The economy isn’t design school. People being able to have affordable rent, live near where they work, and enjoy the walkability and dynamism that cities offer is more important than some random busybody’s aesthetic preferences. One of the main solutions to the rent being too high in cities is right in front of us. It’s the Five-Over-One. And they’re magnificent. Damn the aesthetics — full speed ahead.
What Five-Over-Ones Are and Why They Work
Five-Over-One buildings are exactly what their name suggests: five stories of residential units built with wood-frame construction (Type 5 construction in International Building Code [IBC] parlance) sitting atop one floor of concrete retail space (Type 1 construction in the IBC). This kind of building became much easier to build thanks to a 2009 amendment to the IBC that increased the allowable height for wood-frame construction from two stories to five. That technical change opened up a new era of housing development. Five-Over-Ones look like this. If you are close to a city, you’ve probably seen them in some of the newer parts of your town.
Five-Over-One’s hit a sweet spot of maximizing the number of units that a developer can build at the lowest cost. They can deliver between 80 and 115 housing units per acre of land. Compare that with single family homes, which typically deliver an average of one to four units per acre. At the same time, light-frame wood construction saves roughly $30,000 per housing unit on development over concrete and steel, so developers can build more housing for less money. Building to four or five stories maximizes the number of units that can be built while staying within that part of the building code (meaning more supply). Go higher and you’re forced into expensive construction methods. Stay lower and you’re leaving housing on the table. But right here, with this construction type, at this height range, you can get a lot of housing production at reasonable costs. This is why the Five-Over-One is the workhorse of dense, walkable, affordable market-rate housing.
Three Reforms That Can Unleash a Building Boom
Make no mistake about it: these buildings are our best tool for bringing rents down through increased supply. So then how do we get more of them?
Three specific reforms would help. First, mixed-use buildings should be allowed by-right in commercially zoned areas. Most cities maintain rigid separation between residential and commercial uses, a relic from when planners wanted to keep factories away from homes. But today, people want vibrant, walkable urban spaces. These are great for creating the density that allows that. Yet in many cities, these can’t be built in commercially zoned areas without lengthy approvals and neighborhood battles. The solution is straightforward: allow Five-Over-Ones by-right in all commercially zoned areas. If a zone works for retail, it works for people living above that retail. You might even get the biggest retail companies to handle development and costs. Costco is building 800 apartments above a new store in Los Angeles. Seriously- could Costco be any more amazing?!
Second, density restrictions need to be significantly relaxed or outright repealed. Many cities impose arbitrary limits on units per acre that essentially ban Five-Over-Ones. These regulations strangle housing production even while we desperately need more housing. Eliminating these density caps would immediately make thousands of potential projects viable.
Third, parking minimums need to be reduced or repealed. Many cities require developers to build one or two parking spaces per unit, often in expensive underground garages. For a 100-unit building, this adds millions in construction costs that get passed to renters. These mandates assume every resident owns a car, which contradicts the entire point of dense, walkable, transit-oriented development. Eliminating them would allow developers to build more units for less money in exactly the locations where car ownership is least necessary.
These three reforms work together. Allowing Five-Over-Ones by-right in commercial zones, removing density caps, and eliminating parking minimums would mean that projects that were marginal suddenly become feasible. Sites that sat vacant become development opportunities. The result would be a genuine building boom: thousands upon thousands of new units of dense, walkable housing in neighborhoods where demand is highest and prices are most out of control.
We’ve actually seen this happen in practice in Minneapolis. In 2018, Minneapolis voted to allow duplexes and triplexes on any lot that had previously been single-family-only zoned. In 2015, it reduced parking minimums and then got rid of them completely in 2021. In 2020, it allowed for more construction of Five-Over-One and similarly sized apartment buildings along transit corridors. What happened? Compared to other parts of Minnesota, Minneapolis builtmore housing, saw slower rent increases, and saw a drop rather than a rise in homelessness. Minneapolis shows that a society that builds more is a society that’s more affordable. And, importantly, it was the Five-Over-Ones (and other larger buildings) that provided most of the supply growth. As I said, these are the workhorses of affordable market rate housing.
The Aesthetic Objection
Now we get to the inevitable pushback: “But Five-Over-Ones are ugly!” Architecture critics love to complain about these buildings, calling them soulless and monotonous. An artist in Denver who was interviewed by the New York Times about these buildings after he created a group to criticize them said of these buildings that “They’re like Denny’s….You could be at a Denny’s in Iowa or New Mexico or Colorado, and you wouldn’t know. You just know that you’re at a Denny’s.” A lot of the criticisms of five-over-ones have this kind of flavor to them.
There are two responses to that. First, it is the local government who are the ones who are imposing all kinds of design regulations on developers like that they ‘break up the massing’ or have certain facades. The result is enforced pseudo-variety that ends up looking the same everywhere because everyone follows the same playbook of approved design moves. If we want Five-Over-Ones to look different, we need to stop forcing developers to comply with design codes that create the uniformity everyone complains about. Give architects actual freedom and you’ll get actual variety.
But there’s an even deeper point here. The most important aesthetic truth in housing is this: nothing is uglier than scarcity, nothing is more beautiful than abundance. But You know what’s really ugly? Sky-high rates of homelessness. People feeling financially squeezed by how much rent costs. Families crammed into tiny apartments that are a third the size of what they need. Workers spending two hours a day commuting because they can’t afford to live near their jobs. Young people trapped in their parents’ basements. Teachers and firefighters priced out of the communities they serve. THAT is what housing scarcity looks like and it is 100x uglier than any Five-Over-One ever could be.
Seen in a certain light, Five-Over-Ones are glorious! They represent people having a place to live at a rent they can afford. They represent walkable neighborhoods where street-level retail thrives because there are enough residents to support local businesses. They represent shorter commutes, less traffic, lower emissions, and the kind of urban vitality that makes cities worth living in. The Five-Over-One is magnificent, and we should build lots more of them.
-GW