Pocket Neighborhoods Can Help Alleviate A Housing Shortage, But First Zoning & Building Codes Need To Change
By Mike Oates
Every week, I hear a version of the same story from employers across our nine counties. A hospital can’t fill nursing shifts because the candidates can’t afford to live within a reasonable drive. A school district loses a young teacher to a job closer to where she can rent. A fire company struggles to recruit volunteers because the people who grew up here can no longer buy here. A retired couple wants to downsize and stay in the community they built, but there is nothing between the four-bedroom colonial and the apartment complex off the highway.
We don’t have a housing shortage so much as a housing-type shortage. And a small nonprofit in Georgia has shown one way to fill it.
The MicroLife Institute, based in Atlanta, builds what it calls pocket neighborhoods: small clusters of right-sized cottages arranged around a shared green, with parking tucked behind and front porches facing one another. Its pilot, Cottages on Vaughan, sits on a half-acre one block from downtown Clarkston, Georgia. Eight one-bedroom cottages, each under 500 square feet, sold in 2021 for roughly $109,000 to just over $200,000. No subsidy was involved. More than 1,500 people joined the interest list before sales opened, and the project won the Atlanta Regional Commission’s Regional Excellence Award and a national Urban Land Institute award.
The important part isn’t the tiny houses. It’s what came before them. MicroLife spent fourteen months working with Clarkston officials to write a cottage-court ordinance that allowed smaller homes on smaller lots and reduced minimum parking requirements. The city council passed it unanimously. Without that zoning change, the project was illegal. With it, the market did the rest.
MicroLife is now scaling the model. Cottages on Cochran, in Union City, will put nine two- and three-bedroom cottages of 800 to 1,200 square feet on one acre, priced for households earning 60 to 80 percent of area median income, in partnership with Fulton County and the Atlanta land bank. If it works, a second phase of nine follows on the adjoining acre. This is “gentle density”: more homes on less land, at a scale that fits a village street rather than overwhelming it.
There is a useful historical comparison here. In 1947, Levitt & Sons broke ground on Long Island potato fields and, using assembly-line methods, produced more than 17,000 nearly identical Cape Cods that sold for under $8,000. Levittown solved a postwar housing emergency by standardizing one product, the detached single-family house on its own lot, and building it at enormous scale. It worked, and it also locked in a pattern: large lots, car dependence, and zoning codes that made anything other than the Levittown model difficult or impossible to build. Much of the Hudson Valley still lives under those codes.
The pocket neighborhood is, in a sense, Levittown’s inverse. Instead of one product at massive scale, it offers a small, repeatable product at village scale. Instead of spreading outward onto farmland, it fills in a half-acre near an existing Main Street, using water, sewer, and sidewalks that are already there. And instead of the private backyard as the organizing idea, it uses shared green space to lower the cost of each home and build the kind of neighborly connection that Vaughan residents now sustain with weekly group dinners.
Consider who this housing serves. A volunteer firefighter or EMT who needs to live minutes from the station. A nurse working twelve-hour shifts at Vassar Brothers, Garnet Health, or Montefiore Nyack Hospital who wants a home she can own rather than rent. A first-year teacher. A veteran returning to Orange or Dutchess County. A widow in her seventies in Rhinebeck, Warwick, or Chatham who wants a single-level home on one side of the green and her longtime neighbors still within walking distance. These are the people every community says it wants to keep, and these are precisely the households a $150,000 to $250,000 cottage can reach.
No one is proposing that pocket neighborhoods replace the apartment buildings, senior housing, and single-family subdivisions we also need. They are one tool among several. But they are a tool that most Hudson Valley municipalities cannot currently use, because our codes were written for a different century.
So here is a practical ask for our town boards and village trustees. Take a look at Clarkston’s cottage-court ordinance. Identify one underused half-acre near your downtown. Invite a builder, a land bank, or a nonprofit to propose eight to twelve cottages around a green. HVEDC will help connect the partners and bring the model to your table.
Levittown showed that America could build fast when it committed to a model. The Hudson Valley’s next model may be much smaller, and that might be exactly the point.
Mike Oates is President and CEO of the Hudson Valley Economic Development Corporation, a nine-county regional economic development organization headquartered in Poughkeepsie, NY.
