Alexandra Vondeling: The Neighborhood IS the amenity

Alex Vondeling has spent her career digging into the part of the problem most people skip past. Not whether we need more housing, we clearly do, but what kind, at what scale, and arranged in what way. She is a principal at Opticos Design, the Berkeley firm that coined the term missing middle housing more than a decade ago, and she has become one of the clearest voices in the country on how to actually build it.

What I appreciate about Alex, and about Opticos, is that they are not content to only name a problem. They work tirelessly on the solution. In this conversation we get into the important difference between a fourplex that looks like a house and a fourplex surrounded by parking, why the streetscape decides whether urbanism works at all, and the struggle between how a city can adopt a beautiful comprehensive plan while its own engineers have rules in place that make it impossible to build.

We also get into my own work and projects and why the neighborhood, not just the gym within it, is the amenity. If you build places for a living, or you just want to understand why the good ones feel good, this one is worth your time.