Creating Walkable, Urban Communities Through Missing Middle Housing with Dan Parolek – Ep. 59 - a podcast by Matthew Loos, P.E.

placemakingpodcast@gmail.comFacebook-fTwitterLinkedinInstagramCreating Walkable, Urban Communities Through Missing Middle Housing with Dan Parolek – Ep. 59About the GuestCan’t wait to share this next conversation with all of you. Today on the show I have Dan Parolek, Founder of Opticos Design. Dan inspired a new movement for housing choice in 2010 when he coined the term “Missing Middle Housing,” a transformative concept that highlights a time-proven and beloved way to provide more housing and more housing choices in sustainable, walkable places. Opticos Design is driving a radical paradigm shift, urging cities, elected officials, urban planners, architects and builders to fundamentally rethink the way they design, locate, regulate, and develop homes. Americans want and need more diverse housing choices in walkable neighborhoods; homes that are attainable, sustainable, and beautifully designed.In this episode, we look at the definition of Missing Middle Housing and how it fits into various neighborhoods and schemes, the keys to success that he’s found in this type of development, and the biggest barriers to achieving true Missing Middle Housing options. There is tons of great information in this episode and I greatly appreciated Dan for taking the time out of his extremely busy schedule to discuss this topic of Creating Walkable, Urban Communities through Missing Middle Housing.As always, if you have enjoyed the show, please subscribe to the show and share it with your friends in the industry. There will be more exciting conversations on the shows to come. So without further ado, let’s start the show!Show NotesMatt (00:00):Hey welcome the show, Dan.Dan (00:02):Thanks for having me, Matt.Matt (00:04):Glad to have you on this show. You're, you're quite the celebrity in the development real estate development rings with your introduction of missing middle housing and what you're doing with Opticos. I'd like to kind of just start off here by getting to learn a little bit more about you and where you started out and, and then we will, we'll kind of transition that to Opticos and, and missing middle housing and, and we'll just go from there.Dan (00:39):Sure. Well just a little brief. I I'm trained as an architect. I have an undergraduate degree in architecture from Notre Dame and I practiced architecture in New York City for a number of years before deciding that I really wanted to work at the block, the neighborhood, and even the sort of city and regional scale. So I moved out to Berkeley, to go to UC Berkeley's master of urban design program. And it was just, a perfect fit for indoctrinating me into the world of urban design and how to get projects implemented and, and really just good how to get good urbanism to happen and how to root those barriers. And so actually upon my, my graduate thesis won a design competition called housing, the next 10 million which was ha ways that the California central valley could grow thoughtfully and accommodate the growth without compromising its character and the agricultural economy.Dan (01:44):And so that, that, that launched Opticos just, just a little over 20 years ago. Now we had a 20th-anniversary CEL, well celebration. We didn't really celebrate much last year due to COVID, but we we've re reached the 20-year threshold last year. Congratulations. Yeah. And one of the other reasons I started the company is because I did want to work on both architecture scale building scale projects, as well as those, that neighborhood and city scale that I mentioned earlier. And there was really no opportunity to do that even here in the bay area. And so, I decided I was just going to, I was just going to do it with my own company.Matt (02:26):Yeah. Awesome. I've got several questions from just that,

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