Writer and editor
Berkeley, California
Joined May 2011
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Glad to hear this proposal is getting some traction. Berkeley needs to broaden its approach to redevelopment to take families with kids into consideration. That demographic is underserved.
Really enjoyed working w/ @UrbanCourtyard on a concept for new growth on the North Shattuck shopping streets in Berkeley that actually suits familities with kids. Neighborhood is ideal for them.
A very special Courtyard Urbanist proposal for Berkeley, done in collaboration with local architect, John Parman.
North Shattuck Ave is being upzoned, and there's an opportunity to bring family-friendly density to this walkable corridor that has amenities families already want, including great schools, shops, and parks.
Our proposal explains how Berkeley can add ~400 homes, including a substantial share of family-friendly townhouses and apartments with access to protected outdoor space.
Family housing, brilliantly explained by @UrbanCourtyard
$4.2 million. Fourteen homes on a 60x100 lot. One main stair plus an exterior spiral stair to the courtyard.
5 1BDs, 6 2BDs, 2 3BDs, 1 4BD.
7 of the 14 homes have 2BD+ with kitchen windows looking directly onto a sandbox in the backyard.
This is what family-friendly density looks like.
~
$298k per home.
$155k per bedroom.
$351 per residential square foot, at $290/sf hard cost.
Six stories: a shop and garage at the sidewalk, an accessible 1BD, a 4BD simplex across all of floor 2, two family floors with a 3BD and a 2BD each, and two floors of smaller homes on top.
FAR 2.4. About 100 homes an acre. Garden, trees, balconies.
Michigan’s new single-stair law gets you four of these floors. The other two are waiting on the state.
Candlestick Park just got a lot more interesting! (Via @UrbanCourtyard)
Courtyard housing is sought-after in Stockholm, @UrbanCourtyard reports.
Delightful clip and video about a courtyard block in Stockholm's Gamla stan, opens onto a secret park, the courtyard of the Cepheus block.
Today only residents get in. It's extremely expensive ($1,300 per sq ft.) ... NOT because the buildings are expensive to build or maintain, but because demand for these buildings FAR EXCEEDS THE SUPPLY, due to artificial constraints preventing more construction like this.
How it came to be is a lesson for our cities. 🧵
credit: 🎥 Glenn Lindberg / YouTube link below
Courtyard housing is getting traction.
Chicago is now the center of the progressive housing policy universe.
The Planning Department has released a request for proposals for modern courtyard housing on city-owned land.
This is how a new housing model starts! Begin with a public site and demonstration project, then chart that path toward making courtyard housing normal again across the city.
This is pertinent to Berkeley and other "streetcar suburbs." It's a retort to @Scott_Wiener famous "backyards are immoral" remark.
One way or another, accessible outdoor space is crucial for kids. There are several ways to provide it, but failing to do so, which has become standard practice in these parts, is wrong. Wiener and Wicks should address this, not pretend it's not an issue.
Backyards are immoral what? The number one thing parents dislike about city housing (in one HUD study) is the lack of safe outside place to play. A shared, protected courtyard creates a safe outside place for families with young children -- as well as outdoor space for people to garden, store bikes, grill, etc.
I would argue that denying people a backyard through zoning that doesn't restrict lot coverage is immoral. You are pushing families into the suburbs by failing to provide them safe outdoor space in the city.
John J. Parman retweeted
Backyards are immoral what? The number one thing parents dislike about city housing (in one HUD study) is the lack of safe outside place to play. A shared, protected courtyard creates a safe outside place for families with young children -- as well as outdoor space for people to garden, store bikes, grill, etc.
I would argue that denying people a backyard through zoning that doesn't restrict lot coverage is immoral. You are pushing families into the suburbs by failing to provide them safe outdoor space in the city.
Let's not forget the politicians themselves.
"Politics, it turns out, is one of the more affordable and efficient pastimes for free-spending billionaires."
San Francisco's wealthiest have unprecedented control of city politics via @MLNow @EskSF missionlocal.org/2026/09/san…
Ten years in, California's 2016+ housing legislation needs tuning.
johnjparman.medium.com/the-r…
Of interest.
This is the coolest adaptive reuse project in Oakland:
This beautiful 1930s Spanish Revival church was converted into 60 apartments.
It originally served as a Baptist church and later operated as a mosque and school.
Instead of demolishing it, the developers preserved the historic architecture and completely reimagined the interior.
The result:
• 32 studios
• 26 one-bedrooms
• 2 two-bedrooms
• Historic arched windows + architectural details
• Modern apartments built within the original structure
The coolest part?
They kept the original church sanctuary intact and turned it into a 4,869 SF community space with 30-foot ceilings 🤯
Oakland has so many beautiful old buildings. It's all about figuring out how to give a building a second life.
📍Oakland
Glad to see urbanity is alive and well. Let's bring this to the Bay Area.
Passed Planning Commission tonight. Up next: City Council and TIF approval.
It's a 34-unit pocket neighborhood of rental townhomes, live/works, and flats, a 5-minute walk to the center of a growing walkable district in the OKC metro.
Designing and developing this project with our excellent partners @CanvasArch.
Very excited about this one!
These courtyard housing studies by @UrbanCourtyard are really informative. If they help us transition to better multifamily housing typologies, she will have done us collectively a great service.
"The Sixty Forty" courtyard prototype building for Chicago. Two different skins -- classic and modern.
Many different unit mixes.
Sixty-Forty stands for the dimensions. These are sixty feet of street frontage and forty feet deep (blank party walls).
3600' sf yard in back, assuming 100' deep lot.
About 2200 residential sf/floor. So assuming ground floor is garage and commercial/flex, you could have a mix of anywhere between 5 5BDs or 20 1BDs. And lots in between. Illustrative family-compatible below.
I watched @UrbanCourtyard present this on a SPUR talk earlier. Huge fan of the courtyard housing idea. We need to get past big boxy crap pretending to be family housing - it's not. It's mostly not even affordable. This is a ray of hope. Really glad to see it.
Relevant to the North Shattuck shopping streets. (Via @UrbanCourtyard - with thanks.)
Berkeley has many of the same qualities, but the public schools aren't very good and the Council is hellbent to pave over the parts that work. Higher density can work, as @UrbanCourtyard argues, but what we're getting for the most part is mediocre.
We were in Wicker Park this weekend and overwhelmed by the level of pedestrian activity there. No empty storefronts. Shops are PACKED with people shopping for books, records, clothing, etc.
It made me think of this Economist piece that included Wicker Park among affluent neighborhoods defying suburbanization. Family formation no longer automatically means suburban departure
Households with children increasingly remain where schools, parks, shops, transit, and social life are accessible on foot.
Importantly, the premium attaches to low-rise, fine-grained neighborhoods with streets, small blocks, active ground floors, parks, and family-sized homes.
Artificial scarcity has made these neighborhoods into luxury goods, which is very sad. Their premiums demonstrate demand, but also reveal the failure to produce more comparable places.
