I got a phone call today from Eric Brown, a colleague in Savannah.  Eric is a long time CNU member and member of the New Urban Guild. He said he would really try to make it to the Small Developer Boot Camp in Duncanville in August, Atlanta in October for sure.  He told me about the "missing tooth" sites he sees everyday in Savannah, the spots that just need one or two straightforward buildings to transform the block.  Eric has designed a lot of those "workhorse buildings" over the years.  I'm a big fan of his work as an Architect.

He said that he wants to start putting some of those buildings out as open source building types, similar to what David Kim and I have been doing with the 4F and the Single Stair Walk-up.  Eric recognizes that there is a big demand for incremental development if folks can work out the business model that lets them make a living working at a smaller, more local scale and he is stepping up to help them figure it out.

A bright spot in what had been a tough day.  So here's to Eric Brown, a real stand up guy.  If you see him at the Dallas or Atlanta Boot Camps, please buy him a beer.

A number of people have asked me recently why I am so focused on small developer/builders producing rental apartments , rental cottage courts, and mixed use rental buildings.  Yes, I did not enjoy the process of building for sale housing, but more important than my experience trying to manage the often unrealistic expectations of homebuyers, was reading the research of Arthur C. (Chris) Nelson.  It blew my mind.  If this guy is only half right, the world of real estate and community development is now a very different place.

The numbers on demand for rental on a national basis from Arthur C. Nelson  break down like this:

Rental apartments will be 48% of the growth of all new housing to be built between now and 2030.

Some of that demand will be delivered by the conversion of existing detached housing, which has been overbuilt.

National demand for all new housing units is about 1.3 million units a year until 2030.  Nelson puts 48% of that demand as rental.  Last year there were about 400,000 multi-family units built according to the census (combined rental and condo ownership)

48% of 1,300,000 new units in annual production is 624,000 rental units, so even if all 400,000 of the multifamily units produced last year were rental (and they were not) that is a production shortfall of a quarter million rental units units.

Nelson presents a summary of market preference from four separate surveys which say that about 1/3 of folks in the US would rather live in walkable urbanism.  If all of the nation's the new housing production was delivered in walkable urbanism every year, we would not be able to meet the current demand (again just 1/3 of the market) until something like 2040.   If more good stuff gets built and people see it on the ground, and a greater number of  people decide that they want it, meeting that larger demand will, of course, take longer.  For example, if 1/2 the population decides that they prefer walkable urbanism and all the available production capacity goes into delivering walkable urbanism, it would take until 2060 to satisfy the market demand.

Chris Nelson's presentation at CNU 21 in 2013 captures most of his book Reshaping Metropolitan America  here is a link to the video:  Arthur C. Nelson at CNU21

The data set from Nelson's book is available for download as an excel file here: Reshaping Metropolitan America Data Set

It is broken down by metropolitan statistical area (MSA) so you can see what is going on in a given region vs. the national data Nelson uses to explain his findings in his book and CNU presentation.

You can find the US Census numbers on building permits here: Building Permit History

My reading of the data is that Albuquerque has demand for well over 2,000 new rental units a year between now and 2030.  Last year we produced 400.  Can you see why I think the opportunities for small developers are going to be in rental buildings?

In the Fall of 2011 a number of folks active in the Congress for the New Urbanism gathered in Montgomery, Alabama to talk about how we might climb out of the smoking crater of the Financial Crisis and the worst Real Estate Recession in our lifetimes.  Victor Dover and Andres Duany were quite vocal on the issue of scale, that it would be very important for urbanists to learn how to deliver good places with smaller pieces.  I think this is still true.  The Great Recession showed us just how vulnerable our enterprises were when big stuff suddenly stopped getting built and fee for service work dried up overnight.

A 4 minute clip by Ben Brown of Victor Dover on the importance of using a smaller increment of development.  (I don't think anyone else has made a better case since).

Ben's clip of me pitching why understanding development math would be a good thing for design and policy folks: https://www.youtube.com/embed/Cv0BcmaecGc">2011 Understanding the numbers .