City of Santa Monica
Planning Commission
1 MEMORANDUM
Date: April 19, 2026
To: Mayor and City Council
From: Josh Hamilton, Chair, Planning Commission, on behalf of the Commission Re: Planning Commission recommendations on Missing Middle Housing Purpose
At its April 15, 2026, meeting, the Planning Commission considered a proposal developed by Commissioner Landres — circulated in advance as a memorandum and summarized at the meeting by PowerPoint presentation — for a missing middle housing program oriented around the cottage-court building form. The Commission voted to transmit the recommendations set forth below, forwarding Commissioner Landres’s memorandum and presentation as Exhibit A.
The Commission asks Council to take up missing middle housing as a policy matter, to define it for Santa Monica, and to direct staff to study the proposal in Exhibit A and related options as the starting point for an implementable program.
Context
The Commission has returned repeatedly, across multiple recent items, to the observation that Santa Monica lacks a working pathway to house households in the workforce income range — roughly 120– 200% of Area Median Income — that includes teachers, firefighters, nurses, and similar workers and their families. These households generally do not qualify for LIHTC-financed affordable housing, and they cannot afford the single-family homes or most townhomes currently available in Santa Monica. The City’s Moderate-Income Housing Overlay and Community Assembly / Congregational Affordable Housing programs were each designed with this gap in mind, but neither has produced units at meaningful scale.
The term “missing middle housing” was coined in 2010 by Daniel Parolek of Opticos Design and is defined in depth at www.missingmiddlehousing.com. At its core, the concept calls for small-scale multifamily housing in single-family neighborhoods that are walkable and convenient to neighborhood commercial districts, transit, and other amenities, offering an affordable alternative to households whose incomes preclude purchasing a detached single-family home. An essential component is contextual design and scale compatible with less dense neighboring properties.
The cottage-court form — six or seven detached cottages of approximately 850 square feet each, arranged around a shared courtyard — offers a pathway that appears to pencil at current Santa Monica land values 2 in R1 and R2, particularly where it can achieve R3 building-code classification through the courtyard configuration. It is also a building form with deep Santa Monica and Southern California roots: courtyard housing was among the principal affordable-home-building models of the 1930s.
Recommendations
The Commission recommends that Council:
1. Formally define “missing middle housing” for Santa Monica The Commission’s deliberations clarified that the term carries two distinct but related components: a form component and a related income-range component of roughly 120–200% AMI. The relationship between the two runs in a specific direction: the form drives the affordability, not the other way around. A cottagecourt configuration at the right density yields units whose size and construction cost produce workforcerange pricing on the open market, without requiring deed restrictions across all units.
The Commission recommends that Council’s definition address both components, and that Council give conceptual direction while leaving room for staff to refine the precise AMI band against Santa Monica’s actual wage distribution.
2. Explore options for pursuing missing middle housing
The Commission recommends that Council explore options for pursuing missing middle housing, including but not limited to the cottage-court-based program in Exhibit A. As a concrete illustration of what a workable pathway could look like, that program contemplates: six or seven detached cottages of approximately 850 square feet around a shared courtyard; R3 construction classification in R1/R2 via the cottage-court form; density of roughly one unit per 800 square feet (30 du/ac, SB 79–compliant); at least one deed-restricted workforce-covenant unit at 200% AMI per project; and a targeted income band of roughly 120–200% AMI.
3. Direct staff to conduct feasibility studies and a nexus study The Commission recommends that Council direct staff to conduct feasibility studies and a nexus study (e.g., on the disaggregated transportation impact fee described below) to refine the definition and the implementing policy choices. The work should include explicit room for staff analysis to fine-tune the AMI range for Santa Monica, given that 200% of LA County AMI reads very differently against Santa Monica’s actual wage distribution for teachers, firefighters, nurses, and similar workforce households — the Santa Monica figures run materially higher than the County figures at the same percentage.
4. Scope the work to dovetail with the next Housing Element 3 The Commission recommends that Council scope the work to dovetail with preparation for the 7th cycle Housing Element. The hard deadline is that the feasibility studies and nexus study are completed in time to bake the program into that Housing Element; where individual components can move faster, they should.
5. Recognize that a missing middle housing program would complement other development pathways
A missing middle housing program would complement other development pathways — including SB 9, SB 1123/684, and SB 79, among others. It is designed to stack with those pathways where stacking is advantageous, and to offer an alternative where those pathways do not pencil for the relevant parcel types and ownership profiles.
6. Forward the associated policy components to staff as part of the study package The memorandum in Exhibit A identifies a set of associated policy components that the cottage-court program relies on to pencil. The Commission recommends that Council forward these to staff as part of the study package:
• a tiered AHPP fee trade for workforce-covenant units; • disaggregation of the transportation impact fee into a per-parking-space vehicle fee and a perbedroom multimodal fee; • pre-approved plans;
• 90-day ministerial review;
• a revolving or rotating capital / bridge-loan fund to help edge-case projects convert from construction financing to permanent financing;
• lot-consolidation allowances;
• exploration of CRC/AB 6 building-code treatment;
• an alternative-compliance pathway for the Community Assembly program (SMMC § 9.31.196), including a nonprofit-developer partner waiver and Community Land Trust ground-lease standards for congregation-owned parcels.
The Commission flags for Council’s attention that several of these components — notably the transportation fee restructuring — could have wider application and extend citywide, independent of a missing middle housing program. Council may wish to direct staff to consider them on that broader basis.
Transmittal
Commissioner Landres is available to represent the Commission before Council on this item and to answer questions on Exhibit A. The Commission stands ready to provide additional analysis or to take the matter 4 up again at Council’s request, and notes that the staff work contemplated above would in the ordinary course return to the Commission for refinement before any codification is transmitted back to Council.
Respectfully submitted,
Josh Hamilton
Chair, Planning Commission
Exhibit A: Commissioner Landres’s memorandum and PowerPoint presentation on missing middle housing (attached separately).
1. AB 1070, which would study “shifting 3- to 10-unit residential developments from regulation under the California Building Standards Code (Building Code) to the California Residential Code (CRC),” has replaced AB 6, with the same purpose and initial text. It currently is pending in the California State Senate. The Commission’s April recommendation regarding legislative support now should become a recommendation for support for AB 1070, and the presentation now reflects that change.
2. NB: The Commission’s supporting documentation for its recommendation is based on the FY2025 limits for the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale HUD Metro FMR Area. As Council is aware, HUD published the FY2026 limits in May. The Area Median Income for a four-person household rose by 1.4% to $108,100, placing the 200% threshold at$216,200 for a four-person household.
City of Santa Monica
Planning Commission
ADDENDUM - JUNE 24, 2026
Date: For the City Council meeting of July 14, 2026
To: Mayor and City Council
From: Josh Hamilton, Chair, Planning Commission and Shawn Landres, Planning Commissioner Re: Missing Middle Addendum to the Missing Middle Housing Realignment Plan