The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded Island Press a $20,000 Art Works grant to support architect and urban designer Daniel Parolek’s forthcoming book Missing Middle Housing: Thinking Big and Building Small to Respond to Today’s Housing Crisis, which will be published in July 2020.
This grant will aid Island Press in publishing this important book. The project will address a U.S. housing crisis that keeps more and more Americans from home ownership and reveals its least understood problem—the tremendous mismatch in U.S. housing stock. Missing Middle Housing will show why missing middle housing types (duplexes, fourplexes, bungalow courts, live-work units, and more) are a critically important solution to address the vast disparity between what is currently being built and the type of housing people want and need—walkable, affordable, and urban. It will be a valuable tool for urban design professionals working to create vibrant and equitable urban communities.
The Art Works funding category supports projects that focus on public engagement with, and access to, various forms of excellent art across the nation; the creation of art that meets the highest standards of excellence; learning in the arts at all stages of life; and the integration of the arts into the fabric of community life.
“The arts are at the heart of our communities, connecting people through shared experiences and artistic expression,” said Arts Endowment chairman Mary Anne Carter. “The National Endowment for the Arts is proud to support projects like Missing Middle Housing.”
With the benefit of beautiful full-color graphics, Parolek’s book will go into depth about the benefits and qualities of missing middle housing, explains why more developers should be building them, and defines the barriers cities need to remove to enable them to be built. He proves that density is too blunt of an instrument to effectively regulate for twenty-first-century housing needs.
Island Press relies on both philanthropic funding and revenue from book sales to fulfill its mission.
“We are grateful to the NEA for recognizing the value of Parolek’s work and the importance of delivering solutions for creating more sustainable cities through books. Because of their funding, Island Press will be able to ensure Missing Middle Housing becomes a foundational resource for practitioners and policymakers to think differently about how to address housing needs for today’s communities,” said David Miller, president of Island Press.
