More Housing Without Losing Character: Four Michigan Cities Are Already Doing It

Michigan’s housing bills are moving — and the communities that benefit most won’t be the ones who wait for the ink to dry.

The MI Housing Readiness Package would accelerate construction and rehabilitation, require updates to local zoning, and catalyze investments in housing as a talent-retention tool. The bills have bipartisan co-sponsors and real momentum. There will likely still be some changes to the final bills, but more Michiganders are finally understanding just how hard our codes have made it to build anything other than large, single-family homes.

The Michigan Housing Readiness Package requires local zoning to accommodate smaller homes on smaller lots, if local homeowners want homes like this.

But state legislation doesn’t come with much local support when it’s time to actually implement the new mandates. I’ve watched enough state housing legislation land at the local level to know what happens next:

State policy creates obligations. It rarely creates capacity to execute.

The fiscal case most communities aren’t making

Before we get to the design conversation, there’s a fiscal conversation that most municipalities aren’t having — and they should.

Every stretch of road, water main, and sidewalk your community maintains costs the same whether there’s one house on it or three. The pipes don’t know. The pavement doesn’t care. What changes is the taxable value carried by that infrastructure, and therefore the long-term financial sustainability of serving those neighborhoods at all.

More homes on the same stretch of infrastructure produce more taxable value and greater financial sustainability. That isn’t a talking point — it’s arithmetic. Michigan cities built on century-old grids already have the streets, the sewers, and the sidewalks in place. What many of them don’t have is enough rooftops to pay for the upkeep. Adding housing in existing neighborhoods is one of the few tools a community has to strengthen its tax base without raising rates, cutting services, or annexing new land.

The MI Housing Readiness Package isn’t just a permission structure for more housing. It’s a permission structure for a more financially durable municipal model — if communities know what to ask for.

The real fear behind the debate

The fear that comes up in every zoning conversation I’ve been in is the same: Will adding housing destroy the character of our neighborhood?

It’s a legitimate question. It’s also, in most cases, a false choice.

The Michigan places we love most — the walkable downtowns, the tree-lined streets, the mixed-era neighborhoods where a bungalow sits comfortably next to a duplex next to a small apartment building — were almost all built at densities current zoning no longer allows. We didn’t lose neighborhood character by building more housing. In many places, we lost it by making it illegal to build housing the way we used to.

Design requirements can be incorporated into local zoning to ensure unique neighborhood attributes are respected, while maintaining the freedom of the private market to respond to community needs and local household budgets. Massing rules, setbacks that preserve street rhythm, form and material standards, porch and entrance requirements, window-to-wall ratios — these tools let a community define what new housing should look like without dictating who gets to build it or what rent it has to hit.

That distinction matters. Design standards protect neighborhood character. Unit-count caps, bedroom limits, and use prohibitions don’t — they just suppress supply and hand the market over to whoever can afford the delay. Done well, design-focused zoning answers the question “Will this fit here?” with a predictable yes, and does it faster than any discretionary review process ever could.

Four Michigan communities already doing the work

This isn’t theoretical. Several Michigan communities have already updated local zoning to allow more housing diversity and incorporated minimum design guidelines that protect the character of their neighborhoods. Three are worth looking at closely.

Kalamazoo

Kalamazoo began reforming its zoning in 2018, neighborhood by neighborhood, after the city discovered that most of its lots didn’t even conform to the zoning that governed them. The reform has opened the door to missing middle housing — front-to-back duplexes, stacked duplexes, side-by-side duplexes, and fourplexes — across residential neighborhoods that had effectively been locked in to single-family detached homes.

What makes Kalamazoo distinctive is the pre-approved plan catalog it paired with the zoning changes. The city commissioned professionally designed missing middle plans that match the scale, setback, and form of the surrounding neighborhood fabric — so a duplex reads as a house on the street, not as a project. A builder can walk in with a plan the city has already approved and a permit bundle already prepared, cutting months out of the approval process. Up to two accessory dwellings per lot are allowed, and on larger lots, multiple buildings per lot are possible.

The result has been real missing middle housing getting built on real Kalamazoo lots, at a scale neighbors recognize as part of their neighborhood rather than a disruption to it.

Grand Rapids

In 2024, Grand Rapids adopted a package of zoning amendments explicitly aimed at increasing housing supply, diversifying housing types, and improving affordability. The amendments reduced lot area and width requirements for two-family and small multi-family (six units or fewer) developments, expanded where small multi-family is permitted by right on designated residential streets, liberalized ADU regulations, and eliminated parking minimums for small-scale developments near transit.

Crucially, all of this sits inside an existing design and development framework — form standards, traditional neighborhood design standards in the TN districts, setback and massing rules — that keeps the new capacity compatible with the historic fabric of Grand Rapids neighborhoods. More units. Same neighborhood feel. The reform didn’t create a loophole for bad design; it cleared a path for good design that had been blocked by lot-size and use restrictions.

Fennville

Fennville is the smallest of these four communities — a city of roughly 1,400 in Allegan County — and in some ways the most instructive, because it shows what preparation looks like when a community decides to go all the way. In early 2024, Fennville overhauled its zoning ordinance to allow a wider mix of housing types, responding to a 2022 Master Plan that had identified a clear gap in missing middle housing for households earning between 80% and 120% of area median income. The city paired that zoning work with Redevelopment Ready Communities certification from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation and reactivated its Brownfield Redevelopment Authority to make real financial tools available for the projects the new zoning now permits.

Then Fennville did something most communities don’t: it put its own land on the table. In August 2025, the City of Fennville and its Downtown Development Authority issued two RFPs to sell publicly-owned parcels adjacent to the new City Square Park downtown, both of which had been held publicly for more than two decades.

The ~0.8-acre DDA-owned parcel at West Main and West Fennville Streets comes with a vision plan from Opticos Design — the firm that coined the term “missing middle housing” — calling for roughly 20 residential units across a mixed-use building fronting Main Street and a cottage court of duplexes and triplexes on the south half of the site, along with 3,000 square feet of ground-floor retail. The adjacent city-owned lot at 113 W. Fennville Street envisions eight townhomes with garages. Fennville’s approach models the full arc of what preparation actually looks like: not just legal permission, but land, financial tools, design vision, and a public commitment to turn new zoning into actual housing and economic growth.

Ferndale

In December 2024, Ferndale adopted a full rewrite of its zoning code. The new ordinance ended single-family-only zoning as the exclusive residential pattern, opening the door to triplexes, quadplexes, and ADUs across the city — but it did so inside a form-based framework, with height limits, compatibility standards, and design expectations that prevent the caricature of “a tower next to a bungalow” that opponents always warn about.

Ferndale’s code is explicitly rooted in its 2022 Master Plan and is built to advance design, sustainability, and equity values alongside housing diversity. It’s one of the cleanest recent examples in Michigan of a community using a zoning rewrite to deliver housing capacity and reinforce the physical qualities that make Ferndale, Ferndale.

What preparation actually looks like

The communities that will benefit most from the MI Home Program — or any future state housing legislation — are the ones doing preparation work now. Before the bill passes.

In our experience, that preparation has four components:

An honest local assessment — what the community’s housing gap actually looks like, who’s being priced out, and what infill capacity exists on the ground. A zoning audit paired with a local market analysis and neighborhood specific design standards work — identifying where current rules block the housing the community needs, and what design guardrails should accompany any new capacity. A fiscal analysis — understanding how additional housing on existing infrastructure changes the long-term financial picture for municipal budgets. And a community engagement strategy that starts early — building the local trust, and the political coalition, that lets a good project get approved without a lot of hard feelings and political turmoil.

That last one is usually the difference between a zoning reform that looks good on paper and one that actually produces housing.

The window is open now

This is the work we do at Flywheel: helping municipalities translate broad mandates into locally-grounded strategies, build the coalitions they’ll need before they need them, and design policy frameworks that welcome new housing while protecting what’s irreplaceable.

If your community is starting to think through what the MI Housing Readiness Package could mean for you — or if you’re already feeling the pressure of the housing conversation locally and want a sharper way to approach it — I’d welcome the conversation. The communities that prepare early will have more options, and better outcomes, than the ones that react late.