Pocket Neighborhood

What Is a Pocket Neighborhood?

A pocket neighborhood is a small group of homes clustered around a shared open space, such as a garden, lawn or courtyard. Instead of each house facing the street, front porches face the shared space and cars are usually parked at the edge of the site. The layout encourages casual contact between neighbors while protecting each home’s privacy.

Architect Ross Chapin coined the term in the 1990s while designing the Third Street Cottages in Langley, Washington. The pattern is older. Bungalow courts, with small houses arranged around a central garden, appeared in Pasadena, California, around 1910, and Seattle had courts of worker housing in the same decade. The idea overlaps heavily with cottage housing, but its defining feature is the shared space and the social cluster around it, not house size.

How Pocket Neighborhoods Work

Conventional single-family zoning generally requires one house per lot, with a minimum lot size and street frontage. Pocket neighborhoods therefore usually need a special code provision or planned-development approval. Typical cottage codes trade extra density for small homes and design standards:

• Homes are capped in size.
• Homes face a usable common open space.
• Parking is grouped and screened from the street.
• The commons is usually owned and maintained jointly, often through a condominium or homeowners association.

According to Chapin’s firm, Langley, Washington, adopted the first contemporary cottage courtyard ordinance in 1995. It allowed up to double the usual number of detached homes if cottages stayed small, faced a shared commons and kept parking shielded from the street. In 2019, Oregon’s House Bill 2001 required cities of more than 25,000 people, and smaller cities in the Portland metro area, to allow cottage clusters, along with duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and townhouses, in residential areas zoned for detached single-family homes.

Example

The Third Street Cottages in Langley were the first project built under that city’s code. Eight detached cottages sit on four standard single-family lots, about 31,000 square feet in total. Each has a main floor of about 650 square feet plus a small loft, under the code’s 975-square-foot cap. The homes surround a shared garden with a common building and a toolshed. Parking is set apart, and the homes are owned as condominiums.

Why It Matters for Workforce Housing

Small homes on shared land use less land per household. That can bring prices below those of detached houses on full-size lots, so pocket neighborhoods often come up as a missing middle housing or starter home option for teachers, nurses and other moderate-income workers. Small size alone does not guarantee affordability, however. Cottages in desirable areas can sell at high prices per square foot. Communities that want them to stay affordable for the long term typically pair the format with subsidy, a community land trust or a deed restriction.