As one walks up and down the residential areas of Moscow, there are a plethora of historic and beautiful houses that make up the neighborhood. What is not immediately obvious from the outside is that many of those houses are subdivided into multi-family units, which provide quality housing to Moscow residents that benefit both them and the city.
These units are examples of gentle density, which allows neighborhoods to introduce more units into areas without creating the high-rise apartments that many people despise for changing the footprint of the neighborhoods they live in. Other examples are attached townhouses and condominium buildings.
In the Moscow zoning code, these houses are delineated with an R-4 classification, which is described in the Moscow city zoning code as “where activity levels are high and adequate public facilities are available, especially near the University of Idaho campus or the City Central Business Zoning District (the area that surrounds Main St.)”
These versions of housing are also linked to expanding affordability and diversity in these neighborhoods, by allowing people to afford to live in calmer suburban neighborhoods. This is done by loosening the existing zoning restrictions on suburban neighborhoods, many of which are restricted on density per acre.
It is important to note that many of these zoning restrictions were put in as exclusionary measures to keep poor people and people of color out of the “nice” neighborhoods in the area. By keeping the housing in those areas expensive, cities were able to effectively create segregated neighborhoods.
With rising housing prices across the U.S., many urban planners are looking for ways to promote increasing density in their cities and are just starting to stumble upon this solution that has been used in Moscow for a long while.
One of the most popular examples of the change of zoning laws to accommodate gentle density comes out of the City of Minneapolis’s 2040 long-range plan, where the outlined zoning changes effectively get rid of single-family exclusionary zoning in all of Minneapolis’s suburban neighborhoods.
These houses are significantly cheaper than single-family occupancies within their neighborhoods but preserve access to the amenities of the area. In an example from D.C., a single-family home in the district can be sold for around 1.5 million dollars. A set of three attached townhomes on a similar lot would sell for 1 million each, and the price for a six-unit condo building would equal 579 thousand each, and there are only purchased homes, but many of these gentle density buildings become rental properties, like the ones locally.
By providing this medium-density housing in Moscow and elsewhere, it allows young people to live in neighborhoods with access to the resources that they normally would not.
Abigail Spencer can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter at @ABairdSpencer