New partnership draws inspiration from catalog and kit homes to shore up state housing stock

What’s happening: In the state’s ongoing efforts to address its housing stock shortage, Michigan is taking a page from a century-old playbook to make home-building faster and less expensive. The Michigan Municipal League and Michigan Economic Development Corporation have partnered to create the Pattern Book Homes for 21st Century Michigan, a two-part guide that pulls inspiration from the catalog and kit homes of companies like Sears and Aladdin. It’s a strategy that many Michigan communities and builders used to fill their housing stock needs in the first half of the 20th century, and one now made new again. This new guide has been made available for free, an open-source approach to an expensive problem.

A Parkside catalog home in Berkley.What it is: The Pattern Book Homes for 21st Century Michigan provides free construction plans for multi-family homes and includes duplex and fourplex options. The designs, produced by East Arbor Architects, are modeled after the classic architectural styles popular of the kit homes of the 1920s and 1930s. These are homes that are now architecturally revered and found in neighborhoods like Ann Arbor’s Old West Side and Bay City’s Mechanic Street. The second half of the Pattern Book Homes guide includes a toolkit to help communities modernize their zoning codes to allow for the speedy construction of such homes.

The original Parkside listing in a Sears catalog.Why it’s important: “The Pattern Book Homes guide offers (another solution) for addressing the need for smaller scale housing,” says Melissa Milton-Pung, program manager with the Michigan Municipal League. “By helping municipalities streamline the process of zoning updates and plan review, we help speed up the process for getting new homes built. By making the 95 percent complete contract documents available for free, we save builders tens of thousands of dollars on design development, so they can concentrate funds on materials and labor.”

The Michigan Municipal League estimates that Pattern Book homes can be constructed at $500,000 per duplex and $900,000 per fourplex. Additional designs and models are expected to be introduced in 2023.

Rural focus: “New two-family and four-family homes can be built on vacant lots in both urban and rural settings,” Milton-Pung says. “Many Michigan villages have conducted maintenance and expansion on their sewer lagoons, some for projected growth that never occurred due to the Recession. By concentrating new construction on lots which are right in town or immediately adjacent, these new homes can be connected to existing roads, electricity, internet, water & sewer. Builders can reduce the cost of running new lines or digging new septic fields. Villages will benefit from adding more users to their systems, which in turn result in more tax dollars to support the ongoing maintenance of infrastructure already built.”

The Pattern Book Homes for 21st Century Michigan is available online.

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