If you are a fan of European mystery shows, you may have been watching one and had the thought, “Wow, this murder victim had a fantastic apartment”: High ceilings, beautiful natural light, an open floor plan, and a deck facing out over a lovely green space. Unlike apartments in America, which “live like a hotel,” these apartments really look like a place to live. The reason many European apartments, particularly in older buildings, look so different is because they are centered around courtyard blocks. The reasons we don’t have such housing in America are fairly banal, largely due to a jumble of building regulations that few Americans know about or understand.
This has created the situation that everyone knows: There is an urban housing shortage, few middle class families can find good housing in cities, government services deteriorate due to a lack of social cohesion and tax base, and the public wastes endless time and resources in cars on lonely drives to work while paradoxically being surrounded by far too many people. I am, myself, a lifelong small town dweller in part because big cities in America don’t provide anywhere I would want to live. And yet, for such a well recognized problem, few can agree on the causes, much less the solutions. One woman, however, does have a solution.
Alicia Pederson, a Chicago mom of three, has founded an advocacy group called Courtyard Urbanist hoping to change all of that. She envisions bringing courtyard blocks to America to fill the “missing middle” in American housing. A courtyard block is what it sounds like: buildings, generally four to six stories high, set directly against the sidewalk, which ring the entire block and have an open courtyard for the use of the residents in the center. The resulting structure provides a peaceful oasis amidst bustling urban life. Pederson believes this would create “whole-life neighborhoods” that will strengthen cities, communities, and public schools by making them places that people with options want to live, while moving home ownership away from financial conglomerates and towards individual owners and smaller companies.
That may all sound too good to be true, but it isn’t, and in fact it is remarkable for being a solution with national relevance that also works on a scale as small as one square block—if governments will let it.
Pederson was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan in the 1980s. Her father worked as a project manager on large construction projects, and they moved several times when she was young, mostly in the Midwest but also for a time outside of Boston. A bookworm from a young age, she responded to a lack of community and long-term social connections by reading. Eventually, the family settled near Grand Rapids, Michigan, a beautiful area but with a city core she describes as “hollowed out” by the development of the interstate. Where they lived was an “exurb” that required a car to do anything, even to play with friends. As Pederson watched her mother spend her 30s and 40s driving herself and her three younger sisters around for every activity, she contrasted it with the lives of the characters in the books she loved to read, and saw that there was something unnatural about how her family was living. Like many other American detractors from the suburban idyll, she began to question what that form of social organization is actually good for.
After high school, Pederson went to Michigan’s Hillsdale College, drawn in by its “Great Books” program. She studied Italian and became particularly devoted to the work of Dante. After she finished college, she moved to Florence as an au pair, wanting to learn the Florentine dialect to read Dante in his original tongue. There, she lived with a wealthy family who had a magnificent ground floor home in a Renaissance palazzo, which was perhaps 4,000 square feet. Naturally, this young lover of the Renaissance from the American suburbs who had last lived in Hillsdale, a farm city of around 8,000 people, was impressed by the splendor of this stately residence and the historic center of so venerable a city as Florence.
“While I lived there I did English language tutoring for other families, so I saw the insides of a lot of homes across the social spectrum. These middle class homes didn’t have palatial ground floor units, but they had more modest units on the third or fourth floor that were still really nice,” Pederson told The American Conservative. “They had a window wall overlooking the street and a window wall with a balcony overlooking the courtyard. They were really nice homes with access to the city and everything the city had to offer. It just changed the way I thought about cities and developments.”
After two years in Florence, Pederson moved back to the United States to attain a master’s degree in Italian at Boston College. She likes Boston a lot, but still didn’t feel that it captured the glory of European urban form and function. She subsequently went to Northwestern University in Chicago to get a PhD in English, specializing in Renaissance English and Italian literature, particularly relating to the historic development of urban life. While getting her PhD, she got married and had three children in four years, significantly slowing her progress towards her doctorate. She received her PhD in 2020, and, due to world events, chose to not enter the academic job market at that time. She did, however, decide to stay and raise her family in Chicago, having a preference for population density and a dislike for a car-travel-punctuated life. Her family, none of whom are urbanites, think she is crazy to raise a family in Chicago, but she loves city life.
In 2024, Pederson started writing about what she calls “courtyard urbanism” on X, and then in the major area newspapers. She then started her Substack, Courtyard Urbanist, which seeks to make information about this kind of development available in one place, as American developers who want to pursue such ideas are generally “reinventing the wheel” due to lack of information. She provides a variety of practical advice about rule changes, working with councils, activism, and many other subjects, while educating the public about the concept itself.
Hers may seem like an unusual background for a housing reform activist, but it makes sense. After all, it is the regulators, planners, architects, and developers who have made the mess our cities are in. If she had studied a “relevant field,” she most probably would have only been taught how to expand the mire. Instead, by studying humanities, she learned about things like history, beauty, human desires, and what a thriving society looks like. Humanities teaches the vision necessary to apply the lessons of past civilization toward the society which surrounds us.
The core premise of courtyard urbanism is to build lowrise buildings on what Pederson calls the “crust” of the neighborhood, thus conserving a unified green space. Outside of New York, housing in American cities is generally built in such a way that for most buildings a front and side “setback” is required, which is to say that the buildings don’t have a “party wall” and must have some distance from the sidewalk. Commonly, alleys are required so that people can park their cars. The impact of this on, for example, the well-to-do Chicago neighborhood of Lincoln Square where Pederson lives, is that the neighborhood is a mass of small single-family homes on narrow lots that have a tiny patch of grass in front and an alley in the back where every house has a garage and an unusably small lawn. To look at a satellite view of the neighborhood, one gets the feeling that Chicago employed a sardine-factory worker to do their urban planning. Even so, the poor design wastes space, since the tiny gaps between these freestanding homes are not big enough to do anything with but exterior maintenance, and twice as many side wall materials as are necessary have been used throughout. Bare lots in this neighborhood sell for around $700,000, and a newly constructed townhouse with three bedrooms and nothing particularly special about it sells for around $1.4 million.
The alternative under current rules is building gargantuan apartment complexes, generally in limited locations due to zoning. A variety of fixed costs such as the land itself and American fire egress and elevator requirements incentivize making these as tall as possible. The buildings have a long corridor and a “double-loaded” hallway, which is to say one with apartments on both sides like a hotel, with a view only on one side. These buildings cost perhaps $70–100 million to construct, and as such are only built by institutional capital. Generally, parents with other options do not want to raise children in such apartments, and apartments you would want to raise a family in are largely restricted to the ultrawealthy. The alternative to either of these things for those who work in the city is, of course, suburbia and commuting.
The most common objection to Pederson’s advocacy, particularly among conservatives, is that America’s housing reflects consumer preference. This simply isn’t true. As Pederson puts it, “The government is in the way. The government is leading to constraints in the choices. It is not the case that where people live actually reflects their true preference because the housing market is so constrained by government.” During the 20th century many neighborhoods were “down-zoned” and only freestanding single family homes can be built there. Courtyard blocks are functionally banned almost everywhere in America. But they could be encouraged by simply removing the offset requirement while requiring 50 percent of the lot to be open space, the code that encouraged courtyards in 19th century Europe.
Another problem is what Pederson calls “demented anti-science fire codes,” which require buildings to be built a certain way, including elevator codes that ban the picturesque open central elevators you would see in old films. Pederson acknowledges, however, that part of the issue is that American buildings are built out of “matchsticks,” and that you can have a different code for buildings made out of stone and masonry; despite less strict fire codes, Europe has a better fire safety record than America for this reason. Along with all of these regulations comes the Anglo love for residential-only zoning, though no one actually dislikes having small restaurants, beauty salons, and convenience stores on a neighborhood’s street level.
Another objection is the claim that affluent families don’t want to live in the cities; this is disproven by the tremendous cost of family housing in cities. In truth, America has rarely tried building cities for the whole life of middle-class denizens. In Pederson’s own family, which has been in America since the early 17th century, they rarely stayed in any city for more than a generation. The reality is that good family housing in cities is tremendously expensive, so there is obviously high demand. A further concern in this regard is the quality of city schools. In Pederson’s case, her children go to Catholic school—because Catholic schools were open in 2020 and public schools were not—and they grew to love the school and its community. Yet the public schools are good enough in her gentrifying neighborhood that it is part of the reason they moved there in the first place, and she intends to send her children to the local public high school, which she describes as “outstanding.”
For the time being, Pederson imagines that the early examples of courtyard housing in America would be targeted at upper-middle class professionals who can choose to use a private school, but once a “critical mass” of middle-class families are in a neighborhood, the public schools greatly improve. This broader middle-class home ownership also reduces the common political problem of most city-dwellers forming a landless lumpenproletariat while the property owners live outside of city limits. Thus, voters and those who pay the most taxes and run the businesses are almost completely different people with warring economic interests. The result is perpetual dysfunction.
What is most exciting about this entire premise is the freedom it gives the public to organically build up neighborhoods with a unique character. Originally most courtyard blocks went up one building at a time with no real plan, not unlike the old brick main street in many cities in the American West. In other instances, there was more central planning. Regardless, a man with two lots can build a four story building that has a spacious four-bedroom owner’s apartment on the ground floor, two smaller three-bedroom apartments on both the second and third floors, and then four one-bedroom apartments on the top floor. This means there are now 16 bedrooms where there would have been six if developed as two small homes. Such a building would most likely cost $4–6 million. Certainly a factory worker couldn’t build such a place, but a successful lawyer or doctor could, perhaps putting his adult children in the upper apartments and really feeling as if he was leaving them something. It’s notable that when someone like Zohran Mamdani talks about landlords it is called the politics of “envy,” but people don’t really envy their landlord because city apartment “landlords” are rarely a person: they are faceless conglomerates of capital interests that have employed someone of a comparable social class to the tenants to oversee the building. If the landlord was more commonly a prosperous burgher living in the building, landlord–tenant relations would look much different.
Alternatively, a few families could come together and get a construction loan for a new building. The buildings can be made into condominiums or kept as rentals with one building owner. A lot of the questions a person might have about “how this works” are things that are already common in housing, such as party walls. Institutional investors could also build single apartment buildings covering a whole block. If he desired, a man could build a single-lot four story-row house akin to Philadelphia’s famed duplexes, but there is little obvious advantage to living in a skinny four-story house instead of a wide one story apartment. Further—while Pederson doesn’t worry about parking because as she says “the amenities are in the neighborhood,” there is generally under one car per household, and rideshare services are ever more popular—small garages can be included in the buildings, or, if its makes financial sense, a commercial parking garage can be one of the buildings on the block.
As well as the apartments themselves being lovely, where this housing shines is the courtyard itself. In the Renaissance, courtyards were used for things like wells, laundry, and keeping small livestock to turn your household waste into food. Modern courtyards are recreational and can be managed a few different ways. In some places, the ground-floor apartments have fenced, private yards. Ideally though, this is a community space, managed by something like a “master HoA.” Typically, courtyards are primarily accessible through the hallways of the building, with a locked gate big enough for a firetruck to enter in the case of emergency, though also for more mundane things like letting in work crews or having mulch delivered. Pederson said that, for people like her and the other professional moms she knows, having a place for their kids to play outside safely from a young age but no lawn care responsibilities on weekends is “the dream.” But other people do like to garden or take care of lawns, so this work could be done by a group of residents who volunteer. If a central courtyard is managed by a “master HoA,” it has the interesting impact of giving people in big cities something like a village council. Unlike a normal HoA, the body would have a valuable common space to care for, and rather than just telling you what to do with your own property.
Two typical setups are a one-acre site with a half-acre courtyard and four-story buildings and a two acre site with a one acre courtyard and six-story buildings. The former would have 80–120 residents, while the latter would have 250–350 residents; this is a good amount of land and number of people to vote on how to use it. Once there is this sort of local government over the common space, it can do all sorts of other organizing work, such as setting up volunteering schedules, playground supervision, block parties, or inviting local political candidates to speak. In short, caring for the shared space proactively builds community. Further, while a common courtyard layout would include trees and gardens, a paved trail, benches, and a small playground, you can do with them more or less anything the group decides. There are courtyards with raised garden beds, tennis or basketball courts, swimming pools, and more. Over time it will draw residents who like what is in the courtyard, so you could have a block tennis league on a private court.
Of particular importance is that courtyard blocks are for “whole life” living and facilitate the mixing of generations. Also, because of the differing unit sizes, they encourage class mixing, at least along the spectrum of the middle class. America is a much more income-segregated society than is commonly admitted.
The 19th-century novelist Émile Zola shows how the development of large apartments built under the celebrated urban planner Haussman, who created modern Paris, impacted society from a few different perspectives. Pot Luck, the most amusing of Zola’s generally bleak novels, is something like a reality show set in a new courtyard building. In the respectable middle-class block live the elderly owner, his adult shopkeeper children, an old widowed woman, a clerk with two marriageable daughters who is living beyond his means, a modest young couple in a one bedroom apartment off the back steps, and the main character, a young man new to Paris trying to make his fortune in the city. In the attic, there are small servants’ rooms (which today could either be set up as dorm-type living with a shared kitchen and bathroom, or otherwise made nicer lofts with skylights on the sloped roofs).
The characters love, fight, employ, and help each other in ways reflecting their disparate circumstances. It is very different from our habit of housing people exclusively next to those of near identical economic status. The reader can imagine having a “village” even in so hectic a metropolis as 19th century Paris, and it is thanks to housing design.
The tide is turning on American housing; people across the political spectrum want to do something different, if they could only agree on what. In March, Pederson was invited to an event where Illinois’s Gov. J.B. Pritzker presented his BUILD Plan for deregulating some housing in the Land of Lincoln. While it doesn’t allow for courtyard blocks, it is a step in the right direction, and allows multi-unit dwellings of up to eight units, depending on lot size, in areas previously zoned only for single-family homes. Many conservatives across the state, notably suburban mayors, were apoplectic. They worry this will bring Section 8 housing to their previously single-family neighborhoods, there being some sort of confusion about the concept of market-rate apartments. Pritzker commented that it is amusing that he, a Democrat, is making free-market reforms, and it is Republicans who are angry about it. This same thing happened in Washington State: A law was passed to allow units up to sixplexes in previously single-family neighborhoods. I was seemingly the only conservative trying to explain that change was a deregulatory, free-market reform and not any kind of left-wing “big government” act.
We should hope that more deregulation of housing comes, and that it leads to the American urban courtyard blocks that Pederson dreams of. No one is trying to take away suburban life from those who want it, but there is a great demand for family housing in cities that is not being met, and everything about our country will work better if more of America’s middle class were to own homes and raise families in the cities where they work. Courtyard urbanism is not a panacea for American cities, nor is it a “one-size-fits-all” solution to America’s housing problems, but what is remarkable about it is that it can grow and adapt to fit spaces where it is allowed. It is an unfortunate missed opportunity if we do not let it do so.
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