During Sears, Roebuck and Company’s heyday, the iconic retailer dispatched more than 50 million catalogs every year. Each was a behemoth stretching hundreds of pages and promising virtually anything a household could desire — even the home itself.
From 1908 to the 1940s, prospective homeowners could order an entire house under the Sears Modern Homes program, picking from dozens of models. The company shipped more than 75,000 of these homes, in the form of precut lumber, parts and an instruction manual, by rail across the country.
Decades later, a new type of catalog of homes is the centerpiece of a movement that aims to bring new housing — and with it, new life — to Rust Belt cities beset by generations of divestment and decline. In Ohio, a statewide initiative is helping municipalities adopt pre-approved housing plans programs. Instead of making a blueprint from scratch, builders can choose from home designs provided by the city, fast-tracking the design and permitting process and cutting costs.
The Housing Ohio initiative aims to provide a toolkit to Ohio communities — with a focus on legacy cities, those that have been bleeding population and industries in recent decades — that includes pre-drawn housing plans, zoning reforms and best practices for implementing a program like this, said Casey Terry, research manager at the Greater Ohio Policy Center.
Terry’s group is spearheading the Housing Ohio initiative with Ohio Realtors. She said the coalition began working on the project about four years ago, after observing similar programs in states like Michigan.
The Housing Ohio guidebook includes two housing plans: a narrow single-family home and a duplex, each with several variations based on the number of bedrooms and other building features. Terry said these plans are specifically designed for infill parcels.
“Let’s build in communities that already exist, and infrastructure is already there, so that these communities that are losing this population aren’t also trying to expand roads and sewer and everything to get to these greenfield developments,” Terry said.
Programs like this will also help create a housing supply that’s currently missing in many cities and attract new residents, said Edward Erfurt, chief technical advisor at Strong Towns, a nonprofit that promotes dense, walkable neighborhoods.
“The number one home buyer right now is a single individual — they’re struggling with affordability, they’re trying to find a location — so we don’t have the variety of housing we once had in our cities,” Erfurt said.
Although lower home prices have been a draw of the Midwest — the median sales price for existing homes in the region was $336,300 in May, compared to $429,300 nationally — affordability remains an issue. In Ohio, the median home price is 2.6 times the median household income, the largest ratio since 2005, according to the Ohio Housing Finance Agency.
Pre-approved plans programs could help fill neighborhoods with the kind of modest, affordable housing that puts homeownership within reach for more families.
Eight communities around Ohio are now actively designing pre-approved plans programs, including major metros like Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo, according to Housing Ohio’s tracker, with dozens more having expressed interest.
In April, Lima, a city in Northwest Ohio, became the first local government to launch a pre-approved plans program using resources from Housing Ohio. The city’s Build-Ready Program pairs the housing plans from the coalition’s guidebook with a series of incentives, such as property tax abatements and utility tap fee waivers.
Lima is planning for these new developments to go on infill lots in the city’s core neighborhoods that are typically between 40 and 50 feet wide, said Associate Planner Michael McBeth.
“There’s just such a sporadic nature to the lots from block to block. It’s almost like when your child starts losing teeth,” Jessica Begonia, Lima’s public information officer, said. “That’s the whole point of what this program is trying to tackle, [which] is to bring our blocks back to the full vitality and to really create that neighborhood density again.”
Doug Ditto, the city’s building department administrator, recently built his own house. He said the process for drafting the floor plan took about six months.
“Having the pre-approved plans already there and ready to be built, with some minor paperwork — it’s going to speed up that whole process,” Ditto said. “So you’re going from multiple months to just a couple weeks on getting plans that are ready to be built.”
Getting the Build-Ready Program off the ground was the result of extensive collaboration among city departments and outside partners, Begonia said.
GOPC hosts regular meetings among cities pursuing pre-approved plans programs. Terry said internal coordination is one of the biggest challenges in implementing a program like this.
“When you hear ‘pre-approved,’ that can make building inspectors jumpy, like, ‘Oh, we’re not even going to get to see this.’ So someone that I spoke with used the analogy of TSA PreCheck: You still have to get checked, but it’s faster, it’s a streamlined process,” she said. “It’s just the time and coordination it takes to get all the internal departments aligned.”
For Erfurt, the work required to audit and streamline the building plan approval process may be the program’s greatest value.
“The biggest bang for the buck for the city is when they go through this process, they actually are stress testing their codes, and they’re aligning their city hall from gatekeeping to guidance,” he said. “We’re seeing a lot of the complexities that a small developer might complain about. City hall is actually experiencing that themselves, and it allows them to untangle all of those exhaustive, over-intrusive requirements, processes and procedures that are preventing us from getting this variety of housing in our communities.”
Since launching the program, Lima has received more than two dozen requests for the building plans from a mix of lot owners and developers, Ditto said.
The city has also begun to explore zoning reforms that could facilitate infill development under the Build-Ready Program. McBeth said one focus is on improving the process for building a duplex on a parcel zoned for a single-family home, which currently requires obtaining a special use permit that prolongs the construction timeline.
The program will run in conjunction with the city’s existing programs, such as a program that provides down payment assistance to lower-income families, to address the housing issue holistically.
“Ultimately, what we’re working towards is neighborhoods that have that population density back and to be able to have a variety of housing at all price points,” Begonia said. “I think the problem that cities across the nation are facing is a shortage of housing at all price points, and so we’re waging battle on a lot of different fronts.”
