Houston Residential Best Practices
Client:
City of Houston
Services Provided:
Policy Planning, Housing Strategy, Implementation Strategy
The City of Houston is one of the most affordable cities to live in the US, but like many other major cities, it is undergoing an affordable housing crisis and faces a shortage of missing middle housing. To begin to address this issue, Lionheart worked with the City of Houston to establish best practices the City should strive for as a precursor to a Code update.
Process
The process for this project, completed under an accelerated timeline with preestablished vision and goals, included establishing benchmark cities and reviewing codes to study the approach each city took to address the issues of missing middle housing, affordable housing.
Afterwards, Lionheart dug deeper and investigated the effectiveness of these policies and ideas once implemented, for practical uses in the physical world via interviews with City officials from a few key cities. We then collected this information and considered how these policies related to the City of Houston’s specific situation, for example the City’s notable lack of zoning policies, or environmental considerations such as the extent of the floodplain in Houston, in addition to how the goals for this project and discovered policies fit into the larger City goals from previous plans, such as Plan Houston or Urban Resilience.
