Housing doesn’t have to be revolutionary to matter.
That was the point I kept coming back to after a recent conversation with David West, housing and community development director for Tompkins County and the former planning director in Geneva. We talked about ADU’s, cottage courts, permitting, architecture, environmental review, and practically every other piece of the housing puzzle.
The answer wasn’t one sweeping state program or a massive apartment complex in every community. It was so much simpler.
Make it easier to build the next small thing.
That sounds wildly insufficient when the need is thousands of homes. Obviously, an apartment over a garage won’t solve a regional housing crisis. Neither will a duplex, four small cottages sharing a walkway or a vacant upper floor converted into a couple of apartments.
That said, those projects begin to matter when they aren’t treated as exceptions.
Tompkins County offers a useful example of why the old assumptions no longer work. Its population has remained relatively stable at about 102,000, but the number of households has increased as families have shrunk. The county’s latest housing snapshot says demand has continued to grow, especially for smaller units, even without explosive population growth. Rents have also risen faster than incomes, while several categories of workforce and affordable housing remain well below the targets established in the previous housing strategy.
This isn’t unique to Ithaca. Nationally, the Census Bureau says one-person households accounted for 29% of all households in 2025, up from 20% in 1975.
The math isn’t complicated. A community can have roughly the same population and still need significantly more places to live. Four people sharing one house require less housing than four people living in three separate households.
Yet many communities across the Finger Lakes continue to use population stability — or decline — as evidence that new housing isn’t necessary. Then they wonder why a young teacher, recent grad, aging parent, or single worker can’t find an affordable place to live.
We’ve created systems that make stopping housing easy and building it difficult. The biggest projects can sometimes survive those systems because they have attorneys, engineers, consultants, and enough potential profit to absorb delays. The small projects communities claim to want often can’t.
A homeowner considering an accessory dwelling unit doesn’t have an unlimited planning budget. Neither does the local contractor trying to put four apartments on a vacant lot. If approval requires a year of meetings, redesigns and uncertainty, the project may be dead before anyone formally votes against it.
West described accessory dwelling units as a litmus test. They won’t produce thousands of homes, and they aren’t necessarily cheap to build. But if a community adopts an ADU law filled with parking mandates, owner-occupancy rules and dimensional requirements that make construction impossible on most lots, what has it really accomplished?
It’s adopted the appearance of reform while preserving the old outcomes.
A serious ADU policy should allow one on most residential lots. Duplexes and other small multifamily buildings should be permitted in more places without a full political review. Communities should consider allowing multiple principal buildings on one property, which could make cottage courts possible without creating an entirely new regulatory universe.
The goal isn’t to eliminate standards. It’s to make the standards clear enough that someone knows the answer before spending thousands of dollars on a design.
That applies to architecture, too.
People aren’t wrong when they complain about boxy apartment buildings, repetitive façades, or developments that appear disconnected from the surrounding neighborhood. Bad design creates real opposition. Communities should care about how buildings meet the street, where doors and windows are placed, how parking is arranged and whether a project contributes anything to the public space around it.
The mistake is waiting until a project reaches a planning board to announce that everyone dislikes the design.
By then, meaningful changes are expensive. As West pointed out, language requiring a building to be “harmonious” with its surroundings leaves applicants guessing and board members arguing over personal taste.
Clear, measurable design standards give communities more leverage and developers more certainty.
If a town wants buildings near the sidewalk, parking beside or behind them, regular entrances and façades that resemble the traditional development pattern, it should put those requirements in the code. Don’t invite someone to follow one set of rules and then punish them for failing to anticipate another.
Small communities face another practical problem: capacity. A town with a few thousand residents probably can’t afford a full planning department. That makes a 200-page zoning code filled with cross-references and exceptions even more absurd.
Shared planning staff may make sense in some places. In others, the honest answer is a shorter code that a volunteer planning board, property owner and local builder can understand. Regulation should be scaled to the community responsible for administering it.
There are legitimate counterarguments to all of this. Infrastructure has limits. Poorly planned growth can strain roads, water systems, sewer plants and municipal budgets. Environmental review exists for a reason. Neighbors deserve protection from real impacts, and larger projects should receive more scrutiny than four cottages or a converted upper floor.
The answer is proportional review, not no review.
New York recently moved in that direction by adding certain multifamily projects of no more than 10,000 square feet to the list of actions that don’t require further review under the State Environmental Quality Review Act. That won’t transform housing production by itself, but it recognizes that a modest residential project shouldn’t automatically face the same process as something with substantially greater environmental consequences.
This is where West offered the best advice from our conversation: Be boring first.
Communities have spent years looking for transformational projects while making ordinary growth unnecessarily difficult. A few apartments above a storefront won’t generate a ribbon-cutting. A backyard cottage won’t reverse population decline. Six small homes sharing a courtyard won’t repair a municipal budget.
But small changes accumulate. Successful projects show residents that growth doesn’t mean the end of their neighborhood. They give local builders experience, create homes at different stages of life and build trust in a government process that many people assume exists only to frustrate them.
We don’t have to slay the housing dragon in one swing. We have to stop pretending every small step is a threat.
If communities can’t make ordinary housing ordinary again, then they don’t have a housing strategy. They have a collection of reasons to keep saying no.
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