The ‘missing middle’ of zoning code reform

Beyond the battles between NIMBY and YIMBY, a third option— call it “QUIMBY”—offers a promising path forward.

NOTE: This blog post first ran in CNU Public Square, and it includes topics we will discuss at the 63rd International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) conference in Riga, Latvia, July 6-10, 2026. Thanks to CNU Public Square.

Michael Mehaffy

Executive Director, Lennard Institute / IMCL

Imagine that you’re a parent with a couple of quarrelsome kids. You give them some slices of cake, and perhaps not surprisingly, they fight over who got the bigger slice. Now imagine instead that you tell one of the kids to slice the cake, and let the other kid pick the first slice. Watch how accurately that kid will surgically slice that cake! And then there can no longer be a dispute about the fairness of the result. Remarkably, your “rules of the game” are rewarding cooperation instead of infighting.

The story illustrates an important point: sometimes the resolution of conflict is not downstream where the outcomes are almost sure to be in dispute, but rather upstream, in the setting of the rules and frameworks that determine the outcomes. And sometimes, it’s critical to get the participants to understand and agree on those upstream conditions ahead of time. 

So it is with zoning code reform and the other regulatory streamlining changes that almost everyone agrees are necessary to achieve better housing production and lower costs, as well as other important goals for livable cities and neighborhoods.

This comes at a time when we have clearly dysfunctional public involvement and regulatory processes—seemingly very good at delivering the worst of both worlds: slower and more expensive projects, yet still managing to leave citizens unhappy.  Only those who are expert in gaming such an irrational system are likely to come out well. Meanwhile, the urban challenges of unaffordability, displacement, homelessness, and lower-quality urban growth persist. That’s why more and more jurisdictions are working toward code reform and looking for ways to gain public support in the process. 

Granted, local residents often oppose new development for predictable reasons—traffic, parking, safety, and the catch-all, “density.” Then they become “NIMBYs,” short for Not In My Back Yard. To be fair to them—and we must, since after all, it is their lives being affected—what they often fear is not “density” in the abstract, but negative impacts on their neighborhoods and their quality of life from “space invaders”—noise, shadows, loss of sky view, safety and quality of life issues, and often, just plain ugliness.

How can we break through this NIMBY impasse? One alternative is the YIMBY movement, known as “Yes In My Back Yard.” That approach seeks to expedite housing production over the objections of NIMBYs, largely on the theory that more housing production will lower home prices. But as research increasingly shows, supply is only one factor in housing costs. 

In fact, overall supply in the US is actually more than the demand: 148.3 million total units, of which 15.2 million are vacant, according to the Census Bureau. (About 770,000 people are currently homeless, according to HUD.) The deeper problem lies in the mismatch in both location and unit type, as many of the vacant units are in depopulated areas, or they are not matched to the needs (wrong size, type, condition or cost). This indicates an urgent need for more housing of specific types, in specific locations.

A second point is that it’s not only the up-front cost of the home, but also the monthly cost of living in a given location—commuting, utilities, maintenance and so on—that make a home truly affordable. There is also the related question of the value for money: is it a livable, good-quality place? Or is it “affordable” only in a narrow sense, while it carries another kind of cost, in degraded quality of life? Perhaps the NIMBYs are telling us something worth hearing. 

This is why we need not just housing quantity, but also housing quality, and place quality. Yes, we do need zoning reform and permit streamlining, urgently—but also innovative construction systems, financial incentives, and creative mechanisms like community land trusts. We need not just one “silver bullet” of deregulation, but the “silver buckshot” of coordinated tools and toolkits. Above all, we need to clearly define the quality of the outcome, within a fair and functional democratic process. 

That’s the aim of what we call the “QUIMBY” methodology—short for “QUality In My Back Yard,” and employed by us in a number of community planning processes with encouraging results. It seeks to address the “missing middle” between NIMBYs and YIMBYs, by calling on citizens to become part of a proactive upstream process, rather than a reactive downstream one. We point out that the question is not whether the community will grow, but how – and what role those citizens will play in advance, in defining and achieving a win-win outcome. Instead of NIMBY opponents, or (less likely) YIMBY boosters of any projects regardless of character, they become participants in co-creating zoning reforms, streamlined regulations, and pre-approved plans and specifications in advance. 

How does the QUIMBY approach work in practice? In White Salmon, Washington, following completion of our Housing Needs Analysis and Housing Action Plan, we conducted a number of stakeholder meetings to discuss community visions of good development, and the many barriers that infill builders were experiencing in delivering it. From there, we developed an online visual preference survey for all citizens, showing pairs of alternative development types based on alternative zoning models, e.g. smaller setbacks, garage configurations, specific building types and sizes, etc. (The images were carefully selected to match weather, lighting, and other “apples to apples” factors.)

Based on the results of these collaborative processes, we developed a series of proposals for zoning code reform and regulatory streamlining, as well as a model form-based code. Following additional feedback, these proposals were developed into draft ordinances, and taken through the Planning Commission and City Council into adoption. The process went smoothly, with remarkably little opposition. The City of White Salmon is now a small-town leader in allowing more units, smaller setbacks, reduced offsite parking mandates, and other innovations. 

Following the adoption of the zoning code reforms, we also circulated an online visual preference survey for pre-approved plan candidates, and for affordable manufactured housing units. From these, the participating citizens selected sixteen “middle housing” plans and six manufactured homes for pre-approval, based on preferred aesthetics. These residents pre-approved those candidates as acceptable neighbors demonstrating “Quality In My Back Yard”.  (This pre-approved plan strategy has also been deployed in a number of other communities, with equally encouraging results.) 

In West Richland, Washington, we followed a similar process for a large greenfield urban extension of the city, developing a sub-area plan and zoning code. In that case we also used a visual preference survey, coupled with in-person meetings with stakeholders. We also used another tool in our toolkit, the pattern language methodology—a series of interrelated planning and design elements, following a method developed by architect Christopher Alexander. We used the results from the community survey and stakeholder interviews to generate a draft pattern language, using it to form the outline specifications for an innovative new zoning code. The pattern language was reviewed and edited by the City staff and City Council with public feedback, and it was recently finalized. The resulting zoning code, which includes form-based elements shaped by the patterns, is now being completed.

We have also used the pattern language methodology in other projects in the US and internationally, with very encouraging results. One of the timely applications has been in projects for climate adaptation and resilience, including patterns for thermal comfort, urban greening, walkability, multi-modal transportation, and many other elements of urban livability. We have found the patterns to be user-friendly and very effective as a shared vision tool for quality outcomes.

Some of the patterns also focus on specific implementation processes and mechanisms. We are currently working with UN-Habitat to develop patterns for implementation of the “New Urban Agenda,” the outcome document of the Habitat III conference that was adopted by acclamation by all 193 countries of the United Nations, including the US. That documenttracks remarkably closely with the Charter of the New Urbanism—a remarkable milestone for the Congress for the New Urbanism. Yet in both cases, implementation remains a looming challenge. 

Therefore, the point of all this work is to overcome the barriers, and find a more “agile” pathway to getting better results: one that brings conflicting parties (and too often, conflicting requirements) into a coordinated public process where we all can collaborate effectively, and deliver what’s needed by the community. 

Like the parent in our example, we can do so best by shifting key decisions upstream, aligning incentives toward agreement rather than veto, and rewarding communities and builders alike for targeting quality before conflict hardens into opposition. Based on the evidence to date, this approach offers a very encouraging way forward through the current regulatory and political thicket.   

Note: Mehaffy will be leading a session at CNU 34 in Northwest Arkansas on “Small Towns Leading the Way on Zoning Code Reforms,” and discussing the QUIMBY methodology along with White Salmon Mayor Marla Keethler and others.​

---

The 63rd International Making Cities Livable will take place in Riga and Jelgava, Latvia, July 6-10, 2026, with a significant track devoted to development of pattern languages and related insights. Other tracks will include urban resilience, climate-friendly planning, housing afforability, walkability, transportation choice, health and well-being, architectural quality and the edges of public space, and other frontier topics of city livability today. For more information, or to submit an abstract to join the conference as a presenter, please visit https://www.imcl.online/latvia.

Next IMCL Conference Set to Share Frontier City Research and Solutions, as Call for Abstracts Enters Final Two Weeks

Submitted abstract topics to date include climate adaptation, ecology, regenerative planning and design, walkability and transportation choice, local identity, neuroscience, pattern languages, and the value of public markets; submissions have come from across the globe

ABOVE: The Call for Abstracts is still open for the 63rd International Making Cities Livable, and the Call will close at the end of February. For more information or to submit, please visit: https://www.imcl.online/cfa26

JELGAVA, LATVIA - The 63rd International Making Cities (IMCL) conference, in Riga and Jelgava, will focus on "Regenerative Architecture and Urbanism: Recovery and Resilience After an Age of Disruption." Participants from across disciplines and national borders will gather to share peer-to-peer findings on the latest solutions to urban challenges, with a focus on the current time of geopolitical change -- and an examination of the lessons of historic disruptions and recoveries in Latvia and beyond.

The abstracts submitted to date for the conference, to be held July 6-10, 2026, include a broad representation of advanced scholars and city leaders from Europe, North America, China, India, Bangladesh, Zambia, and Australia. Topics addressed by abstracts submitted to date include:

• Climate adaptation

• Local identity and architecture

• New urban technology

• Pattern language (“Nested Resilient Patterns”)

• Walkability and street retrofits

• Neuroscience and urban mental health

• Neuroscience for school and healthcare building design

• Ecology, green building and quality of life

• Implementation pathways

• Regenerative zoning

• Regenerative mobility

• Regeneration in the Post-Soviet East Bloc

• Beauty and neuroscience

• Urban design methodologies

• Resilient housing and climate stress

• Transportation choice

• The value of public markets, and how to create them

Submissions are welcome from scholars, practitioners, city and NGO leaders, and may include new research, case studies, or new methodologies and their evaluations. The conference will focus on effective implementation strategies for making a new generation of more livable cities, towns and suburbs.

This year’s focus on “Recovery and Resilience After an Age of Disruption” invites participants to look both backward and forward: to historic precedents of recovery in Europe and elsewhere, and to emerging models for regenerative development. How do cities recover from war, economic collapse, environmental damage, or technological upheaval—and how do they avoid rebuilding the same vulnerabilities? What does that mean today, for climate adaptation, resilience, and quality of life, as we face new disruptions? What does it mean to move beyond mitigation toward true regeneration, where urban systems can restore ecological health, social capital, and economic opportunity?

These are questions with immediate implications for effective policy and practice, and the conference provides a rare forum for sharing ideas in dialogue with scholars, practitioners, and city officials who are working directly on implementation.

For potential attendees and abstract submitters, IMCL offers a distinctive value proposition. Unlike larger trade-oriented conferences, IMCL emphasizes peer-to-peer exchange in a collegial, discussion-rich setting. Sessions are intentionally structured to allow substantive dialogue rather than rapid-fire presentation. This format has historically enabled collaborations that extend well beyond the conference itself—joint research projects, policy initiatives, and long-term professional networks. For emerging scholars, it is an opportunity to engage senior figures in an accessible setting. For practitioners and city leaders, it provides exposure to frontier research that can be translated into actionable policy and design strategies.

The geographic setting adds a further layer of relevance. Riga and Jelgava sit at the crossroads of Northern and Eastern Europe, shaped by centuries of cultural exchange, occupation, independence, and renewal. The Baltic region offers powerful lessons in post-disruption recovery, from post-war reconstruction to post-Soviet transition, and now to contemporary European integration amid new geopolitical pressures. Participants will have the opportunity not only to discuss resilience in abstract terms, but to experience it firsthand in urban form, public space, and civic life.

Riga’s celebrated Art Nouveau district, its UNESCO-listed Old Town, and its contemporary waterfront developments provide case studies in heritage preservation, adaptive reuse, and public realm design. Jelgava, with its historic palace complex and evolving civic center, offers a complementary setting for exploring smaller-city regeneration strategies, particularly relevant to cities navigating economic transition and demographic change. Site visits, workshops, walking discussions, and informal exchanges will allow participants to engage directly with the physical and institutional contexts that shape Baltic urban development.

The July timing further enhances the appeal. Early summer in Latvia offers maximum daylight hours, temperate weather, and vibrant public life in streets, parks, and markets — an ideal setting for experiential learning and study travel. Participants may wish to extend their visit to explore other Baltic cities such as Tallinn or Vilnius, or other parts of Scandinavia and northern Europe. They can examine first-hand the region's innovative and emerging models of mobility, landscape conservation, and heritage-led development. The conference is therefore not only a professional exchange, but a gateway to deeper study of a region that has undergone—and continues to undergo—profound transformation.

The IMCL was founded in 1985 by Henry Lennard, a Viennese medical sociologist, and Suzanne Crowhurst Lennard, a British architectural scholar. The Lennards met at the University of California, Berkeley, and the series they created there over forty years ago has become a premier international gathering of scholars, practitioners and city leaders, coming together across borders, sectors and disciplines to share the latest knowledge on effective solutions to today's urban challenges. The host organization, the non-profit Lennard Institute for Livable Cities, is currently based in the USA but has seen regular conference participants and prominent speakers from every continent except Antarctica.

The Call for Abstracts is open through the end of February. For researchers, practitioners, and civic leaders committed to regenerative urbanism, the coming weeks represent a final opportunity to contribute to what promises to be an especially timely and consequential gathering.

---

For more information about the 63rd IMCL conference, or to submit an abstract, please visit https://www.imcl.online/latvia.

From Vision to Code: Why Pattern Languages May Be the Crucial "Missing Middle" of Urban Implementation

The methodology pioneered by Christopher Alexander has transformed software, wiki and other fields; with key reforms, could it finally fulfill its promise for architecture and urbanism?

EDITOR'S NOTE: This blog post is part of a series of discussion topics leading to the 63rd International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) conference in Riga and Jelgava, Latvia. July 6-10, 2026. Key colleagues of Christopher Alexander will be present to continue work on the pattern language methodology and related innovations.

In recent years, the idea of the “Missing Middle” has become a common point of reference in housing debates. Across North America and beyond, planners and policymakers are recognizing that a healthy housing ecosystem cannot be sustained by a polarized mix of detached single-family homes on one end and large apartment buildings on the other. A mix of sizes and types of units, once common in walkable neighborhoods, is increasingly understood as essential to affordability, diversity, and community life. In the USA, these often included duplexes, triplexes, small apartment buildings, rowhouses, and other types.

Yet despite widespread agreement on the forms of this so-called "Missing Middle" housing, results on the ground remain uneven. Many well-intentioned reforms stall, produce marginal outcomes, or provoke backlash. This has led to a growing realization: the problem is not simply a shortage of housing types. It is a deeper failure in the process by which communities translate shared aspirations into workable rules.

The "Missing Middle" of Implementation

There is, in other words, another Missing Middle — one that sits upstream of buildings and blocks. It lies in the gap between community vision and the codes, standards, and policies that ultimately shape what gets built. Cities may articulate strong goals, like walkability, mixed use, livability, affordability... quality. Yet too often those goals dissolve as they move from plans to zoning text, from zoning to engineering standards, and from standards to development review. (Or from community preference to developer product, too often limited by the incentives, disincentives, barriers, and other risk profiles faced by the developer.) This is the terrain where good intentions are most often lost.

What is needed, to start, is greater upstream alignment on the goals, proactively forming a positive, achievable way forward, rather than a reacting negatively to a project that is already under way. That's what methodologies such as our own QUIMBY (short for QUality In My Back Yard) aim to do: focus on upstream alignment by building shared understanding and consent, before regulatory and project-level decisions harden into opposition and community polarization.

But even when communities succeed in articulating what they want, they still face a persistent question: How do we carry that intent, intact, into code and policy—following best practices rather than reinventing the wheel each time?

This question is increasingly being asked at the global scale as well. Through emerging collaborations with organizations such as UN-Habitat, cities across the globe are working to implement the New Urban Agenda—the United Nations’ framework for sustainable urban development that was adopted by all 193 member states. That's a very big deal: the world has reached agreement that we need better-quality urbanization, and more livable cities.

At its core, the New Urban Agenda promotes many of the same principles long championed by the International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) and by the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) and other long-standing and allied organizations: compact, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods; strong public spaces; social inclusion; and cities designed around shared human well-being rather than technocratic efficiency or specialist privilege.

The challenge, however, is familiar. Like the Charter of the New Urbanism, the New Urban Agenda is rich in values and aspirations; but translating those aspirations into everyday regulatory practice remains difficult. Without a reliable method for bridging vision and implementation, even the most widely endorsed frameworks risk remaining declarative rather than transformative.

What is now becoming clear, through applied work in cities large and small, is that addressing this upstream Missing Middle may be the single most important step cities can take to ensure that housing reform, public-space investment, and sustainability goals actually deliver the livable, equitable outcomes they promise.

Why Conventional Tools Fail at the Point of Translation

Most cities already possess an impressive array of planning tools: comprehensive plans, vision documents, corridor studies, form-based codes, overlays, design guidelines, and community engagement processes. Yet despite this sophistication, the same implementation failures recur with striking regularity.

The problem is not a lack of information, nor even a lack of public input. It is that most conventional tools are structurally brittle. Vision plans articulate values but stop short of operational guidance. Codes are legally precise but often disconnected from lived experience. Design guidelines are aspirational but optional, or so vague they are easily gamed. Each tool performs adequately within its own silo—yet meaning is steadily lost as ideas pass from one institutional handoff to the next.

This is why well-loved plans so often yield disappointing results. The planning document says “walkable, mixed-use, human-scaled,” but the zoning code still privileges separation of uses, excessive setbacks, and auto-oriented standards. Engineering manuals quietly override urban design goals. Development review becomes a box-checking exercise rather than a test of whether shared intentions are being met.

In short, the failure occurs not at the level of vision, but at the level of translation.

Patterns as the Missing Bridge Between Vision and Code

This is where pattern languages—originally developed by the architect Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure at UC Berkeley—offer a fundamentally different approach, and an enormous (if still largely unmet) promise.

The methodology has proven enormously useful in fields like software, engineering, user experience, agile development, wiki and wikipedia, and a remarkably diverse range of other fields. They capture practical, repeatable solutions in plain language and allow people to build complex systems step by step, learning and adapting as they go. They help teams share knowledge, avoid repeating mistakes, and improve systems over time without rigid top-down control.

In architecture and urban planning, by contrast, pattern languages were often misunderstood as fixed rulebooks or stylistic checklists, and were pushed aside by centralized planning and abstract regulations. That is beginning to change: growing evidence about health, sustainability, and quality of life—along with better digital tools and more participatory design methods—is reviving pattern languages as a powerful way to turn shared community values into places that are flexible, humane, and resilient.

What is especially useful in this context is that patterns operate at a crucial intermediate scale. They are neither abstract aspirations nor prescriptive regulations. Instead, they describe recurring relationships between human needs, spatial structure, and contextual conditions, expressed in a form that can guide many different implementations. A well-written pattern preserves intent while allowing adaptation.

This is what conventional tools lack. Pattern languages allow cities to say not just what they want, but how those qualities are reliably produced, without freezing solutions in place.

In practical terms, patterns can:

• Translate qualitative goals into testable design logic

• Inform zoning and code reform without dictating architectural style

• Provide continuity across political cycles and phased development

• Create a shared vocabulary among citizens, staff, consultants, and developers

Importantly, this approach aligns closely with the logic behind the QUIMBY (QUality In My Back Yard) methodology: building quality with communities, upstream, by making desired outcomes explicit, legible, and negotiable before conflict hardens around specific projects. Patterns do not replace democratic process; rather, they make it more effective by anchoring discussion in shared, evidence-based structures rather than abstractions.

What Applied Work Is Showing: Patterns in Practice

This is no longer a theoretical proposition. Over the past several years, pattern-based consulting has been applied successfully across a wide range of contexts, scales, and political environments, including in our own consulting work.

Working with the City of West Richland, Washington and citizen stakeholders, we used a custom-developed pattern language to translate community aspirations into code-ready guidance, helping city leaders align growth, walkability, and neighborhood character without resorting to rigid prescriptions. In several other cities, working for public agencies and private clients, we developed patterns to support planning and policy around livability and incremental development, creating a clearer path from shared vision to regulatory reform and on to entitled plan.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, we conducted a "mini-charrette" with stakeholders and professionals (as part of a CNU Congress) to develop pattern-based frameworks that informed corridor retrofit strategies. The patterns demonstrated how stakeholders could move beyond abstract concepts of “complete streets” and the like, toward concrete, place-specific guidance to integrate mobility, land use, and public life.

We have also used pattern methods internationally, to address challenges of resilience, climate adaptation and related challenges. In Saudi Arabia, we worked with the Center for Local Governance and several municipalities and state agencies to develop "a new pattern language for Saudi Cities," with patterns that addressed challenges as varied as thermal comfort in public space, walkability, and the design of socially supportive urban environments. The work confirmed to us that patterns can operate across cultures while remaining locally grounded.

ABOVE: Some of the patterns and pattern languages we have developed, including patterns for climate adaptation, thermal comfort, and urban resilience.

Across these cases, a consistent lesson emerges: when patterns are introduced upstream—before codes are rewritten or projects are proposed—implementation becomes faster, clearer, and less contentious. The work shifts from negotiating exceptions to aligning systems.

Why This Matters Now

As cities grapple with housing affordability, climate adaptation, public health, and social fragmentation, the temptation is to search for the next policy lever or design innovation. But the evidence increasingly suggests that the more urgent task is institutional: developing better tools for carrying shared intent into everyday decision-making.

Pattern languages, properly updated, operationalized, and embedded within contemporary governance, offer an especially promising path forward. To be sure, they are not a replacement for plans or codes, but they are the essential "connective tissue" that finally allows the regulations and policies to work effectively.

For organizations like the IMCL, committed to walkable, mixed-use, and livable cities, this represents a critical frontier: moving beyond advocacy toward repeatable, scalable implementation methods that cities can actually use.

ABOVE: A pattern language format that is designed to reside on a wiki, accessible from a smartphone. (This version was developed by wiki inventor Ward Cunningham.) Data-driven pattern languages offer a path to expanded capacity for scenario-modeling, visualization, monitoring and certification, and other complex planning tasks.

---

The 63rd International Making Cities Livable will take place in Riga and Jelgava, Latvia, July 6-10, 2026, with a significant track devoted to development of pattern languages and related insights. Other tracks will include urban resilience, climate-friendly planning, housing afforability, walkability, transportation choice, health and well-being, architectural quality and the edges of public space, and other frontier topics of city livability today. For more information, or to submit an abstract to join the conference as a presenter, please visit https://www.imcl.online/latvia.