A budgeting primer for the custom home, 2026 edition. Somewhere in Cincinnati right now a couple is sitting at a kitchen table with a sketchbook, a laptop, and a number. The sketchbook holds a house they have been drawing in their heads for years, which is to say a kitchen with a long window over … Read more
Six stories. Twenty-four households. Four units per floor. A point access block is a mid-rise apartment building where one centrally placed stair serves every unit on every level directly. Four to six units per floor. Up to six stories under Type I-A or Type II-A non-combustible construction, fully sprinklered, with a pressurized stair enclosure and … Read more
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act passed the Senate on March 12 by a vote of 89 to 10. The House passed its version in February, 390 to 9. Bipartisan support at that scale is rare for anything in Congress right now. Housing got it. The bill is not law yet. The Senate added … Read more
This is Part 4 of our series on the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. [Part 1 covers the bill overview. Part 2 covers pattern books and BuildReady. Part 3 covers point-access blocks.] A healthy neighborhood has renters. This needs to be said plainly because the national conversation around Section 901 has collapsed into a … Read more
This is Part 3 of our series on the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. [Part 1 covers the bill overview. Part 2 covers the pattern book program and Cincinnati’s BuildReady initiative.] If there is one provision in this bill that has architects paying attention, it is Section 103: Federal Guidelines for Point-Access Block Buildings. … Read more
This is Part 2 of our series on the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. [Part 1 covers the bill’s three major provisions.] A two-bedroom apartment in a middle-tier Cincinnati neighborhood rents for roughly $1.25 per square foot. The wood-frame construction to build that apartment costs roughly $250 per square foot. A 3,000-square-foot duplex runs … Read more
There are thousands of vacant lots in Cincinnati zoned for residential construction. Most of them sit in neighborhoods that lost a quarter of their housing stock in the last fifty years. Almost none of them have a new building on them. On March 12, the U.S. Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act … Read more
I published an op-ed in the Cincinnati Business Courier this week. It’s about the thing that sits underneath every project we work on at Trilobite Design: the physical connections between Cincinnati’s neighborhoods, and what happens when those connections fail. Read the full op-ed in the Cincinnati Business Courier → The argument is simple. We have … Read more
I’m not expecting any of my regular readers to jump on something this big. But this is a very interestig opportunity for development in a fantastic central location. Springfield Township is not entirely contiguous, and this 6-acre parcel is part of a neighborhood section that is nestled between the Cincinnati neighborhoods of Mt Airy (south) … Read more
Every so often, a piece of land presents an opportunity that transcends mere construction. We’ve found such a place—an easily buildable lot whose true value lies not in its soil, but in its context. A Canvas for the Unconventional: A Unique Lot Awaits Your Vision This lot is nestled between two stunningly different neighbors: a … Read more