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 $600,000 to $750,000 before you touch the land, the permits, or the loan. The rent that building generates does not cover the debt service in most zip codes.
A free floor plan saves $15,000 to $40,000 in architectural fees. That is real money. It is also a rounding error on a $700,000 project that cannot cash-flow.
Cincinnati’s BuildReady initiative will produce six pre-approved plans for middle housing. The federal ROAD Act’s Section 211 creates a permanent grant program for exactly this kind of work. Both are pointed in the right direction. Neither goes far enough.
Policy First. Floor Plans Second.
Three regulatory barriers do more damage to middle housing feasibility than the cost of architectural drawings.
The Commercial Code Jump. The Ohio Building Code classifies a four-unit building as commercial multifamily. That triggers the International Building Code: fire-rated corridor separations, commercial mechanical systems, enhanced accessibility, sometimes sprinklers. The cost penalty is $30,000 to $80,000 per building. A fourplex must generate significantly more revenue per unit than a triplex to justify one additional unit of construction. In most neighborhoods, it cannot. The pre-approved plans should demonstrate cost-effective IBC compliance. The state should extend the residential code to four units. Several states already have.
Parking Minimums. A 25-foot-wide lot. A 19-foot-wide building. No room for a driveway. That is arithmetic, not architecture. Either these buildings rely on street parking, or the city eliminates parking minimums for pre-approved plan users. Every parking space consumes lot area that could be housing. Our density is directly tied to how people store their vehicles.
Fee-Simple Subdivision. Renting builds a landlord’s wealth. Owning builds a family’s wealth. If the city wants middle housing to anchor neighborhoods instead of just filling them, the plans must support individual ownership from the start. That means a fast-track administrative path for lot subdivisions that produce attached townhomes or stacked flats with individual deeds. The current process works. It is just slow enough to discourage it.
Fix those three and the free floor plans start to matter. Skip them and you have a nice catalog that nobody builds from.
A Living Library, Not a Static Catalog
BuildReady proposes six plans. Two each for duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes. That is a reasonable seed. It is not a system.
Cincinnati has 52 neighborhoods. Lot dimensions vary. Topography varies wildly (this is a city built on hills and ravines, not a grid on a prairie). Street character varies. Six plans cannot account for hillside foundations, corner lot setbacks, historic overlay requirements, or the dozens of site conditions that make Cincinnati’s building stock distinctive.
A static catalog gets used for a few years and then collects dust while the building code updates around it.
The alternative: a Living Library. Use BuildReady and the federal pattern book grants to fund the first six plans. Engineer them to a high standard. Have the city hold liability for the baseline 80 percent of the documents. Then create a permanent pathway for any licensed Ohio architect to submit new compliant plans to the collection.
Incentivize developers to pull from the library. Expedited permitting. Reduced utility fees. Parking flexibility. Incentivize architects to expand it. A negotiated fee for every plan that enters the collection.
Every new site condition that gets solved becomes a public asset. Every architect who contributes has a professional stake in the system. The library markets itself because it is constantly being used and growing.
The federal grants can fund quality review, maintenance, and expansion indefinitely. BuildReady becomes the seed.
The Living Library becomes the infrastructure.
High Performance Is the Baseline
If the city is setting a standard for middle housing, that standard should include buildings people can afford to live in. Not just afford to build.
Every plan in the Living Library should meet or approach Passive House certification. A Passive House envelope delivers utility bills 60 to 80 percent below code-minimum construction. Pair that envelope with rooftop solar and every new building can approach net-zero energy. We are already doing this on the homes we design.
The upfront cost premium is 5 to 15 percent on a typical project. The math on the other side is simple. A renter paying $1,200 a month with a $150 utility bill is spending $1,350. Put that renter in a Passive House unit with a $40 utility bill and the total drops to $1,240. That is $110 a month. $1,320 a year. Nearly $40,000 per unit over a 30-year building life.
Buildings that are cheap to build but expensive to heat are not affordable housing. They shift the cost from the developer’s pro forma to the resident’s monthly budget. The developer is long gone by the time that bill arrives.
Let Citizens Design the Neighborhood
BuildReady’s current plan includes an open-call design competition for building designs. Architects submit conceptual floor plans and elevations.
I have a different suggestion. We already know how to design an efficient fourplex. The design challenges of a 25-by-50-foot building envelope have been solved thousands of times (I have personally solved them in Walnut Hills, Northside, and Mt. Auburn). What we lack is community consensus on where density belongs and what the neighborhood around it should look like.
Instead of asking residents to critique roof pitches, ask them to map their daily lives. Where do they walk? Where do they wish they could walk? Where would a corner grocery or a bus stop change their morning? Let 52 neighborhoods produce 52 visions of their own future. Then let the architects pull from the Living Library to execute those visions lot by lot.
The public’s expertise is their neighborhood. The architect’s expertise is the building. Keep everyone in their strongest lane.
What We Are Doing
Trilobite Design submitted a detailed response to the BuildReady RFI advocating for the Living Library model, the neighborhood design competition, and Passive House performance standards. We intend to compete for the RFP to create the initial plan sets.
The ROAD Act gives Cincinnati the federal backing to think bigger than six plans on a shelf.
We are not waiting for permission.