A crescent of century-old homes at Fourth Street and Barrons Avenue are artifacts of Waco’s distant past. In them, however, city housing officials see a more affordable future.
Built in 1916 by Waco architect Milton Scott, Terrace Gardens is a cluster of bungalows and two-story apartments wrapping three sides of a courtyard. It’s among the country’s earlier examples of what urbanists call a cottage or bungalow court — a pocket neighborhood designed around shared greenspace.
Waco housing officials are exploring cottage courts as one way to close a housing shortfall first identified in 2022. That would be accomplished by modifying zoning rules to make permitting cottage court developments less arduous.
Galen Price, the city’s director of housing and community development, foresees the smaller homes appealing to those who want a small footprint, such as couples downsizing after their children leave the family home. They can also appeal to residents seeking something a little less crowded than an apartment and more community-oriented than a suburban single-family home.
Whatever the reason, this approach will help drive down housing costs, the city’s aim.
“The way these make housing more affordable is you’re able to increase the number of units on a particular piece of land, lowering the overall development cost, which thereby lowers cost per unit,” Price said.
The city could also provide financial assistance to cottage court developments that go beyond the structural affordability built into the model, Price said.
Local demand for cottage courts and developers’ interest in the concept will determine if any get built.
City staff plan to bring a package of affordable housing and density recommendations to council members by November. At present, those recommendations include a zoning ordinance for cottage courts, streamlined permitting for accessory dwelling units, and changes to minimum parking requirements, among other ideas.
Compared to an apartment complex, cottage courts offer a less disruptive way to increase the density in single-family neighborhoods, said Josh Caballero, Waco’s community engagement officer and member of the city’s High Density Task Group, the group working on housing and density recommendations to be brought to council in November.
Though rare in Waco and across Texas, the cottage court concept and its denser counterpart, the cottage apartment — such as the Palm Court on Austin Avenue — exploded in popularity during the early 20th Century. They went out of fashion after World War II, receding with the growth of suburbs and restrictive zoning in the 1950s.
Like Waco, cities across the country are reviving the long-forgotten model in their bid to improve housing affordability. In Decatur, an affluent suburb of Atlanta, a new cottage court development was paired with a community land trust to keep homes affordable by shielding them from land speculation.
Waco officials are also pursuing land trust and land banking mechanisms, as the Waco Bridge reported earlier this year. Price said future cottage courts in Waco could combine those two tools in the same way the Decatur development did.
The complement of density and affordability tools under consideration by city staff serve a secondary goal, too, Price said. They prepare Waco to comply with new density laws approved by the Legislature last year, as Waco inches toward the population threshold where those laws go into effect.
‘I don’t have any plans on moving’
It was nearly 100 degrees but felt no more than 85 in the Terrace Gardens courtyard Monday night. The canopies of two old pecan trees cloaked the grass in shade where three longtime residents gathered by a shared barbecue smoker.
“It’s our little slice of heaven,” said Mary Ziehe, who moved into her two-bedroom cottage in 2013. Her rent hovers just below $1,000 a month.
Affordable rent allows Ziehe and her neighbors to stay put, but only explains part of why they want to.
“The sense of community is nice. If I need something, I can rely on my neighbors to help,” said Shannon Hill, who’s lived at Terrace Gardens since 2002 and leads the math and science department at McLennan Community College. “We all love living here, and I don’t have any plans on moving.”
Ziehe rattled off stories of neighbors helping feed her cat during vacations, coming to her aid when she locked herself out of the apartment, and coming together in times of need. During COVID, the adults of Terrace Garden put together a trick-or-treat route for the resident children.
Drew Triplett is raising three boys from a cottage unit across the courtyard.
“We’ll throw baseballs, footballs in the yard and they’ll play games, they’re scootering and biking … and they know to stay in this area,” he said.
The courtyard served as a safe space for play, watched over by neighbors Triplett has known for years. That dynamic reminded Ziehe of playing in the safety of her cul-de-sac growing up. A 1999 urban design paper on cottage courts made the same connection, likening cul-de-sacs to cottage courts but with a street where the courtyard would be.
Meanwhile, Terrace Garden’s central firepit coaxed “the introverts” to catch up, Hill said, and seemed to have a similar effect on the community’s two semi-feral cats, Waffles and Nicole Kitten.
Terrace Gardens owner Jud Griffis spent periods of his early adulthood living in the cottage court.
In a separate interview, Griffis said the unplanned interactions the model fosters are what separate communities like Terrace Gardens from more dispersed developments. Griffis sits on the board of Grassroots Community Development, which is building Renaissance at Sanger Avenue, a Waco affordable housing development guided by the same design ethos.
“Some of what happened in my life at Terrace Gardens might be what got me so interested in that development,” Griffis said.
Can it scale?
Griffis is passionate about filling in empty inner-city lots with dense housing. He wants to prevent Waco from sprawling endlessly like the state’s larger cities.
But as a property developer, he said the real demand for developments such as Renaissance at Sanger Avenue is difficult to gauge, let alone the smaller, denser and ultimately more unorthodox cottage court model.
“It’s a test, but we’re super excited about it,” he said of Renaissance, which received city and federal financial assistance to become a reality.
A developer hoping to make a profit off a cottage court would have to overcome the price of city lots as well as anxiety over public school districts, which factors heavily into decisions of where families choose to live, he said.
Those are good questions, said Caballero, the engagement officer. Zoning changes are the first step to answering them.
Waco “needs to ensure that (cottage courts) are even an option for developers… (and) to lay the groundwork for that option to exist,” he said.
Nationally, there is ample evidence of the model’s appeal, both for developers and prospective residents. Caballero and Price cited Carlton Landing, Oklahoma’s new master-planned resort community, which is built around cottage courts and the design principles of New Urbanism.
“We think that’s a cool concept. That’s one of the ones we’ve looked at a lot,” Caballero said.
Disclosure: McLennan Community College has been a financial supporter of The Waco Bridge, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in The Waco Bridge’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
