Flexible Home Design for a Lifetime of Change – GWC Mag

In his book Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It, M. Nolan Gray reports that 70% of America is zoned for single-family houses. He writes, “Of all the problems that zoning causes or exacerbates, none has attracted greater attention than the cost of housing—and for good reason. In 2021 alone, home prices rose by nearly 20 percent.”

Many cities are dealing with the housing crisis by loosening zoning and permitting multiple units in previously single-family zones. In Canada, the federal government provides funding for housing, but only in cities that change their zoning to permit fourplexes. The federal minister of housing tweets, “We want cities to increase their ambition on housing, and through federal funding, we are incentivizing that change.” The city of Toronto is planning a “generational transformation” of housing policies that include “multiplex” permissions throughout the city.

New solution with broad appeal

Mike Manning of Greenbilt Homes has been dreaming of his “FlexPlex” multifamily dwelling for a decade and just completed one in a part of Toronto that permitted multifamily housing. His timing is exquisite as the entire city opens to the concept.

The FlexPlex looks like a single-family home from the street. With architecture by Paul Dowsett of Sustainable, it doesn’t look out of place in the neighborhood. However, where builders would previously buy up little post-war bungalows and build monster single-family homes, a FlexPlex build of the same square footage can accommodate up to four households. The impact of this on housing affordability and carbon footprint per capita is immense.

The FlexPlex design has four almost identical floors—actually, three floors plus a basement, which is quite high out of the ground—currently configured as two units of two floors each. The floor plans above illustrate the top floor, configured as two bedrooms,…

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