Beaufort County FBC Gets the Nod from Driehaus, CNU Charter Awards

Beaufort County has experienced incredible growth in the past 10 years, and is expected to continue into the foreseeable future. To help channel future growth toward existing urban areas, and protect the county’s rural character, the county, the City of ...

Dan Talks Missing Middle Housing on Strong Towns Podcast

Opticos Principal Dan Parolek is at the Congress for New Urbanism’s annual conference in Dallas/Fort Worth this week, where he sat down with the Strong Towns podcast to talk about urban planning in the Bay Area, how to retain the ...

Opticos Is Excited to Announce Our New Missing Middle Housing Website!

MissingMiddleHousing.com is a new online resource dedicated to helping planners, architects, and builders implement a diverse range of housing types for the walkable communities of the future. Opticos Design’s Daniel Parolek coined the term “Missing Middle” in 2010 to define ...

Opticos Goes Back to School on Form-Based Codes, Part 2

This winter quarter at UCLA, Tony Perez, director of Form-Based Coding at Opticos Design, is teaching UP 252, a graduate-level class on Form-Based Coding and planning on Thursday evenings in a three-hour studio format. Working in small teams, the students ...

Missing Middle Housing Takes Off in Michigan with First-Ever Design Competition

The first-ever 2015 Michigan Missing Middle Housing Design Competition challenges architects, designers, and urban planners nationwide to come up with innovative solutions for affordable housing options that offer a walkable lifestyle. The goal of the competition, sponsored by the American Institute of ...