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New Row House Construction with wood sheathing and asphalt roof

To Bobbie Flory, the leader of the Lawrence Home Builders Association, the city’s plan to create a library of ready-to use housing designs with a fast-tracked approval process makes good sense.

But there’s a caveat: It won’t help the city add new housing unless the designs are things builders actually want to use – and things that will actually sell.

“I think it has the opportunity to be really good,” Flory said. “But it can’t just be simply another collection of architectural drawings. It needs to address the real barriers that builders face, and that is getting it through the review process, really cutting down that timeline, and then making it something that people want to buy.”

City staff doesn’t seem to want just any old collection of plans, either, as the city announced this week that it would be holding a focus group with builders, developers and other community members in December to get a better idea of what they want.

We’ve reported before on the pre-approved housing pilot project, which is expected to roll out next June and will connect developers and property owners with ready-to-use construction plans for single-family homes, duplexes and other dwellings that have already gone through the necessary city reviews.

The city is working on it with a company called Pattern Zones, and Affordable Housing Administrator Lea Roselyn has said that the project is meant to be tailored to Lawrence’s specific needs. This fall and winter, the city and the consultants will be doing not just the focus group, but also research on lot conditions and neighborhoods. In the spring, the city will do a detailed review of a shortlist of plans, and there will be another focus group where builders and others in the community can share their opinions about them.

“The City is not simply purchasing a generic catalog of house plans,” Roselyn wrote about the project in a September memo to city leaders. “The project includes a process for identifying, adapting, reviewing, and ultimately pre-approving plans that are appropriate for Lawrence.” She also wrote that the city will be judging the three-year pilot program and deciding whether to extend it based on whether the plans are actually used.

Lawrence has done things kind of like this before, but for individual builders and their own proprietary plans, Flory said. She said that the city has worked with builders to expedite plans that they’ve used in the past.

“[The city] has said to builders, ‘If you have a plan that you are not changing, it’s already been approved, let us know, and you can fast-track it.”

But that’s still quite different from the city itself making a library of plans available to anyone.

One thing builders will want to know, Flory said, is how much variance will be allowed before a more thorough review will be required. Every builder or subcontractor does things a little differently, she said, and they also need latitude to use materials that make sense for them from a cost standpoint.

“How rigid are they going to be in some modifications? For example, what if they want to change the materials?” Flory said. “Is this going to allow for flexibility?”

Building codes, she said, are already designed to do this – the code may have a minimum standard for things like energy-efficiency ratings, for instance, but it doesn’t tell builders the exact steps they have to take to hit that target. She hopes the pre-approved plans will work more like that.

“Our building codes are designed that way, and that’s why we like our building codes,” Flory said. “They set minimum standards, but they’re not so specific that there’s only one way to do it.”

That doesn’t mean builders should get to make dramatic changes to the plans, like adding something to the design that wasn’t there before. But just allowing for a variety of materials and techniques would help make the plans more appealing to developers, she thinks – and to homebuyers.

“The flip side is, the consumer gets a different product. It’s not an exact replica, a whole neighborhood of exactly the same house,” Flory said.

She thinks consumers will also probably like the savings.

Many parts of the city’s approval process add to the cost of a home. Flory said that often, plans aren’t approved on the first try – they go through rounds of revisions, which require more professional fees for architectural services and add to the time spent in the queue waiting for approval. The greater delays then lead to greater carrying costs for construction loans.

“All of those things add up,” she said.

What she’s heard about pre-approved housing plans is that they can shave off 1% to 2% of the cost of a home. That could mean thousands of dollars in savings, which she said really does make a difference for many people trying to become homeowners.

Similar programs in other communities, including nearby in Overland Park, have left her “pleasantly surprised.” There are still site-specific approvals that builders need to get, but that process is much, much shorter and simpler. “In some places, it knocks it in half,” she said. “… Time is money, and if you can reduce the time, you’re also reducing costs.”

City staff is certainly hoping for that, because pre-approved plans are one of the remedies for the affordable housing shortage proposed in Lawrence’s most recent housing study. That report found that Lawrence had a severe shortage of housing of all types and needed more than 6,300 new units of housing over the next 10 years. And, as Roselyn put it in her memo to city leaders, “Increasing housing supply and reducing the cost of housing production can contribute to improved housing affordability over time.”

Flory said the Lawrence Home Builders Association is working with the city right now on how to expedite approval processes in general, not just for this pilot program. “We support anything that puts more housing opportunities in our community,” she said, and the pre-approved plans will be one more tool for that. Based on what she’s seen in other communities, she doesn’t think it’s going to be a monumental change at first.

“It hasn’t been, like, 50% of the housing stock is now built by this,” she said. “It’s been much smaller than that. But you have to start somewhere, and this is the start to that. And if it’s embraced and everybody does a good job of moving it through the process, then we’ve done something good and we’ve increased our housing stock.

“… I don’t think the expectation is that in three years, everything’s going to be one of these few housing designs,” she added. “But it is yet another option, and options are good.”

And she said that it shouldn’t be just up to builders to determine how it works.

“The more people that can give input, I think, the higher the chances of coming out with a product that Lawrence, Kansas, specifically would embrace – not just the builders and not just the buyers, but both,” she said. “Everybody needs to say, ‘Yeah, this is something we want.'”

The virtual focus group for developers, builders and others interested in the pilot program will be at noon on Wednesday, Dec. 9. You can find a Zoom registration link on engage.lawrenceks.gov/pre-approved-housing-plans.