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well I'm Ross chapen and I'm so glad so glad to have you here um I've been involved in uh creating pocket neighborhoods both designing and planning uh and building for nearly 20
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years now and the idea of a pocket neighborhood is uh uh small groupings of individuals households coming together around a shared Commons in this case we've got a lovely Garden as the commons
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and uh but it also might be a shared alley it might be um even a very very uh simple pedestrian street uh what we've gotten here is uh this is the third
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street Cottages in Langley Washington in uh uh the Pacific Northwest and what we have done uh it was initiated by a zoning um uh ordinance that allows for
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double the density of houses in any residential area if uh the houses are limited in size to under, Square ft if they're oriented around um a shared
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Commons a garden and two and three if the cars are coralled and not being obnoxious to the surrounding neighborhood so given that we're allowed to have um more houses on four Lots we
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had eight houses on four Lots what we realized after it was created was that there was a tremendous uh Market that was untapped uh people who want to downsize who want to live in a proximity
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to they want to know their neighbors and that is um empty nesters single parents uh people getting started far more than um most of the houses most of the population that would typically the only
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option they have would be family-sized houses so that's what we're doing here the um pocket neighborhoods the idea is the scale of sociability uh the people that we relate to on a daily basis um
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how many would that be would it be 50 20 I've determined that it's more like 6 to eight nearby neighbors that we can relate to easily so if you've got a larger development you might have uh three or four or five Pockets depending
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upon how big the development is rather than uh a huge Park in surrounded by you know 30 or 40 households uh there are many I call them uh patterns for
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community that we design in uh some of them have to do as I mentioned about the um uh clusters of a dozen that would be a key pattern the idea of a common space
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at the center uh the idea of uh if you've got community you to have Community you need to have privacy and to have privacy we really look at how um on take a look at this house right over
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here you've got um the active part of the house uh The Sunny Side when it is sunny out uh facing south and the North side if you can swing around
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here uh there are no windows looking onto uh the next door neighbor and so when you wake up in the morning and you open the curtains you don't have somebody up surprise look at you so nested houses all the houses dovetail
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together one to another and so you can be quite close together and yet um have privacy the other piece that we've worked with is the layers of personal space and so between the the shared
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Commons that we're in there may be um a low hedge through here and a fence now I could step over this fence and at the same time it marks uh the layering
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inside there is um then the private yard we've got the porch with the flower boxes these aren't just cute but they are away for personal expression but away for another sense of layering it's
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interesting with this house we are probably 5T to the porch and yet there's a sense of privacy here the porches themselves are room sized and so they're an extension of the home the um the
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layering goes inside the house where the active portions of the house are forward and facing the commons and the private part of the house is farther back and looking at its own private little Garden
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or in the rear or it might be up above uh in the house so those are some of the key patterns that we work with um in design whether it be a group of small Cottages or it might be a a pocket
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neighborhood of of larger homes
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