Developing Successful Infill Housing

Rating:
Summary: A Great Source on Urban Infill Housing Development
Review: This book discusses market considerations, land acquisition and design of housing developed within older urban and brownfield settings.

Rather than a quantitative analysis, this book offers a comprehensive qualitative discussion of the issues and challenges of redeveloping in urban centers. Topics include market demand drivers, development strategies and peculiarities of redeveloping in urban centers including environmental, legal and regulatory issues. The marketing discussion includes both the for-rent and for-sale housing markets, and demographic segments of young singles and couples, aging boomers and others. There are two chapters on dealing with public-sector partnerships and on working with the community. The last chapter features numerous case studies of infill projects recently completed in cities throughout the U.S.

The focus is primarily on market-rate housing, but also offers some input on subsidized housing development and discusses various forms of support available to infill housing developers including the role of consultants, and municipal/federal incentive and assistance programs. Chapter six gives a progress report of infill development programs currently underway in a dozen cities, and lists best practices engaged in by these cities.

I liked the fact that the book was written with a lot of input from developers who are doing urban infill housing developments, and frequently printed direct quotations from interviews with these developers as they discussed aspects of projects, financial returns and development strategies.

I would highly recommend this book to landowners, developers, architects, financiers and others having a connection to or looking to generate ideas for brownfield and urban housing development.