Workforce &
Attainable Housing
Detached homes at a price that works for people who already work here. The design gets us most of the way; municipal participation on infrastructure closes the rest of the gap — and it lands directly in the purchase price.
The market stopped
building small.
Detached homes under 1,000 square feet used to be a normal product. They largely disappeared — not because demand went away, but because minimum lot sizes, parking mandates, and the fixed costs of development made small units uneconomic. A builder who has to buy a 9,000 square foot lot and install a full set of utilities will put the biggest house they can on it.
Small format development changes that math by spreading land and infrastructure cost across more units. That gets attainable detached housing within reach — but the last stretch of the gap is almost always infrastructure, and that's where the municipality decides how affordable the finished home is allowed to be.
- More units per acre — land cost per home drops sharply
- Shared infrastructure — one set of mains, drives, and stormwater serving many homes
- Repeatable plans — design amortized across the development, not paid per house
- Efficient footprints — 400 to 800 square feet designed well rather than 1,800 designed cheaply
- Municipal cost participation — the single largest remaining lever, and the one we don't control
Four sponsors,
four different reasons.
You can't fill positions because the people you'd hire can't find housing within a reasonable commute. Employer-sponsored housing on land you already own is faster than waiting for the market and cheaper than the turnover you're absorbing now. Structures range from owned-and-rented to a land contribution with a third-party operator.
You have a housing element in your comprehensive plan, surplus parcels, and pressure to show progress. You also hold the lever that matters most: what share of the infrastructure cost the project has to carry. Cities that put real dollars behind laterals, mains, drives, and stormwater — or waive the fees attached to them — get materially cheaper finished homes than cities that only rewrite the zoning.
You're chasing per-unit cost. Detached small format lands between a rehabbed single-family home and a multifamily building on cost per unit, while producing the housing type most households actually want. Land trust and shared-equity models fit cleanly.
Churches, schools, and institutions across Dane County sit on underused parking lots and lawn. Converting a portion into housing serves the mission and generates revenue that supports the rest of the operation — and it's often a permitted use already.
Where the cost
actually comes out.
Attainability is engineered in early, not negotiated at bid. These are the six levers we control ourselves. The largest lever of all belongs to the municipality — that one comes next.
The single biggest lever. Going from one home per lot to five cuts land cost per unit by roughly eighty percent. Everything else is rounding error by comparison.
Rectangles with simple roofs cost meaningfully less per square foot than articulated forms. Spend the variation budget on siding, color, and entry treatment where it's visible.
Crews building the fifth identical unit are substantially faster than on the first. Sequencing identical plans consecutively is free money.
Frost-protected shallow foundations, where soils and code allow, remove significant excavation and concrete cost versus a full frost wall.
A well-insulated 600 square foot home needs a fraction of the mechanical equipment of a conventional house. Tight envelope, small equipment, low operating cost for the resident.
The most expensive line item in a stalled project is carrying cost. Choosing a by-right path over a discretionary one is often worth more than any construction savings.
We use "attainable" deliberately. Affordable housing is a regulatory term tied to area median income thresholds, subsidy programs, and compliance obligations. What we build is market-rate housing that costs less because it's smaller and the land and infrastructure are shared. It can be paired with subsidy or income restriction where a partner wants that — but the plainer and more durable path is a municipality that helps carry the infrastructure, which lowers the price for every buyer without creating a compliance regime anyone has to administer for thirty years.
Every infrastructure dollar
the city covers is a dollar
off the price of the home.
This is the part of attainable housing that gets talked about least and decides the most. Zoning reform makes small format housing legal. Infrastructure cost participation is what makes it affordable. The two are not substitutes, and a city that does the first without the second will wonder why the units it legalized never got cheap.
Infrastructure is a hard cost in the development budget. Remove it and the per-home basis drops by the same amount — it isn't absorbed as margin, because on attainable projects the margin is thin enough that pricing tracks cost closely.
A dollar the developer has to finance costs more than a dollar by the time the home sells — it carries interest through construction and a return expectation on top. Public dollars skip both, so they land harder than their face value.
One lateral extension or shared drive serves the whole development. Municipal participation on a single shared improvement reduces the cost basis of every home on the site at once, which is why it goes further here than on a conventional single-lot build.
It is rarely a check. In practice it's TIF applied to site infrastructure, waived or deferred connection and impact fees, the city extending or upsizing a main it was going to touch anyway, land contributed or sold below market from the surplus inventory, stormwater handled at a district level instead of on-site, or simply a fee schedule that charges a 600 square foot home less than a 2,400 square foot one. We'll model any of these against your specific parcel and show you what each is worth per home — that number is usually the difference between a project that serves your workforce and one that doesn't get built.
Let's model what it would take
Tell us the parcel and who the housing is for. We'll come back with a unit count, an entitlement path, and a preliminary cost per home.
Start a Site Feasibility Review →