Urban Life

Gone are the days when a typical growing American suburb didn’t have a single building over two stories. While the classic images of suburbia remain the single-family home with a spacious lawn and the strip mall on a stroad, a slow but steady change has occurred over the past couple decades. We’ve witnessed the normalization of “suburban retrofit” projects: private developments that attempt to introduce a more urban form to the suburbs, with compact layouts, higher densities, taller buildings, more variety in land use (residential, retail, etc.) and more emphasis on walkability.

Mid-rise apartments tend to sprout up in little pockets of open land along major roads that were left undeveloped, like holes in Swiss cheese, as development filled in around them. In fast-growing places, the “Swiss cheese” effect is a common phenomenon, as landowners may sit on undeveloped land for a long time to speculate on its rising value, wait for the right market timing to develop it, or navigate a slow and complex approval process.