow. We continue to grow outwards, outwards, outwards, and so that first, second generation, I would say, suburban growth, this is not like a core community, an established, rooted community. It's not that close to downtown. It has an LRT station within a 15-20 minute walk. So I would say it almost has that blend—the cul-de-sac is what really used to stick out for me because it had a cul-de-sac but it still had lanes, which was like this really unusual event where not everything was front drive. There was a mix of cul-de-sacs, still primarily gridded, but cul-de-sacs kind of dropped throughout where, you know, if I was to take you to some of the 90s and 2000s, it's all cul-de-sacs, zero lane infrastructure. The cars are all along the street, all double-attached garage and there's no variation, it's all very similar single-family homes with big, big yards front and back. And so I think that one was always special to me because it kind of had that blend of what we love about the cul-de-sac but still was primarily the vehicular traffic. All the waste and recycling still happened through the alleys which were all paved, by the way, and we used to play road hockey in as well, because, it was just like we played everywhere. So, yeah, definitely a memory that sticks with me.

Shane Phillips 00:09:55
I'm now going to be thinking about this distinction between places with divided lane roads and places that just kind of you know, free for all. I've never really thought about that as a as a way of categorizing places, but in my experience it actually does say a lot about the place. So, getting into today's conversation, this is intended to be paired with our previous one with Seva Rodnyansky, where we talked about his report on pre-approved building plans with Dennis Su that they wrote for Pew Charitable Trusts. Seva is a researcher and that report was a research project that provides a really helpful high-level overview of what pre-approved building plan programs are, the track records of existing U.S programs and some lessons drawn from the more successful among them. This time we're going to be approaching this from the practitioner's perspective, getting a little bit more in the weeds with people who have actually worked on these programs all across North America. Now both of you have served as sort of ambassadors for pre-approved building plans and educators for cities and advocates who might be interested in them, so let's just start by hearing about some of your work in that space. Al, how about we start with you. Just a bit about your background, what got you interested in pre-approved building plans, and what you've been up to with your company's educational programs, Mddl School and Mddl U.

Alkarim Devani 00:11:15
Awesome. So yeah, I'm a born and raised Calgarian. So I've lived in Canada and in Calgary my entire life, believe it or not, and I've kind of grown up in the development industry. I got my real estate license when I was 18. I started a single family home building company. I've only worked in established areas now and it's coming on to almost 20 years, which is crazy, because I started incredibly young—I'm not that old, but kind of just started the same way many journeys do you know? I wanted to tear down an old 1960s single family old and build a duplex, and so I did that and went on to kind of, you know, build more of those. I luckily and unluckily married an architect who made fun a lot of our first designs but obviously improved my understanding of the built form and how we can build better pedestrian realm experiences and better buildings, and so we went on to do that and I think we kind of had this you know midlife crisis of like. So we're just going to build really affluent houses for people in established neighborhoods where only a little portion of Calgarians get to experience that, and that was always troubling for me. My mom had passed away, wanted to bring my dad back into the inner city, didn't want to build them. You know, a 2000 square foot infill. It just didn't make sense. He was by himself and so stumbled on this idea of a row home, made an application in 2015. It got shut down. But it was the best thing that ever happened to me, because through that, you know, we helped build the first missing middle little housing row housing district. We went on to build, you know, over 500 units now kind of in that infill side, built a significantly large rental portfolio. I worked on seven story buildings, all within established neighborhoods, and I think, kind of again I had this like crisis moment where it was like, well, I don't know if I love building these big mid-rise buildings, I think they make sense, I think they're still good for community, but it wasn't the thing that I was the most excited about and I also wasn't sure if I just wanted to continue and you'd building a portfolio of rental housing, that we were going to serve this community. Not to say it wasn't great, but I just felt like there was more. And so, yeah, you know, started, started middle with this idea of like, how do we start to break down the barriers and the constraints to create more, you know, middle housing units, and how do we build more people that can we, that can build them and build the right frameworks, and kind of how? I landed on middle and pre-approved plans and it's been an amazing journey. We're doing work all over North America for over a dozen different municipalities, municipalities, and I think, Shane, you were going to mention this, but I recently just defended my thesis and got my doctorate through the school of landscape and architecture and Planning here at the UC, and I'm not an architect by trade, I just have a business degree. So that was a pretty cool thing for me to go through. You know, three years of like. How do we figure out what middle housing could look like? And I would tell you I haven't quite solved it, but the pre-approved plan side is one of many tools that I think is going to be required for us to continue to advance housing at this scale.

Shane Phillips 00:14:07
Well, congratulations on the doctorate from, I guess, the other UC. One of your two educational programs is called mddl school. I'm wondering if that's like a concession to the United States. Do you guys call it middle school in Canada, or is it like secondary, primary? Cause you've got grade two, grade three, you know, whereas we would say second grade, third grade.

Alkarim Devani 00:14:23
It's a bit of both. There's a mix, like I think we kind of mix it around. But yeah, middle school is pretty common. Man, I'm still trying to learn what sophomore and varsity is. Half the time I don't know what I'm talking about, but freshmen and you know, we've been obviously coming down to UCLA quite a bit—UC Berkeley and like, the alumni and how strongly people feel about their university, so I'm having to learn. You know all that as well. But I was gonna say like much of our inspiration on our education stuff came through Inc Dev and seeing the amazing kind of camaraderie with Strong Towns and all of that, and we really took that as like how do we build off of that kind of momentum and framework? And so again, yeah, we launched mddl school just like let's go out there across Canada, 1500 people in a year in different communities, which led us to building a full out educational program launched with the University of Calgary here. It's a certified program, six courses over 100 hours and, as you know, Shane, we're launching a similar program with UCLA which is like how do we build that fundamental, rooted education in hopes of being that first foundation to break down some of the other pillars, to actually getting to more housing in this form?

Shane Phillips 00:15:45
And that mention of Inc Dev, I think, is a good transition to Eric. This is the Incremental Development Alliance, which Eric is a—I don't know—participant in, member of, leader of. That's not your main job, but tell us, Eric, a little bit about your background, your interest in pre-approved building plan programs and the work you've been doing on these programs, both on the education side and on the practice side.

Eric Kronberg 00:16:08
Absolutely So. My dad took us to Northwest Ohio when I was a little kid, fostered in me a disappointment in suburbia and a thirst for cities and urbanism as young, and so I did everything I could to go to a college that had that, which was Tulane in New Orleans, and New Orleans was a wonderful urban context to learn about cities and places, and I also knew that if I stayed after college I'd be dead by 40, which was several years ago. Atlanta became a wonderful choice to move to afterwards and realized I loved infill, I loved urbanism, I love helping on these kinds of projects. You learn really quickly how important zoning is and barriers to solve to be able to do anything, and I fell in with a lot of folks from commerce, New Urbanism early on and to help foster more technical understanding of the urban networks, not just the architecture, as an architecture grad and then eventually helped become an early faculty member with incremental development alliance, like you know, alan, you were saying—and that was back in 2015, I think—some of the early foundations of that, so it's been over a decade helping.

Shane Phillips 00:17:12
And just to jump in there, Incremental Development Alliance is essentially kind of a training for small scale builders, right, who want to build this kind of housing that we're talking about. That's probably a little too simple, but yeah.

Eric Kronberg 00:17:25
To clarify: Incremental Development Alliance, national nonprofit capacity building and training, really focused on the nuts and bolts of small development, originally founded to train 1,000 small developers. They've already had 10,000 people go through the coursework and training over the years. But for me it's just in a lot of leadership. It's just as important to be training elected officials and city staff on the nuts and bolts of small development as it is the actual small developers. And the path to pre-approved plans was that in the early years it was really frustrating because you teach people all the great small scale infill and things that would be possible to make a project pencil to do attainable housing and it's all illegal right. None of it's actually allowed in their city and so you're just setting up people for failure. So it really hurts. And it also really hurt as a architect in Atlanta that cares about housing across the country, I knew nobody in Topeka, Omaha, Lansing could afford to hire a boutique urban design firm out of Atlanta to solve their small infill project. There's no math that maths for that and so I get mad. We figure out ways to solve problems, and so incremental code consultants in codes was a first step to solve the problem, which is really pre-designed code modules that make it really a lot simpler for a small town or a mid-sized city to buy an off-the-shelf module for one district or two districts to legalize housing as a pilot, to get things going so you can legalize the housing, which is important and critical to get the housing but the right kinds of housing. They haven't been designed for years. Architects don't know how to draw it, Builders don't know how to build it. The knowledge is missing throughout the country and we could never be drawing bespoke housing for city after city. So really pushed us to come and come up with our own plan library. We're friends with the folks from Pattern Zones who are in early pre-proof plans and zoning calibrated group and other comrades really, and colleagues in Equal Development Alliance who work together to put plan libraries together to focus on this as a way to solve access to better plans. But the other thing I failed to mention is really in our firm we're deeply, deeply focused on attainable housing and attainable main streets and commercial spaces. Just like al, we had a very similar crisis point. I'm like what I don't want to do—big houses for big bougie rich folks. I'd like to solve fundamental housing problems for communities at an accessible and attainable level and you need need to change the delivery system to do that. Pre-approved plans are absolutely part of that program. One of the things that we've experienced—I think, Al, you probably have too—is because of your own development. We run our own performance. We understand development math. InkDev teaches you to take the rents or the sale prices that you're trying to achieve and you work backwards right like if you want to rent for $1,000 a month, that sets a huge set of constraints for land price, the number of units you have to have, the kind of building and building codes, all the trade-offs and barriers you have to work through to get to an answer. So we've developed our own catalog within our firm that we share and partner with other firms with. That is highly calibrated to really cute, really thoughtful, simple buildings that are typically more than one unit per lot to solve the attainable housing crisis.

Shane Phillips 00:20:31
So I want to expand kind of on what we talked about last time or build a little bit on our conversation with Seva. That Pew report from the previous episode looks at about 40 pre-approved plan programs across the US. But as we've heard, Al, you also do a lot of work in Canada. Eric, I know you're actively working with at least a few cities to develop new programs that are not in that report. So I want to hear a little bit about how things are going more on the cutting edge and outside the US. So, Al, I'll start with you again and what is going on in Canada.

Alkarim Devani 00:21:03
Before I jump in there, Shane, I did—I did want to just add to what Eric was saying, and I think that the financial literacy piece that he's talking about is one of the most critical aspects of all of this right, because when you engineer something from, can it actually be built, can it actually make money or can it not, is such a huge input for whether or not zoning makes any sense, whether or not pre-approved plans make any sense, and so I think that piece is so understated—And I think you know this, Shane, in the tool that we've built, our GIS implementation tool, which we're also launching with the city of LA, is about taking existing zoning, that the statewide legislation, city legislation, is applied so that the everyday citizen has access to understanding what is my zoning, because it's been so complicated—it still is throughout North America. I can't understand zoning code still in so many different places. So how do you boil that down? But also, how do you then layer on? The financial literacy is like: is this even possible? And in many cities I think, Eric, you probably had the same experience—It's not like it's cool that you incrementally increased your density to two. That doesn't mean you're ever going to see a housing start ever happen, because it's just financially unviable for anybody in the marketplace, even if you had a developer that may want to do that—And I'm sure, Eric, you've had that same experience, you know. Are we just moving the dial? Are we actually trying to create housing? And those are two very, very different things.

Shane Phillips 00:22:24
This is work that we've been doing a lot of at UCLA, at the Lewis Center. There's, on the one hand, what is the capacity on paper? Okay, there's a single family home there and the zoning code says you can build three units. Then there's the question of what is actually viable, what's likely to be built there or even has a chance of being financially feasible, and if for building code reasons, if for just the high cost of land is a barrier, any number of things can mean that three units is actually nothing. It's the one unit that's there and that's not going to change unless some really dramatic things change beyond, just beyond the unit count. You know you might have to go to six units or ten units. You might have to make some really big changes to the building code. You might need subsidies if those things aren't going to change. A lot of those things are just we've done a very bad job, I think, particularly in California, because we focus so much on planning and we have these housing targets that say: you know this city, you need to plan for 100,000 units over eight years, or, in the case of Los Angeles, about 500,000 units over eight years, and then there's no real consideration of well, are all of those units on sites that are already developed to five stories, are most of those units in low income areas where the rents and sale prices don't support the cost of new construction. All these things really make a difference to what actually gets built. But oftentimes we're just looking at like a single number. You know what is the total capacity, you know you add up every parcel and what the zoning says you can build in kind of the best circumstances, maximum number, and that's our capacity. But that's not. That's not our capacity at all and I think you're, you guys are really getting at that. Well, that's a whole other conversation, I suppose. So let's get back to what's happening in Canada, because I have no idea. I got I got a good sense of where we're at in the US from Seva and their report, but I really have no idea what's going on in Canada right now and it seems like it's quite a bit.

Alkarim Devani 00:24:21
It's a it's a tall task to make me all of Canada's representative...

Shane Phillips 00:24:25
Give me a couple examples.

Alkarim Devani 00:24:25
I'll do my very best, yeah, yeah. Well, the first thing I'd say is, like I know Canada—US tensions. I don't know if it's high, if you guys feel it's high, but on our side it seems high. There's a lot going on and there's a lot of Canadians that feel offended.

Shane Phillips 00:24:37
Yes, rightfully so, and I think we are, we're in a position where we can kind of like, laugh it off is not the word, but it's not a threat to us in the way that it obviously is to you guys...

Alkarim Devani 00:24:49
A hundred percent.

Shane Phillips 00:24:49
So I can understand it being a little hotter on the Canadian side than on the US side.

Alkarim Devani 00:24:55
I mean. I would just say, though, like now having the opportunity to work on both sides of the border, there's just so much similarities, more than there are, kind of not, and when housing, you know, is really discussed in a bipartisan manner, that really resonates with me, and I've seen that in so many cool places. So I would just say, like the similarities are much more vast than we think. The one thing I would tell you, for us, from a federal government side, that has been a game changer is the interest in this housing forum and typology. And so we had something that was called the Housing Accelerator Fund. That was basically pools of millions, if not a billion dollars to incentivize cities to reform their zoning code. So, Eric, they started exactly where you said is, first and foremost, we'll give you money if you change your as of right and eliminate exclusionary zoning. So cities were like what you're going to give me this many millions of dollars? How do I say no, I'm going to go and do it. And so they did So. Across the country, every single metro that got money had ended exclusionary zoning, anywhere from one unit all the way up to eight to six, depending on the city and where you're at, Some cities did what you would expect and say, well, we're not doing that, you can't force us what to do, you can't pay us off, kind of thing. And so we've seen mixed results all throughout the country. From a federal government perspective, stating that you know we want to see change, I would say, for the most part extremely positive, even though we've had some back and forth which we'll get into. But the federal government had played a huge role at recognizing the opportunity of this housing form. They talked a lot about the Sears catalog. They've been investing a lot of money into modern methods of construction, which I'm happy to dive into more. So I would just say, at the high level, really cool to see the highest level of government find a way to incentivize cities who are willing to make those changes, or provinces—We've seen province-led action. British Columbia was six units as of right—It came fully into effect june 30th—Also started to move into this next step, which is like: okay, we now have the zoning in place. How do we go further? And further for them was catalog plans. Now I want to describe catalog plans really clearly. The catalog plans were very cool, like you know, over 50 unique plans that were they hired a main architect, regional architects, to come together and design these catalog plans on a regional basis. Very inspiring, incredible architecture. Publicly accessible. Anyone can download them, amend them and then go and apply for a building permit. My only struggle on that end from the CMHC catalog plan set. They're not building permit enabled and you can imagine how much pushback they got back on that. So nothing about them makes them. So they're actually fully accessible and usable, which is a huge concern for a lot of capacities.

Shane Phillips 00:27:39
So it sounds like they're pre-designed plans, but they're not pre-approved. Is that right?

Alkarim Devani 00:27:45
Correct. Yeah, So, Shane there's. They did not work with any cities to get actual internal buy-in. They just basically had design plans that they said would be regional, fit and the tough thing about them was, like many cities, they wouldn't meet the building codes, they wouldn't meet the current zoning standards. There was a ton of pushback about whether or not they were even really appropriate and so, again, I think quantitatively you can measure that and say that wasn't worth it. You know you come up with a bunch of reasons why that wasn't the right approach. What I would say it did do is it fostered more conversation, more interest. And now what CMHC is doing: we're supporting them on taking those plans and making them building permit ready in certain municipalities that have asked us to do that. So the first step was: you know we have the government's interest. You know, the other thing that we have here that has been transformational is our version of our kind of insured mortgage program, our Fannie and Freddie Mac CMHC produced. You know this incredible program where if you build five or more rental units—up to 500, it was typically originally meant for larger developers—you could get up to 95% loan to cost 50-year amortizations at the bond interest rate so long as a percentage of your units were affordable and the rest could be market, and so that program was announced roughly five years ago in a meaningful way, and you got to a point now where 90% of our rental financing programs are using those insured back products.

Shane Phillips 00:29:14
95% loan to cost is very generous compared to the 60% or 70% that you're going to get in the market.

Alkarim Devani 00:29:22
100%, but it's enabling housing that would have never ever gotten built. And so you have two things. You have market housing, which is also increasing vacancies. We're seeing huge supplies and we're seeing a percentage of those units still be deemed affordable. And this isn't like a get rich quick scheme because it's 50 years. They have a 10 year rental agreement requirements, and so there's things about the program that have worked exceptionally well, almost too well. I don't think CMHC wanted to tilt the entire market to become the insurer for the entire purpose of the program built rental market, which they are now, and so they're starting to push back and trying to figure out how, you know, can they get back to more conventional style loans that are being built. But yeah, I would just say the federal government very, very in heightened around housing and trying a bunch of different things, some working extremely well, but their interest in this low scale density is just so cool for us to see, because they're trying to introduce financial financial mechanisms that are very specific to one to four units, and that's been a game changer for us, kind of here north of the border for sure.

Shane Phillips 00:30:24
And something I think we're still lacking here in the US. You know we have the 21st Century Road to Housing Act and there's even a program in there relating to pre approved building plans and maybe there will be funding that is actually, you know, goes into support that. But there's a whole host of other barriers to these kinds of housing products and the funding will be nice to have, but really very much a first step and probably not the most important thing that the federal government in particular could be doing to encourage missing middle housing. Eric, I'll send this back to you. Among other things, I'm kind of interested in hearing whether you feel like the pre-approved plan programs that are being started today or that are being worked through right now are really incorporating lessons learned from the earlier iterations that we heard about in Kalamazoo and South Bend and Hawaii County and so on, or if it's been more like the kind of thing where every city kind of has to start from square one and figure it out themselves, because they think they're unique, special places and there's nothing to learn from anywhere else.

Eric Kronberg 00:31:24
Well, I mean, I think, unfortunately I mean there's definitely some people that are learning lessons and trying to move forward on that. That's wonderful, but I think most cities think they're that special snowflake and that everything's really special to them, and I also think that a lot of it is. They think that pre-approved plans are about pre-approved plans. Right, that is simple and it's direct. It's a tool, and it's a tool that you can use to influence change if you've got leadership trying to influence change. But I think most of the time it becomes the thing that everybody else is doing. It's bright and shiny, it sounds sexy. I have just this big personal fear that it feels like a thing you can do as staff or a city to make it look like you're moving the ball forward, but you're not really touching your exclusionary zoning or your other policies that are the big barrier. And if you understand that one house per lot is a fundamental barrier to getting the housing we need pre-approved plans that just make that a little bit easier. It doesn't really move the needle, and so I think the challenge is, as cities are trying to learn, they're learning incrementally and peace here and there, but they're not really dreaming and thinking about all they could be using these programs to advance equitable housing goals in their places. And the one thing I would just say: I was literally on a call with some smaller towns in Southern Indiana. We're helping with some policy reform and it's the thing we see everywhere. Zoning is scary to everybody, right? Citizens are scared to death. They don't understand what it means. They don't understand what's going to be allowed. They think the worst thing is going to be built right next to them, property values destroyed, all all these fears. If you can show them something positive, that can happen. Like they hate duplexes, oh, but that really cute duplex computer plans program, that would be fine, right. So using these programs to lead on policy and to pilot on policy is critical. We don't see enough of that, right. We see some of that. Some cities doing it. I want to say that we don't see any of that, but, like to me, it's how you use it as a tool to move it forward and hopefully, hopefully, municipalities in this podcast, you know, will help get inspired to think more about it. The plans are the medium to create the change. They're kind of value, neutral in themselves often.

Shane Phillips 00:33:27
And that's something that sort of came up in our conversation with Seva too, and this was a later question in my notes, but I think we'll jump ahead to it because it gets to what you need to do to complement these plans or how you use these plans to accomplish bigger and in some ways, more important goals. You know address more fundamental problems. So in that last conversation we talked about how it seems like the biggest opportunity with pre approved plans isn't necessarily in how many homes are built from them, but in that it gives you an excuse to get the planning department, the building or permitting department, the utilities, the fire department, transportation, etc. All in a room together and your nominal goal from those meetings is to hash out whatever's standing in the way of permitting and building these catalog homes as quickly and inexpensively as possible. But the obstacles that you identify in that room are not likely to be limited to that small set of projects. So this is really your chance to make it easier to build housing of all types and, eric to your point, maybe to build the trust, build the credibility and create some excitement or positivity around what is possible from things like zoning reform that are probably going to need to complement these kinds of plans in many communities. So, eric, I think I probably picked up this insight from a presentation of yours back at cnu or earlier, so I'd like to hear you just say more about that, make that case for us about how these programs can and should be used for kind of a bigger vision, a bigger effort, and give us some idea of how that's actually accomplished in practice, because I think it sounds like a great idea. But I can also imagine how widening your scope can derail this work on pre-approved plants specifically, and the political will in favor of these pre-approved planned projects might not extend to other developments in the city. So those are just a couple possible barriers that come up to me immediately, but curious to hear what you have to say.

Eric Kronberg 00:35:31
I think I'm going to talk about two examples, and Kalamazoo and South Bend were two rockstar cities in the pre-approved plans arena that have been doing this longer and having great outcomes with great leadership in their planning and city leadership between Tim Corcoran and Rebekah Kik. There are also two really early cities that brought Inc Dev in for training—And you know I'm good friends with Rebecca—in which she she presented at CNU, so she was talking about how you know she thought the pre-approved plans would help us facilitate getting things moving. The Inc Dev training and the plans helped her teach her entire city staff the basics of development. Al, just like you're saying, you've got to have a financial target of what you're trying to hit that you work backwards from to solve a problem By having specific math problems to solve. It helped them understand that there's only certain kinds of units that you have to deliver to solve those problems right. So it's a development problem that ties to the zoning problem, that ties to the infrastructure problem, that ties to the everything. It helps define your why, and both of those cities did a lot of that financial why to understand what they needed to do for everything from there, and so that's a best case scenario to get some basic development math training on city staff. To say, well, if this is our outcome, let's work backwards through the process.

Shane Phillips 00:36:44
And just to jump in there. I think that's. That's in contrast to, I think, how these conversations usually go, which is essentially just like well, we need four plexes, we need six plexes, and then it's just a debate about: well, do we like those? What are the downsides of them? There's not any like hard goal there for you to aspire to and it becomes very easy to just kind of nitpick about what you like or dislike about that housing type or that design and you completely lose sight of the fact that, like well, if we don't do this, there is literally no way to achieve our affordability goals. If we're going to limit ourselves to single family homes or to duplexes or townhouses or what you know, it's going to depend on the community, but I think having that very clear price goal, rent goal, is so valuable. I don't know that it's always easy to establish that and people are going to disagree about even what that goal should be, but I do think, as a North Star, that's really powerful.

Eric Kronberg 00:37:43
So that helps. And one other thing that I'll say that's kind of spun out in our work about this is that we've we're big policy geeks, we love the right kinds of zoning, but we've also really embraced the power of fee simple ownership. You know Washington State sent some great state level reforms to allow lot splits, you know, for two to four to six units, depending on context. Like most builders build to sell, right, which means a buyer needs to buy, and we've all talked, understand condominium finance in the States is really hard—maybe a little bit less hard in Canada, but maybe not much less hard. And so if you want to conform to the federal loan programs and use that really kind of form of federal subsidy baked into the 30-year mortgage, you need to have products to sell. And so we talk about zoning and platting, which freaks people out. But when you explain like this is how you create home ownership, if you don't like renters, allow buyers to be your neighbor, it ties back to policy choices, right. And then like, well, my God, what would that be? You can bring the pre-approved plans to show. This is a really cute four-flex townhome rowhouse configuration that will look wonderful next to you. It helps give you a path. The only other thing I'll add that we're hoping for ways to grow and have programs work better is 100% state-level programs. IncDev is helping with technical training for Vermont. I think UTIL is doing the actual house or structure designs. But our pitch to Vermont, and any state, is that there's a ton of policies that come from the state level that local municipalities don't have any control roll over right. Like you know, we need the plans to help get the interdepartmental coordination at the city level working together, but at the state level there's all kinds of waivers to state level policy that could be offered in conjunction with the pre-approved plans program that no local municipality could ever do. And so you know Vermont has very limited buildable area. It's a lot of septic systems. There's a lot of policy challenges around that. I am not a septic system expert, but they have some more constrained limitations around that than other states like of New Hampshire and Maine next to them, and we encourage them to think about state-level exceptions for using these policies, particularly around infrastructure that would unlock more housing, and that's the difference of a state-level program. The possibilities are much greater for change than just a city-level program as well. I mean you get into local preemption. There's tension there, but there's also possibilities.

Alkarim Devani 00:40:02
Shane, I guess like super relevant for me, just because where I was in Kalamazoo, I don't know—a month ago and Rebecca brought us in—actually you know, posting dev post pre approved plans to figure out what the next evolution could look like. And I think one of the clear learning for them was like that density threshold was what they could get over the finish line at that time, but recognizing that it's not enough and there was too much community opposition at the time to even go further, We're now that sentiment is changing and I think you know what was cool for us. Bob Bobby Hopewell, the former mayor of Kalamazoo, started this new program through Kabundant, which is how do we empower black and brown developers to actually become developers, not just carpenters or not just siding or construction or framers? And so they brought us in with a cohort of people that said: Al, here's our first cohort, here's the housing gap, here's what we're looking for. And we met with the community land bank. We're working for the city, We're helping this group of developers now try to break through this glass ceiling. But one of the things that became very clear for us is like no housing in Kalamazoo is getting built without subsidies, so everything has some sort of affordable housing subsidy, and if you're black or you're brown or you're doing this for the very first time, you don't actually meet the county requirements, the state requirements or the federal requirements. And so how do we?

Shane Phillips 00:41:19
And just to be clear, that's not because of your race, but that's. That's basically because you have to have a track record, essentially.

Alkarim Devani 00:41:28
You don't meet the bonding requirements.

Shane Phillips 00:41:30
Right, almost by definition, you can't be a new person. You kind of have to partner with others to get that experience, which there's good reasons for that. But it is a real barrier for people who are trying to break into this industry that is very racially and gender segregated or concentrated rather.

Alkarim Devani 00:41:47
100%. And like it was funny because, like, we had the Northside Community Association, primarily black, but starting to buy back. They bought back their school site, they bought back houses, they got funding to do all these things and now they're asking themselves of what comes next. And there was a bit of like skepticism over the pre approved plans. And there was a woman there—I can't remember her name, she was on fire. She was amazing, she was four feet. We did a bus tour and she was like I don't want these Cracker Jack boxes in my community. I was like, Oh really, like, tell me more, have you walked through and what don't you like about them? We went and toured one. She's like I actually don't mind these, these aren't so bad, and they're literally like just across the street. It was the first pre-approved plan that she had seen inside and so I think so much of the next step, of like okay, you know one thing I love about kalamazoo: they're so community oriented, so community focused. The people were incredible, let alone how beautiful the fabric was in this little remote place was like. They're so inspired to create housing, create equality, create this—The first time I've ever heard of, you know an accelerator targeted on this to create more developers. And so I think, like this tool that we're talking about is the tip of the iceberg, and we're looking at deploying our GIS mapping tool. And that's the only thing I was going to add. Here is, like, in Kelowna, we now have deployed. You know, our GIS mapping tool is live. We have almost 15 pre-approved plans now that are building permit approved on there. We know exactly which homes currently meet that requirement. We know our data tells us that it's unlikely that certain communities will ever see redevelopment within the next five to 10 years because the numbers don't make sense. These ones may go early. So we're actually have knowledge and understanding that you're not going to have six units everywhere because it financially doesn't make sense and nor is that how this type of development happens. And so, as we start to pair data to the reform that we're making In the city of Kelowna, now it's 10 days to a building permit with a pre-approved plan set, and I would just say that not only are we educating the internal departments, but community is kind of back to what Eric said, and politicians are so important to get buy-in, and so when they see something that has a tree plan, has a landscape plan, understand what the pedestrian realm experience is going to look like. It's so vital because it gives that confidence, confidence that you get from the politicians eventually, you know, makes administration feel better if the community feels better. And so there's this cycle that we need to really figure out how to make a bunch of stakeholders feel better about what we're doing. And the only last piece I'll add is, like I think Eric probably knows this as much as I do—simply just designing the pre-approved plans and having them sit on the shelf is never the idea. And we're starting to see cities emerge to say: we want to demonstrate and lead by example to show this is possible. So incredibly powerful when they say: you know, we're going to demonstrate the very first project to prove that this can land in community and land the way we hope it will. And all of us know this, Shane, even in Los Angeles, the double duplex, like if we just create the policy framework and even if it's good, we can still get really bad examples that eventually don't really create durability to long-term housing, which is the ultimate goal.

Shane Phillips 00:44:57
Let me try to sum up a few things that I'm hearing here. One—and you guys can tell me if this is overstating things—I feel like you know, pre-approved building plan programs—good, if that's all you did you know, fine, that's an improvement. But if it is, all you do from the program is just get a few projects that are you know can be permitted quickly and will be built more quickly, you've missed the vast majority of the opportunity of standing up one of these programs, because there's just so much more you can accomplish as part of that program. The other thing I'm hearing, which I think we didn't really get into in our conversation with sieva, is: these are pre-approved building plan programs but they're not really just building plan programs. There's landscaping, there's trees, there's streetscape, there's, you know, all these things that come alongside of it, and you're not just giving people some kind of idea and buy-in on what the buildings are going to look like, but what the actual entire property is going to look like and ideally you know, if that expands, what the whole community is going to look like, kind of where you're headed. Are both of those like: do you guys agree with those statements?

Eric Kronberg 00:46:06
I do, and I just would expand on the last part of the comments. We just wrapped up and helped Tulsa deploy their pre-pre-plans program and I'm always the optimist hoping that we can do more and there's political realities, limitations. But you know, what we talked about with Tulsa is for their 1920s neighborhoods. There's a really straightforward lot platting regime, right, typical lot sizes, alley, no, alley, corner, mid-block. All these things are really understandable and I was really hoping and we did some of this work with the city. But when you're going from only one house per lot to two or three, getting some pre-approved site plans is really a really important goal because it's utility connections, it's easements, like: do they want separate meters for every unit? How does this all work? It's one thing to get your building department and infrastructure groups to work together with the standard things, but if they're going to something they haven't seen before, it really freaks them out. And so a pre-approved plans program—even if you're allowing two units of housing to be sold separately on one lot lot—to work through all those mechanisms of connection and storm water and trees or whatever—that's way more important and harder, right, It's variable, but that's the training that really really matters. And if you use these programs to push beyond one house per lot really important to get to better outcomes.

Shane Phillips 00:47:21
And this isn't a question I had prepared, but I do think it's important to ask now, when you have the, particularly the departments that are not normally involved in housing from an affordability perspective in particular—so let's put aside planning, put aside even the permitting department to some extent. When you have utilities, when you have the fire department, you have the transportation department, what is the case that is being made to those agencies to get on board with this, to convince them that these changes, accepting these things up front, is worthwhile? Maybe making some concessions or trading this for that? What do those conversations look like when they're successful?

Eric Kronberg 00:48:03
It's the mayor or city manager saying "We have to do this. It's a priority for me to get reelected. Make it happen," otherwise it's not.

Alkarim Devani 00:48:10
And I would just say, Shane, it's so much harder. Okay, Let's just take the housing form right. Let's take go one from four. Everyone can kind of guise under like the list of all the problems that there are—the zoning, the construction, the buildability, the permitting process, like we can list these forever. But the minute that you start to knock some of those off and it's like very clear, let's take DWP in Los Angeles and power as like one of the ones that comes up all the time for everyone about a real roadblock, a real challenge. Well, the minute that we can kind of zero in on something that is causing the constraint—exactly what Eric said—it's easier for the mayor or city staff or chief to say: this is a problem, we need to decide the position that we're going to take on this, and for us it's like the ambiguity is the problem, It's not the decision. So it's like if fire does not want to allow units behind units or feels like that is going to create a challenge, we just need to know that, so then we can respond accordingly and then come back with the information. I think the fact that these departments live in ambiguity when each one of these applications come like. Let's talk about no pre-approved plan process. You have a fourplex that comes it's units behind units. They haven't seen it before, they don't really know how to respond to it. That is the challenge that I think small-scale development dies on. It's why we can't create financing for it, why we can't have more people doing it, because each person you meet—Eric—I don't know if this is true for you—it's like all of us who have survived barely made it through, and it's so hard even when we try to think about helping the next person. Like every time I sit down with someone, it's like here's everything that could go wrong, but where you're starting better than where we started is there wasn't this community of support that existed, and so I think, like what we're trying to do is reduce the barriers, create a much more proven, practical process. Whatever the unit count is, whatever the cities end up on, that's what it is, but it's the ambiguity and the fact that they can kick these things to each other that makes it so incredibly difficult. And so you know, I just watched the odyssey—great movie, by the way- 70 mil, it was non-stop. But this idea about like rowing in the same direction and rowing together is so important. It doesn't need to be fast, it does need to be consistent, it needs to be smooth, there needs to be a process and we need to continuously looking at it to see where are we faltering. And I think that's the commitment we're asking for when cities are embarking on this journey, because simply saying yeah, we threw these up on the shelf, no one used them. It was great. Yeah, that we could have told you that was going to happen.

Shane Phillips 00:50:44
So one of the things I would say is the clearest benefits of pre-approved plans is that they can speed up the pre-construction phase of development, mainly the design and the permitting, and also if there's entitlement that needs to happen through the planning department or zone changes, it can help with those as well. It's probably the main benefit that pre-approved plans are sold on and that makes sense to. But in a slide deck that you sent me, Eric, I noticed a chart in there comparing timelines for discretionary, for buy right and then for pre-approved housing—and you know they're just kind of shortening as you step from one to the next. But what was interesting there was, in addition to much shorter design and permitting phases for the pre-approved housing, it also showed a shortened construction timeline. I don't think it's obvious why these programs could or would speed up construction. So explain that for us.

Eric Kronberg 00:51:36
Sure, I'll talk through a couple of components of it. To get to the construction answer. One of the again the benefits isn't just that you can get through planning or permitting faster, but with our clients that are working with us, you know, we're able to give them a conceptual site plan and then access to construction documents right away. So building out your financial model can happen at like the second or third week with really robust information of what the project is going to be. You still have to figure out, guess what the horizontal cost and civil design will be. But if you can imagine having access to that information at week two, it radically changes the entire process for finance and not just approvals and everything else. And that really matters for the smaller projects, right, you know, for a 200 unit apartment complex, whatever, it's different. But if it's a fourplex and you've built this once or twice and you know you have access to the plans, you run your costs, you know everything. It solves your lot: acquisition strategies and everything else. But also we're doing a lot of work here in Atlanta, mostly with nonprofits or mission-based for-profits, and several of the for-profit, mission-based builders use our plans all the time. Their subs know our plans, right, Putting a bid together takes them five minutes because we have cute names like: oh, the azalea—I built four of those last month. It's going to be that's the price. I don't have to look at it. Right, they're getting refined, you know, I think, see what you talked about. You know production builders. They have a handful of plans. Their subs know exactly what they're doing in they're out. It's hyper-efficient. You know. We're trying to not equal that, but come closer to that right with known, really efficient buildings. We're constantly refining, tweaking the framing, making it better every time with feedback from the subs, to make it really effective and increase quality and reduce cost and increase efficiency. That's how it gets faster to build too, because it's a known, understood thing, right it's. It's just the trades or understand the building types and they're also intended to be pretty freaking simple buildings to build, right, like they're simple boxes with great windows and really cute porches and high ceilings that are great to live in, right. So we're intentionally thinking about constructability and financeability with what we're doing. That's where you can really start to speed up construction, because it's the right product that you're approaching to execute.

Alkarim Devani 00:53:47
And Shane, if I could just like add on to that, I think you know our goal is to figure out how to bring more people to do this type of thing. We're trying to create more predictability. Right now We're talking about the pre-process of actually getting to construction, but where things can actually go the absolute worst is during the construction process. So your RFPs—you know site conditions, you know you just get hosed on construction, and that happens all the time, regardless if you're a veteran or not, and so the more that we can do this kind of repetitive, predictable process. This has been happening in the greenfield and new growth communities forever. The reason why those things make money is because they rinse and they repeat, they have pre-approved plans. This is not a foreign concept to cities that have had new growth, and in Alberta we've had pre-approved plans forever in our new growth communities. It's just never been applied to our established growth communities. And the only other piece that I think is so important is that when you think about modern methods of construction, those are coming like they're coming for the first time. They've been talked about for 20 years. I still think they're probably a little bit away, but I believe that this process naturally speaks so well to that capacity and that capability. We have data that tells us whether the land is the same as flat, what constraints it sits from. You have this pre approved design process and then you have these. You know this modern method, whether it's panelized, volumetric, whatever it is. We supported one of the largest modular manufacturers, probably in the world, deliver their first 32 units stacked, missing middle housing typology. Now they have that skew. They're going to do 150 of those this year. In the next year, year and a half alone, you know, three weeks to manufacture them, 48 hours to get them put on site. And it's funny enough, I did an interview with her. She said the one that they did in the established communities with two streets versus kind of in a little bit more of an old, like I would call it more suburban style community, was way harder because there was more community pushback. There hadn't been a lot of redevelopment there, where in the established neighborhoods the neighbors are like oh, you're done, like it's all up, like you're good, like you're leaving now, because they were used to like 18 months, 24 months of people with hammers and nails and all the things that come with it, and so I've seen it now visually with my own eyes, like where this is actually starting to happen and this process could easily become a vision for—where a homeowner picks a SKU, gets it delivered and is ready to rock and, hopefully, all of us knock on wood. This starts to solve the financing gap that has clearly been the biggest challenge within middle housing and gentle density, but we're never going to solve this by trying to start out financing and say, oh yeah, well, if there was billions of dollars, this industry would work. Yeah, that's like every industry, but there are some other things that we need to fix first, and I think this is one that I'm also really excited about.

Shane Phillips 00:56:38
Essentially like create enough comps that the financing industry is interested and has some faith that things are going to work out. You did mention how Greenfield track developers, single family home developers, sort of rinse and repeat the same designs and approach, and I think that could sound like we're trying to make established neighborhoods do the same or become the same. And I just want to make the point here that because this is infill and you're only kind of redeveloping a property here and there at a time, it's not the same thing at all in terms of you're not going to create homogenous communities in the same way as a suburban new development, just by nature of the fact that, like in no community really do you ever see the whole block torn down. And that's especially going to be the case when we're talking about three, four, six units at a time on a parcel. The only cases where you see like a whole block disappear in a matter of years is some inner suburb or near the downtown that's suddenly up zoned from single family to like seven stories. That occasionally happens, but the scale we're talking about just not a thing.

Eric Kronberg 00:57:45
So, Shane, I actually got, I can't. I got actually pushed back because I can't. I'm going to fully disagree with you and say not true, because what we're seeing—and we're doing multiple projects like this across the country—I swear to God, every mid-sized town has a three-acre site within a half mile of their main street. That's a former school site, right, that is everywhere. And we're doing multiples of those. But what we're doing is because we have a library of plans, we incentivize our partners to pick five or six or seven unit plans from our catalog and we're not charging extra for the variation, and so we can plan for 50 or 60 units with a lot of variation built in. So we see those sites with a great catalog.

Shane Phillips 00:58:28
I think you're not actually disagreeing. What I was imagining was like tearing down a bunch of single family houses, basically, and replacing them with, you know, maybe two or three times as many homes If we're talking about like a vacant parcel or a parcel where the building really has no future except to be torn down and it's just like one big structure. That kind of thing totally agree, and this sounds like the perfect opportunity for those kinds of places. This is really the story of the Malone Park Commons that we had Andre Jones talking about in Memphis.

Alkarim Devani 00:58:57
One thing I would, though, add, Shane, though, is like: naturally, the constraints are different, so you'll never end up with the suburban style thing that we're thinking about, right, like I don't. I don't mean to call it the plight, but sometimes it feels like the plight of the like cul-de-sac, front drive garage communities, and I—and I don't want to call it a plight because I recognize that so many Americans, so many Canadians live in those—call, those homes are affordable, they served a really strong purpose, that, naturally, just there's too many other constraints that don't allow for that to happen. In infill—and I say this all the time—like when you go to Copenhagen or Potato Road and Malmo and you see the same home the whole entire row down, you're like: oh, this is lovely, like I love this street and it feels good, but for some reason, I think our culture resonates with, oh similar architectural patterns and housing forms, making me think of that, and I don't—I don't, maybe, want that, and so I think a bit of that is just like we have to think about what that may look, look like in an infill context, and then think about the examples where that repetitiveness—like we joke about this all the time is like if you brick something, they will like it. So brick it. Like if you're scared, just brick it and we're good. So I think, like we just have to. We have to really show different cultural references and new normatives of what that could be look like, and again, I really need to walk this back. I can't hate the suburbs, because our suburbs in calgary are getting better than our established neighborhoods because they have more density, city requirements, they have like they. They're becoming a real sense of place, and so I know the congress of new urbanism had this big push like if we're going to fix anything and new growth is going to happen, let's make better new growth, and that work is starting to show up in so many cities, and so I would just say, like the our thought process of an evolution, hopefully, of how we create housing, there's a better way to do it and we're all starting to see that, and I—and I think yes for anyone that's afraid that 12 single family homes are all going to look like a bunch of you know, vinyl siding—that's what we all are trying to avoid—is what I would say.

Eric Kronberg 01:00:51
Just really quick, just to jump in. I have to share this. You know everybody's scared of cookie cutter houses. You know that's how it's described often. But we like to point out that if the ingredients are really good and the cookies are delicious, it's a very different conversation. Right? You need to have great ingredients, delicious cookies, and that's New Orleans, that's these traditional neighborhoods, all these streets of the same house over and over and over again, with minor porch variation, minor roof variation, because it was the right kind of house to the climate, to the vernacular, to the economic, and it's up and down the street like seven, eight times in a row. That's how these neighborhoods were built: better ingredients, better cookies.

Alkarim Devani 01:01:29
I love that, I'm going to steal that, Eric. Sorry. So good.

Eric Kronberg 01:01:32
All yours.

Shane Phillips 01:01:34
I mean Brownstone Brooklyn is sort of the quintessential example of this. The brownstones look different now but when they were actually built they were exactly the same. I think generally they didn't even have the variation that you're talking about being built in from the start. That's just something that kind of evolved over time as individual owners customized and added. You know little bits and bobs. So point very well taken, and I think I mean your point, Al, about how we think of repetition as a bad thing because of our association with the suburbs, and the repetition there is really really interesting because you're 100 right in the right context. It looks amazing, it works really well, it just depends. So there are a couple of aspects of pre-approved plan programs that I still feel a little adrift on. So I'm just going to ask a few questions that are a bit more in the weeds, as though we have not been in the weeds already. This first one is about what kinds of plans should go into the catalog, because there are a lot of options to choose from. You've got building plans designed specifically for the catalog and I would say within that category there's a further distinction between plans that move through an internal design process, maybe with outside assistance from designers and architects. Then you've got a kind of more external version, which is the design competition. There are building plans that are put into a library after being approved for a different project. Those can be used again by the same developer. Maybe in some cases they can be used by other people who want to use them, presumably with the consent of the original designer or architect and maybe the developer. I realize this is not an exhaustive list of options available to cities and that those options are not mutually exclusive and that these distinctions are probably fuzzier than I really am making clear here. But putting all that aside for the moment, my point is just that there are a lot of choices to make and it feels overwhelming. Say, you're the consultant for a city developing a pre-approved plans program. I'm a city employee managing this project. I'm breathlessly sharing all these concerns and worried about screwing it up and making the wrong choices. Starting with this very important step of the what and the how of adding building plans to the program. What is your advice to me? Either of you can take this or both of you.

Eric Kronberg 01:03:46
I'll start to give to Al. I mean, I think we start with the conversation we started before. You're absolutely going to be adrift unless you know the why—And the why needs to be the financial targets right. That provides guardrails so quickly as to what kinds of housing and kinds of types you need to be doing without those financial goals from attainability or otherwise. It is just kind of like going to the store: does this look good? I don't know. Does that look good? You just don't know.

Shane Phillips 01:04:12
Cheesecake factory—40-page menu.

Eric Kronberg 01:04:13
Thousands of choices, whatever. Yeah. So I think that's the thing. The other thing that we've been pushing on like an idealized version for us for cities is: I think this is very American. You know, cities feel like it's really important for them to own the plans. That's a very expensive use of funds to buy the plans outright at the beginning from the designers for, you know, exclusive reuse in a jurisdiction. If you buy six, eight, 10, 12 plans, half of them, maybe a third of them, may be really good and calibrated better. The others may not get used that much, right? So we're always talking about a lease to own model. Just do a subscription for the first couple of years to tweak and calibrate and figure out the plans that really respond well to your conditions and also what you need to change in zoning to have them work better. And if you want to own the plans at year two or three at least you've test run the program to figure out what is working well. But we just try to caution cities from buying the plans out right at the beginning like that's more money for us as architects. I just don't think it's a good use of taxpayer funds. I'd so much rather see that money go into interdepartmental training, coordination and other things than owning plans that may or may not work in the long run for them.

Alkarim Devani 01:05:18
And maybe I'll kind of walk through what our process is. When we get brought in Shane—kind of similar to what you said—The first thing I say is: please don't have a design competition. And like, I love architects—God bless their hearts—But like, when you have architects that design plants freely, some that are local, some that are not, from all over the world, man, they're inspiring, they're exceptional, they're incredible, but God knows how anyone is ever going to build any of them. And so that is our first flag is like please don't let the architects out of the cage just yet. Let's like figure out what's happening. And so the first thing we talk about is localized context. So we meet with the industry locally, like what is everyone building? What can they build, What can't they build? What's working, What isn't working? What would allow them to move maybe from a single family to a duplex, triplex, fourplex? So what is the localized industry capacity look like today? The second thing for us is like how do we get localized designers that are part of that ecosystem producing these plans? Because we find that they should know that better than anybody else, and often architects who are doing well don't practice in this space for the same reason eric just said. It's like I could go do a mid-rise and spend my life there and make way more money than I can designing these and it's just too hard—like it is a tough place—to make the numbers make sense when you're doing one. So what we've found is cities obviously have different approaches, similar to what eric said. Do they want to own them, do they not? We generally encourage them not to own their plans. We encourage them to work, hire us to work—with localized architects to design the right framework plan that have embedded cost and construction into them. And then the market. This is what we did in Kelowna. So we onboarded three, we scrutinized three really heavily. Three different architects had their pre-approved plans, and then the second phase was the city. Kelowna opened it up to more architects, which is kind of letting the market decide what they want those rights to be, and then they compete with each other. You want to charge five grand, seven grand, four grand, 10 grand—everyone will decide—but all of these and then more people are able to kind of onboard their pre-approved plans. And so I love this model because it encourages more architects to join. As Eric said, some of them might need to be reformed, tweaked. The market may move, might change, and this way cities are not just throwing a bunch of cash out the door and then having to go back all the time. And we're encouraging more and more designers to join the program and as it gets more uptake and more and more viability, you'll see more architects and hopefully good architecture start to emerge. And the cool thing is the cities get to decide whether or not your plan meets the caliber and criteria for a pre-approved plan. And again. I don't know if we've said this, but the one thing that we've seen happen is by the city's investing in a pre-approved design. They kind of set the benchmark of what their expectations are of design caliber. So even those that choose not to use them, their hope like subjectively—yes, there's no architectural controls, but it's like we've invested—that our expectation is: this is the quality and caliber designs that we want to see. What is it that you're putting forward that would not enable you to put these trees, this landscaping buffer, this facade on? So I think that's another really awesome, hard to measure substance of what these plans are creating, but I'm hoping it increases the overall design caliber of what's getting built in these cities.

Shane Phillips 01:08:32
And I mean, I guess, besides the caliber per se, it's just like: what do we value as a community, like what are the features of a building, of a site plan that we care enough about to put into this pre-approved plan that we spent a bunch of time on? Doesn't have to be something that's expensive or particularly nice compared to other options. It's just like this is the thing that works for us. Maybe it's brick, for example.

Alkarim Devani 01:08:59
Agreed and you know communities have been spending their time fighting about parking and density, and once that argument is gone and that no longer is a conversation piece, we can actually start to talk about how the product meets the ground. And that's what I tell most communities is like I'm not sure you're going to win the conversation on parking or density with where cities are going, but where we can add a lot of value is on improving the quality of the homes that come into our communities, and that's where we try to reposition everybody. And you know we don't do engagement, you know we do education. So it's like I want you to have all the same tools and all the same capacity as a developer who is to come and maybe buy the home next door. And so you know, engagement is a weird word today. I don't even know how to define it, so many different ways and what people are doing. But for us it's like let's make sure that we have done everything possible to make sure that person who lives in that community has the capacity to do this, and if they don't, what are some of the barriers that we need to still kind of run through in order to actually make it work?

Shane Phillips 01:10:01
This is sort of a follow-on and I don't know if this is too far in the weeds, but, as you guys know, we spent a lot of time on building codes a few months ago and the difference between the international residential code and international building code, IRC versus IBC, and just the many different requirements that are triggered by going from two units to three units. There's other requirements that are triggered by going from four to five, because that's the dividing line between between residential and commercial from a financing perspective. I don't know if there are different thresholds for this kind of thing, but I hear about needing, you know, for some kinds of plans you need to bring on an architect—maybe the one who designed it, maybe another one—to kind of maybe stamp the plans or to go further with them, to do more to oversee the project, versus others where it seems like you can just take the plans and build it with your contractors and you're good to go. What is that dividing line? What should we know about the differences between building more units versus fewer units in a project, when you need to bring on an architect, and if that's like the kind of thing that you really want to avoid if you're trying to cut costs or if it's something that, in the right context, is a totally reasonable expense. I don't even know what to ask here exactly, because I feel like there's a lot of potential pitfalls, but it does seem really important.

Eric Kronberg 01:11:24
I can take a first pass again and give it to Al and I'll talk about Tulsa as the example and answer some type of questions. So IRC, Residential Codes, one single unit, duplex in townhomes, and I'll actually I'll start with South Bend Their program. You know they had all that are IRC and they had a townhome component that you could use, like by the plan, to do two, four, six, eight townhomes, a row, homes in a row. They had that as an option in the plan program, which is a really interesting way to get more density. Tulsa wanted to have IBC buildings. We do as a firm a lot of single, single stair, three-story walk-ups and two-story walk-ups as basically pre-designed within our office, and so we were able to provide a couple IVC buildings to the program for Tulsa. But the way that works is it's basically a pre-design, a preset price right for access to the plans, because we have to stamp the plans. Our engineers have to stamp the plans every time and so we worked with the city of Tulsa building department, reviewed the plans, had any code, you know, questions or comments based on what they see in Oklahoma. We've revised the plan so we have a set of three-story walk-ups ready to go for them. I think a four-plex, a six-plex and a 12-plex maybe I can't remember exactly which buildings we're doing, but that's licensed per use each time, and so they paid us some design fees to calibrate, but we cannot sell them the plans to own as a city because they have to be stamped. We're also.

Shane Phillips 01:12:48
Is that a meaningful barrier or is that just something like: yeah, this isn't a big deal? I guess the big question for me is: is it as pre approved? It seems like you could still have this kind of coming together of all the departments, agencies, and they've all agreed that it's good to go. But I don't know, maybe the fact that you have to get these things stamped every single time means that they're going to be scrutinizing every project a lot more closely and individually, in such a way that the pre-approval is not really accomplishing what it's intended to.

Eric Kronberg 01:13:23
Let me just one more criticism of the problems pre-approved plans programs are trying to solve. We're very scarred from the permitting process in Atlanta because—and in many cities, the actual review of the building is the fastest part, right, that's the least complex, the least unknown, the easiest to get right. For us it's the zoning, it's the site review and stormwater, it's the trees, it's the arborist, it's public works and infrastructure. Pre-approved plans plans have a limited capacity to solve those problems generally. That's why it's that interdepartmental coordination that's so important to get on board, with those departments not being barriers. Right, and the fees for a sixplex in Tulsa are not going to be cheap. The reason that would be really meaningful is if this lot is only allowed to be as a single family or duplex, or you can simply buy the plans for this one sixplex and be allowed to build it a discretionary or administrative up zone, if you will. That creates a whole other pathway to those buildings being useful. But the other thing I would say just from experience: we do a lot of three-story walk-ups, mostly for nonprofits, and we have partner union studios and providence does a lot of this work in New England. We rarely see anybody build one four-plex or one six-plex on a lot. It's usually a nonprofit. It's usually a half-acre lot. It's usually two to four buildings. It's usually a 16 to 40 unit project. The pre-designed building is still really powerful. I use cluster three or four buildings to make courtyards and great urbanism. So it's still a wonderful solution. But that's usually how it gets deployed. So having that as a pre-approved plan in tulsa is meaningful. You know, if a non-profit has the right site, they could use those buildings and go. We're doing that with non-profits across the country, sort of as our own pre-designed plan shop. So there's a lot of power in it, even without like, as you said, is it really pre-approved? Well, the challenge is it's going to be the site design and those issues. That's your biggest barrier. But even just having access to those plans is really really meaningful.

Shane Phillips 01:15:28
I want to really again underscore a point you made there about how the permit review, the permitting process, may be one of the least problematic steps in the construction process overall, and so if all that your pre-approved plan program is doing is shortening that by 50%- 70%, but you still have all these other steps and all the uncertainty associated with them, to say nothing of the delay, you're not accomplishing a whole lot.

Eric Kronberg 01:15:58
Absolutely. I think that's if you're a municipal official listening to this podcast. Please take that statement to heart.

Shane Phillips 01:16:04
Well, we've already run late here and I wanted to give a little time at the end here, because there's so much I don't know, and you guys are the experts. What did I not ask you about? What are some of the pitfalls, the opportunities that you want to make sure our audience is left with before you go?

Alkarim Devani 01:16:23
I guess the thing for me that stands out—like I didn't jump into the—obviously the constructability challenges that we face here as well, Shane, like in Canada, we have part three and part nine of the building code over four units—you move into a different part—need full engineering, full architecture, and typically we're running into sprinkler issues and fire suppression systems. And again—

Shane Phillips 01:16:41
Sounds very similar.

Alkarim Devani 01:16:42
Yeah, the building from part nine to part three is more complex, and so I think like it's fresh for me, I'm still like reeling from it because I'm from Calgary, but probably what I would call the most progressive policy in all of North America. I would say pound for pound, I would argue that it was producing some of the most the significant amount of middle housing anywhere in North America. For sure, in Canada We've led in terms of numbers and we just had a new council that was reelected in less than a month ago, just removed. We are now the only major Metro that does not have a missing middle housing policy.

Shane Phillips 01:17:18
So you passed it in 2024 and repealed it in 2026.

Alkarim Devani 01:17:21
Less than two years later. So one to eight, back to zero, like back to one unit as of right. And it's tough, Like I'm not going to lie, Like I think the thing that I've learned is we have to move cautiously but optimistically. We need to be aware of what. We need to stand up goalposts, because I think what happened here in Calgary is we kind of let loose a lot of new developers. You know, some not so great products from my personal perspective, some that I even built, like some of the ones that I reflect on. I'm like I don't love that, looking back on it, and I think the challenge that we have is that we are building with existing communities, with existing neighborhoods. Their communities are changing. You know I was talking to the dean here at the school of architecture about this idea, about we were missing a design process. That I think is critical and so if someone could just walk in tomorrow—that's a, you know, a drafts person. It's not to say that they don't have a design framework or an understanding, but we almost need to embed some sort of design parameter process. I hate architectural controls. I don't know the answer, but I am sensitive that if we don't have care in our designs and in how these housing forms meet the ground, creating durability, long-term durability for middle housing will continuously be a friction point, and so for me, that is probably the freshest thing on my mind when we enter into, in new cities of like: how do we do this with care and how do we get more people to understand the culture of care that they need to apply? And again, education is slow, it's long, it's boring, but it for me, it's becoming so much more clear that this program that we're building is so important because we need to build up that unconscious kind of collectiveness of what's possible and grow that more and more amongst people. I think I you know, eric, I think for me the thing that I learned at Strong Towns and a lot of these conferences: we all talk to each other, we all know, but how do we talk to more people who don't know and bring more people into the ecosystem shane, and so you know, our bheg at middle is: we want more homeowners, we want more politicians, we want more people to be able to see this is physically possible. And I'll leave with one last story for me, because I was in la demar matthews is a local architect based out of south central la, works on like black aesthetic, black architecture, and what he said to me was so cool was that he thinks the one thing that could could save Compton is actually empowering homeowners to redevelop themselves. If they don't, they're just going to get gentrified out of their community and they're going to continue to build these mid-rise buildings that black people are not coming back and settling into. But the one SB 9 that's happening in Compton is a family building housing for their generational family to stay within Los Angeles, and I think that is what we all envision In order to do that. All of these tools that we're working in, I believe, is in that homage and in that kind of honor of how do we create more frameworks for everyday citizens so politicians feel good planning administration feel motivated and we can actually tell the stories and find these champions and support them in being successful, because none of this matters if we're not actually succeeding in doing that.

Shane Phillips 01:20:24
Eric, how about you?

Eric Kronberg 01:20:25
Awesome. I've got just a quick, I think very compatible follow-up. You know, I think the best way to think about these pre-approved plans, programs, it's a tool for implementation and what we talk about and preach here at a KUA is that education matters. We do that all the time. Yeah, I know you're doing it all the time, but we think piloting is step two, policy is step three. Right, Get on board, do a pilot to demonstrate what's possible. And usually that pilot requires a whole bunch of zoning permissions, permissions. So if the zoning approvals are done in a way that is set up to be a district that can be replicated, not a one-off, you build the cute housing, you get buy-in. It's a lot easier to talk about policy changes with your community to widen than it is to talk about policy in the abstract. So if you're trying to figure out how to get more housing in your community and policy has to change, piloting is critical. Pre-approved plans are a really powerful piloting tool to really streamline how the whole workflow can go: internally in city hall, in the departments, and then externally for the public. So just as we're thinking about deployment, this is how we see it's fitting together: well Calibrated pilot policy, pilot projects to get widespread adoption across your city.

Shane Phillips 01:21:37
Well, I love that as a closing concept and proposal, so we're gonna wrap it up there. Thank you both, Al and Eric, for being so generous with your time and for coming on here with me on the Housing Voice podcast. Great to finally have you here.

Eric Kronberg 01:21:51
Thank you so much, Shane.

Alkarim Devani 01:21:52
Glad to be on here, Shane, thanks so much.

Shane Phillips 01:21:59
You can find our show notes and a transcript of the episode on our website, lewis.ucla.edu. Talk with us and other listeners at uclahousingvoice.substack.com. The UCLA Lewis Center is on the socials and you can find me there at @shanedphillips. Thanks for listening.