Daniel Herriges wrote:

There’s no large city in America that’s doing a better job of pivoting to a Strong Towns approach than Memphis, Tennessee. And there are many working from easier starting points. For decades, Memphis aggressively annexed outlying land, juicing cheap suburban growth while older neighborhoods suffered poverty and blight. In recent years, city officials have made a remarkable U-turn, shifting their emphasis to building back up the city’s core neighborhoods and supporting the existing residents in them.

It’s working. Memphis is home to some stellar examples of bottom-up revitalization and urban reinvention, and no shortage of local heroes doing the work. Now, Memphis is continuing this impressive streak by tackling some deeper issues that are necessary for the city’s renaissance, but don’t really have a place in the public consciousness.

One of those is building codes. Memphis is now the site of a first-in-the-nation (as far as we, or they, can tell) building code reform intended to make it easier to build missing middle housing, by removing regulatory restrictions that too often cripple the financial feasibility of these small-scale projects.

Under Memphis’s new rules, three- to six-unit residential structures can now be built under the residential building code, instead of the commercial code. This is a change that may seem wonky and obscure to most laypeople, but any small-scale developer will tell you it’s a big deal. Here’s why.