Five Years of Successful Projects and Partnership with the City of Memphis, Tennessee

The success of the partnership between Opticos and the City of Memphis demonstrates what is possible when City and community priorities align around a visionary comprehensive plan. For five years, they have worked together on building local capacity and rehabilitating relationships between the City and the community early in the planning process. This laid a strong foundation for later implementation efforts of planning, coding, and design projects, which are quickly showing what it means for Memphis to “build up, not out” in its third century.

Reflecting on the New York Times Article “What Happened to the Starter Home”

This excellent article, which features Opticos’ Mews Homes in Daybreak and a quote from Founding Principal Dan Parolek, reinforces that it is not just generally a lack of housing that is causing today’s housing crisis, but more specifically the lack of smaller, attainably-priced starter homes.

Top Five Mistakes to Avoid When Enabling Missing Middle Housing in your City or State: Don’t Get This Wrong

The Top 5 Missing Middle Housing Mistakes Series Part 1

If You Want Safe Streets, Buy a Better Fire Engine

That lesson was brought home, once again, by the Opticos team’s work on a recent downtown plan. Our team had encountered a typical American conflict. Many community members wanted walkable streets, with wide sidewalks, protected bicycle lanes, slow-moving traffic, and ample room for trees, flowers, and sidewalk cafés. The fire department wanted wide, unobstructed swathes of asphalt. This conflict between community members’ desire for low-speed streets, with a high level of traffic safety, and a fire department’s desire for wide, high-speed roads is frequent in the United States. But in Europe, it is rare.

Opticos’ Top Public Missing Middle Applications Nationwide

While many communities, from small rural towns and counties to medium and large sized cities, share the same goal of delivering much-needed, attainably-priced housing choices, there is no one size fits all recommendation.