Listen now | Architect, Urban Designer, Author and Principal of Opticos Design talks about the state of cities, missing middle housing, form-based codes and more
There's a substantial gap between what regulators need to do to satisfy their professional obligations, what reformers do to promote new concepts, and what ordinary people (would be missing middle "flippers") might accomplish. I've tried. It's not pretty. The other approach is to acknowledge reality and embrace it. Our current institutional arrangements generate disposable places that work their way down the value chain and leave a failed insolvent waste stream. That's actually an opportunity. It's possible to buy on the cheap, avoid interacting with the authorities, and reinvent things by other means in places no one else cares about. Every cool, hip, artsy, sexy place you can think of started out as a salvage operation.
There's a substantial gap between what regulators need to do to satisfy their professional obligations, what reformers do to promote new concepts, and what ordinary people (would be missing middle "flippers") might accomplish. I've tried. It's not pretty. The other approach is to acknowledge reality and embrace it. Our current institutional arrangements generate disposable places that work their way down the value chain and leave a failed insolvent waste stream. That's actually an opportunity. It's possible to buy on the cheap, avoid interacting with the authorities, and reinvent things by other means in places no one else cares about. Every cool, hip, artsy, sexy place you can think of started out as a salvage operation.