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Even casual observers of America’s NIMBY wars will be familiar with the dog-eared playbook of reforms that pro-growth politicians are now deploying to boost the supply of homes: Ending single-family zoning, banning parking requirements, permitting mini-houses (or Accessory Dwelling Units) in the backyard.
How about redoing the building code to make it possible to construct small apartment buildings like single-family homes—that is, quickly and cheaply? That’s what the Dallas City Council passed on Wednesday afternoon, making Dallas the first city in the country with a special set of rules for small apartment buildings—those that are smaller than 7,500 square feet and have eight units or fewer.
Those types of buildings, with regional variations that include Boston’s triple-deckers, Chicago’s three-flats, and L.A.’s dingbats, are often similar in size to large single-family homes. But they are in awfully short supply, thwarted by a gauntlet of restrictive land use laws—hence the nickname “missing middle.”
In Dallas, a developer, attorney, and former council member named Philip Kingston hit on a new snag that seemed to be holding back those little buildings—even where they were otherwise permitted by zoning. A few years ago, Kingston was cutting his teeth as an infill developer when he found himself getting outbid for small properties, only to see them transformed into fancy, two-family homes. “I was thinking, why are their numbers not matching mine? I can build six units,” he said. He estimated the city has lost a thousand units of housing to these “underbuilt” sites.
Kingston’s view is that the costs of the higher-caliber IBC go well beyond a second staircase. The “commercial” code includes studies of drainage, electrical load, and other design specifications that both cost money to execute and take up time to go over with city staff (who themselves may be more familiar with the residential code). Many architects and engineers in the sprawling Dallas area, he noted, don’t even work with the IBC. “There are house architects and multifamily architects. It’s a bright line. There are no architects who want to do an eight-unit complex.”
He drew inspiration from Canada, which permits a lower design standard for small residential buildings under three stories—not requiring a sprinkler system, for example. That does make life easier for small builders in Canada, though the hard cutoff at three stories distorts what gets built in its own way, said Conrad Speckert, a Canadian architect and student of the code. “In Canada you don’t see a lot of four-story buildings, even if the zoning allows it. In many cases it remains more feasible to build three stories because of the construction costs, consulting, and complexity that come with that scale jump.”
The overwhelming concern is fire safety. The first U.S. city to try smuggling apartment buildings into the single-family code was Memphis, which decided to do so for buildings of three to six units in 2021 in response to a plan by Opticos Design (whose founder, Daniel Parolek, coined the expression “missing middle”).
“There is very little market activity,” John Zeanah, the Memphis and Shelby County director of planning and development, told me. “A lot of neighborhoods need new housing, a lot of neighborhoods need subsidy. We needed to think about not just what zoning barriers needed to be rolled back, but what the cost of delivering that product was.” The regulatory wall between two and three units seemed like a natural place to focus.
But the Tennessee fire marshal did not agree. Despite two years of conversations between Memphis planners and state fire officials, the state would not budge. In the end, Memphis settled for a new state law last year that exempts buildings of three-to-four units from sprinkler requirements and allows buildings up to six stories to have a single staircase.
In Dallas, the city settled on a fire safety compromise—one- and two-hour firewalls between units. Is this new code the magic bullet that will create infill housing abundance in Dallas? Probably not. But at least one developer will be taking advantage: Kingston himself. He’s looking forward to a city with more small apartment buildings and fewer luxury duplexes and McMansions. More places for people to live, in neighborhoods that already have jobs, schools, and shops, perhaps even in the place of sprawl on the edge of town. And if it’s a little easier to hear the neighbors through the walls, well, you get what you pay for. “Affordable infill, green building,” Kingston said. “We’re trying to get into heaven like everyone else.”
