Cottage Communities and Pocket Neighborhoods

A cottage community is a cluster of small detached homes arranged around a shared green or courtyard instead of along a street, with parking grouped at the edge of the site. A pocket neighborhood is the same idea seen from the social side: a small group of households that share a common space. The two terms overlap, and many projects are both.

The format matters for affordable workforce housing because it fits more homes on a piece of land than conventional lots allow while keeping the detached house that many households want. That lowers the land cost per home. It does not make a home affordable by itself. Affordability depends on who builds the homes, how they are financed and whether rents or prices are restricted.

What Makes a Cottage Community

Washington’s Municipal Research and Services Center (MRSC), a nonprofit that advises local governments, describes cottage housing as smaller detached homes, typically 800 to 1,200 square feet, oriented around a common open space such as a courtyard, garden or walkway. Some cottages are smaller. A 2000 primer by The Housing Partnership, a King County, Washington, nonprofit, acknowledged that the term has no precise definition, then listed the features most projects share:

• Small detached homes. Each household has its own house, often one or one and a half stories.
• Shared open space. Front doors and porches face a common green, not a driveway.
• Parking at the edge. Cars are kept in a shared lot or garage away from the homes.
• A limited cluster. The primer suggested at least four and no more than twelve cottages per cluster, so that neighbors know one another.
• Shared extras. Some clusters add a workshop, storage building, garden or common house.

Architect Ross Chapin, who coined the term pocket neighborhood in the 1990s, defines it as a social cluster of households around a shared space. In his definition cottages are not essential. Townhouses or a small apartment court can form a pocket neighborhood too.

Ownership varies. The homes can be condominiums with jointly owned grounds, houses on small lots with a homeowners association, or rentals under one owner.

Cottage clusters are one of the missing middle housing types: buildings that sit between a detached house on a full lot and a large apartment building. They are related to, but different from, the tiny house, which is usually smaller still, and the accessory dwelling unit, which is a second home on the lot of an existing house.

From Worker Courts to State Law

An old pattern that zoning left behind

The Housing Partnership’s primer noted that the Seattle area’s older cottage clusters were built early in the 20th century, predated current zoning and survived as grandfathered uses. Chapin describes them as worker housing courts from the 1910s.

What stopped new ones was zoning. Most single-family zoning allows one house per lot and sets a minimum lot size and street frontage for each. Several small houses sharing one piece of land do not fit those rules, so for decades the pattern could not legally be repeated in most neighborhoods.

The Washington cottage codes

The modern revival began in the Puget Sound region. Seattle drafted a cottage housing code in the early 1990s. According to The Housing Partnership, the version the city adopted in 1994 confined cottages to low-rise multifamily zones, where land was costlier, and had produced no new projects by 2000.

In 1995 the small town of Langley, on Whidbey Island, adapted Seattle’s draft for its own residential zones. Chapin writes that the Langley code is believed to be the first contemporary cottage courtyard ordinance enacted in the United States. It allowed up to twice the usual number of homes if the cottages stayed small, faced a shared commons and kept parking screened from the street. In effect it was a density bonus for small houses.

The first project built under it, Third Street Cottages, put eight cottages on four standard single-family lots totaling about 31,000 square feet. Each cottage has about 650 square feet on the main floor plus a loft. The homes share a garden, a commons building and a tool shed, and they are owned as condominiums.

Other cities followed. Shoreline, Washington, modeled an ordinance on Langley’s. In the early 2000s Chapin and his development partners proposed a variant for Kirkland, Washington, that allowed one and a half times the usual density with homes of under 1,500 square feet. Chapin writes that the city tested the code on a demonstration project and then adopted it citywide.

Statewide rules

Two states have since written the form into law as part of broader upzoning efforts:

• Oregon. House Bill 2001 (2019) required cities with more than 25,000 people, and most cities in the Portland metro area, to allow cottage clusters and other middle housing in areas zoned for detached single-family homes. Local codes were due by June 30, 2022. A 2025 law, House Bill 2138, broadened the state’s definition of a cottage cluster so that the homes can be attached in groups of up to four.
• Washington. A 2023 law defines cottage housing and lists it among nine middle housing types. Covered cities with at least 25,000 people must allow at least six of the nine, so cottage housing is an option under the law, not a universal requirement.

The guide to zoning reform and the YIMBY movement covers these laws in more detail.

How codes compare

Cottage ordinances share a basic bargain: more homes per acre in exchange for limits on size and rules about layout.

Why the Land Math Works

Clustering spreads the price of a parcel across more homes.

The Housing Partnership’s 2000 primer found that Puget Sound cottage clusters ranged from 12 to 36 homes per acre. It estimated that land made up 15% to 20% of total sales in a cottage project built in a single-family zone, compared with 25% to 30% in typical single-family development. Those figures describe one region a generation ago.

Suppose a one-acre parcel costs $300,000. Divided into four conventional lots, each home carries $75,000 in land cost. Built as twelve cottages, each carries $25,000. These numbers are invented for illustration.

Other savings follow from the layout:

• Smaller homes use less material and labor in total, although the primer noted that builders can put some of the savings into better finishes.
• Shared infrastructure, such as a single parking area and common walkways, serves many homes.
• Infill sites that are too small or oddly shaped for a subdivision can work for a cluster. MRSC notes that cottage housing is frequently used as infill in single-family neighborhoods.

Who Cottage Communities Serve

Cottages suit small households, and small households are now common. The Census Bureau reported that 27.6% of occupied U.S. households had one person in 2020, up from 7.7% in 1940.

The Housing Partnership found that single people were the predominant cottage buyers in the Puget Sound market. It said the homes also worked well for couples, single parents and older adults who wanted to stay in a detached house without the upkeep of a large one. Those groups overlap with the households that workforce housing is meant to reach, such as early-career teachers, health aides, and service and trades workers. For buyers, a cottage can serve as a starter home.

Small Is Not the Same as Affordable

A small house on shared land costs less to produce than a large house on its own lot. Whether the resident pays less is a separate question.

The 2000 primer estimated that cottages could come to market anywhere from about $130,000 to $300,000 in King County at the time, depending on location and finishes. The same tension surfaced in Delaware in late 2024, when New Castle County considered a pocket neighborhood ordinance. Spotlight Delaware reported that a council sponsor estimated the homes might sell for $265,000 to $400,000, and another council member questioned whether that should be called affordable.

Communities that want cottages to stay within reach of moderate-income workers generally add one of these tools:

• A nonprofit or mission-driven owner that sets rents below the market
• A deed restriction limiting resale prices or rents
• A community land trust that owns the land and sells or rents only the homes
• Donated or discounted land, grants and low-cost loans that fill the gap between cost and what residents can pay

The guide to how affordable workforce housing gets built explains how those pieces are assembled.

Why Cottage Projects Draw Opposition

Cottage clusters add homes to low-density neighborhoods, and that is often contested. Neighbors commonly object that the homes will lower nearby property values, will not match the character of the area, or will set a precedent for more.

Cottage codes try to answer these concerns through design: size and height caps, required open space, screened parking and, in some early proposals, a rule that clusters be spaced apart. The Housing Partnership argued that quality matters most. It warned that building “cheap little boxes” would erode public support for the form.

Procedure matters as well. Where a code allows cottage clusters through by-right development, a project that meets the written standards is approved administratively. Where each project needs a rezoning or a public hearing, the outcome depends on local politics.

Example: Market Street Village in Georgetown, Delaware

Little Living, the nonprofit that publishes this site, is developing Market Street Village, a community of 20 rental cottages on East Market Street in Georgetown, the Sussex County seat. Little Living gives the address as 501–515 E. Market St. Spotlight Delaware has reported that the homes will range from about 450 to 800 square feet, with one, two and three bedrooms, on a site about half a mile from the town center. WHYY reported in 2025 that the site came together from two adjacent parcels of about an acre each, both offered by local landowners. Later news reports have put the site at roughly one to two acres.

Its approval shows how contested a small project can become:

1. Spring 2025. Little Living built two model cottages in Georgetown so that officials and residents could see the product.
2. Fall 2025. The town’s planning commission endorsed a cottage housing ordinance in September. From October, residents attended council meetings in large numbers to oppose it. Critics said the homes would hurt property values, would not fit the town and would make Georgetown a test site. Supporters, including town officials, pointed to the shortage of homes that local workers and older residents could afford.
3. December 8, 2025. The Town Council adopted the ordinance 4 to 1 after about two hours of comment and debate. It allows up to 12 cottages per acre.
4. February 9, 2026. The council voted 3 to 1 to rezone the Market Street parcels from commercial to residential use, clearing the main hurdle for the project. Site plan review remained.
5. May to September 2026. Voters elected a new mayor and a new council member who had opposed the ordinance. In July the council paused review of new cottage applications. In August it voted 3 to 1 to begin repealing the ordinance. In September the town’s planning commission voted 3 to 2 to recommend against repeal. As of late September 2026 the council had not taken a final vote.

Both Spotlight Delaware and WHYY report that Market Street Village was approved before the repeal effort and would not be affected by it. WHYY reported in September 2026 that the project’s preliminary site plan was under review. In February 2026 Little Living’s founder told Spotlight Delaware he hoped to finish by spring 2027. In August 2026 the organization said it expects the community to be complete in July 2027.

The Delaware housing guide has more on housing in the state.

The Bottom Line

Cottage communities and pocket neighborhoods revive an old way of building: small houses gathered around a shared green. They use land efficiently, suit small households and can fit into existing neighborhoods. They need zoning that permits them and, to serve working households over time, an owner or a legal mechanism that keeps costs down. Local acceptance is not guaranteed and often has to be earned project by project.