Missing Middle Housing
For an Arlington we can all call home
Support for Missing Middle Housing in Arlington is growing!
What is Missing Middle Housing?
Missing Middle Housing is a type of housing that falls between detached single-family homes and mid-rise apartments. These modestly-scaled homes—which can include duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, and townhomes, among others—blend well within and along the edges of existing neighborhoods and are already common occurrences in many historic communities.
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What are Local Experts Saying?
Watch our video series to learn how adding more housing options will impact our environment, community diversity, livability, and the growing senior population in Arlington.
Missing Middle Housing and the Environment
Missing Middle Housing and Community Diversity
Missing Middle Housing and Livability
Missing Middle Housing and Seniors
How would Missing Middle Housing benefit Arlington?
Market-driven affordability helps to curb out-of-reach housing prices and increases attainable home options in neighborhoods close to jobs, schools, public transit, parks, and businesses.
MMH provides more housing types in areas with currently very few options other than the most expensive single-family homes.
When our communities can offer homes to those other than Arlington’s wealthiest, we foster the diversity and individual character that make our neighborhoods feel like home.
Missing middle housing will shrink Arlington’s ecological impact by improving walkability, reducing sprawl, easing traffic congestion, and lowering carbon emissions.
Increasing the supply of efficiently-sized, easily-maintained homes will allow more Arlingtonians to age in their communities.
Why is It Missing?
Modest home types like duplexes, triplexes and other multiplexes are already part of the fabric of some of our historic neighborhoods, but these familiar homes are mostly illegal to build now. They were systematically outlawed over the decades by zoning policies deliberately designed to build invisible walls around predominantly white neighborhoods—policies that are still present in Arlington County codes today.
Re-legalizing Missing Middle Housing would allow a greater variety of housing choices throughout Arlington rather than reserving most neighborhoods for the largest and most expensive housing. Missing Middle Housing is a common-sense solution to Arlington’s unattainable housing costs because it will allow naturally less expensive housing to provide the opportunity for more types of Arlington households.
Missing Middle Housing Examples
Missing Middle Housing offers a range of housing options and designs and is very often on the same scale as single-detached homes. This flexibility allows missing middle types to fit seamlessly into existing residential neighborhoods.
Duplex
Fourplex
Eight-plex
Townhome
Multiplex
Missing Middle Housing term created by Daniel Parolek/Image © Opticos Design, Inc. For more info visit www.missingmiddlehousing.com
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