Michigan Municipal League Review Magazine September/October 2023

THE LAB REPORT

The Michigan Housing Data Portal will be rolled out in Fall 2023. It can be used to tell customized stories with visualized data about specific market geographies across the state.

Volume II of this Pattern Book Homes manual will also include three additional copyright-free construction documents for a small-scale cottage that can be built singly or in groups, a new rowhome duplex, and an above-the-garage accessory dwelling unit (ADU). The narrative will discuss how these smaller-scale housing forms can be fit as a “modular mixed-tape” for construction on municipal lots or arranged in various forms on larger tracts of land. It will examine strategies for project optimization taking into account rising construction costs as they intersect with green building standards. Finally, it will explore how to pull together financial packages and construction budgets for estimation purposes and seek out potential lenders or other financing programs to assist in implementing the recommended housing concepts. Like Volume I, these buildable plans will be 95 percent complete and will be published publicly. They will be available free of charge, with appropriate cautionary recommendations for users’ due diligence.

These two solutions in the works are only a few of the many ways that Michigan can respond to housing needs. With nuance, vision, and careful understanding of changing needs with these and other responses being crafted beyond current confines. Pushing past the limits of what currently exists or is not yet built on the housing market, Michigan has an opportunity to employ a response to current housing demands in a manner which is both imaginative and pragmatic. Unlike the Mariner, who wasted the solution flying above him, let’s use both our hearts full of creativity and our heads full of data to build a variety of housing options for our diverse and changing population. Melissa Milton-Pung is a policy research labs program manager for the League. You may contact her at 734-669-6328 or mmiltonpung@mml.org.

38 THE REVIEW

SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2023