Read the full article by Ken Magri at Sacramento News & Review
The task seems Herculean: Sacramento needs to add more than 60,000 housing units within the next decade.
Part of the strategy for achieving this goal might lie in “Missing Middle Housing” (MMH), which describes a housing strategy that breaks away from the small occupancy of single-family homes and the density of high-rise apartments. The word “middle” refers to housing that fills a need somewhere in between those extremes by creating more affordable structures that are mid-range in terms of scale and type of building.
Duplexes, triplexes, townhouses and clustered cottages, once common in the years before World War II, all work within the MMH concept because they house more people on a parcel of land than a single-family home. But a large part of this strategy also includes building onto existing homes, like garage conversions, house expansions and Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), which are separate homes inside a backyard.
“The housing inventory is old,” said Jack Saba, co-founder of Bequall, a Sacramento ADU builder. “Not only do we need to address the supply of housing, we need to increase the options of housing so that people are in the right-sized homes.”