Portland’s quest: a better ‘skinny house’

Portland, Oregon, is seeking better designs for the so-called skinny house. The city’s R-2.5 zoning category allows the traditional 50-by-100-foot Portland lot to be halved lengthwise. When required sideyard setbacks are subtracted, the result is a house 15 feet wide and often 60 or more feet long — dismaying the neighbors. Consequently, Portland City Commissioner Randy Leonard directed the city’s Bureau of Development Services to conduct an international competition for designs for single-family houses that would fit on 25-by-100-foot lots. The “Living Smart” competition drew 426 entries from 22 countries and 36 states during the summer. From those, 49 finalists were selected in September as examples of “design excellence.” Oregonian architecture critic Randy Gragg wrote that few if any of the 49 design winners “could be built for the current Portland market, where skinny houses typically sell for less than $200,000.” The 49 tended to represent the more radical of the competition’s designs. In November the jurors conducted the competition’s second phase, going through all 426 entries to identify about 20 prototypes that fared well by somewhat different standards: they can be built under current codes and within a realistic budget. The selected prototypes are to be exhibited in the Portland AIA Gallery Dec. 2-23. The results of the entire competition will be presented in two separate publications: a full-color “Design Excellence Monograph” and a catalog of narrow-lot house designs suited to Portland’s needs. (To order, visit the Living Smart website, www.livingsmartpdx.com.) The competition is not just an architectural exercise. A future phase will present “permit-ready” plans, which can make their way through regulatory processes quickly. The city has pledged to “identify and implement process incentives or other mechanisms that will make the designs desirable and functional for builders.” The goal is to have an assortment of narrow-lot designs that meet the needs of first-time homebuyers, are compatible with a variety of neighborhoods, and “respond to a range of market demands.” The need for better narrow-lot designs emerged as the region limited sprawl by maintaining an urban growth boundary and as it concentrated more development within existing neighborhoods. “Developers were coming into neighborhoods, buying houses, tearing them down, and subdividing the lots,” said Christine Caruso, an architect and Portland planning commissioner who served as a competition juror. “We were getting cookie-cutter, suburban-style housing that all looked the same. You’d see a two-and-a-half- or three-story super-skinny house next to a fifties ranch.” Narrow, dull houses that filled most of their lots spurred neighborhood opposition to infill development, especially where the development entailed demolition of existing houses and was out of scale with its neighborhood. In 2003 the city reaffirmed its support for narrow-lot infill construction but added new design requirements. In the main single-family zone, the city restricted narrow infill dwellings to lots already vacant. The City Council also permitted small, detached houses in two higher-density zones. “Our goal is to have a mix of housing types,” Caruso said. The hope is that narrow houses can be designed with floor plans and features that suit today’s tastes, yet fit in older neighborhoods. A big issue is how to deal with the car, Caruso noted. She identified three of the principal design responses for narrow-lot houses as these: • Raising the house a few feet and placing a partly submerged garage below it. • Having two houses share a driveway, as is common in old neighborhoods. • Allowing the owner to park or build a structure such as a carport that encroaches into the side setback zone. This may require a change in the zoning code. u