Spotlight on Zoning Practice
Let’s Make This ‘Shouse’ a Home
Depending on where you live, you may have noticed new post-frame, metal-roofed homes with massive, attached garages or workshops popping up across the exurban landscape. Whether you call them barndominiums or shouses (i.e., shop + house), they certainly make an impression. While it can be hard to pinpoint when a fringe housing trend has gone mainstream, you could probably consider two articles on the same day in the New York Times to be a good indicator.
In the March issue of Zoning Practice, "Opening the Door to Unconventional Homes," Charlie Nichols, AICP, and Benjamin Schmidt note that the demand for nontraditional housing in rural and exurban areas goes far beyond barndominiums and shouses. And, as champions of predictability, our zoning regulations and building codes can get in the way of housing innovation.
Could Strange Homes Shake Up the Status Quo?
For many of us, the word "house" is (at least subconsciously) synonymous with a wood-framed, site-built, single-family, detached residence. But, of course, planners know that houses come in all shapes, sizes, and configurations and can be built using various materials and construction methods. And there is a growing consensus that addressing the housing crisis will require planners, local officials, and builders to rethink traditional approaches to siting, designing, and building homes.
According to Nichols and Schmidt, there is an emerging typology of unconventional homes that blurs the line between custom-built and standardized. In some cases, builders are repurposing existing industrial materials or structures like shipping containers or grain bins to create new custom homes. In other cases, builders are standardizing new home types, such as barndominiums, shouses, and Quonset homes, that take advantage of common nonresidential construction practices. At the same time, earth-sheltered homes harken back to ancient home-building techniques, while 3D-printed homes may point the way to the future of home construction.
What if We Gave Metal Buildings a Break?
As Nichols and Schmidt point out, many cities, towns, and counties prohibit all new metal-clad (or metal-roofed) residences. Typically, planners and local officials have based these prohibitions on a sense of collective aesthetic preferences for brick or siding-clad homes. Putting aside the issue of the inherent subjectivity of aesthetics, banning "metal" homes means banning a cheap, durable, and abundant building material at a time when many homebuilders are struggling to get any housing to pencil out.
Authorizing unconventional building materials removes a significant barrier for nontraditional homes, say Nichols and Schmidt. But it's also important to note that opening the door to metal-clad homes doesn't have to mean surrendering all control over appearance. If the housing crisis has taught planners any lesson, it's that we need to create space for a wider variety of housing and be open to new approaches to home construction. For many communities, accepting "metal" homes may be a logical first step.
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