With the Parker administration’s H.O.M.E. plan proposal before City Council, elected officials and planners should use this opportunity to consider what kinds of buildings we want to see more of, and then work backward from there. Too often, zoning rules are changed as a reaction to some local controversy, but the current moment calls for a different approach. We should think more proactively about the building types that make the most sense, reviewing what already exists and what people are trying to build today, and clearing away the obstacles to creating more of what we like.
For example: Philly could use a lot more mid-rise housing, between four and eight stories, with between four and 19 units, because those provide the most affordable rents in the city. One of Mayor Parker’s new zoning bills could be amended to make a big difference for the viability of these buildings, especially if paired with other building code reforms that have been picking up momentum nationally.
Missing mid-rise housing
Two weeks ago, we got a first glimpse of Mayor Parker’s early legislative priorities under the H.O.M.E. initiative, with the administration sending five bills to City Council for consideration. Two sessions later, only one of the five has a sponsor so far: A bill amending the 5th District zoning overlay instituted by then-District Councilperson Darrell Clarke, which discouraged the kinds of mid-size buildings the city needs in Center City and the surrounding neighborhoods.
The most pertinent proposal for mid-rise housing is removing the expensive off-street parking mandates Councilmembers have imposed in Center City, University City and a portion of North Broad Street. (Otherwise known as zoning districts CMX4 and CMX5.)
Off-street parking mandates add hundreds of dollars a month to people’s rent, even for tenants who don’t drive, who then have to subsidize their neighbors’ parking in the building’s garage. One reason for this is that off-street parking is incredibly expensive to build, especially now that building material costs keep rising, and are expected to rise even more with President Trump’s tariffs.
But the other reason is that parking just takes up a lot of space in a building. All the space devoted to a garage and all the related internal building infrastructure takes up room that can’t be devoted to more homes and living space. Not surprisingly, when cities remove parking mandates, builders add more housing and less parking to projects.
In some cases, the cost of building an underground garage for the required parking spaces ends up being the real limit on how tall a building can be. On paper a builder might be legally allowed to add more units than proposed, but if providing the parking for them is too unaffordable, they’ll opt for a smaller building.
It’s common for cities first dipping a toe in the parking reform waters to start by removing the off-street parking mandates in their downtowns or close to transit stations, and only later, if ever, removing the parking mandates in lower-density residential districts. Philly did this backwards back in 2012 when the Zoning Code Commission recommendations adopted by Council removed parking mandates entirely for rowhomes, small apartments, and 2 to 5 story mixed-use apartment buildings. That same package also reduced the parking mandates for mid-rise and high-rise buildings to require only 3 spaces for every 10 units, down from 1 space per unit.
That’s a lot better than in some other cities, but having any required parking for high-rises at all has a real housing cost. And right now, City Hall’s mission is to increase housing construction.
Even in areas where mid-rise housing is allowed by the zoning code, parking mandates often nudge developers toward building very large single-family townhomes instead. That’s what happened with a fairly recent project at 740 South Broad at the corner of Broad and Fitzwater streets — an ideal location for a large apartment building right on top of the Broad Street Line — where developer Ryan Reich opted to build just 10 townhomes instead of an apartment building with a hundred housing units. According to OCF Realty CEO Ori Feibush, who was involved as a broker on the project, the parking mandates were decisive in tilting the playing field toward townhomes.
“It’s simple economics,” Feibush said, “If that property was zoned CMX3 with no parking minimums it would be an apartment building.”
CMX3 is supposed to be Philly’s main zoning district for mid-rise housing, somewhere between 3-story buildings and high-rises, but it hasn’t been primed for success with the rules as written, because the 2012-era City Council didn’t fully commit to the concept.
If Council removed the parking mandates in CMX3 areas, we would likely see more developers opting to build true mid-rise buildings instead of large townhomes. (Some builders and architects have pointed out that the loading space requirements and setbacks also play a role in reducing the amount of usable space for housing, so there’s more to do here than just axing the parking mandates.) At the very least, the parking bill provides a chance to address one of the top factors pushing builders to shrink their projects at a time when the city is trying to increase housing production.
The geographic reach of CMX3 is another point in favor of including it in the bill. This parcel map from GIS analyst Ian Kettlewell shows where it is mapped today.
Compare that to the map above of CMX4 and 5, which mainly affects properties in the core of Center City and University City.
While expanding the bill this way could complicate passage a little more, it’s also the case that CMX3 covers a lot of areas where elected officials should want to see more mid-rise housing built, because they have good access to transit or commercial corridors or are located in or near high-opportunity neighborhoods.
You sometimes hear elected officials alternate between saying they want new housing development to be more evenly spread across the city, and saying it should be more contained in the “yuppie fishtanks” of Northern Liberties and Fishtown and other such places to avoid putting more development pressure on nearby neighborhoods that are more in flux demographically.
Expanding parking relief would get us a little of both. As you can see on the map, there’s a lot more Northern Liberties and Fishtown-area land left to build on that’s zoned for mid-rise housing, especially in the East Callowhill Overlay north of Old City. This area has seen a good amount of construction already, like The Noble at 2nd and Spring Garden, but there’s still a ton of underused land left there, and it’s smack dab between two wealthy neighborhoods. Encouraging more mid-rise and high-rise development there would make a lot of sense for the Parker administration and City Council, not least because there are very few people living around there now to even complain about it. The Greater Fishtown area has already seen a lot of construction, but it’s nowhere near out of juice yet.
At the same time, many commercial corridors outside of Center City have pockets of CMX3 zoning, and commercial corridors are another great option for places to encourage more mid-rise housing. The BID Alliance, an association representing Business Improvement Districts in various neighborhoods, called for eliminating parking mandates in its 2023 policy platform, reasoning that more dense housing over shops translates to more built-in foot traffic for their corridor businesses, and thus more viable commercial corridors. The BID Alliance also called for a better transit-oriented development law to allow denser buildings near transit stations, which are often co-located with commercial corridors.
The point is, instead of thinking only about the additional detractors the bill might pick up if it were expanded to include these other areas, it’s worth considering the additional opportunities like East Callowhill, or the potential constituencies like BIDs and CDCs who could be added to the supporter column under an expanded bill.
Building code reform for nicer apartments and family housing
Another policy arena for fixing Philly’s mid-rise housing rules is the building code.
In Pennsylvania, buildings over four stories are required to have a second stairwell, and this leads to building designs like the “5-over-1” that feature a hotel-like hallway with stairs at each end, and the housing units on either side. This layout gives most residents access to windows on only one side of the unit, and is more amenable to studio apartments and 1- and 2-bedroom layouts.
This style of building is always coming in for abuse from people who consider them “gentrification buildings” and dislike the blockiness of them. Buildings like this tend to take up all or most of a city block and can seem kind of imposing from the street level.
New York City and Seattle allow for another type of mid-rise building, called a Point Access Block by architects. These cities allow apartment buildings up to six stories to have a single stairwell and an elevator, with additional fire safety measures included to compensate. This allows for less-blocky mid-rise buildings on skinny lots that are more complementary to the neighborhood from a design perspective.
From a resident standpoint, these buildings also allow for better apartment floor plans and a greater diversity of unit sizes, with the ability to fit in 3- and 4-bedroom units more easily. From a developer standpoint, these buildings can also fit more units (more revenue) on a smaller plot of land than buildings with two staircases.
More cities and states are looking at mimicking New York and Seattle’s code language for Point Access Blocks; Austin, Texas most recently passed such a change. These initiatives have tended to run into resistance from fire departments and code officials in some of the places where lawmakers pursued these changes, but new research from the Pew Charitable Trusts found that the fire safety record of these buildings is no worse than for buildings with two staircases, suggesting the safety trade-offs of making this change are few to non-existent.
Last year, PA Reps Josh Siegel and Tarik Khan introduced a bill (HB1988) to study the concept, which didn’t ultimately go anywhere, but it still picked up 18 additional co-sponsors, including six reps from Philadelphia. PA’s building code law has similar language to Washington state’s language, which allows municipalities to pass building code laws stronger than the state’s, but not weaker. Even under that law, Seattle still was able to pass the single-stair building code change locally because it was packaged with other changes that made the local code more strict overall.
This could be an especially useful change for the viability of mid-rise housing in Philly, due to our smallest-in-the-nation lot sizes and relatively permissive infill development rules overall. Many neighbors would appreciate new buildings that are less hulking, and more in line with the width of our classic commercial corridor buildings with ground-floor shops and housing overhead. It would also unlock more opportunities for developments with shared courtyard space for residents, if combined with the previously mentioned changes to parking mandates.
The zoning debate in City Council is a chance to think bigger about the kinds of buildings we want to see in Philly in the future, and there’s a major opportunity to rethink the rules for mid-rise housing. Our city knows how to build rowhouses, and we know how to build high-rises, but our mid-rise housing leaves a lot to be desired. With some smart code changes, Philly can open the door to a more affordable housing style for more of our neighbors that is more livable, more contextual, and better-suited to meeting the housing needs of our growing city.
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