Triplex, 472 East Granite Avenue, City of South Salt Lake, with a painting propped up against the house

When I took the photo I didn't notice the painting propped against the facade.

I've been collecting photos of small multunit "single family" properties that are embedded within Salt Lake City, but also neighboring communities and other cities in the Salt Lake Valley.

Often a duplex will be on a corner, with entrances on each side of the street.  Or on an arterial.  Or a few next to each other.

There may be triplexes or even larger properties.

First I started trying to photograph these buildings because to me, compared to "everywhere else" this kind of property sensitively located within a neighborhood extends the range of housing types available to people representing a wider range of needs and incomes.  Not every house in a neighborhood should be a big single family detached house, especially as more households nationally are as small as one person.

Arlington County Board Chair Katie Cristol hears from citizens holding signs demanding more affordable housing at a county board meeting in Arlington, Virginia, on Nov. 12, 2022. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)

Second, I think it's a better way to visually express how a change in the zoning of traditionally single family residences to up to fourplexes can be done without wrecking community character.  

My photo album, Duplexes, Triplexes, Quads etc., demonstrates this.  Plenty of the buildings date to the 1930s and before, while others are more contemporary--to me less attractive but still illustrative.

Duplex, English Tudor style, 1601-1605 700 East, Salt Lake City.

I love the great variety of brick used in the Prairie style era of homebuilding in Salt Lake.  Unlike DC, which is dominated by red brick, red brick is rare here but there are so many other colors.  This isn't Prairie style but it's around the same time.

I plan on putting together a few pages of a brick color pattern book, partly as a way to guide architectural style decision making in the Sugar House area.

This is important because of the trend nationally to do this kind of rezoning in places like Minneapolis, Arlington County, Virginia, etc. ("Single-family Zoning: Can History be Reversed?," Joint Center for Housing Studies).

And the opposition to it, not just in Arlington County.  Although Brookings says that's because of bad messaging, "‘End single-family zoning’ is bad political messaging."

The funny thing is Salt Lake City is "considering" changing single family zoning, and many people are against, while there are all kinds of positive examples within the city already.  It's just that it's so subtle people may not realize it.

Apartment building reaches out to local Single Family Residents as potential marketers of the neighborhood

In community revitalization, property owners are seen as more valuable then renters, and most of our local involvement methods focus on property owners, except for interest groups which expand the range of participation, such as tenants unions, or anti-poverty groups.

I've wondered about the dilemma of community involvement in neighborhoods with a mix of renters and owners.  In the Carrollsburg neighborhood of DC, which was built on the grounds of a public housing project, and mixes owner-occupied (the majority of housing), with apartments set to look like rowhouses, managed by the DC Housing Authority, the resident association is for owners only.

Segregation of the poor.  It reminds me of "poor doors" in mixed income housing developments ("City Has Gone from Allowing ‘Poor Doors’ to Permitting ‘Poor Buildings’," City Limits, "‘There’s no way I can pay’: London residents despair of steep costs and forced use of ‘poor door’" and "Poor doors: the segregation of London's inner-city flat dwellers," Guardian).  

The playground at Baylis Old School development in south London ‘where an impenetrable hedge separates the owner occupiers’ kids playground from the narrow strip allotted to families in social and affordable rented housing in the same block’. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian 

Some developments in London even precluded low income residents from using public facilities associated with the building (" This article is more than 6 years old Too poor to play: children in social housing blocked from communal playground" and "Playgrounds only for the rich kids? What grotesque social apartheid," Guardian).

So this act by a local apartment building in Salt Lake is very interesting, where they had an open house and invited area residents, in part to convert them as "salespeople" for promoting living in the neighborhood and in their particular apartment building.

Relatedly, years ago I had the idea--when urban living was at the beginning of its resurgence--that apartment buildings should set up a couple of B&B apartments so people could experiment with the choice at a low cost.

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A charter school by my house in DC for its first years invited residents to participate in events as a way to increase involvement and likely reduce complaints from people not happy with living near an institutional use.

Active initiative in Edina, Minnesota to preserve affordable single family houses | But why not build triple deckers?

KARE-TV reports ("Edina launches pilot program to save affordable homes from teardown") that Edina, a high demand suburb of Minneapolis, has instituted a program aimed at reducing teardowns, which replace smaller, older, more affordable houses, with what some call "McMansions," which are much larger, more expensive houses, often ersatz when compared to the size and architectural style of houses when the neighborhood was first built.

According to this article, Edina and a neighborhood in Minneapolis are the two hottest markets for teardowns in Greater Minneapolis (in the past in the DC area, Arlington and Chevy Chase in Montgomery County have been particularly hot markets for teardowns).

From the KARE-TV article:

Citywide since 2008, nearly 1,000 Edina homes have been demolished – roughly eight percent of the city’s single-family homes. The average value of Edina's teardowns: $421,420 The average value of the homes built in their place: $1,165,786. That’s an increase of increase of 177%. “It's something just so out of whack,” Ruth says.

There is an opportunity cost involved in two ways, either positive or negative, depending on your perspective.  First, teardowns up-price the housing in a community, reducing affordability.  On the other hand, when a local government is reliant on property tax for the bulk of its operating revenue, this process increases the property tax revenue stream.

In either case, teardowns are a form of "reproduction of space" that leads to significant community changes.

-- Edina Neighbors for Affordable Housing

Edina launched as a pilot a "Housing Preservation Program" focused not on historic preservation per se, but on the preservation of housing affordability (that's what "housing preservation" means in the public and social housing field too, not historic preservation).

Working with the West Hennepin Affordable Housing Land Trust, Edina will use funds generated from developer proffers and community development block grants to buy the houses.

From the article:

The city mailed more than 1,000 post cards asking the question, “Do you want to sell your home but not for a teardown?” The city ... make[s] funds available to buy a limited number of houses for their appraised values to assure those homes remain intact and with families needing more affordable options. “This is not a moratorium at all on teardowns,” Stephanie Hawkinson, Edina’s affordable housing development manager, says. “We are not mandating that anyone sells their home to us. We're just providing them with a choice.”

It will be interesting to see how this works, how much funding they have, and whether or not sellers are willing to sell to the city initiative, instead of extracting a somewhat higher price from the for profit real estate development market. 

Multiple units as an another alternative?  One of the forces "generating" teardowns is large lot size.  The lots appear to be large and can accommodate multiple families just as easily as a large house. Another way to increase housing access would be to allow "multiple unit" housing types on these lots.

I would say duplexes are "too small" given the rise in demand for housing given the constant increase in population.  So build triplexes and larger units ("Massachusetts Triple Deckers as "Missing Middle Housing" -- triplexes").

Minneapolis has changed its "single family zoning" so that duplexes and triplexes are "matter of right" as well ("How Minneapolis Freed Itself From the Stranglehold of Single-Family Homes," POLITICO).  

My criticism is that relying on individual property owners to take the initiative means that it will take decades to see much effect ("A short point about why eliminating single family zoning won't result in a rise in "affordable housing" (any time soon)").

This Boston double triple decker, now four separate units, rather than six, is for sale for $1.4 million.

By contrast, creating an active housing conversion/building program comparable to the Edina program would be a way to generate a greater number of units more quickly.

Although in the short run, it won't yield housing that is newly affordable without subsidy, because it is built at current costs for land, labor, and materials.