• Citywide strategy to promote Missing Middle housing

    The Sacramento Citywide Missing Middle Strategy uses a sliding-scale FAR system to spur affordable housing development. Opticos Design won a 2026 CNU Charter Award in the Region: Metropolis, City, and Town category.
    Sacramento, California, is implementing a nationally significant strategy to promote Missing Middle housing to meet a target of 45,580 new housing units citywide this decade. As the author of this strategy, which aims to provide more than 25,000 low- to moderate-income living spaces, Opticos Design...Read more

  • Innovative, affordable homeownership in Brooklyn

    Belle Gardens uses creative design of small apartment buildings to provide affordable homeownership in a rowhouse neighborhood in Brooklyn. David Cunningham Architecture Planning won a 2026 CNU Charter Award in The Block, Street, and Building category.
    Along a transit-oriented corridor in Brooklyn, a design and development team is showing how to construct scattered-site, Missing Middle housing with context-sensitive architecture, and some buildings use single-stair construction. David Cunningham Architecture Planning won a 2026 Charter Award for...Read more

  • Workforce housing, grounded in trade-offs, for a famous ski resort

    The Northern South Park Neighborhood Plan and Code is providing desperately needed affordable housing in Jackson, Wyoming. Opticos Design won a 2026 CNU Charter Award in The Neighborhood, District, and Corridor category.
    Housing costs in Jackson, Wyoming, are among the highest in the US, with average home values of nearly $2 million, according to Zillow, and one-bedroom units rent for nearly $3,000. The affordability crisis in this mountain and ski resort town has worsened drastically over the last decade: in 2013...Read more

  • French Garden City changes ugly to beautiful

    The New “Cité-Jardins”— Le Plessis-Robinson, France, turned dismal blocks of modernist apartments into a beautiful new urban center. Atelier Xavier Bohl won a 2026 CNU Charter Award in The Neighborhood, District, and Corridor category.
    The New “Cité-Jardins”—the New Garden City—in Le Plessis-Robinson outside of Paris, France, is surely one of the most dramatic redevelopments in the history of New Urbanism. “This town did the impossible. It was able to transform itself from a gloomy, dispirited town dominated by concrete flats,...Read more