In our urban communities, we talk a lot about local character, uniqueness, and small businesses. Yet, we are often confused about what strategies might actually help to enhance that character or build upon it. Many people think it’s a problem of money; i.e., that we need to throw more money in incentives to local or small businesses. Some think it’s all the fault of a system rigged to support corporate chains. And others still think it’s the fault of a government that purposefully stifles commercial enterprises.

Those all have some grains of truth, but the bigger reality is much more complicated. It relates to our whole, modern understanding of cities and development. For about 100 years, cities all over the world have implemented an entirely new ideology that runs counter to how cities developed more naturally for centuries. This stark change was made on purpose, based in thinking from the late 19th and early 20th centuries that was responding to the shockwaves of industrialization. Part of that approach was the adoption of a model that commerce should be separated from residences, and part of it was a larger idea that cities and economies can and should be controlled from centralized agencies that are professionally managed. The latter sounds very common-sensical to us today, but it’s important to understand how radical of a shift that was, and what the actual results have been on the ground. Every choice or approach has consequences, and we tend to overlook the negative consequences to how we manage cities today.

When it comes to the idea of functional zones for cities, copious literature has described the impact of separating all commerce out from living areas. I don’t need to rehash any of that here, other than to point out that the intellectual progenitors of this separation were Le Corbusier’s Radiant City and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City. Both were incredibly radical departures from how humans had built cities for thousands of years, and both were also wrapped up in early 20th-century political ideologies. These were not incremental, organic tweaks meant to improve human settlements based on the issues of the times. They were utopian visions, meant to completely reshape human life and destroy the old ways. What’s most bizarre isn’t necessarily what they proposed, but that 100 years later, these visions are still hailed in architecture schools despite their obvious failures.

While planners, designers and critics rightly focus on the design theories and what they’ve done to cities, we often overlook how the shift in management of cities also had an enormous impact. The city planning movement of the same era ultimately is responsible for creating citizen review boards, planning commissions, and layers and layers of zoning and development regulations. As time passed, regulations and review processes got more and more complex. Look at your city’s original zoning code and compare it to today’s. The former is probably a small booklet with simple prescriptions, while the latter is often a multiple-binder document of hundreds of pages, mostly unintelligible to laypeople.

These combined forces have effectively created the dilemma that the advocates of missing middle housing describe: with systems so complex, uncertain and expensive to navigate, the logical development response is either a single-family house (which never gets denied) or a very large apartment or mixed-use building that is bull-dogged through the system by a team of lawyers and consultants. All of the buildings in the middle were typically built by small investors, families or individuals, and in most cases the return isn’t worth the expense or risk today. Missing middle buildings may tick a lot of boxes noted by planners and architects, but it’s just too hard to get them built profitably in our modern systems. This is all without mentioning how our society has become so brainwashed as to the virtues of the single family detached house, that residents even in urban communities tend to oppose just about any project or code change that doesn’t protect single-family areas from change.

These types of buildings used to be built routinely and naturally by small investors: